Questions Surrounding the Resting Place of Sacajawea

Sacajawea remains an inspiration to women everywhere. A guide and interpreter for Lewis and Clark on their great westward expedition, Sacajawea became a legend even during her lifetime. While the journals of Clark and of others on the expedition recorded information about her life, the details of her death are still in question. When Sacajawea actually died, how she died and where her remains now rest are all questions that scholars and Native Americans have been investigating for years.

When Sacajawea died

An entry in a fort clerk's journal from 1812, long after the expedition ended, says that Charbonneau's wife, possibly Sacajawea, died of a fever on December 20th. By 1812, Sacajawea would have been around 25 years old and would have had two children, Jean-Baptiste and Lizette. These children were later adopted by Clark, and the laws in Missouri, where Clark lived, would not have allowed a child declared an orphan without some proof of the parents' death. Yet, there are stories in Native American tradition of a Shoshone woman who died, presumably of old age, in 1884. Investigation suggests this could have been Sacajawea, in which case she would have left her husband in 1812.

Possible burial sites for Sacajawea

If Sacajawea truly died in 1812, she is laid to rest in an unmarked grave in the burial grounds at Fort Manuel at the border of South and North Dakota on the Missouri River. Her grave marker, though, is at another site. In Fort Washakie, Wyoming, on the Wind River Shoshone Indian Reservation there is a grave marker for Sacajawea. However, Native American legend records a different tradition, explaining that Sacajawea left her husband and traveled into the plains, where she settled with a Comanche tribe. When her Comanche husband, she moved on to rejoin her home tribe, the Shoshone, and died among her people.

Most historians still hold to the belief that Sacajawea died in 1812 of a fever, as the clerk at Fort Manuel said in his journal. However, many Native American historians believe that Sacajawea journeyed home and was laid to rest with her native tribe. Her death and resting place remain a mystery, and probably will stay so for decades to come.