Scout-History | Sacagawea Meets her Brother (Journals of Lewis and Clark) | PBS (2024)

FAQs

Where did Sacagawea reunite with her brother? ›

In August of 1805, west of the Continental Divide, when the expedition needed to secure horses, Sacagawea was joyfully reunited with her brother, Cameahwait.

On August 15, 1805, the expedition encountered the Shoshone tribe. Lewis and Clark arranged for a meeting with the chief, Cameahwait, and Sacagawea served as the translator. As she began interpreting, she realized that the chief was in fact her brother. She ran to embrace him and wept from joy.

What is Sacagawea best known for? Sacagawea is best known for her association with the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–06). A Shoshone woman, she accompanied the expedition as an interpreter and traveled with them for thousands of miles from St Louis, Missouri, to the Pacific Northwest.

From age twelve to sixteen, she lived along the Knife River in a Hidatsa village called Awatixa. She was married by age sixteen, and we do not know how much choice she had in the matter. Her husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, was thirty years older than her and had another wife, named Otter Woman.

On a cold February day in 1805, the screams of a woman in labor could be heard coming from a round earth lodge in a Hidatsa village near the Knife River. Inside, Sacagawea, just sixteen years old, was giving birth to her first child. The baby's father, Toussaint Charbonneau, had lived in a Hidatsa town for years.

This one-minute video segment from IdahoPTV's "Moments in Time" presents Captain William Clark's journal entry from August 17, 1805, which describes the emotional moment when Sacagawea recognized her brother Cameahwait and learned the fate of the rest her family.

It was her Hidatsa captors who gave her the name Sacagawea, which means “Bird Woman.” The warriors brought Sacagawea to a Hidatsa-Mandan settlement in present-day North Dakota. About a year later, when Sacagawea was only 13 years old, her captors forced her to marry French trapper Toussaint Charbonneau.

Clark offered to take Pomp, Sacagawea's son also known as Jean Baptiste, to raise him as his own son and educate him. In 1809, Charbonneau and Sacagawea brought Pomp to St. Louis, and Clark kept his promise. He raised and educated little Jean Baptiste as one of his own.

After Sacagawea's death in December 1812, her husband took both of her children to William Clark in St. Louis, Missouri. Clark had previously promised to provide an education for Jean Baptiste. Clark adopted both children.

What happened when Sacagawea died? ›

Evidence supporting Sacagawea's death in 1812

The cause of her death was putrid fever or typhus, a parasite bacterium spread by fleas. This disease is deadly unless treated with antibiotics. At her death both her children, Lizette and Jean Babtiste, were entrusted to Clark who formally took their guardianship by a St.

Answer and Explanation: Sacagawea was the daughter of the chief of the Lemhi Shoshone and his wife. Their names are not recorded and although some sources list them as Smoked Lodge and Otter Woman, these names are not documented.

The name we know her by is in fact Hidatsa, from the Hidatsa words for bird (“sacaga”) and woman (“wea”). Did you know? Sacagawea was a highly skilled food gatherer.

In later years, Sacajawea returned to the Shoshone homeland to live near Bazil. Many recorded documents and statements made by descendants, officials at Fort Washakie, and by the Federal Government record her death and burial place at the Sacajawea Cemetery, Fort Washakie, Wyoming in 1884.

Born to a Shoshone chief around 1788, Sacagawea had been kidnapped by an enemy tribe when she was about 12, then sold to a French-Canadian trapper.

When the expedition approached the Shoshone, Sakakawea recognized her brother as well as some childhood friends resulting in a joyous and tearful reunion. It also resulted in obtaining Shoshone aid in the form of horses for their continued journey west.

Sacagawea was either 16 or 17 years old when she joined the Corps of Discovery. She met Lewis and Clark while she was living among the Mandan and Hidatsa in North Dakota, though she was a Lemhi Shoshone from Idaho.

Sacagawea was forced into a nonconsensual marriage to Toussaint Charbonneau in 1801. Charbonneau was born in 1767, so he would have been around 34 at the time he married Sacagawea.

After the expedition

In April 1807, about a year after the end of the expedition, the Charbonneau family moved to St. Louis, at Clark's invitation. Toussaint Charbonneau and Sacagawea departed for the Mandan villages in April 1809 and left the boy to live with Clark.