Selects: Sacagawea: Impressive Teen

When Josh and Chuck recorded their 2021 episode on Sacagawea, Josh realized he had been mispronouncing her name for 45 years. He had grown up saying "Saca-ja-weya" like most Americans. But the historical record suggests something different: in William Clark's journals, her name appears 17 times, and not once is the third syllable spelled with a J. It is always a hard G. Lewis and Clark tried to spell Native American words phonetically, and they were terrible spellers even of English, but on this they were consistent. The name is more accurately "Sacagawea," not "Saca-ja-weya." There is still debate — the Shoshone people themselves sometimes use "Sacajawea," and the meaning shifts between "boat pusher" in Shoshone and "bird woman" in Hidatsa — but the hosts land on the hard G pronunciation as the more historically supported one.

A Teenager Kidnapped into History

Sacagawea was born around 1788 or 1789 as a member of the Lemhi band of the Shoshone tribe, in what is now the Salmon River region of Idaho. She grew up among the "salmon eaters" near the Bitterroot Mountains. When she was about 12 years old, she was out on a buffalo hunt when members of the Hidatsa tribe — enemies of the Shoshone — came across her and kidnapped her. She was taken to a Hidatsa settlement near what is now Bismarck, North Dakota.