Sacagawea Sees the Ocean

Sacagawea first saw the Pacific Ocean from a point not far from where this picture was taken. To the left is the beach now known as Cannon Beach, where, in 1806, a whale had just washed ashore.

Oregon State University

“We were told when she [Sacagawea] got back, a lot of people treated her mean. The reason they treated her mean is because they thought she was just a crazy lady because of this one story when she actually saw the ocean. She said she saw this ocean that it was so wide it was like the whole land was covered with water. She also said she seen this huge skeleton that was huger than any of the homes that we had. A lot people thought this woman is crazy…there’s no rivers that go beyond the sunset; there’s no fish that exist that’s huger than our teepees or lodges. And she was talking about the whale skeleton that she saw on the shores of the Pacific Ocean.”—Randy’l Teton, Shoshone, ca. 2005

Like many people from inland areas, Sacagawea had never seen the ocean. When she heard that William Clark and several men were packing up to see a huge fish beached near unending stretch of water that they called the ocean, she did not want to miss it. Clark wrote that Sacagawea,

was very impatient to be permitted to go with me, and was therefore indulged; She observed that She had traveled a long way with us to See the great waters, and that now that monstrous fish was also to be Seen, She thought it verry hard that She Could not be permitted to See either (She had never yet been to the Ocian).

None of the men keeping journals wrote it down, but Sacagawea probably brought her baby with her.

Clark paid a Clatsop man two fishhooks to guide them on the well-traveled trail over a seaside mountain (now called Tillamook Head). The ascent was steep and exhausting. When they got to the top, they ran into Chinook people carrying heavy loads of whale blubber and oil back to their homes.

As they sat together at this high point, the ocean would have been in view in all directions, the first time Sacagawea saw it. Everyone probably swapped stories about the whale as they gazed at the endless ocean below. How might Sacagawea have felt, to see this vast expanse of water and meet the people who encountered it every day? Would her one-year-old son remember seeing the water that went past the sunset?