What if Everything We Know About Sacagawea Is Wrong?
July 30, 2025 at 03:33AMDid Sacagawea die in 1812, in her 20s, of a fever? Or did she live a half-century more, ultimately dying in 1869 after being shot in Montana Territory? Christopher Cox details the years-long efforts of group of Hidatsa elders to challenge the narrative dominance of the Lewis and Clark journals and the histories built upon them.
Sacagawea long ago left the realm of the apolitical dead. Over the years, she has been pressed into service as an avatar of patient humility or assertive feminism, of American expansionism or Indigenous rights, of Jeffersonian derring-do or native wisdom. Her face is on U.S. currency, her name has been affixed to a caldera on Venus and there are statues of her spread throughout the nation, each incarnation seeming to pull her further out of context. The Trump administration has said it wants to include a sculpture of her in a planned National Garden of American Heroes, effectively claiming her as an honorary citizen — though to the federal government at the time, she was closer to being an alien enemy.
The Hidatsas’ portrait of Sacagawea is both richer and more ambiguous than the one found in standard histories. By adding decades to her life, they have changed its meaning: The journey to the Pacific, rather than the whole of her existence, becomes a two-year blip in a story that stretches across the 19th century, from the opening of the Western frontier to the Civil War and beyond. Almost all those years were spent back where Lewis and Clark found her, among the Hidatsa.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/29/sacagawea-eagle-woman-lewis-clark-history/
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