Sacagawea: More Than Charbonneau's Wife

Added: 2026-05-26

[00:00:00]But there's the the assumption that I think too often we want to see Sacagawea as Charbonneau's wife and I don't think that's the right word for it. I think she was a slave and this is a word that Clark used. If you look at his conversations with Biddle, he talked about that Sacagawea was a slave and so Charbonneau acquired her in some way.

[00:00:18]We'll never quite know for sure how that happened either, but the relationship between them I think has been sanitized and romanticized the relationship between Sacagawea and Charbonneau in a way that I don't think the historical record reflects. We have a lot of mentions of Charbonneau throughout the 19th century, not many of them are positive. And so one thing I really tried to push in the book is that Charbonneau was even by the standards of the fur trade in this time and place, he was kind of a lousy guy and I think one reason Sacagawea worked to help the expedition was that she realized the captains could help her get back to the Shoshone and that the captains could also help keep her safe. We know that that happened because Charbonneau struck her at one point at a very tense moment in the expedition and Clark intervened.

[00:00:56]And Clark says that we're not going to be doing that.