Part VIII · Home
Chapter 29
Farewells
The Mandan and Hidatsa villages, present-day North Dakota
When the Corps reached the Mandan villages again in August 1806, Sacagawea, Charbonneau and their son stayed behind. Charbonneau was paid about five hundred dollars; Sacagawea was paid nothing. Clark offered to raise and educate their son, and a few years later the family brought him to St. Louis.
14 August 1806
On 14 August the Corps comes round a bend in the Missouri and sees the earth lodges of the Mandan and Hidatsa villages again, more than sixteen months after leaving them. The villagers crowd the riverbank to welcome them back. Fort Mandan, across the river, has mostly burned down.
The captains hold councils with the chiefs. They want some of them to travel to Washington to meet the President. Most say no; the Lakota are between them and the East, and the journey is dangerous. In the end Sheheke, the Mandan chief called Big White, agrees to go, with his wife and son.
15–16 August 1806
John Colter comes to the captains with a request. Two trappers they met on the river have invited him to go back up the Missouri with them to trap beaver. Clark writes that “Colter one of our men expressed a desire to join Some trappers.” He has been away from home for more than two years, and now he wants to go straight back into the wilderness.
The captains agree, “provided no one of the party would ask or expect a similar permission.” The men all agree. They give Colter supplies and wish him luck. Over the next few years he will wander through the Rocky Mountains alone, and become the first known European American to see the hot springs and geysers of Yellowstone.
17 August 1806
The Charbonneau family is staying here, at the villages. The captains settle their account with Charbonneau for his services as an interpreter and for a horse and a tent, “in all amounting to 500$ 33⅓ cents.” Sacagawea, who carried her baby across a continent, interpreted with the Shoshone, and guided Clark through the mountains, is paid nothing.
Clark has grown very fond of little Pomp, now nineteen months old. He writes that he “offered to take his little Son a butifull promising Child who is 19 months old,” to raise and educate him in St. Louis. Charbonneau and Sacagawea agree, once the boy is old enough to leave his mother, in about a year.
Then the Corps pushes off down the river, and the family is left standing on the bank.
20 August 1806
Three days later, Clark sits down in his boat and writes Charbonneau a letter. He repeats his offer: “As to your little Son (my boy Pomp) you well know my fondness for him and my anxiety to take and raise him as my own child.”
He also writes the only words of thanks to Sacagawea that anyone on the expedition put on paper: “your woman who accompanied you that long dangerous and fatigueing rout to the Pacific Ocean and back diserved a greater reward for her attention and services on that rout than we had in our power to give her at the Mandans.”