Last updated: April 10, 2026
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Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Histories of Sacagawea
Courtesy of MHA Nation Sacagawea Project Board
The Hidatsa people have kept Sacagawea’s memory alive for generations through oral histories as well as written documentation. The Hidatsa do not believe that Sacagawea’s history was accurately captured in the Lewis and Clark Expedition journals. Many Hidatsa people today state that expedition journalists either misinterpreted what Sacagawea and Toussaint Charbonneau, her husband, told them about Sacagawea’s Tribal affiliation and past, and/or that Charbonneau told half truths about Sacagawea’s heritage to make her appear more valuable to the expedition. They say that Sacagawea was a Hidatsa and Crow woman whose true name was Ma-eshu-wea, or Eagle Woman. In 2015, members of the MHA Nation formed the Sacagawea Project Board to capture MHA histories of Sacagawea and to compile other evidence that points to Sacagawea being of Hidatsa ancestry. The result of this work was the 2021 book, "Our Story of Eagle Woman Sacagawea: They Got It Wrong."
Account written by the MHA Sacagawea Project Board and shared here with permission:
The people of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation of the Ft. Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota have their own account of Sacagawea. A summary of it follows. The full account is detailed in "Our Story of Eagle Woman, Sacagawea: They Got It Wrong" written by tribal historians of the Sacagawea Project Board of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation.
Sacagawea’s mother was Crow, Otter Woman1, and her father was Hidatsa, Smoked Lodge. According to oral history, Sacagawea was born when her parents lived among the Hidatsas. She grew up learning the ways of the Hidatsa and Crow people, as her parents moved back and forth between the two tribes. The Hidatsa and Crow people had at one time been one tribe and, although they had recently separated, they were still closely related. Sacagawea’s father was a well-known tribal leader and her brother, Cherry Necklace, was a medicine person, so the family also traveled to other tribes to visit and help the people. One of the tribes they visited was the Shoshone Tribe, and the family made friends with their chief, Cameahwait. Smoked Lodge adopted him as a brother. This practice was and still is common.
Sacagawea’s older sister, Otter Woman2 (named after their mother), married Toussaint Charbonneau, who lived among the Hidatsa and served as interpreter between white traders and Indian people. The custom was that men often married sisters and so later, Charbonneau also married Sacagawea.
The Lewis and Clark company went through Hidatsa territory on their way west. They needed interpreters to help them communicate with the various Indian tribes. They knew they would encounter Shoshone people and especially requested someone that spoke Shoshone as they knew they would need a translator to help them secure horses for that part of their journey. Charbonneau told Lewis and Clark that his wife spoke Shoshone and thus gave a mistaken interpretation that she was Shoshone. Sacagawea would not have objected to this understanding because the adoption, by her father, of a Shoshone brother made her a member of a Shoshone family. She had learned some of their language and knew sign language, and she and Charbonneau had been to visit the Shoshones the year before. Charbonneau, along with Sacagawea, was “hired” for the job to accompany the expedition.
According to Hidatsa oral history, Sacagawea’s given name was Maeshuwea, Eagle Woman in Hidatsa, but it was changed to Sacagawea, Bird Woman, in Hidatsa, because it was easier for Charbonneau and the other white men to say or to express in sign language.
As in other stories of Sacagawea, she assisted the Lewis and Clark group in many ways while also carrying and caring for her baby, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau. She knew about food plants along the way as she had been there before and Indian people had a vast knowledge of plants. She knew of landmarks because she had been there before. When the group reached the Shoshones, she knew Cameahwait as a brother because of the adoption that her father had with the Shoshone chief and a Tribal way of identifying adopted relatives.
Because there were so many different languages and no less than three or four people involved in the interpretation process, it is highly likely that there were misunderstandings and misstatements entered into the written journals. Lewis and Clark had to make statements or requests in English to Charbonneau, who primarily spoke French, and he had to translate that request to Sacagawea in his limited Hidatsa, and then back again. An additional member of the explorers who spoke French also helped to interpret. An example of a misunderstanding was that Sacagawea was known for having snake medicine, but this was interpreted to mean that she was Shoshone, who were known as Snake Indians, and this furthered her misidentification.
In 1809, Charbonneau and Sacagawea took their son Jean Baptiste to live with Captain Clark and be educated in St. Louis. The family lived in the St. Louis area a short while. In 1811, Charbonneau took a job at Ft. Manuel in South Dakota. While there, Sacagawea’s older sister, Otter Woman2 who was the other wife of Charbonneau, died in 1812. Otter Woman2 left two children, Toussaint Jr. and a baby girl named Lizette who later died in infancy. These children were also sent to live with Captain Clark in 1813. Toussaint Jr. was 10 years old in 1813, or at least two years older than Jean Baptiste who was Sacagawea’s first-born child, providing evidence that Toussaint Jr. was not Sacagawea’s child, and it was not Sacagawea who died at Ft. Manuel.
In 1815, Sacagawea and Charbonneau went to St. Louis to check on Jean Baptiste and Toussaint Jr. While they were there, Charbonneau was hired for a fur trapping expedition to the West. The expedition traveled westward along the Arkansas River to the Santa Fe area. Sacagawea went along. They went to the mountains near Great Salt Lake, to Wyoming, and back to the Hidatsa villages in 1817. Sacagawea told of this trip to her relatives and to others from her Hidatsa Tribe and they retold the account. The facts that Sacagawea and Charbonneau went to St. Louis in 1815 documents, and that this trip was recorded in fur-trading logs give further evidence that Sacagawea did not die in 1812. One such document is "Toussaint Charbonneau: A Most Durable Man" in South Dakota History.
Several historical documents tell of Sacagawea living among the Hidatsas after 1817. According to the diary of General Henry Atkinson, she was present at the signing of the Atkinson-O'Fallon treaty between the Hidatsa and the United States in 1825. Her father Smoked Lodge signed the treaty as a warrior representing the Hidatsas. Mountain Man Jim Beckwourth, a friend of Jean Baptiste, was married into the Crow Tribe and had several Crow wives between 1826 and 1835. He spoke highly of Jean Baptiste’s mother and said she was of the Crow Tribe and probably related to his Crow relatives. Jean Baptiste himself told his colleagues that he was a half-breed; his father was French and his mother was Crow, emphasizing his heredity in his matrilineal line. His mother’s mother was also Crow. Jean Baptiste never once stated that he was Shoshone.
In 1837 Smallpox struck the Hidatsa villages where Sacagawea and Charbonneau lived. Due to the epidemic, Sacagawea and Charbonneau moved to the Fort Union area, close to the present Montana/North Dakota line, according to Hidatsa leader Wolf Chief who was interviewed by the esteemed historian of Hidatsa life, Alfred Bowers. It was near this time that Sacagawea had three more children, daughters Otter Woman3, named after Sacagawea’s mother and sister, Cedar Woman and Different Breast. These children were identified to Bowers by Wolf Chief and later by Bulls Eye, her grandson.
In about 1839, Charbonneau was known to be working at Ft. Clark according to Chardon, the manager there. This document reports Charbonneau and Sacagawea going to visit the Hidatsas. According to the interview of Wolf Chief by Bowers, Sacagawea was asked to go with Charbonneau either to Ft. Clark or to St. Louis, but she refused. Charbonneau then left for St. Louis and later passed away. Jean Baptiste filed for his father’s probate in 1843.
Bowers recorded that Sacagawea lived at Like-a-Fishhook Village after that with her daughters and her brother, Cherry Necklace. Historian Gilbert Wilson recorded a garden plot of Eagle Woman’s at the Hidatsa Like-a-Fishhook Village and told of a hunting trip in which Sacagawea participated with her nephews, sons of Cherry Necklace. Bowers also documented a Mandan ceremony attended by Sacagawea (Eagle Woman) and her daughters. Her Crow relatives came to visit her, and she traveled to Montana to visit them.
In 1869 Sacagawea, her daughter Otter Woman3, and Otter Woman’s young son Bulls Eye were on a trip to the Montana area of Sand Creek, near Wolf Point, when their party was ambushed and Otter Woman3 was killed. Although Sacagawea was severely injured, she took Bulls Eye and they walked to a trading post where she died seven days later. She is buried near Ft. Buford. It was Bulls Eye who knew of his grandmother’s life and told it to Major A. B. Welch, a US Army Corps of Engineers and Hidatsa historian in 1923 in front of many tribal members who corroborated his story and signed as witnesses.
Sacagawea’s son Jean Baptiste became a well-known fur trapper, guide, miner, scout for the government with the Mormon Battalion and served as the mayor for a mission near San Diego, California. His obituary states that his mother was a half breed of the Crow tribe. He is buried in Danner, Oregon, debunking the claim that he and his mother were Shoshone and buried in Wyoming.
Some have asked why the Hidatsas have waited so long to tell their account of Sacagawea. In fact, they have tried to tell this important information for the last 100 years. They told the account in 1923 when Bulls Eye spoke to a formal Hidatsa Tribal Council, and this meeting was published by the Bismarck Tribune. Major A. B. Welch monitored and logged the proceedings. Unfortunately, suffragist Eva Dye’s desire to create an American heroine out of Sacagawea combined with Professor Grace Heberd’s plan to glorify the state of Wyoming with a blatant disregard for the facts, proved a lethal detriment to the truth.
Ten years after Bullseye told the Hidatsa story, another relative told of her close kinship to Sacagawea. In 1933 an elderly lady from the Ft. Totten Reservation in eastern North Dakota, Mary Charbonneau Hillstrom, spoke to the press regarding her kinship to Sacagawea and Toussaint Charbonneau. It appears that her grandmother was Otter Woman2, Sacagawea’s sister, who was also married to Toussaint Charbonneau. Their child was Toussaint Charbonneau Jr. After his mother Otter Woman2 died at Ft. Manuel, Toussaint Jr. lived with Clark for a while but later wished to return to the trapper world of his father. He returned to Dakota Territory, married Victoria Vandell and began his own family, moving them initially to the Turtle Mountain Reservation and later to the Spirit Lake (Ft. Totten) Reservation. Although Mary Hillstrom didn’t get the names quite right, she nevertheless attempted to tell of her relationship to Sacagawea. Bureau of Indian Affairs records and DNA evidence tie Toussaint Jr’s descendants to Sacagawea’s descendants and to her other relatives at Ft. Berthold.
Over the years, three Mandan Hidatsa and Arikara Tribal Councils and chairpersons at Ft. Berthold have tried to convince the United States government to recognize the fact that Sacagawea was Hidatsa/Crow, including the current MHA Council. Now the Sacagawea Project Board has produced and published evidence to support its account of Sacagawea, some of it so obvious that it is questionable as to why it is not considered by historians. Evidence keeps mounting. For example, it is noted that the Shoshone have also used the same names, Otter Woman and Smoked Lodge, as Sacajawea’s parents, although they have no tribal records or oral history to back up this claim, as the Hidatsas have. Questions remain, such as why Sacagawea didn’t return to the Shoshones in the Idaho area if they were her people. Also, Sacagawea had trouble communicating with the Shoshone on their visit and had to resort to sign language to assist with comprehension.
The information in our book, including Sacagawea’s family tree, is documented by oral history, Tribal and federal government records, accounts by others who wrote histories of the time, and, most importantly, by DNA matches that link Sacagawea’s Hidatsa and Crow relatives, link her direct descendants to Charbonneau descendants, and link Sacagawea’s Hidatsa relatives who are not descendants of Charbonneau to the descendants of Toussaint and Otter Woman2 (Sacagawea’s sister) indicating that they are related through Otter Woman and Sacagawea’s Hidatsa line. All of this evidence supports Sacagawea family information included in our book. We have extensive DNA match data that is not in the book, because we provided only examples of our findings.
Lastly, her true name is Sacagawea (Bird Woman) and was never Sacajawea with a “J.” In 1814, approximately ten years after the trek west, Nicholas Biddle, a Philadelphia lawyer and failed banker who had never been out west, was asked to edit the Lewis and Clark Journals. He had a difficult time with her name, and being unfamiliar with Indian names, he added a J to make it easier for him to pronounce. This new name, Sacajawea, translated to Boat Launcher in Shoshone, which seemed appropriate to those with little actual knowledge. Meanwhile, the real Sacagawea was alive and well--traveling and/or living at home in the Hidatsa Villages in North Dakota until her documented death in 1869 while on a trading trip to Montana with her daughter and grandson.