Sacagawea

Sacagawea was approximately 16 years old and pregnant when Meriwether Lewis and William Clark hired her husband, a French-Canadian fur trader named Toussaint Charbonneau, as an interpreter in the winter of 1804. The Corps of Discovery needed a Shoshone speaker to negotiate for horses at the Rocky Mountain crossings — without horses the expedition could not cross the mountains, and without a crossing there was no expedition. Sacagawea gave birth to her son Jean-Baptiste in February 1805 and set out west with the Corps two months later, infant strapped to her back, into territory she had not seen since being kidnapped from her people years before.

Her contributions went far beyond translation. When a supply boat nearly capsized on the Missouri River in a sudden squall, she calmly retrieved the floating journals, instruments, and medicines while Charbonneau panicked at the helm. Clark named a river after her. When the Corps reached the Shoshone band near the Continental Divide, its leader turned out to be her brother Cameahwait — a coincidence that secured horses and guides and almost certainly saved the expedition. Her presence throughout the journey also served a diplomatic function no military escort could provide: a woman traveling with a war party, carrying a baby, signaled peaceful intent to every nation they encountered.

History treated Sacagawea better in retrospect than her own era did. She received no pay for her service; Charbonneau was paid $500.33 and 320 acres of land. She disappears from the historical record after 1806; one account places her death in 1812 at a Missouri River trading post, another has her living until 1884 among the Shoshone. She has more statues in the United States than any other woman — a late and partial form of recognition for someone who, by any fair accounting, deserves at least equal billing on the expedition that bears two other names.