Selects: Sacagawea: Impressive Teen

0:00 Hey everybody, it's me, Josh. And for this week's Select, I've chosen our 2021 episode on Sacagawea, whose name I learned to pronounce correctly after 45 years on the planet in this very episode. She's one of those figures in American history who's been morphed into more of a folk legend than a real-life person. And I think that's because we round out the contours of historic people so we can teach young kids about them. And that after a while, that kiddified version is all they become in everyone's mind. So, like anyone, there's a lot more to Sacagawea than the average person realizes. But what's most amazing is that we actually know a lot of that stuff about her. It's amazing because not only was she a Native American living

0:42 at the beginning of the 19th century on the Great Plains, but she was a teenager and a girl. And yet, we know a bunch about her. And what we know adds up to a pretty great person. That's why we named this episode Impressive Teen. Hope you're impressed by her too. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's over there, and this is Stuff You Should Know.

1:18 And I can't help but feel that I'm being subtweeted right now.

1:23 What for? I don't know what that means.

1:25 Oh, it's where you talk about somebody without directly talking about them. You just kind of maybe talk about their behavior, how you disapprove of something that they did, but you don't directly say this person did this and I don't like it.

1:39 You know, I, uh, one time, I don't know all this lingo with the Twitter cause I was never on it. And I was emailing with Jonathan Colton, musician, Jonathan Colton about coming on movie crush. And I can't remember what I said, but he said something, something don't at me. And I didn't know what that meant. And I was like, Oh my gosh, I'm sorry. I'm not sure what I did. Uh, I don't know. I apologize if I did something wrong.

2:04 And I think he was kind of.

2:06 Like, who is this idiot?

2:09 Hodgman likes this guy.

2:11 And I think don't– I mean, doesn't that just mean you're tagging someone on Twitter or something?

2:15 Yeah, but usually it means like you're telling them that they got something wrong or you disagree with what they said or they should be ashamed of what they said. It's usually a hostile thing that you're adding somebody. Or you're– yeah, they don't– they're– They have made their point and they don't want to hear any feedback from you about it.

2:33 That's kind of what I took from it. And you have to like kind of snap a few times when you say it.

2:40 I'm just really so thankful still that I never joined Twitter. That's the last thing I need. I'm already on Facebook, which is terrible. I've been enjoying Instagram, I have to say. That seems like a pretty nice crowd.

2:51 Totally different place. Yeah.

2:54 But, you know, we're talking about all this because we're talking about Sacagawea.

2:58 Yes, we are.

3:00 Naturally.

3:01 Yeah, naturally. Who would probably eschew both Instagram and Twitter because she seems like a pretty solid human being.

3:08 She'd be like, don't at me.

3:10 That's right. So just to get this done out of the gate, again, I thought that her name was pronounced Sacajawea. I am not like in the minority in the United States, at least, because that's how we were raised to say her name. Unfortunately, we have such things as historians and people who listen to Native Americans who have been told over the years, no, it's not Sacagawea, it's Sacagawea, right?

3:38 There's one pronunciation of it. But it's not ja, it's ga. And we've started to kind of pronounce her name correctly. You say it way better than me. So why don't you take it?

3:51 Well, I mean, gosh, this is the third time now we're on this. I've seen different things from Sacagawea to Sacagawea. I think in Clark's journal, William Clark, that is of Lewis and Clark fame, spelled it S-A-H-K-A-H, emphasis on that, G-A-R-W-E-A. So Sacagawea or Sacagawea. But then the Shoshone, which is a Native American tribe that– well, we'll get to the importance there– They say, actually, it is S-A-C-A-J-A-W-E-A, and it means boat pusher, not the Hidatsa language of bird woman.

4:36 So there is some debate.

4:37 Yeah. One thing that I did see is that Lewis and Clark– and they factor in this because Sacagawea was the main guide and interpreter as they pushed further westward– they actually tried to spell every Indian or Native American word that they encountered phonetically as best they could. They were terrible spellers even of English words. I mean, just like barely literate, it seemed like. But they tried their best. Yeah, it's really bad. But they tried to spell every word that they found phonetically. And I think Sacagawea's... name appears 17 different times in both of their journals. And not once do they spell that third syllable, guh, with a J sound, with a J. It's always a G. And they think that it was a hard G so that

5:35 it's Sacagawea, not Sacagawea.

5:38 So they said it's definitely Gif and not Jif.

5:41 Right. Which it is definitely Gif, as we all know.

5:46 So if you listen to the Lewis and Clark episode, was it a two-parter? I feel like it was.

5:50 It was not. It was not? Wow. You're thinking of the Evel Knievel episode.

5:55 God, it's so embarrassing. You always bring that up to shame me, I think.

6:00 It shames both of us and Jerry to a certain extent as well for letting that one through.

6:04 She could have stepped in and been like, for God's sakes, what are you doing?

6:06 Totally. Consolidate, man.

6:10 So a great episode, though.

6:14 I know in that episode we talked a bit, obviously, about Chicago Way and Ken Burns and his great documentary about the Corps of Discovery. But she was born, she lived a short life, and there is a little controversy on how long she did live, which we'll get to at the end. But she was born in either 1788 or 89 as a member of the LEMHI, is what I'm going to say.

6:35 L-E-M-H-I, Band of The Shoshone tribe, which we spoke about a minute ago.

6:45 Is it Shoshone or Shoshone?

6:48 Shoshone? Is it Shoshone?

6:49 That's what I've always heard. But then again, I always heard it was Sacagawea, too.

6:52 I know.

6:54 I believe it's Shoshone.

6:56 She grew up, though, in a very, I imagine, lovely, lovely part of the country in what is now Idaho in the Salmon River region.

7:03 Yes. So she was actually a member of a specific band of the Lemhe Shoshone tribe. The salmon eaters is what they were called. And she grew up in that part of Idaho. I guess it was around the Bitterroot Mountains near the Continental Divide. And the Bitterroots are part of the Rockies. But, yeah, it just sounds absolutely gorgeous.

7:32 The Shoshone tribe was enemies to the Hidatsa, who you mentioned earlier. And the reason that they say that Sacagawea means bird woman is because Sacagawea became an involuntary member of the Hidatsa tribe when she was around 12 years old. I didn't get if she was out on a buffalo hunt or if the Hidatsa happened to be out on a buffalo hunt and came across her. Did you understand that?

7:57 I'm not sure.

7:58 I kind of just in my mind thought that they were out, but I guess it doesn't really matter because either way she was kidnapped.

8:05 Mm-hmm.

8:07 And settled with them near what is now Bismarck, North Dakota.

8:12 Yeah.

8:13 And here's where her.

8:13 Life took a– or I guess that event actually took her life in a very different direction. And that was a trading center, an international trading center. So people from all over the world would kind of stop through there to trade their wares. And she was essentially– I mean, it's hard to not say kidnapped again. A French-Canadian fur trader, Toussaint Charbonneau.

8:40 Beautiful.

8:41 Took her as property. He called her his wife.

8:44 But we can't, you know, now through today's lens, we've gotten a lot better about not glossing over that stuff. She was property to him. She was a teenager, I think like 16 or 17.

8:54 Not even, I think she was actually 15.

8:57 Oh, was she?

9:00 And she was about two decades younger than him. And there's no other way to say it other than she was property. And part of being property was that she was raped by Charbonneau.

9:11 Yeah. Like there's no way you can put it that like she didn't have any say in the matter of whether they had sex. So like it's just that's rape no matter what. But yeah, over the years, like she's always been referred to as one of his wives because I guess Americans didn't want to kind of confront that stuff, you know? So she ends up living among the Hadatsa as Charbonneau's wife slash property because Charbonneau being a fur trader and the Hadatsa settlement that they lived at being this kind of international trading post, he had kind of adopted like the Hadassah way of living himself. Just being a fur trader, he had to be able to handle himself out in the elements. So I think it kind of, it was his speed. From what I gathered for the

10:10 rest of his life, he just basically lived in a style similar to Native American's. So she– aside from being away from her native tribe, she lived probably fairly– in a fairly cosmopolitan manner compared to how she would have had she never been kidnapped from the Lemhi band of Shoshones, which is kind of sad. But there's one thing that should be said. There's documentary opinion that she was– she was not unhappy living on this kind of this border land between the two cultures. Like she, she seemed to feel somewhat comfortable living among, you know, the, the colonizers way of life on the frontier. It just as much as she did living among the Shoshone. Yeah.

11:09 And we should also point out that a lot of this is very little is recorded. A lot of speculative information. because, you know, there's remarkable, well, I guess not remarkable because it was 1803, but very little actual recorded information about her life.

11:25 But it's remarkable how much there is for the typical teenage Native American girl at the time. Like the fact that there's anything recorded about her is kind of a huge testimony to her and her personality.

11:40 No, absolutely. So 1803 is when.

11:45 Charbonneau takes control of her life. 1803 is also when Thomas Jefferson said, hey, we got this big tract of land, really sweet deal called the Louisiana Purchase, 828,000 square miles of land stretching from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico, from the Mississippi to Colorado. And we need to go see what's out there because White people have never explored this territory. I want to find a Northwest Passage, which was eventually found. They were looking in the wrong place.

12:22 But that's what they were sort of after. But they were after more. Jefferson really wanted to know what was out there, the landscape.

12:30 He wanted maps.

12:31 He wanted to know about the Native American tribes. He wanted to know about the plant life and the animal life and just like go uh, Meriwether Lewis out there and record everything you can.

12:43 Yeah. Meriwether Lewis was, um, Jefferson's personal secretary and Lewis, um, selected, um, what was Clark's first name?

12:53 Josh? Billy.

12:54 William. William Clark. Billy Clark. Um, as who had been his, uh, captain in, um, the army as the leader of the expedition. He found him to be an able leader and said, Hey, you want to come lead this super high prestige, um, expedition for the president that the entire nation is going to be watching. And Clark said, sure, let's do it.

13:16 So Lewis and Clark set out, um, on this expedition and they actually traveled, I think 1600 miles before they ended up, um, in at that, uh, Hidatsa settlement, um, which is about where they really started to hit the frontier from what I understand.

13:34 All right. That sounds like a great turning point to take a break.

13:38 Okay.

13:39 So we'll be back right after this and pick up with the meeting of Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea.

13:48 Stuff you should know. Josh and Chuck. Stuff you should know. Okay, Chuck, so we've reached what is now today Bismarck, North Dakota.

14:14 South Dakota.

14:15 South Dakota. You sure?

14:18 I think so.

14:19 No, it's– Is that not right? Yeah, it's Bismarck, North Dakota.

14:22 Are there two?

14:22 I was going to say it almost literally doesn't matter.

14:27 We're going to get crushed for this.

14:29 It is. No, it's definitely Bismarck, North Dakota.

14:32 Okay. Then that was a misprint then in the.

14:36 I'll tell you what, get this. I've got this machine called the Computor.

14:40 Are you actually going to look it up?

14:42 Yeah, I'm going to look it up. I'm going to do a favor for the people of Bismarck for once. Bismarck, North Dakota.

14:49 I think it's North Dakota.

14:50 It is.

14:51 That's weird because I think this is from How Stuff Works. They've got South Dakota written in there. Oh, boy.

14:56 All right. We'll have to send an email.

15:00 I'm going to at them.

15:03 Yeah. Don't you know that's the tagline of How Stuff Works? Don't add us.

15:08 That's right.

15:09 So apologies to all the people in both Dakotas, all three Dakotas. We meant nothing by it. And we're going to do a live show there one day to make up for it.

15:18 Are we?

15:19 Sure. Why not?

15:21 I'll tell you later.

15:23 Okay.

15:27 All right.

15:27 Where are we? It's November 2nd, 1804.

15:28 Mm-hmm. When they finally land and they meet up with Sacagawea, who is six months pregnant at this point. And Charbonneau is, I get the impression that he's a bit of a, not a grifter maybe, but sort of an opportunist.

15:50 Yeah? Yeah, I think so, for sure. I mean, like, he's a fur trader for Pete's sake. Like, you got to be a little. Like that includes not just survival in the woods and killing animals, but also having to, you know, get the highest price you can for your pelts. So I'm guessing there's a bit of used car salesman to Charbonneau for sure.

16:10 And he was not exactly— It seems like it. He was not well-liked by Lewis and Clark. I don't know that he was hated or despised, but I get the impression from reading historians' interpretations of their journal entries about Charbonneau is that he was kind of a cross between— Chris Farley.

16:32 Okay.

16:33 And Gollum, maybe? I can't wait to see that photoshopped.

16:43 Oh, goodness. Yeah, I know who's going to take care of that for us.

16:45 So just this idea that this guy was not competent necessarily and was maybe a little bit evil. And that's, you know, all you need to know about Charbonneau. I also get the impression, Chuck, that there was a, you know, we'll talk about later, but there was, Sacagawea was plucked from historic obscurity. And really kind of raised up on this pedestal. And I think rightly so. But there was a sport that developed alongside of that where you could very easily raise Sacagawea up by contrasting her to her good-for-nothing, slave-holding, quote, husband.

17:22 And showing how just terrible he was at everything. It made her look all the much better. So I think there's a sport to it. There's kind of a long history of putting down Charbonneau. Um, but I think that it's kind of rooted in fact, from what I understand.

17:39 Yeah.

17:39 So at any rate, he comes along and he's like, Hey, you guys really need to bring me along. And, uh, and my wife, uh, slash property here. Um, I speak Hidatsa in French and they're like, we don't really need that, but I see that Sakagaway speaks Shoshone and we really need to learn that because at a certain point, we're going to need to talk to them to get some horses.

18:03 And since we can't hire a woman because it's 1803, we have to actually hire the husband to get her to come along.

18:10 I guess you both can come.

18:12 Yeah. So, like, we got to explain why Sacagawea being Shoshone was really important. And it was, like you said, those horses. Somehow, I'm not exactly sure how they already knew this because these are the first Americans to chart a course westward. But they knew that the— The Missouri River and the Columbia River was separated by mountains, the Rocky Mountains, the Bitterroot Mountains to be specific. And that since they were taking to the river, they were going to need to get from one river to the other.

18:48 And that the Shoshone Indians happened to live exactly where they needed or where they needed to pass through, where they needed the most help, where they needed horses. And so having a Shoshone along to help broker a deal would be incredibly useful. So useful, in fact, that the arrangement was going to be that when they finally met up with the Shoshone tribe in this area where they needed the horses the most, Sacagawea was going to speak to the Shoshones. And then she was going to translate what the Shoshones said into Hidatsa to Charbonneau. Sure. Yeah.

19:28 Charbonneau was going to translate from Hadassah into French for a French-speaking member of the Corps of Discovery, who would then translate from French into English for Lewis and Clark. That's how important.

19:38 Charbonneau didn't even speak English?

19:40 No, he spoke Hadassah in French.

19:43 Okay, I thought that meant in addition to English.

19:45 No, so he did play a role that was important. He was going to translate from Hadassah into French. It would have been way better if he had spoken English, but it just meant another person in the chain. Everything came out purple monkey dishwasher at the end.

20:07 So one thing we failed to mention, I think, which is just remarkable, is that a few, a couple of months before they leave together, Sacagawea has her son, Jean-Baptiste, known as Baptiste. And so, and I know we talked about this in Lewis and Clark, but I think I didn't have a kid at the time. It's just astounding to me now that I've had a two-month-old baby to take and like keeping that baby alive and all the comforts of modern-day America, to take a baby like that on a voyage like.

20:40 This is astounding. Yeah, for sure. It's really remarkable.

20:46 Yeah, and I mean, like, if you look at all of the memorials to Sacagawea, I don't think there's one out there that doesn't also show Baptiste as well.

20:57 Of course not.

20:58 Not just because he was an adopted honorary member of the Corps of Discovery. Basically a mascot, sure. Yeah. But also because it just goes to point out just how astounding what his mom did was. I think when Sacagawea was put on the dollar coin in the United States in 2000, Hillary Clinton famously referred to her as the original working mom.

21:29 Wow, that's a pretty cool designation.

21:32 I thought so, too. So, yeah, I think it's great that she's remembered as doing all this with a baby strapped to her back the whole time.

21:42 Right. So that's their plan.

21:45 They plan to get there, send her out to talk to the Shoshone tribe to get these horses, which was a good plan. But it was even way better. It worked out almost like it had been written in a movie script or something. Because I think it is Lewis— shows up first and has contact with an older woman of the tribe. And then about 60 Shoshone on horseback ride up. And they're like, you seem like a decent guy.

22:13 You're friendly. Let's all make this work out. Then Clark's group shows up about a day later with Sakagaway. And they're like, oh, my God, it's you. You were the one that was kidnapped and taken away so many years ago. And then Chief Kameowate rides up. And it's Sacagawea's brother.

22:33 Yeah. So not only do they get to have this reunion, but Lewis and Clark are like, yes, we're going to get such a good deal on these horses.

22:43 Yeah.

22:44 The chief is her brother. Like, this is perfect. But you know what that stuck out to me as, Chuck? That meant that Sacagawea probably would have met Lewis and Clark even if she had never been kidnapped.

22:59 Yeah, maybe so.

23:00 Isn't that really crazy to think like that one way or another, she was going to probably meet Lewis and Clark, even with her life diverging that radically from its, you know, original projected path. Yeah.

23:13 And what it really did was, I mean, she was already proving to be useful in that she could identify berries and things that you could eat and plants that you could use as medicine and kind of acted as the The navigator, in a lot of cases, is like, no, we need to go this way. I've been here before.

23:31 This is where I grew up.

23:31 Yeah, there's a huge, huge rock called Beaverhead Rock that she famously recognized that you can go visit and stand in the place, basically, where she showed Lewis and Clark, like, look, my people are going to be right around here. I recognize this place.

23:46 Yeah, so they've already got all this respect for her up until that point. And then she has such an in with the Shoshone community. Like you said, they get, I'm sure, a really good deal on the horses. And not only that, but they get help. They kind of partner up with them to help them along, which is a really big deal.

24:01 Yeah, because Lewis and Clark's expedition had somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 people involved, huge boats, several huge boats, lots of equipment, lots of instruments. And some people say, well, like if they needed horses, why didn't they bring the horses? Well, because they traveled by water. They really needed horses really, really badly. Yeah. But just for this one specific part of the trip in between the Missouri and the Columbia River, Thomas Jefferson very famously called it a dilly of a pickle that they had run into. But the fact that they were able to get the horses from the Shoshone, it just basically checked this enormous box that the whole expedition was predicated on. They could not have completed their

24:48 mission without this. Right. And Sacagawea basically brokered that, made sure that box got checked. And there's one other thing that stands out about her too that gets overlooked that I saw in a few places. Charbonneau had another wife who was Shoshone. And if they needed a Shoshone speaker who was, you know, with Charbonneau, who came with Charbonneau, they could have very easily gone with Otter Woman, the other, I guess, victim of Charbonneau. And they didn't. They went with Sacagawea, who, knowing full well that she came with an infant now, like there was going to be an infant, even though with Otter Woman there wouldn't have been. So clearly Sacagawea is like putting out the right kind of vibes.

25:34 It's saying like, I'm extraordinarily competent. You should probably pick me, even though if you pick me, I'm going to be bringing a newborn baby along on this frontier trek. I think that says a lot about the kind of... I guess, charisma or competence or whatever she was putting out that, that, that Lewis and Clark were like, yes, I think she would be the better of the two.

26:00 Yeah.

26:00 Because you don't want a two month old baby along.

26:03 No, but if you're cute, but nah.

26:05 But if you say, okay, we'll have a two month baby along, like that says a lot about the mom that's carrying the baby around and her abilities are, I think.

26:15 Yeah, absolutely. Um, she also proved her worth when, And I can't remember if we– I think we might have talked about this.

26:21 When there was a– one of their sailing vessels almost capsized when a big squall hit it. Apparently Charbonneau was navigating. He panicked under pressure. And it was Sakagaway who was calm and.

26:37 Said, you know what?

26:37 We need to get these papers together. We need to get the books that we've been writing in, all these navigational instruments and medicines and provisions and other stuff. We need to get it all together and take care of it. And, oh, also this baby. And basically saved that situation. And Charbonneau was just, you know.

26:56 He was like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.

26:59 Sacre bleu. Sacre bleu.

27:00 That's right. So, yeah, that's one of the big stories that's told about Sacagawea. So much so, I mean, that either Lewis or Clark wrote about it and basically was like, this Sacagawea is an amazing creature. Like, she's doing stuff that other members of the Corps are not doing. I mean, there is, I think, at least 12 members of the Corps of Discovery who aren't mentioned by name in either of the journals of Lewis and Clark throughout the expedition.

27:30 They did work. They did their job, obviously. But they didn't get mentioned because they weren't doing stuff like Sacagawea was. And I think the fact that she's mentioned multiple times with kind of frequently— discussing like just their impressed, how impressed they were with her. It says a lot as well.

27:51 Yeah.

27:52 I mean, they named because of that sailing incident, they named a branch of the Missouri river after her. And I think Clark was the one who really grew closer to her. It's really hard to get a read on exactly what the nature of their relationship was. It seems just like maybe a mentor type of relationship in that he, kind of took her under his wing and took these long walks with her. I don't think there's anything untoward about it is kind of what I'm getting at.

28:24 I don't have that impression either, and I have not run across a historian that's asserted that there was something untoward about it either.

28:31 But they were close.

28:33 Yeah, they were. The way I took it was like an adopted little sister kind of thing.

28:39 Yeah, that's kind of the way I see it too.

28:40 I also don't think Charbonneau would have stood for that. I think that would have been— not okay with him because he was the kind of guy who'd be like, that's my property, you know? Right.

28:50 Well, of course.

28:51 So I, yeah, I don't have that impression, but yeah, I thought the same thing, you know, as well.

28:57 Uh, and in fact, they thought so much of her, especially Clark that, and this is a really telling thing is that they gave, when they reached the Pacific coast, there was a vote on whether or not to stay there for the winter or not. And they actually let her vote, which in, The early 1800s, to let a woman have a vote like that was remarkable.

29:19 Yeah. So when they decided to stay, that vote led to them staying in what's now Astoria, Oregon. They build a winter quarters called Fort Clatsop after a friendly tribe nearby. Fort Clatsop? That's what I thought too, but it's close. There's an L in there. Yeah, Clatsop. But the Clatsop people said, hey, get this. There's a beached whale. You got to see this thing. It's enormous. And so I think Lewis was like, okay, we're going to go check this out. You guys stay here. And Sacagawea, I know we talked about this in the Lewis and Clark episode.

29:58 Sacagawea said, look, man, I have walked a long ways and helped you guys out. And the idea that you're not going to let me see the ocean, I've never seen any ocean. You're not going to let me see the ocean. And this giant whale that's been beached, come on. And so Lewis relented very famously and was like, okay, come along. So, so I could go away. I kind of, she put her foot down basically and said, no, I'm, I'm going to see this. That would be unusually cruel not to let me. So She went and saw this giant whale. She saw the ocean for the first time.

30:30 I mean, that's a pretty big– I've never seen a beached whale. Imagine seeing a beached whale the first time you see the ocean too.

30:37 You know?

30:38 Yeah.

30:39 I remember when I– as a young kid when I– we showed my grandmother the ocean for the first time and she was in her– geez, she was probably in her 70s.

30:49 She lived to be 100.

30:50 Wow.

30:51 So she had to be in her mid-70s when we took her to the ocean. Yeah.

30:54 And we walked her out there, and she walked out on the beach, I'll never forget it, and.

30:58 Said, ooh, it's big.

31:00 That's cute.

31:02 And that was about it. She didn't hang out for long.

31:04 She's like, oh, I'm good. This was enough.

31:07 Yeah, and there was no whale to poke with a stick. I'm kidding, by the way. You should never do that.

31:12 Poke a whale with a stick?

31:14 Yeah, I was making a joke. That wasn't nice.

31:16 I think everybody knew that, Chuck.

31:18 Yeah, you try and get that whale back in the water if you can.

31:20 Not with a stick, though.

31:22 Not with a stick.

31:23 You want to take our second break?

31:25 Yeah, we'll talk about how this all wrapped up and what happened to her afterward right after this.

31:29 Stuff you should know. Josh and Chuck. Stuff you should know. Stuff you should know. Okay, so they made it to the Pacific. They overwintered there in, I think, 1805, 1806. And then they started to make their way back. And they actually went right back to the same Hidatsa settlement, that international trading post outside of Bismarck, North Dakota, where they picked up Charbonneau and Sacagawea. And they said, hey, thanks a lot. We'll see you guys later. And everywhere I saw, um, Charbonneau was paid something like $ 500 and 33 cents for his efforts. And Sacagawea was not paid anything. Um, although I saw also in this article that she was paid as well. What do you, can, do you have any idea?

32:41 Yeah. You know, I was confused too.

32:43 Everywhere else I looked said that she did not get direct payment.

32:47 Which article said that she did?

32:49 I don't know, but it doesn't seem to be right. Um, Or maybe they just sort of said, well, since her captor slash husband was paid, then sort of means she was. I'm not sure, but that's all nowhere else that said that she was actually paid independently.

33:04 And I mean, that would make the most sense, you know? Although after that expedition, I would also not be surprised if she was paid directly, even though it bucked, you know, convention.

33:15 Yeah, he got paid $ 500 and.

33:17 320 acres of land, which was.

33:22 And it's– like I tried to do an inflation comp, but it's– they don't even have anything. I think it said– like when you go that far back, you can't even compare it to today's currency.

33:34 Oh, really?

33:35 Westgate gave me an estimate of about nine grand.

33:39 Oh, see, I saw that too, but I didn't see that as a direct inflation calculator, more like the goods that you could have bought back then.

33:50 Mm-hmm. No, they said $ 9, 000, 000.

33:53 No, I saw that. It just didn't seem like a one-to-one to me.

33:56 Oh, I see. Even still, it seems like really I would imagine $ 500 back then would be like $ 10 trillion today, you know?

34:08 Yeah, it would seem to be the case. It's a little weird.

34:12 But, yeah, because I mean like a journey of thousands of miles at the behest of the president of the United States– And he paid nine grand. Seems like, it just seems like you would get more than that. I don't know. But then again, he's a fur trapper who only speaks Hadassah in French. So who knows?

34:32 I think what confused me is, like, if you enter $ 500 100 years later, it's like $ 15, 000. Or maybe that does work.

34:42 I don't know. It just didn't seem to work out math-wise. But what do I know?

34:45 Yeah, no, I'm with you. You kind of have to be able to peer back into the vagaries of the American economy over the last couple hundred years to suss that out.

34:57 I looked it up and it said what that would be today would be 200 mink, 80 beaver tails. Right.

35:03 And $ 9, 000. Those poor beaver.

35:05 I know. That's the other thing about Charbonneau that people don't say he killed a lot of animals for their pelts.

35:12 That's right.

35:13 So.

35:16 All right, so after the expedition, she stayed with Charbonneau. I think a few years later, they moved to, with little Baptiste, moved to St.

35:28 Louis.

35:28 Yeah, at the invitation of Clark, right?

35:32 Yeah, and it says that he offered them an opportunity of land to farm, which I don't quite get because he just got 320 acres of land.

35:41 I was wondering if that was one and the same.

35:43 Maybe.

35:44 I couldn't quite parse that out. But at any rate, he's like, here, you come here. Here's some land to farm if you let me educate your son in the, you know, American sort of schooling system. And, you know, that was– he was the godfather of the boy at that point, really cared a lot about Baptiste and Sacagawea and wanted the best for him. And I think that was a pretty decent deal for Charbonneau.

36:10 Yeah. So, I mean, I believe– Clark officially adopted Baptiste as his guardian, at least, if not as his adopted parent. And he was educated at the St. Louis Academy, I believe. And then he... I don't know how he met him, but Baptiste went on to meet a German prince who was like, hey, you should totally come back and hang with me in Germany and I'll make sure you get a European education. And he did. He moved to Europe and was educated there, lived a pretty interesting life, said, yeah, I'm going to go back to America, became a trapper for a while, had a bunch of different interesting jobs.

36:52 I believe he was a hotel clerk in Auburn, California for a little while. Um, So, yeah, he did a bunch of different stuff and had a pretty amazing life in addition to basically being the official mascot of the Corps of Discovery's expedition.

37:10 Yeah, and he ended up taking guardianship because Charbonneau and Sacagawea left in April 1811 to go on another fur trading expedition, and they left Baptiste with him.

37:22 So I think it kind of worked out for everyone. Yeah.

37:25 Yeah, I get the impression it wasn't like we don't want our kid and Lewis would give me your kid. I think it was for the best interest of the kid and they all loved him very much. That's the impression I have.

37:36 She also had a daughter about a year after that in 1812, Lisette or Lisette.

37:42 I don't know if it's an S or a Z.

37:45 And this is where we get to the sort of fork in the road as to what actually happened to Sacagaway.

37:52 There are a couple of stories.

37:54 One is that She died not long after of what was called putrid fever, which is probably typhoid fever.

38:02 That's terrible.

38:03 There's another story, and she would have been about 25 years old in December of 1812. There's another story that she went on to live a very long life in another part of the country, but I think that one has kind of been shot down, right?

38:18 Yeah, so at the turn of the last century— Sacagawea was kind of dug out of obscurity. Well, actually, there was a guy who was the official, I don't know, biographer or chronicler of the Corps of Discovery's expedition where he was in charge. His name was Biddle, I believe. Yeah. He was in charge of basically taking the notes of the Corps of Discovery and getting them ready for publication.

38:47 He just couldn't publish the whole thing like that. He edited them, basically. Yeah. But he also interviewed Clark. And out of his interviews with Clark, we found a lot more out about Sacagawea than we knew before. And Biddle was like, this is a very interesting story right here. I'm going to put Sacagawea front and center. So he kind of brought Sacagawea into the foreground for the first time.

39:08 But then almost a century later, as the women's suffrage movement was starting to gain momentum, there was a woman named– Emily, no, Eva Emery Dye, who wrote a book about the Lewis and Clark expedition and said, here's my heroine. Sacagawea is a heroine. I'm going to basically use her. her as an icon for the suffragette movement. And that's how she kind of became this symbol from that point on. I don't remember what kicked off the spiel, though. You asked a question or you said something. What was it?

39:42 Do you remember? What spiel?

39:45 My spiel about how Sacagawea was kind of brought out of obscurity by these writers.

39:52 Oh, oh, oh.

39:53 Where this idea came from that she had gone on to live a long life.

39:59 Oh, right, right.

40:00 That first book that was written by Eva Emery Dye was picked up by another historian who said, you know what, I've heard these stories about this woman who went on to live at the Wind River Reservation, and I think she's actually Sacagawea. And that kind of kicked off this whole hunt.

40:19 Yeah, because like you said, there are numerous people who wrote down sort of officially that she did die very young at 25 years old, including I think Clark in one of his– I think like maybe a financial ledger.

40:38 Yeah.

40:39 Ledger? Ledger.

40:42 It was a cash book about like where people– like where are they now basically and have they been paid?

40:47 Right.

40:48 And next to her name, he just wrote dead, which.

40:53 Not even a frowny face next to it.

40:55 I guess if it's a ledger, you're just trying to sort of, you know, be cold about it. But for someone who really cared a lot about her, it seemed it probably wasn't the right place to wax philosophical.

41:06 Right. But also some people have said, well, no, he was covering for her because she, the legend goes that she left Charbonneau, ran off. To live a life away from her.

41:16 As an independent woman.

41:17 Right, exactly. Which really kind of dovetailed with the suffragette movement's push for women's rights. So that was a great idea that that's what she did. And the idea was that Clark was covering for her in his little cash ledger by saying she was dead, knowing full well she was alive. Other people are like, who's going to ever look in Clark's cash ledger? Like Sharpa knows ever going to get his hands on it. That's probably not correct.

41:43 And the whole idea that she went on to live on the Wind River Reservation until age 100 when she died in like the 1880s.

41:51 Makes for a good story.

41:52 It makes for a great story. And there was a woman who did live like that. Her name was Para Evo, also known as Basil's mother, who lived to be 100. And a lot of people said, no, that's Sacagawea. But that was before more historical record came out, including an account from a guy named who worked for the same fur trading company that Charbonneau did, knew Charbonneau personally, and wrote in his journal, had no reason to make anything up, but in December, I think on December 20th of 1812, was it? Wrote that Charbonneau's wife, he's the one who said that she had a putrid fever and died, and that she was the best woman in the fort. She was a good woman and the best woman in the fort.

42:39 She was aged about 25 years, which totally fits the bill for Sacagawea.

42:45 And she left a fine infant girl.

42:47 Yes. So once that guy's journal was found, that was basically the nail in the coffin of the idea that Sacagawea had lived to age 100 after escaping her captor husband.

43:00 Yeah, I think what's kind of cool is, you know, even though there's very little officially recorded about her life everywhere, She is recorded.

43:08 It's all glowing praise.

43:11 There's not like one entry where anyone was ever like, oh boy, Sakagaway and that baby are really, like what a mistake that was. By all accounts, she was a boon to the Corps of Discovery and a big, big part of its success.

43:25 Yeah, and so as a result, Chuck, Lifetime, as in Lifetime Movie Network Lifetime, I couldn't find the year, but they recently conducted a survey of memorials to create the Lifetime Herstory And of, I think, 5,500 plus statues, monuments, and memorials that exist in the United States, only about 200, which is around 4%, honor women. But of those 200, 16 honor Sacagawea, which means that she is the most honored woman via monuments and statues in the entire United States.

44:04 Wow. Amazing.

44:05 The first one from what I read was by a group of suffragettes in Portland, Oregon in 1905. And that statue is obviously still there today. And it is beautiful. And guess who's strapped to her back in the statue? Lissette? Close enough.

44:22 Little Baptiste.

44:23 Little Baptiste, that's right. You got anything else?

44:26 No, other than, and we should mention, I don't think we know a lot about what happened to Lissette. Unfortunately, she was sort of lost to history.

44:32 Yeah, for sure. I guess that's it.

44:37 That's it.

44:37 All right, so since we said that's it, that means it's time, everybody, for Listener Mail.

44:43 Yeah, we're going to do a couple of corrections, a bit of a mea culpa for me and a correction.

44:48 Oh, I like those.

44:49 I said the word redneck a lot, entitled the episode about the Klan, used the word redneck. And, you know, I probably shouldn't have. That's a derogatory term. The name actually has a different history. I think West Virginia coal miners has something to do with that. And I just wasn't really being as sensitive enough. I'm not apologizing for degrading the Klan.

45:15 Right.

45:16 But I probably shouldn't have used the word redneck with such a broad brush.

45:19 But think about it, though, Chuck. That means the Klan is so rotten, they give rednecks a bad name. That's essentially what we're saying here.

45:29 I love it.

45:30 And then from that same episode, We need to address the Robert Byrd incident.

45:35 Because we heard from a lot of people.

45:36 That was all me.

45:38 Yeah, so I think we were talking about Senator Robert Byrd sort of being unapologetic about being in the Klan. That was very much not the case. This is one of the many emails, and this is from Aaron Patrick Lyons.

45:48 He, him, his. Hey, listen to the great episode on the KKK. As usual, did a bang-up job.

45:55 However, I have to take issue with Josh's statement indicating that Senator Robert Byrd was an unrepentant Klansman.

46:01 He was indeed.

46:02 and exalted Cyclops or local leader of the clan in the fifties, uh, into the fifties. But through the seventies and eighties, he had a sincere change of heart regarding race relations and voted for the Martin Luther King jr. National holiday among other legislation in his very long career. Uh, he was deeply embarrassed, uh, embarrassed and apologetic about.

46:21 His time in the clan.

46:22 Uh, and that is like I said, from Eric Patrick, Aaron, Patrick Lyons in Cedar Falls, Iowa. We heard from a lot of people that, um, Not only did he vote for the MLK holiday, but apparently did a lot of work for legislation.

46:38 For equal rights for African-Americans.

46:41 I totally flubbed that one. So my apologies to Robert Byrd's family for tarnishing his legacy in that small way. And I'm glad we got corrected almost immediately right after the episode came out. It was, can't believe you guys use rednecks so much. You were totally wrong about Robert Byrd. So this listener mail is perfect. And then there's one other thing I want to say, too, about the redneck thing, Chuck.

47:02 Somebody pointed out, I think it was on Twitter, that using the word redneck was not only derogatory towards rednecks, it obfuscated, it covered up all of the people who aren't rednecks, who are just kind of everyday normal people who are either in the clan or subscribe to the clan's ideologies. That it makes it seem like just this marginal group or a marginal thought or fringe thought when it's really kind of subscribed to by an alarming number of people. that, you know, you live and work beside and might never really guess at just how deep their racism goes. So I think that's another reason to have eschewed it as well.

47:40 Yeah, and, you know, I'm not going to stick up for myself, but I think when you grow up in the South, you might feel like you have a little bit of ownership on using a word like that.

47:48 For sure.

47:49 So, yeah, my apologies to all the great rednecks of the world.

47:53 That's right. Sorry, Jeff Foxworthy. That's right. Sorry, Larry the Cable Guy. Who's actually not really a redneck if you listen to David Cross's beef with him.

48:03 Yeah, I mean, that's fully an act, right?

48:05 Yeah, from what I understand.

48:07 He created that persona to get more fans of comedy.

48:10 That's right.

48:12 Smart man. That's right.

48:14 And, well, I guess since we started talking about Larry the Cable Guy, that's the end of this episode, and listener mail is petered out. And if you want to get in touch with us to correct us or call us out for something or whatever, lay it on us. Send us an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.

48:36 For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.