Sacagawea

Sacagawea was a Lemhi Shoshone woman who served as an interpreter and guide for the Lewis and Clark Corps of Discovery Expedition across the western portion of the future United States between 1804 and 1806, having been brought onto the expedition through her French Canadian trapper husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, whom the expedition hired partly for her language skills. Traveling with her infant son for much of the journey, she helped the expedition negotiate for horses with a Shoshone band that turned out to be led by her own brother, a chance reunion that proved critical to the expedition's ability to cross the Rocky Mountains, and her presence with a child is credited by expedition members' own journals with signaling peaceful intent to other Native groups the party encountered along the way. She also assisted the expedition with knowledge of edible plants and geography in parts of the route, and her contributions, recorded directly in the journals of Lewis and Clark, made her one of the few Indigenous women whose role in a major exploration expedition is documented in first-hand contemporary sources rather than reconstructed later. She has since become one of the most commemorated women in American history, honored on currency and in numerous statues and place names, though many details of her later life and the date of her death remain disputed among historians.