Her face is stamped on federal currency and cast in bronze across the country, pointing west, and almost nothing about her is settled. We do not agree on how to spell or pronounce her name. We do not agree on which tribe she was born into. We do not agree on when or where she died. The familiar account has her born around 1788 to the Lemhi Shoshone, taken captive at about twelve in a Hidatsa raid, marched hundreds of miles east, and married off as a teenager to the French-Canadian trapper Toussaint Charbonneau, who by various accounts bought her or won her gambling. Hidatsa oral tradition tells it the other way around: she was born Hidatsa, abducted young by the Shoshone, and that raid was a recapture bringing her home.

Lewis and Clark hired Charbonneau, but they wanted his wife. Nobody in the Corps of Discovery spoke a word of Shoshone, an ...