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Updated: May 31, 2025
As soon as this resolution was known, Chaboneau and his wife requested that they might be permitted to accompany us.
Though neither knew it, Lewis and Clark were only four miles apart, Clark, Chaboneau, the guide, and Sacajawea, the Indian woman, were walking on the shore early in the morning, when the squaw began to dance with signs of the most extravagant joy.
Life among the white people had proved too much for the gentle Sacagawea. She had tried hard to live their way, but their way did not agree with her. She had sickened, and she longed for the lodges of the Shoshonis. Chaboneau, too, had become weary of a civilized life. Sacagawea at last returned to her "home folks" the Snakes. No doubt Chaboneau went with her.
Having lost some notes and remarks which he had made on first ascending the river, he determined to go up to the Whitebear Islands along its banks, in order to supply the deficiency. He there left one man to guard the baggage, and went on to the falls, accompanied by his servant York, Chaboneau, and his wife with her young child.
The canoes had to be hauled by tow-lines, with Sacagawea proudly riding in one of them and helping to fend off with a pole. She had not been here since she was a girl of eleven or twelve, but she caught more landmarks. "Dat is w'at ze Snake call ze Beaver's Head," proclaimed Chaboneau, whose feet had given out. "Ze Snake spen' deir summer 'cross ze mountains jes' ze odder side.
The captains offered to take Chaboneau and Sacagawea and Toussaint on down to St. Louis. The Bird-woman would gladly have gone. She wanted to learn more of the white people's ways. She wanted to be white, herself. But Chaboneau respectfully declined. He said that it would be a strange country, and that he could not make a living there; later, he might send his boy, to be educated by the captains.
In the spring they broke camp, and taking Chaboneau as interpreter in case that the hostile Minnetarees were met, and little Sacagawea to spy out the land of the Snakes, and littlest Toussaint, the baby, as a peace sign to all tribes, with a picked party of thirty-one the two captains started on, up the swollen Missouri. They made no mistake, in the Bird-woman.
To hold speech with this tribe was awkward. "In the first place," wrote Captain Lewis, "we spoke in English to one of our men, who translated it into French to Chaboneau; he interpreted it to his wife in the Minnetaree language; she then put it into Shoshone, and a young Shoshone prisoner explained it to the Chopunnish in their own dialect."
Here, too, they secured the services of an interpreter, one Chaboneau, who continued with them to the end. This man's wife, Sacajawea, whose Indian name was translated "Bird Woman," had been captured from the Snake Indians and sold to Chaboneau, who married her. She was "a good creature, of a mild and gentle disposition, greatly attached to the whites."
She was a Sho-sho-ni, or Snake, woman, from the distant Rocky Mountains, and had been captured by the Minnetarees. Between the Minnetarees of the plains and the Snakes of the mountains there was always war. Now at only sixteen years of age she was the wife of Toussaint Chaboneau, a leather-faced, leather-clad French-Canadian trader living with the Mandans.
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