Exhibits > Sacajawea > Part 4

Sacagawea Imagery, part 4
by Brian W. Dippie

    Generic portrayals of Sacagawea as princess, guide, silent witness, madonna, and the omnipresent third member of the iconic trio have been interspersed with attempts to depict the few documented incidents where she merited individual mention in the Lewis and Clark journals. In order, these are:

May 14 1805: When the captains' pirogue (with her husband at the helm) nearly capsized, Sacagawea who was in the rear had the presence of mind to catch "the articles which floated out"--thus helping avert any loss in what would have been a disaster had the pirogue sunk, since it contained, as Clark noted, "our papers, Instruments, books, medicine, a great proportion of our merchandise, and in short almost every article indispensably necessary to . . . insure the success of the enterprise in which, we are now launched to the distance of 2,200 miles." Artist John Severin captured the moment in a pen and ink sketch published in 1968.

June 13-18 1805: It looked for awhile as though Sacagawea would die en route to the Pacific. She took ill on June 13 and Clark, who deemed her condition "Somewhat dangerous," on the 15th applied a poultice to her lower abdomen (pelvic area), which gave her temporary relief, though she refused all medicine and continued to sink. Lewis on the 16th determined to try the waters of a sulphur spring located a couple of hundred yards from the Missouri's north bank (known to this day as Sacagawea Springs) and. in conjunction with a mixture of barks and opium, produced such a rapid turn around that she was pronounced cured by the 18th: "The Indian woman is recovering fast," Lewis wrote. "She set up the greater part of the day and walked out for the fist time since she arrived here; she eats heartily and is free from fever or pain." Olaf C. Seltzer made a miniature oil painting in the 1930s titled Sacajawea at the Sulphur Spring (June 16, 1805).

June 29 1805: While inspecting the Upper (Black Eagle) Falls of the Missouri in the company of Charbonneau, Sacagawea and her infant on June 29 1805, Clark noticed "a very black cloud rising in the West which threatened immediate rain." He located a deep ravine where the party could be sheltered from the wind and rain--but not from the effects of an especially violent downfall which "instantly collected in the ravine and came down in a rolling torrent with irresistible force driving rocks mud and everything before it," Lewis reported. "I took my gun & Shot pouch in my left hand, and with the right Scrambled up the hill pushing the Interpreters wife (who had her Child in her arms) before me, the Interpreter himself making attempts to pull up his wife by the hand . . . before I got out of the bottom of the ravine which was a flat dry rock when I entered it, the water was up to my waste & wet my watch. . ." A few artists, including Charles M. Russell and Olaf Seltzer, have pictured this near tragedy. Russell's 1903 watercolor Captain Clark, Chaboneau, Sacagawea, and Papoose in the Cloud-burst near the Great Falls, on June 29, 1805 was reproduced in 1904, but the original is presently unlocated. Seltzer's version, The Deluge at Colter Falls, another miniature oil, is in the collection of the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Seltzer has added another figure to his composition, that of Clark's black servant, York, who had accompanied the party but had gone off in search of buffalo and was not present when the others scrambled out of the ravine. "We at length retched the top of the hill Safe," Clark noted, "where I found my Servant in Search of us greatly agitated, for our welfare--"

July 22 1805: "The Indian woman recognizes the country and assures us that this is the river on which her relations live, and that the three forks [of the Missouri] are at no great distance," Lewis observed on July 22. "This piece of information has cheered the spirits of the party who now begin to console themselves with the anticipation of shortly seeing the head of the Missouris yet unknown to the civilized world." Subsequently she recognized the very spot where she was taken captive by the Hidatsas. This was the inspiration for Edgar S. Paxson's 1912 historical mural Lewis and Clark at Three-Forks in which he offered his version of a pointing Sacagawea,

August 17 1805: The meeting with Sacagawea's people, the Shoshones, was so historically important in securing the horses the expedition needed to cross the mountains, and so obviously rife with emotion for Sacagawea that artists have been irresistibly drawn to it. Lewis, who contacted the Shoshones first, commented that "the meeting of those people was really affecting, particularly between Sah cah-gar-we-ah and an Indian woman, who had been taken prisoner at the same time with her, and who had afterwards escaped from the Minnetares [Hidatsas] and rejoined her nation." This is the incident depicted in Charles Russell's brilliant 1918 oil painting Lewis and Clark Expedition. As Clark's party, including Charbonneau and Sacagawea, drew near to the Indians, Clark reported, "the Interpreter & Squar . . . danced for the joyful Sight, and She made signs to me that they were her nation, as I approached nearer them discovered one of Capt Lewis party With them dressed in their Dress; they met me with great Signs of joy. . ." Russell has shown the encounter down to the white man in Indian dress reining in his horse on the left and, in the distance, another detail mentioned by Clark: "those Indians Sung all the way to their Camp where the others had provd. a cind of Shade of Willows Stuck up in a Circle."

Montana artist James Kenneth Ralston in his 1964 oil Shoshonis at Last provided a sequel to Russell's painting, the reception accorded Clark's party when they reached the willow shelter. "The Three Chiefs with Capt. Lewis met me with great cordiality embraced and took a Seat on a white robe," Clark wrote: "The (perog) Canoes arrived & unloaded-- every thing appeared to astonish those people. the appearance of the men, their arms, the Canoes, the Clothing my black Servant & the Segassity of Capt Lewis's Dog." Ralston crowded all of these particulars into a single composition in which Sacagawea, standing on the right, observes as a chief embraces Clark and she recognizes him as her brother--a remarkable coincidence that both Lewis and Clark reported, albeit tersely, in their journals. "The Indian woman proved to be a sister of the Chief Cameahwait," Lewis wrote. Clark adding: "the Great Chief of this nation proved to be the brother of the Woman with us and is a man of Influence Sense & ease & reserved manners."

January 6 1806: After the Corps of Discovery was settled in its winter quarters at Fort Clatsop in present-day Oregon, Clark set out on the seven mile trek by water and foot to the ocean. He had heard of a beached whale and was determined to acquire a supply of whale oil and blubber. Sacagawea had pleaded to go along, Clark noted, and he granted her wish. "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 very hard that She Could not be permitted to See either (She had never yet been to the Ocean)." Though artists have shown Sacagawea wading in the surf like a summer tourist at what today is the resort town of Cannon Beach, the January excursion was no picnic. The wind was blowing hard when Clark's party reached the ocean on the 8th, and the sea, he said, was "breaking with great force against the Scattering rocks at Some distance from Shore, and the rugged rocky points under which we were obliged to pass." One false step and they would have been "dashed against the rocks in an instant, fortunately we passed over 3 of those dismal points and arrived on a beautiful Sand Shore on which we Continued for 2 miles, Crossed a Creek 80 yards near 5 Cabins, and proceeded to the place the whale had perished, found only the Skeleton of this monster on the Sand between 2 of the villages of the Kil a mox nation." The whale, which "lay on the Strand where the waves and tide had driven up & left it," was "already pillaged of every valuable part," and the Tillamooks were "busily engaged boiling the blubber." But the skeleton, measured at 105 feet in length, was impressive, and Sacagawea's insistence on seeing it and the ocean for herself has cemented her reputation as something much more than a "tag-along" on the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Artist John Clymer paid tribute to her initiative in a 1974 oil painting that captured the Gold Medal in its category at the National Academy of Western Art Show that year, Sacajawea at the Big Water. A Washington native with a strong background in Northwest Coast themes, Clymer enjoyed a long, successful career as a commercial illustrator and, beginning in 1942, a Saturday Evening Post cover artist. In the early 1960s he began a second career when he turned to historical Western art. With a special affinity for mountain men subjects, he reached back in time to paint this arresting image of Sacagawea, moccasins in hand, cradleboard on back, wading in the Pacific surf. "This must have been a great experience in her life and one of the wonders of the journey," Clymer's biographer observed.

April 28, May 11, July 3 1806: Besides her services as interpreter during the critical negotiation for horses with the Shoshones (she rendered their words into Hidatsa, Charbonneau the Hidatsa into French, and another expedition member the French into English), Sacagawea was able to communicate with the Walla-Wallas through a Shoshone woman held captive among them. As Clark noted in his journal on April 28: "We found a Sho Sho ne woman, prisoner among those people by means of whome and Sah-cah gah-weah, Shabano's wife we found means of Converceing with the Wallahwallars. we Conversed with them for Several hours and fully Satisfy all their enquiries with respect to our Selves and the Object of our pursuit. they were much pleased." On the 1lth of May Clark recorded a meeting with several headmen of the Chopunnish (Nez Perce) nation. "By the assistance of the Snake boy and our interpreters," Clark noted, we "were enabled to make ourselves under stood by them altho' it had to pass through French, Minnetare, Shoshone and Chopunnish languages. The interpretation being tedious it occupied the greater part of the day, before we had communicated to them what we wished." When Clark set out on his own on July 3 1806 to explore the Yellowstone, he took with his party Charbonneau and Sacagawea "as an interpreter & interpretess for the Crow Inds and the latter for the Shoshoni."

Though the convention of Sacagawea pointing the way as guide has dominated Sacagawea imagery, Charles M. Russell offered a fanciful but beautifully-painted tribute to her primary role as interpreter in a 1905 watercolor, Lewis and Clark on the Lower Columbia. With a deep interest in Montana Indian cultures and a facility at sign language himself, Russell often portrayed parties of Indians in which one member communicates with the others in sign to avoid breaking the silence in hostile country. Here he depicts Sacagawea translating to a party of Northwest Coast Indians in war canoes at the mouth of the Columbia River. To add pictorial interest, he shows her standing and gesturing in sign language, thus reinforcing her spoken words.

"Discovered" by women with a point to make in the early years of the twentieth century, Sacagawea as an icon of women's liberation was the subject of five sculptures before the First World War. Subsequently she was fully integrated into the imagery of Lewis and Clark. When the federal government issued a stamp in 1954 commemorating the 150th anniversary of the expedition, it showed the two explorers in the foreground, Sacagawea standing behind. Recently, in response to the modern woman's movement and a new search for Founding Mothers, she has returned to her singular status once again, Bust portraits are the vogue. Her face graced a commemorative stamp of her own in the "Legends of the West" series issued in 1993,

and it is now indelibly stamped along with that of her baby on the wildly popular Sacagawea "gold dollar" which (perhaps fittingly, given her role as speaker at the Portland monument dedication in 1905) replaced the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin in 2000.

As the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition approaches, Sacagawea imagery is already pouring forth. Unconstrained by fact, artists are free to interpret her as they will. Attempts at historical realism may vie with variations on the tried-and-true stereotypes--beautiful princess, native Madonna, indispensable guide. But realism is bound to lose out in the end. Fact has never trumped romance in Sacagawea imagery because the legend of Sacagawea has an emotional appeal mere fact can never equal. Sacagawea is today the most honored woman in American history. Her name adorns troop ships, parks, schools and landmarks galore. Any artist who would successfully portray her must come to grips with her legend. "There were many heroes, there was but one heroine in this band of immortals," a writer asserted at the time of the Lewis and Clark centennial in 1904. "All honor to her!" One hundred years later Sacagawea is literally coin of the realm part of the common currency of what it means to be an American.

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