Sacajawea Interpretive, Cultural and Educational Center

She was born in this valley around 1788, an Agaidika Shoshone girl of the Salmon Eaters, and taken by a Hidatsa raiding party when she was about twelve. When she came back in August 1805 she came with Lewis and Clark, and found that her brother Cameahwait led her people. Nearly everything else about her is argued over, starting with her name.

The expedition's journals spell it seven different ways, all with a hard g, and Lewis wrote that it meant bird woman, a Hidatsa name from her captivity. A spelling with a j first appeared in the 1814 edition of the journals; the Park Service says its editor made the change for no known reason. Many Shoshone hold to that spelling anyway, and say the name is Shoshone and means something like boat launcher. The Park Service and the dollar coin use Sacagawea. In the Lemhi Valley, where she was born, the signs say Sacajawea.

The center that carries that spelling sits on seventy-one acres along the Lemhi River at the east edge of Salmon, with the Beaverhead Mountains of the Continental Divide behind it. The city of Salmon owns it and runs it with partners including the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes, and its land acknowledgment names this valley as the homeland of the Agaidika, from which they were forcibly removed in 1907. Inside, exhibits cover her life, the expedition and the Agaidika side of the story, with their beadwork and crafts. Outside, a mile of interpretive trail runs through the fields by the river, past a bronze of her and one of Seaman, Lewis's Newfoundland.