Historic Homecoming. Sacajawea, the Bird Woman of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, finds her Shoshone people on Horse Prairie Creek, Montana
Jackson’s watercolor depicts the reunion between Sacagawea and her Shoshone relatives at the headwaters of the Missouri in August 1805. In the foreground, mounted Shoshone warriors and women on foot gather around the expedition party near a stream, with Sacagawea positioned as the central figure mediating between the two groups. Lewis, Clark, and members of the Corps of Discovery stand with their packs and rifles to one side, while the Shoshone, some on horseback, approach from the open country beyond. The setting is rendered with low rolling hills and the broad valley typical of the Beaverhead country in southwestern Montana, executed in transparent washes of green, tan, and pale blue.
The scene records the events of August 17, 1805, when the expedition’s advance party, led by Meriwether Lewis, made contact with a Shoshone band on the upper waters of the Beaverhead drainage. When Clark’s main party arrived with Sacagawea serving as interpreter, she recognized the band’s leader, Cameahwait, as her brother—a coincidence that secured the horses and guidance the Corps needed to cross the Bitterroot Mountains. Horse Prairie Creek, where Jackson places the encounter, flows into the Beaverhead near the site historically identified as Camp Fortunate. The episode has long been treated as one of the providential turning points of the expedition.
William Henry Jackson (1843–1942) is better known as the photographer who documented the Hayden Surveys of the 1870s and produced the first photographs of Yellowstone. Late in his very long life he returned to painting, producing a series of small watercolors of frontier and exploration subjects, many commissioned or acquired by railroad and historical interests in the 1930s and early 1940s. This 1940 work belongs to that late watercolor production, made when Jackson was ninety-seven. It is held in the L. Tom Perry Special Collections at the Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University. Jackson’s Lewis and Clark watercolors have been reproduced regularly in popular histories of the expedition, contributing to the visual vocabulary through which twentieth-century audiences pictured Sacagawea’s role.
