At the Mandan Villages, where the Corps established Fort Mandan, they spent the winter of 1804-1805 planning their foray into the unknown regions on the upper Missouri and trying to establish solid trade alliances with the Mandans. At Fort Mandan and the nearby Indian villages, Lewis and Clark discovered that trade in European goods was integral to Mandan and Hidatsa economies, and they learned the important roles British traders played. The captains hosted Indian leaders at Fort Mandan and learned a great deal about the tribes in the region. The entire Corps had an opportunity to become familiar with individuals and the routine of village life.
York, Clark’s slave who accompanied his master throughout the journey, drew intense interest from the Arikara and Mandan. As Clark recorded, the village Indians were “much astonished at my black Servant.” The Arikara called York “big medicine,” which reflected both his exotic image and an apparent belief that he possessed important power.
It was during their discussions with the Mandan and Hidatsa that the captains met Toussaint Charbonneau, a French trader who lived in a Hidatsa village with his two Shoshone wives and worked for the Northwest Company traders from Montreal. Charbonneau brokered his services on the Expedition with Lewis and Clark by offering his wife, Sacagawea, as an interpreter who could aid them in the Rockies, where they would enter her tribe’s territory.
At about age twelve, Sacagawea had been captured by Hidatsa raiders near the Three Forks of the Missouri in 1800, taken back to the Hidatsa villages, and sold as a wife to Charbonneau, then in his forties. She gave birth to a boy, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, in February 1805, and less than two months later she and her baby left with the Expedition, heading upriver to the farthest reaches of the Missouri.
© William L. Lang, 2004
