Sacajawea’s Grave, Wyoming

Sacajawea, the famed Shoshone Indian so helpful to Lewis and Clark, has a memorial in the cemetery at Fort Washakie, though the actual site of her remains is debated, but unlikely to be here. The cemetery and town is on the Wind River Indian Reservation, a sovereign nation of the Eastern Shoshone, established in 1868, and covering 3,400 square miles—about the same size as Yellowstone National Park. She was born near the region of today’s Salmon, Idaho, through which she guided the Corps of Discovery, after they crossed the Divide together at Lemhi Pass in 1805. Some believe she died in her twenties, in 1812, at a fur trading post in what is now North Dakota, near Lake Sakakawea, a massive reservoir on the Missouri River built in the early 1950s, that bears her name (and which flooded several settlements, native and otherwise). Others claim she married into the Comanche Tribe, and lived into her seventies, mostly in Wyoming, until 1884. Some interpretive plaques at the memorial claim that she is buried here.