“Barb is here? Barb is here!”
I stared at the ranger, who was bouncing up and down excitedly as she looked around the front desk of the Sacajawea Museum Interpretive Center.
“Where?” she demanded. “Where is she?”
“She’s in the exhibits,” I smiled. “But I know it’s closing time…”
I was talking to empty air. Turns out closing time doesn’t matter when you visit a state park in the company of a rock star.
First, a new Discover Pass
We’d squeezed in a visit to Sacajawea Historical State Park after our tour of Hanford earlier that day. The park commemorates the interaction between the indigenous peoples of this area, who have lived here for thousands of years, and Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery, which camped here for two nights in October 1805.
I hadn’t been to Sacajawea since the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial commemoration in 2006, and I was eager to see the updated interpretive center and exhibits there. But it was after 4pm when we pulled in, and we knew we were up against the clock: the museum closes at 5pm.
In a comedy of errors, Mr. Adventure and I realized our Discover Pass, the absurdly inexpensive annual parking pass for Washington State Parks ($30/year! All the parks! Plus other state recreation lands!), had expired. We hung it on the mirror and walked the quarter-mile to the museum to get a new one.
The volunteers on duty pulled out a fresh pass and started to ring it up. “Oh, do you have cash?” they asked. “The wifi doesn’t always work for credit cards.” Yes, we do — in the car. Mr. Adventure went back out to the car.
In the meantime, the park’s interpretive specialist came in, sussed out the situation, and took my credit card. Mr. Adventure returned to find the transaction complete. I handed him the new pass and gave him my best puppy-dog eyes. “Do you mind taking it out to the car?” I pleaded. Mumbling something about exercise and hot days, he left again. The volunteers, done with their shift, departed.
Rock Star Historian
I said to the interpretive specialist, “I know it’s late, but we’re here with Barb Kubik, who used to—” That’s when things got fun.
See, Barb was the park’s first interpretive specialist — or rather, interpretive assistant, because there was no interpretive specialist role when she worked here from 1977 to 1991. The job required her to become an expert on Sacajawea, and she is still one of only a few go-to authorities on the subject. She wrote the history of the park, as well as histories of many other institutions in Tri-Cities. She was the longtime chair of the Washington State Lewis and Clark Trail Committee, which is how we met. She’s a longtime board member of the Lewis and Clark Trail Foundation. If you want to know pretty much anything about the Corps of Discovery, Sacajawea, Tri-Cities, and Sacajawea State Park, you ask Barb. I am honored to call her my friend. She is a legend. And the ranger knew it.
We found Barb in the exhibits, and I just stood back and watched the two of them talk. By that time, Mr. Adventure had had enough running back to the car and went outside to relax with Barb’s husband, Rennie.
Assessing the exhibits
The Interpretive Center is housed in a gorgeous Art Moderne building constructed in 1938 by the Works Progress Administration. It’s been rehabbed a few times, most recently in 2006-2007, and the exhibits have changed as historical understanding has evolved. The galleries focus on local indigenous cultures and their interactions with the Corps of Discovery, with a particular focus on Sacagawea, the park’s namesake.
Barb pointed to displayed artifacts, noting that some items had been removed at the request of the tribes because they had ceremonial or spiritual significance. The collection contains thousands of Native American artifacts, most made from stone or bone, including one Folsom point that is at least 10,000 years old. Many were donated by a local collector who reportedly obtained them within a 100-mile radius of what’s now the park site.
Maps on the floor show where indigenous peoples lived, and highlight the importance of this land as a meeting place for trade, fishing, and cultural exchange. The exhibits remind visitors that while this was new territory for Lewis and Clark, it was well-known to the tribes who lived here. Words like “discovery” and “new” are contextualized accordingly. Interactive displays invite hands-on learning.
Sacagawea and Lewis and Clark
Sacagawea’s role in the Corps of Discovery is highlighted on several panels. Probably 17 years old when she joined the expedition at Fort Mandan, Sacagawea has become more myth than reality over the intervening centuries. Depending on your perspective, she’s a symbol of feminist agency, heroic motherhood, outdoor self-sufficiency, or ethnic and sexual oppression, sometimes all four.
What is known is this: She was an Agaidika (Lemhi) Shoshone who, as a girl, was captured by the Hidatsas and taken from her home in present Idaho to the upper Missouri River in present-day North Dakota. There, Toussaint Charbonneau, a French fur trader, acquired Sacagawea and another Shoshone captive to be his wives. Many historians theorize the marriage occurred à la façon du pays, or “in the fashion of the country,” a term for an arranged marriage negotiated between a girl’s family and a fur trader of some means. Charbonneau has a reputation as a coarse, brutish oaf, but Barb cautioned me that portrait is the result of cultural bias, editorial selectivity on the part of early Lewis and Clark journal editors, and novelists who villainized him to provide a contrast with Sacagawea, who’s often portrayed as untainted and virtuous. We don’t really know what Charbonneau was like.
When Lewis and Clark arrived at the Hidatsa settlements in late 1804, they needed people who could serve as interpreters and guides along the way. They recruited Charbonneau in part because Sacagawea was Shoshone, and the explorers expected to meet Shoshones on their journey. She could help interpret.
In April 1805, carrying her two-month-old son, Jean-Baptiste, Sacagawea set off with the Corps of Discovery. The next month, her quick actions saved the captains’ journals and other items that were floating in a boat that had begun to fill with water. That August, the Corps encountered the Shoshones east of the Rocky Mountains, where the explorers hoped to trade for horses and enlist a guide. The Shoshones were reluctant until Sacagawea recognized her brother, who was the group’s leader. This extraordinary coincidence helped ensure the expedition’s success.
After the Expedition, Sacagawea and Charbonneau moved to St. Louis in 1809 at the invitation of William Clark, who offered to raise Jean-Baptiste, whom he called Pomp or Pompey. Thanks to Clark’s support, Jean-Baptiste went on to have a long and adventurous life as a trader, scholar, explorer, and guide. At 61, he fell ill while traveling through southeastern Oregon. He’s buried at present-day Danner (no relation), population 3. We’ve been to the gravesite.
Sacagawea’s fate is less clear, as she more or less disappears into history after 1810. Most historians believe she died of illness in December 1812, shortly after giving birth to her daughter, Lizette, at Fort Manuel Lisa in present South Dakota. A few argue she left Charbonneau and lived to be an old woman, dying in Wyoming in the late 1800s.
What is clear is that Sacagawea’s presence signaled the Corps of Discovery’s peaceful intent to tribes they encountered on the journey. Just a few days before the expedition camped at what is now Sacajawea State Park, Clark wrote in his journals, “the wife of Shabono our interpeter we find reconsiles all the Indians, as to our friendly intentions a woman with a party of men is a token of peace.” Simply by being there, Sacagawea likely helped avert antagonistic encounters that could have jeopardized the expedition’s success. That is a remarkable legacy.
Sacajawea. Sakakaweah. Sah-car-gah-we-ah.
One of the clearest indicators of how little we know about Sacagawea is the ongoing dispute over her name. Lewis and Clark spelled it at least eight different ways in their journals, and this added to confusion over its pronunciation and meaning.
The Agaidika Shoshone prefer Sacajawea with the “j” sound and interpret the name as meaning “who one assumes a burden.” That spelling was first introduced by Nicholas Biddle, he of Beacon Rock State Park fame, in his edition of the Lewis and Clark journals.
Today, most scholars agree that it has a hard “g” sound, and Sacagawea is the preferred spelling. In North Dakota, homeland of the Hidatsa people, it’s often spelled Sakakawea, which means “bird woman.”
When Sacajawea State Park was established in 1931, that “j” spelling was dominant. And while the park’s name remains unchanged, the exhibits in the interpretive center use the “g” spelling.
Pop culture icon
The many mysteries surrounding Sacagawea’s life and death have led, perhaps inevitably, to popular culture co-opting her. Novels, dolls, movies, toys, games, music, whiskey distillers, and even money have all used Sacagawea to promote a particular image of an unknowable woman.
One corner of the interpretive center is devoted to a small exhibit of some of these pop culture artifacts. Barb pointed to a DVD of The Far Horizons, a movie that portrayed Sacagawea — played by the decidedly non-native actor Donna Reed, as in It’s a Wonderful Life — as William Clark’s love interest. You can’t make this stuff up.
We’d kept the ranger almost an hour past closing time, so we thanked her and headed back outside to find the guys and see the rest of the park.
Lewis and Clark camped (near) here.
More than two centuries ago, the Corps of Discovery pitched camp on the point of land where the Snake River empties into the Columbia. They stayed for two nights, fixing gear, hunting food, and meeting hundreds of indigenous people for whom this place was home.
For the explorers, it was a big moment. The 1805 campsite was their first on the Columbia River, and it marked the first time the Corps was in known-to-them territory since leaving Fort Mandan in present-day North Dakota six months earlier.
In 1879, the Northern Pacific Railway constructed a town, Ainsworth, on the site. It was the first non-native settlement in what is now Franklin County. As many as 1,500 people lived there, but it lasted only a few years. When a railroad bridge across the Snake River was built in 1884, Ainsworth essentially disappeared, with most operations and residents moving to the new town of Pasco. Some of the townsite was flooded when the Columbia was dammed downstream in 1953, but most lies within the state park boundaries. Ainsworth is a state historic site.
In 1927, the Pasco Chapter of the Daughters of the Pioneers formed, largely to ensure preservation of the Corps of Discovery’s campsite. Thomas and Stacie Carstens, owners of a Tacoma-based meat-packing empire, donated an acre of land believed to contain the campsite. The chapter, the third formed in the state, worked with the Washington State Historical Society to construct a monument commemorating the expedition’s first camp on the Columbia River.
Four years later, the Daughters of the Pioneers deeded the land to the state of Washington. The park had been called a variety of names (Carstens Park, Columbia and Snake River Park), but by 1932 its current name was well established. Barb speculates the park was named Sacajawea for three reasons. First, because there was already a Lewis and Clark State Park (in the Chehalis area, far from the Lewis and Clark Trail). Second, because the park’s founders were women and wanted to honor a woman. And third, because Sacajawea was described twice in the expedition’s journals as a “symbol of peace and friendship” in this geographic area.
In 1933, the Carstens donated more land to expand the park to 10 acres, and they added two more lots to the park in 1939. By 1968, it had grown to its present size (different sources put the park at either 267 or 283 acres).
So where’s the campsite? Underwater. Construction of McNary Dam in 1953 flooded parts of the park, including the Corps of Discovery’s campsite. The broad, flat confluence today is part of 64-mile-long Lake Wallula.
Standing on the dock, which faces east-southeast, it’s hard to tell which is the Snake and which is the Columbia. It seems as though the Columbia should be coming from the north. I asked the expert. Barb chuckled and told me that when she started working at the park, she was confused by the same thing, but quickly figured it out. “The docks are all on the Snake,” she said.
When the Corps of Discovery arrived, all of the journalers recorded the momentous occasion. My favorite description comes from Sergeant Patrick Gass, who wrote, “[W]e arrived at the great Columbia river, which comes in from the northwest. …The country all round is level, rich and beautiful, but without timber.” He knew which river was which.
WPA transforms the park
In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration transformed the core of Sacajawea into the park we enjoy today. In addition to building several structures, including the museum, caretaker’s home, bathhouse, drinking fountain, and kitchen, the WPA landscaped the property, planting 500 trees and more than 2,000 shrubs. Eighteen acres of the park, including the campsite and the WPA buildings, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Green oasis
Today, Sacajawea State Park is a green oasis with lots of lovely, large shade trees, broad lawns for running around and lounging upon, and even a small beach for splashing in the Columbia. It’s the only state park in Tri-Cities and in fact, the only state park in a 50-mile radius; the nearest one is Lewis and Clark Trail State Park to the east.
But wait, there’s more
One other feature of the park is the installation of seven story circles that are part of the Confluence Project, a collaboration begun in 1999 whose goal is to use public art to tell the stories of the peoples whose homelands are along the Columbia River. In 2001, local tribes met with architect Maya Lin, best known for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, to discuss how the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial might be a door through which these stories could be told.
Fast-forward to 2019, and installations have been completed at five of the six sites selected, including Fort Vancouver National Historical Park, Cape Disappointment State Park, and Sacajawea State Park. Each installation is different, designed to link the environment and cultures of its site. At Sacajawea, Lin designed seven Story Circles that explore native cultures and languages, natural history, and geology.
Some circle are above-ground, planted with native plants important to local tribes, while others are inset and are empty, perhaps to facilitate storytelling inside the circle.
Nearby, a weathered dugout canoe provides another window into history. It’s not part of the Confluence Project but is visible from the story circles. Other interpretive panels are scattered throughout the park, which is also part of the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail.
Small park, big history
When I sat down to write this post I thought, “Oh, this won’t take too long. We were in the park for only a few hours.” Ha! Sacajawea has so much history packed into its smallish 267 acres, it could be a book. But it’s not one I’ll write. I don’t have to, because Barb, rock star historian of Sacajawea State Park, already did.
Fast facts: Sacajawea State Park
- 267-acre day-use park
- $10 daily parking pass (buy the annual Discover Pass, a bargain at $30)
- 1.2 miles of hiking trails, 0.5 mile accessible trail
- boating, fishing, swimming, waterskiiing
- 200′ dock, 70′ moorage, 2 personal watercraft launches
- horseshoe pits, volleyball court, picnic tables, outdoor exhibits
- Sacajawea Museum Interpretive Center, check hours, free admission
- one Northwest Discovery Water Trail campsite, first-come first-served
- Friends of Sacajawea State Park supports the park through volunteer efforts, including Heritage Days every September
- park brochure
- park map