Fort Manuel – Sacagawea Death

John C. Luttig, Lisa’s clerk at Fort Manuel, kept a journal that included this entry for 20 December 1812: “This Evening the Wife of Charbonneau a Snake Squaw, died of a putrid fever she was a good and best Woman in the fort, aged about 25 years she left a fine infant girl.”

The following year, Luttig was named guardian of Jean Baptiste and Lisette in a St. Louis court document. His name was later replaced with that of William Clark, who paid for the raising and education of the children in St Louis. When Clark wrote his list of the fates of expedition members sometime between 1825 and 1828, he noted Sacagawea as deceased.

Another story of Sacagawea’s later years and death must be mentioned, the oral tradition of the Eastern Shoshone people. (Sacagawea’s people were western Shoshones who lived in the present Lemhi River valley, in Idaho.) The story handed down among the Wind River Shoshones is that Sacagawea adopted an Eastern Shoshone man named Bazil, as her son, and in her later years moved to live with him in Wyoming. There, according to Eastern Shoshone tradition, she is said to have died in 1884, at nearly 100 years of age, and was buried at Fort Washakie on the Wind River [Shoshone] Indian Reservation.