Stuff You Should Know - Sacagawea: Impressive Teen

Episode Date: February 9, 2021

Sacagawea was only 16 when she joined the Corps of Discovery. That is one seriously impressive teenager. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm Munga Shatikler and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find it in Major League Baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas are about to change too.

Visit Skyline Drive on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. 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. And I can't help but feel that I'm being sub-tweeted right now. Oh, it's where you talk about somebody without directly talking about them. You just kind of maybe talk about their behavior or how you disapprove of something that they did but you don't directly say, this person did this and I don't like it.

You know, I one time, I don't know all this lingo with the Twitter because I was never on it and I was emailing with Jonathan Colton, musician, Jonathan Colton about coming on a 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. I don't know, I apologize if I did something wrong and I think he was kind of like, who is this idiot?

How'd you men like this guy? And I think don't, I mean, doesn't that just mean you're tagging someone on Twitter or something? 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 have made their point and they don't want to hear any feedback from you about it. That's what I mean.

That's kind of what I took from it. And you have to like kind of snap a few times when you say it. 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. Totally different place.

Yeah. But, you know, we're talking about all this because we're talking about Sacagawea. Yes. We are. Naturally. Yeah. Naturally. Who would probably eschew both Instagram and Twitter because she seems like a pretty solid

human being. She'd be like, don't at me. That's right. So just to get this done out of the gate, again, I thought that her name was pronounced Sacagawea. I am not like in the minority in the United States at least because that's how we were raised to say her name. Fortunately, 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 Sacakawega, right? There's one pronunciation of it. But that it's not, it's, 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? 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 a 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. So there is some debate. 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, G, with a J sound, with a J. It's always a G, and they think that it was a hard G so that it's Sacagawea, not Sacagawea.

So they said it's definitely GIF and not GIF, which it is definitely GIF as we all know. So if you listen to the Lewis and Clark episode, was it a two-parter? I feel like it was. It was not. It was not? Wow. You're thinking of the evil Knievel episode. God, it's so embarrassing.

You always bring that up to shame me, I think. It shames both of us, and Jerry to a certain extent as well for alerting that one through. Like she could have stepped in. Yeah. And like, for God's sakes, what are you doing? Totally. Consolidate, man. So a great episode, though, I know in that episode we talked a bit, obviously, about

Sacagawea and Ken Burns and his great documentary about the core 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. Okay. L-E-M-H-I, band of the Shoshone tribe, which we spoke about a minute ago. Is it Shoshone or Shoshone?

Shoshone? Is it Shoshone? That's what I've always heard. Again, I always heard it was Sacagawea, too. I believe it's Shoshone. 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. Yes.

So she was actually a member of a specific band of the Lemhi Shoshone. 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. 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? I'm not sure. 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 and settled with them near what is now Bismarck, North Dakota, and here's where her life took a, or I guess that event actually took her life in a very different direction in that 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 fringe Canadian fur trader to saw Charbonneau. Beautiful. Took her as property. He called her his wife, but we can't, you know, now through today's lens, we've got a lot better about not glossing over that stuff.

She was property to him. She was a teenager. I think like 16 or 17, I think she was actually 15, 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. Yeah. Like there's no way you can put it that 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? Right. So she ends up living among the Hidatsa as Charbonneau's wife slash property because Charbonneau being a fur trader and the Hidatsa settlement that they lived at being this kind of international trading post, he had kind of adopted like the Hidatsa way of living

himself. Yeah, 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 rest of his life. He just basically lived in a style similar to Native Americans. So she, aside from being away from her native tribe, she lived, you know, probably fairly, in a fairly cosmopolitan manner compared to how she would have had she never been kidnapped from the Lemhi band of Shoshone's, which is kind of sad, but there's one thing that should be said.

There's documentary opinion that she was not unhappy living on this kind of this border land between the two cultures. I think she seemed to feel somewhat comfortable living among, you know, the colonizer's way of life on the frontier, just as much as she did living among the Shoshone. Yeah, and we should also point out that a lot of this is, very little is recorded, a lot is speculative because, you know, there's remarkable, well, I guess not remarkable because it was 1803, but very little actual recorded information about her life. 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 a kind of a huge testimony to her and her personality. No, absolutely. So 1803 is when 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. 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, he wanted maps, he wanted to know about the Native American tribes, he wanted to know about the plant life and the animal life, and just go, Maryweather Lewis out there and record everything you can.

Yeah, Maryweather Lewis was Jefferson's personal secretary, and Lewis selected, what was Clark's first name? Josh? Billy. William. William Clark. Billy Clark, who had been his captain in 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 expedition for the president that the entire nation's going to be watching? And Clark said, sure, let's do it. So Lewis and Clark set out on this expedition, and they actually traveled, I think 1600 miles before they ended up at that Hidatsa settlement, which is about where they really started to hit the frontier from what I understand. All right, that sounds like a great turning point to take a break. So we'll be back right after this and pick up with the meeting of Lewis and Clark and Sakagawaia.

Stuff you should know. Josh and Sean. Woo! Stuff you should know. I'm Mangesh Atikular, and to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life. In India, it's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology.

And lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in, and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had to handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. It doesn't look good, there is risk to father.

And my whole view on astrology? It changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change, too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay Chuck, so we've reached what is now today Bismarck, North Dakota at the South Dakota. You sure? I think so.

No, it's not right. Yeah, it's Bismarck, North Dakota. Are there two? I was going to say, it almost literally doesn't matter. We're going to get crushed for this. It is, no. It's definitely Bismarck, North Dakota. Okay, then that was a misprint then in the...

I'll tell you what, get this. I've got this machine called the Computor. Are you actually going to look it up? 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. I think it's North Dakota. It is. That's weird because I think this is from House of Works, they've got South Dakota

written in there. Oh boy. All right. I'll have to send an email. I'm not going to, I'm going to add them. Yeah. Don't you know that's the tagline of House of Works? Don't add us.

That's right. So apologies to all the people in the, 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. Are we? Sure, why not? I'll tell you later. Okay.

All right, where are we? It's November 2nd, 1804, 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. Yeah? Yeah, I think so. For sure.

I mean, like he's a fur trader for Pete's sake. Like you got to be, you got to be a little, like that, 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 pelt. So I'm guessing there's a bit of used car salesmen to Charbonneau for sure. And he was not exactly, he was not well liked by Lewis and Clark. I don't know that he was heated or despised, but I get the impression from reading historians interpretations of their journal entries about Charbonneau is that he was kind of across

between Chris Farley and Gollum maybe. I can't wait to see that photo shot. Oh goodness. Yeah. I know who's going to take care of that for us. So just this idea that this guy was not competent necessarily and was maybe a little bit evil. And that's, that's, you know, all you need to know about Charbonneau. I also get the impression, Chuck, that there was a, there was a, you know, we'll talk about

later, but there was, Saka Goea 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 Saka Goea up by contrasting her to her good for nothing slave holdings, quote, husband and showing how just, just terrible he was at everything. It made her look all the, all the much better. So I think there's a sport to it. There's a kind of a long history of putting down Charbonneau, but I think that it's kind

of rooted in fact from what I understand. Yeah. And so at any rate, he comes along and he's like, Hey, you guys really need to bring me along and, and my wife slash property here. I speak Hidatsa in French and they're like, we don't really need that. But I see that Saka Goea 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. 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. I guess you both can come. Yeah. So like we got to explain why Saka Goea being Shoshone was really important. And it was like you said, those horses and 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, 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 and that the Shoshone Indians happen 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, Saka Goea was going to speak to the Shoshone's. And then she was going to translate what the Shoshone said into Hidatsa to Charbonne.

Yeah. Charbonne was going to translate from Hidatsa 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... How Charbonne didn't even speak English? No. He spoke Hidatsa in French. No.

Okay. I thought that meant in addition to English. No. So he did, he did play a role that was important. He was going to translate from Hidatsa into French. It would have been way better if he had spoken English, but it, yeah, it just meant another person in the chain. I think came out purple monkey dishwasher at the end.

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, Saka Goea 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 this is astounding.

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. It's really remarkable. Yeah. And I mean, like if you look at all of the memorials to Saka Goea, I don't think there's one out there that doesn't also show Baptiste as well. Of course not.

Not just because he was an adopted honorary member of the Corps of Discovery, basically a mascot, sure, but also because it just goes to point out just how astounding what his mom did was. I think when Saka Goea was put on the dollar coin in the United States in 2000, Hillary Clinton famously referred to her as the original working mom. Wow. That's a pretty cool designation. I thought so too.

So yeah, I think it's great to just that she's remembered as doing all this with a baby strapped to her back the whole time. Right. So that's their plan. 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 Louis 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, you're friendly, let's all make this work out. Then Clark's group shows up about a day later with Saka Goea, 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 Kamea Waite rides up and it's Saka Goea's brother. So not only do they get to have this reunion, but Louis and Clark are like, yes, we're going to get such a good deal on these horses.

The chief is her brother, like this is perfect, but you know what that stuck out to me as Chuck? That meant that Saka Goea probably would have met Louis and Clark, even if she had never been kidnapped. Yeah, maybe so. Isn't that really crazy to think like that one way or another she was going to probably meet Louis and Clark, even with her life diverging that radically from its original projected path? Yeah, 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 navigator in a lot of cases like, no, we need to go this way. I've been here before. This is where I grew up. 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 Louis and Clark like, look, my people are going to be right around here.

I recognize this place. Yeah, so they've already got all this respect for up until that point, and then she has such an in with the Shoshone. Like you said, they get, I'm sure a really good deal on the horses and not only that, but they get help. They get like, they kind of partner up with them to help them along, which is a really big deal. Yeah, because Louis 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 a bad way and they bring the horses, well, because they traveled by water, they really needed horses really, really badly, 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 just couldn't, they could not have completed their mission without this.

And so I could go away, I 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 Otterwoman, 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 Otterwoman there wouldn't have been. So clearly, Sacagawea is like putting out the right kind of vibes and 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 Lewis and Clark were like, yes, I think she would be the better of the two. Yeah.

Because you don't want a two-month-old baby along. No. They're cute, but nah. 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 what her abilities are, I think. Yeah, absolutely. She also proved her worth when, and I can't remember if we, I think we might have talked about this, when there was one of their sailing vessels almost capsized when a big squall

hit it. Apparently, Charbonneau was navigating, he panicked under pressure, and it was Sacagaway who was calm and said, you know what, 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. He was like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.

Sacra blue, Sacra blue. That's right. So yeah, that's one of the big stories that's told about Sacagaway so much so, I mean, that either Lewis or Clark wrote about it and basically was like, this Sacagaway is an amazing person, 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. They did work, they did their job, obviously, but they didn't get mentioned because they

weren't doing stuff like Sacagaway was, and I think the fact that she's mentioned multiple times with kind of frequently discussing, like, just how impressed they were with her. That says a lot as well. Yeah. 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. 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. The way I took it. But they were close. Yeah, they were.

The way I took it was like an adopted little sister kind of thing. Yeah, that's kind of the way I see it too. 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. Right. Well, of course. So, yeah, I don't have that impression, but yeah, I thought the same thing as well.

And in fact, they thought so much of her, especially Clark that, and this is a really telling thing, is that 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. Yeah. So, when they decided to stay, that vote led to them staying in what's now Astoria, Oregon. They built a winter quarters called Fort Clatsop after a friendly tribe nearby.

Fort Katsop? 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 Saqqa Gawai, I know we talked about this in the Lewis and Clark episode. Saqqa Gawai 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, Saqqa Gawai, she put her foot down basically and said, no, 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. 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, you know? Yeah. 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. She lived to be 100. Wow.

So, she had to be in her mid 70s when we took her to the ocean. And we walked her out there and she walked out on the beach. I'll never forget it. And said, ooh, it's big. Yeah, that's cute. And that was about it. She didn't hang out for long. She's like, I'm good.

This is enough. Yeah. This is a real whale to poke with a stick. So you want to, I'm kidding, by the way, you should never do that. Poke a whale with a stick? Yeah. I was, I was making a joke. That wasn't nice.

I think everybody knew that, Chuck. Yeah. You try and get that whale back in the water if you can. Not with the stick though. Not with the stick. You want to take our second break? Yeah. We'll talk about how this all wrapped up and what happened to her afterward.

Time for this stuff you should know, Josh and Chuck stuff you should know. I'm Mangesh Atikular. And to be honest, I don't believe in astrology, but from the moment I was born, it's been a part of my life in India. It's like smoking. You might not smoke, but you're going to get secondhand astrology. Lately, I've been wondering if the universe has been trying to tell me to stop running and pay attention, because maybe there is magic in the stars, if you're willing to

look for it. So I rounded up some friends and we dove in and let me tell you, it got weird fast. Tantric curses, Major League Baseball teams, canceled marriages, K-pop. But just when I thought I had a handle on this sweet and curious show about astrology, my whole world came crashing down. Situation doesn't look good. There is risk to father. And my whole view on astrology, it changed.

Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, I think your ideas are going to change too. Listen to Skyline Drive and the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 or outside of Bismarck, North Dakota, where they picked up Charbonneau and Sakagoea. And they said, hey, thanks a lot.

We'll see you guys later. And everywhere I saw, Charbonneau was paid something like $500.33 for his efforts, and Sakagoea was not paid anything, although I saw also in this article that she was paid as well. Do you have any idea? Yeah, you know, I was confused too. Everywhere else I looked said that she did not get direct payment. Which article said that she did?

I don't know, but it doesn't seem to be right. 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 I saw nowhere else that said that she was actually paid independently. 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. Yeah, he got paid $500 and 320 acres of land, which was pretty good.

And it's like I tried to do a 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. Oh, really? Westgate gave me an estimate of about $9,000. 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. No, they said $9,000.

No, I saw that. It just didn't seem like a one-to-one to me. Oh, I see. And still, it seems like, really, I would imagine $500 back then would be like $10 trillion today, you know? Yeah, it would seem to be the case. It's a little weird. But yeah, because I mean like a journey of thousands of miles at the behest of the president

of the United States, getting paid $9,000,000,000, it just seems like you would get more than that. But then again, he's a fur trapper who only speaks it out in French, so who knows? I think what confused me is like if you enter $500 a hundred years later, it's like $15,000. Or maybe that does work. I don't know. It just didn't seem to work out math-wise. But what do I know?

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 of hundred years to suss that out. I looked it up and it said what that would be today would be 280 beaver tails in $9,000. It was poor beaver, I know. That's the other thing about Charbonneau that people don't say he killed a lot of animals for their pellets.

That's right. 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. Louis. Yeah, the invitation of Clark, right? 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. I was wondering if that was one and the same. Maybe.

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 American schooling system. He was the godfather of the boy at that point, really cared a lot about Baptiste and Chicago Way and one of the best for him. I think that was a pretty decent deal for Charbonneau. Yeah, so I believe Clark officially adopted Baptiste as his guardian, at least, if not as his adopted parent. He was educated at the St. Louis Academy, I believe, and then he, I don't know how we

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. 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. I believe it was a hotel clerk in Auburn, California for a little while. 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. Yeah, and he ended up taking guardianship because Charbonneau and Chicago Way left in April, 1811 to go on another fur trading expedition and they left Baptiste with him. So I think it kind of worked out for everyone. Yeah, I get the impression it wasn't like we don't want our kid and Lewis would give me your kid. Like it was for the best interest of the kid and they all loved him very much. That's the impression I have.

She also had a daughter about a year after that in 1812, Lisette or Lisette, I don't know if it's an S or a Z and this is where we get to the sort of fork in the road as to what actually happened to Chicago Way. There are a couple of stories. One is that she died not long after of what was called putrid fever, which is probably typhoid fever. That's terrible. There's another story, which 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? Yeah. At the turn of the last century, Chicago Way was kind of dug out of obscurity. Well, actually, there was a guy who was the official, I don't know, biographer, chronicler of the Corps of Discovery's expedition where he was in charge, his name was Biddle, I believe. He was in charge of basically taking the notes of the Corps of Discovery and getting them ready for publication.

He just couldn't publish the whole thing like that. He edited them basically. But he also interviewed Clark, and out of his interviews with Clark, we found a lot more out about Chicago Way than we knew before, and Biddle was like, this is a very interesting story right here. I'm going to put Chicago Way up front and center. So he kind of brought Chicago Way into the foreground for the first time, 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, Chicago Way is a heroine. I'm going to basically use 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 and you said something. What was it? Do you remember?

What spiel? My spiel about how Chicago Way was kind of brought out of obscurity by these writers. Oh, oh, oh, where this idea came from that she had gone on to live a long life. 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 Chicago Way and that kind of kicked off this whole hunt. 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 and one of his, I think maybe a financial ledger, it was a cash book about like where people, like where are they now basically and how they've been paid and next to her name, he just wrote dead, which... Not even a frowny face next to her. 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 philosophically. Right, but also some people have said, well, no, he was covering for her because the legend

goes that she left Charbonneau, ran off to live a life away from her... As an independent woman. Right, exactly, which really kind of dovetailed with the suffragette movements pushed 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 Charbonneau's ever going to get his hands on it.

That's probably not correct. 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. Makes for a good story. 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.

That was before more historical record came out, including an account from a guy 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? Note 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. She was aged about 25 years, which totally fits the bill for Sacagawea.

And she left to find infant girl. Yes. So once that 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. 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, it's all glowing praise. There's not like one entry where anyone was ever like, oh boy, Sacagawea 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. Yeah. And so as a result, Chuck, Lifetime is in Lifetime Movie Network Lifetime. I couldn't find the year, but they recently conducted a survey of memorials to create the Lifetime Herstory map. And of, I think, 5,500 plus statues, monuments and memorials that exist in the United States, only about 200, which is around 4% on her women, but of those 216 on her Sacagawea,

which means that she is the most honored woman via monuments and statues in the entire United States. Amazing. 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.

Little Baptiste. Little Baptiste. That's right. You got anything else? 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. Yeah, for sure.

I guess that's it. That's it. All right. So since we said that's it, that means it's time, everybody, for Listener Mail. Yeah, we're going to do a couple of corrections, a bit of a mea culpa for me and a correction. Oh, I like that. I said the word redneck a lot, entitled the episode about the clan, 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 clan, but I probably shouldn't use the word redneck with such a broad brush. But think about it, Chuck. That means the clan is so rotten, they give rednecks a bad name.

That's essentially what we're saying here. I love it. And then, as from that same episode, we need to address the Robert Byrd instant, because we're from a lot of people. That was all me. Yeah, so I think we were talking about Senator Robert Byrd sort of being unapologetic about being in the clan. That was very much not the case.

This is one of the many emails, and this is from Aaron Patrick Lyons. He hem his. Hey, listen to the great episode on the KKK, and as usual, did a bang up job. However, I have to take issue with Josh's statement indicating that Senator Robert Byrd was an unrepentant clansman. He was indeed an exalted cyclops, or local leader of the clan in the 50s, into the 50s. But through the 70s and 80s, 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. He was deeply embarrassed and apologetic about his time in the clan. And that is, like I said, from Aaron Patrick Lyons in Cedar Falls, Iowa, mirrored from a lot of people that not only did he vote for the MLK holiday, but apparently did a lot of work for legislation for equal rights for African Americans. 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, I can't believe you guys used Redneck 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. Somebody pointed out, I think it was on Twitter that using the word Redneck was not only derogatory towards Rednecks, it obfuscated, 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 subscribed 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. 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. For sure. So, yeah, my apologies to all the great Rednecks of the world.

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. Yeah, I mean, that's fully an act, right? Yeah, from what I understand. He created that persona to get more fans and comedy.

That's right. Smart man. That's right. And, well, I guess since we started talking about Larry the Cable Guy, that's the end of this episode, and Listerner 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 stuffpodcast.ihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio.

For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Munga Chauticular, and it turns out astrology is way more widespread than any of us want to believe. You can find in major league baseball, international banks, K-pop groups, even the White House. But just when I thought I had a handle on this subject, something completely unbelievable happened to me, and my whole view on astrology changed. Whether you're a skeptic or a believer, give me a few minutes because I think your ideas

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