Who Was Sacagawea?

Author: Dennis Brindell Fradin and Judith Bloom

Illustrator: Val Paul Taylor

Published: In 2002 by Grosset & Dunlap

ISBN: 978-0448424859

Synopsis: 

      On April 7, 1805 a sixteen-year-old Shoshone girl named Sacagawea (Sa KA ga WE a), along with her husband and infant son, joined William Clark, Meriwether Lewis and 43 other men on one of the most important American expeditions of all time.  It is known today as the Lewis and Clark expedition.  Over the next year Sacagawea would prove herself to be an indispensable asset to the team.  She would rescue their supplies, help them converse with different Native American peoples and even find food.  Today she is still honored and remembered for her actions.  Mountains in four different states have been named after her, there are a number of statues of her across the country, and her face even appears on our golden dollar coins.   But who was this girl really?  Where did she come from?  How long did she live?  And what happened to her during the other twenty-four years of her life?  If your interested take a look at Who Was Sacagawea?  It is an informative biography of Sacagawea's life, from the time she was born in either 1789 or 1790 to her death in 1812.

 

My Reaction: 

      I've never been a fan of biographies because they often feel like they just drag on and on to me.  I think it has something to do with the writing style.  In order to try and maintain historical accuracy biographies avoid telling anything but the direct truth.  For me this ends up feeling like a string of facts without a real context.  When I read books I want to be transported to another time or place.  I think that's why historical fiction has always interested me more than nonfiction.  In historical fiction the authors are aloud to give the people thoughts and a more realistic, though possibly inaccurate, voice.  Unfortunately, because of this personal characterstic I didn't particularly enjoy reading Who Was Sacagawea? 

Illustration on pages 28-29

    The experience was made worse by the fact that many of the illustrations did not match the information on the page.  In fact, in many cases the illustrations really detracted from my reading experience.  Often I found myself confused by them.  For instance at the end of chapter two the illustrator includes a two page cross section of the "Interior of [a] Mandan Earth Lodging;" it depicts an earthen dwelling built by the Mandan people (28-29).  The illustration itself is labeled and fairly informative, however nowhere in the previous chapter had the author mentioned the Mandan people.  They had discussed the construction of Fort Mandan, "a cluster of cabins" that Lewis and Clark built and lived in during the winter of 1804-1805.  However, if you look at the illustration it is obviously not depicting the Fort, since there are no European Americans included in the picture and the dwelling is clearly not a log cabin.  Therefore, when I turned to this picture I was perplexed.  I thought that maybe I had misunderstood who lived at Fort Mandan.  I ended up skimming the whole chapter again in an effort to find the mysterious Mandan people.  A few pages later, in chapter three I finally found them.  This example demonstrates how poorly integrated the illustrations are in the text.  There were a number of inaccuracies depicted in them as well.  At one point the author describes how Sacagawea's baby's "cradle board was swept away," in a flash flood forcing Sacagawea to carry her son in her arms, but in the next illustration of Sacagawea and her son, there he is strapped in the cradle board on her back (49, 54).
      These inconsistencies were very disappointing.  However, it is important to recognize the fact that the narration in the book is very well researched.  It provided a number of details that I had not encountered when I researched Sacagawae and the Lewis and Clark expedition in sixth grade.  I was pleased to learn about some of the other travelers, such as Clark's slave, York, and the Dog Seaman, who also traveled on the journey.  Furthermore, the authors do a good job of providing phonetic pronunciation for Native American names and words.  But best of all the utilize primary sources; they include actual excerpts from Clark's traveling journal as evidence!  I loved this aspect of the book because who could be a better authority of the Lewis and Clark expedition than William Clark himself?  I also think it a great way to expose children to primary source documents.  It's a pity the illustrations were not as carefully thought out.

 

My Rating (1-5 stars):

 

Still Curious:

If you watch this video you can listen to a biography of Sacagawea's role during the Lewis and Clark expedition as well as hear how her name is supposed to be pronounced.