The news media can’t even decide when Charlton Heston was born (see earlier post), but The Writer’s Almanac has the birthday of Sacajawea. I didn’t even know the Shoshone were keeping birth certificates in 1786.
It’s the birthday of the Shoshone woman Sacajawea, born in Idaho (1786), who served as interpreter for Lewis and Clark’s expedition (1804). Born to a Shoshone chief, kidnapped at 10 by the Hidatsa tribe, and sold into slavery, she was then bought by a French Canadian trapper named Charbonneau, who married her. When Lewis and Clark hired Charbonneau to guide them to the Pacific, his teenage wife — with her two-month-old baby on her back — was part of the package. Officially she acted as interpreter, speaking half a dozen Indian languages, but she also knew which wilderness plants were edible and saved the explorers’ records when their boat overturned. She served as camp cook, housekeeper, and peacemaker with the watchful tribes they met along their way.
Of course, Sacajawea did NOT serve as a guide in 1804. Lewis and Clark didn’t even meet Charbonneau until the winter of 1804-1805. And, of course, the two-month old (in April 1805) was a nine-month-old by the time they wintered 1805-1806 near present-day Astoria, Oregon.
Whatever.