History of American Women

Sacagawea

2012-02-19T20:35:00.000-05:00

Native American Woman on the Lewis and Clark Expedition

On February 28, 1803, President Thomas Jefferson won approval from Congress for a project that would become one of America's greatest stories of adventure. It would be led by Jefferson's secretary Meriwether Lewis and Lewis' friend William Clark. Sacagawea, a Lemhi Shoshone Indian, was the only woman to accompany the 33 members of the permanent party to the Pacific Ocean and back.

Sacagawea and Jean-Baptiste
Sacagawea Center
Salmon, Idaho

As to the pronunciation and spelling of her name, Captain Clark wrote that the "great object was to make every letter sound" in recording Indian words in their journals. He therefore recorded her name as Sacagawea (Sah-cah' gah-we-ah), a combination of the Hidatsa words for bird (sacaga) and woman (wea) - always with a 'g' in the third syllable.

Childhood
Sacagawea was born into the Lemhi Shoshone tribe around 1788 along the banks of the Lemhi River near Tendoy, Idaho. She and other female children of her band experienced mistreatment in her Shoshone village because of their gender. They experienced beatings, given only to girls, and did hard work not required of the male children. Boys in the tribe were never spanked because punishment could break the spirit of the young braves.

Although most of these practices were widely followed by other Shoshone Bands, Sacagawea's people were in an unusually distressed state in the early 1800s. Enemy tribes had been chasing, robbing and decimating their group for many years. It had left them terribly poor and continually on the run, breaking down social values that would have provided unity and peace within the Band.

During the fall of 1800, while the Lemhi tribe were wintering near the three forks of the Missouri River, in what is now Montana, they were attacked by a band of Hidatsa (also known as Minnetaree) raiders. They killed most of the Shoshone Tribe and captured Sacagawea and several other girls to serve as slaves.

Sacagawea was taken from her Rocky Mountain homeland, in what is now Idaho, to the Hidatsa-Mandan villages near Bismarck, North Dakota. Sometime between then and 1804, she was gambled off to an irritable, abusive, middle-aged white French-Canadian fur trader named Troussaint Charbonneau, who claimed Sacagawea and another Shoshone woman as his wives.

Lewis and Clark Expedition
On February 28, 1803, President Thomas Jefferson won approval from Congress for a project that would become one of America's greatest stories of adventure. Twenty-five hundred dollars were appropriated to fund a small expeditionary group, whose mission was to explore the uncharted West. Jefferson called the group the Corps of Discovery, and it was led by Captain Meriwether Lewis and his friend Captain William Clark.

The Corps of Discovery arrived at the Hidatsa villages in November 1804 to spend the winter, and built Fort Mandan. Captains Lewis and Clark interviewed several trappers who might be able to interpret or guide the expedition in the springtime. They hired Charbonneau when they discovered his wife Sacagawea spoke Shoshone.

The Shoshone possessed horses that the expedition would need to cross the western mountains. While Sacagawea did not speak English, she spoke Shoshone and Hidatsa. Her husband Charbonneau spoke Hidatsa and French. When the expedition met the Shoshone, Sacagawea would translate to Hidatsa for Charbonneau, who would translate to French. The Corps' Francois Labiche spoke French and English, and would make the final translation for the two English-speaking captains.

As Clark explained in his journals, Charbonneau was hired "as an interpreter through his wife." Charbonneau and Sacagawea, who was 16 years old and pregnant with her first child, moved into the expedition's fort a week later. Sacagawea gave birth to a son Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau on February 11, 1805, and Lewis recorded the birth in his journal, noting that another of the party's interpreters administered crushed rattlesnake rattles to speed the delivery. Clark and other European Americans nicknamed the boy Little Pomp or Pompy.

In April 1805, the Lewis and Clark Expedition left Fort Mandan and headed up the Missouri River in pirogues (small flat-bottomed boats), which had to be poled against the current and sometimes pulled from the riverbanks. Over the next four years, the Corps of Discovery would travel thousands of miles, experiencing lands, rivers and peoples that no Americans ever had before.

Sacagawea, with the infant Jean Baptiste, was the only woman to accompany the 33 members of the permanent party to the Pacific Ocean and back. Her activities as a member of the Corps included digging for roots, collecting edible plants and picking berries; all of these were used as food, and sometimes as medicine.

On April 7, 1805, the expedition resumed its westward trek along the Missouri River, west to the mountains. On May 14, an incident occurred which was typical of the calmness and self-possession Sacagawea was to display throughout the journey. The boat Sacagawea was in was hit by a sudden storm squall. It keeled over on its side and nearly capsized.

As the other members of the crew worked desperately to right the boat, Sacagawea, with her baby strapped to her back, retrieved the valuable books and instruments that floated out of the boat. They had been wrapped in waterproof packages for protection and, thanks to Sacagawea's courage and quick actions, suffered no damage. Her calmness under duress earned the compliments of the captains.

In August 1805, Captain Lewis and three men scouted 75 miles ahead of the expedition's main party, crossing the Continental Divide at today's Lemhi Pass. The next day, they found a group of Shoshone. Not only did they prove to be Sacagawea's band, but their leader Chief Cameahwait turned out to be her brother. After five years of separation, Sacagawea was reunited with her tribe, only to learn that all her family had died, with the exception of two brothers and the son of her oldest sister, whom she adopted.

Lewis recorded their reunion in his journal:

Shortly after Capt. Clark arrived with the Interpreter Charbono and the Indian woman, who proved to be a sister of the Chief Cameahwait. The meeting of those people was really affecting, particularly between Sah-cah-gar-we-ah and an Indian woman who had been taken prisoner at the same time with her, and who had afterwards escaped from the Minnetares and rejoined her nation.

The Shoshone agreed to barter horses to the Corps and provided guides who took them through the mountains and safely to the Nez Perce country, where they resumed river travel. The trip was so hard that they were reduced to eating tallow candles to survive. When they descended into the more temperate regions on the other side, Sacagawea helped to find and cook camas root to help them regain their strength.

Sacagawea turned out to be incredibly valuable to the Corps as it traveled westward, through the territories of many new tribes. As Clark noted on October 19, 1805, the Indians they encountered were inclined to believe that the whites were friendly when they saw Sacagawea. A war party never traveled with a woman - especially a woman with a baby. During council meetings between Indian chiefs and the Corps, Sacagawea was used and valued as an interpreter.

As the expedition approached the place where the Columbia River emptied into the Pacific Ocean, Sacagawea gave up her beaded belt to enable the captains to trade for a fur robe they wanted to give to President Thomas Jefferson. On November 24 all members of the expedition - including Sacagawea - voted on the location for building their winter fort. Near present-day Astoria, Oregon they constructed and inhabited Fort Clatsop during the winter of 1805-1806.

In January, local Indians told the expedition of a whale washed up on the beach some miles to the south. Clark assembled a group of men to find the whale and possibly obtain some whale oil and blubber, which could be used to feed the Corps. Sacagawea had yet to see the ocean, and insisted on her right to go see this "monstrous fish." By the time they arrived there was nothing left but the skeleton, but they were able to buy about 35 pounds of blubber.

On the return trip, they approached the Rocky Mountains in July 1806. As they passed through her homeland, Sacagawea proved a valuable guide. She remembered Shoshone trails from her childhood, and Clark praised her as his "pilot." On July 13, Sacagawea advised Clark to cross into the Yellowstone River basin at what is now known as Bozeman Pass, Montana.

The Corps returned to the Hidatsa-Mandan villages on August 14, 1806, marking the end of the trip for Sacagawea, Charbonneau and Jean Baptiste. When the trip was over, Charbonneau was given $500.33 and 320 acres of land. Sacagawea, her husband and son remained at Fort Mandan.

As he traveled downriver at the end of the journey, Captain Clark wrote to Charbonneau and invited him to bring his family to St. Louis:

You have been a long time with me and conducted your Self in Such a manner as to gain my friendship, your woman who accompanied you that long dangerous and fatiguing route to the Pacific Ocian and back deserved a greater reward for her attention and services on that route than we had in our power to give her at the Mandans. As to your little Son (my boy Pomp) you well know my fondness of him and my anxiety to take him and raise him as my own child...

Later Years
Charbonneau and Sacagawea spent three years among the Hidatsa before accepting William Clark's invitation to come to St. Louis in 1809. At Clark's insistence they entrusted Jean-Baptiste's education to Clark, who enrolled the young man in boarding school.

In March 1811, Charbonneau sold his land back to Clark and returned to the Dakotas with Sacagawea. Their son remained in St. Louis in the care of Captain Clark, who was the Indian Agent of the Louisiana Purchase at that time. In 1812 Sacagawea gave birth to a daughter, Lisette. Medical researchers believe that Sacagawea suffered from a serious illness most of her adult life, which may have been aggravated by Lisette's birth.

On December 22, 1812, Sacagawea died at age 25. At the time of her death, she was with her husband at Fort Manuel, a Missouri Fur Company trading post in present-day South Dakota.

Eight months after her death, Clark legally adopted Sacagawea's children, Jean Baptiste and Lisette. Baptiste was educated by Clark in St. Lous, and at age 18 was sent to Europe with a German prince. It is not known whether Lisette survived past infancy. Jean-Baptiste carried lifelong celebrity status as the infant who went with the Lewis and Clark Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and back.

Sacagawea has become an important part of the Lewis and Clark legend in the American public imagination. In the early twentieth century the National American Woman Suffrage Association adopted her as a symbol of women's worth and independence, erecting several statues and plaques in her memory and spreading the story of her accomplishments.

SOURCES
Sacajawea
Sacajawea's Home
PBS.org: Sacagawea
Wikipedia: Sacagawea

Caroline Lee Hentz

2012-02-09T16:30:00.000-05:00

Writer and Novelist in Antebellum America

Caroline Lee Hentz (1800–1856) was a nineteenth century novelist and one of the most popular women writers in antebellum America, most noted for her opposition to the abolitionist movement. Her best known novel, The Planter's Northern Bride, was written in response to the enormously popular anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Early Life
Caroline Lee Whiting was born June 1, 1800 in Lancaster, Massachusetts, the youngest of John and Orpah Whiting's eight children. She was very intelligent and had written a poem, a novel and a tragedy by the age of 12. At age 17, she began teaching at the Lancaster Common School.

On September 30, 1824, Caroline Whiting married Nicholas Marcellus Hentz, a Frenchman who had immigrated to the United States in 1816. An entomologist, novelist and artist, Hentz was intellectually gifted but prone to depression and uncontrollable fits of jealousy.

In 1826 the couple moved from Massachusetts to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Nicholas Hentz was professor of modern languages and belles-lettres (creative writing) at the University of North Carolina from 1826 to 1830.

Literary Career
In 1830, the Hentzes moved to Covington, Kentucky, where Nicholas served as headmaster at a female academy. While there Caroline competed for a prize of $500 that had been offered for a play by the directors of the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia. The prize was awarded to her for her tragedy of De Lara, or the Moorish Bride, which was produced on the stage to favorable reviews and afterward published in book form.

Two more of her plays were produced, Constance of Werdenberg, or The Forest League at the Park Theater in New York and Lamorah, or the Western Wild in Cincinnati, where the couple had moved in 1832 to oversee another school for girls. In Cincinnati, Caroline joined a literary group to which the future author Harriet Beecher Stowe also belonged.

While in Ohio, Hentz published her first novel, Lovell's Folly (1833), the purpose of which was to show the incorrectness of the prejudices against southern people. Hentz included unfavorable portraits of recognizable northern citizens. Fearing libel charges, the publisher quickly withdrew the book from circulation.

Although she was born in the North and lived in seven different states, Hentz spent 14 years in Alabama (1834-1848) with her husband and four children. Most of her fiction is set in the South, which she fiercely defended from northern criticism.

In 1834, the Hentzes left Cincinnati following an incident in which Nicholas slapped a man who had sent Caroline a note after a party. It was said of Caroline Hentz that "she was the beautiful, dissatisfied wife of a jealous schoolmaster." Their often stormy marriage near collapse, the Hentzes moved to the frontier town of Florence, Alabama, where they established the Locust Dell Academy.

During the next 14 years, the Hentzes operated girls' schools in Florence (1834-43), Tuscalossa (1843-45) and Tuskegee (1845-48). Caroline continued to publish her work, but most of her time was spent assisting her husband at school, cooking meals for the students and tending to her own children.

In 1848, the Hentzes moved to Columbus, Georgia, to open yet another school, but Nicholas' rapidly deteriorating mental state prompted them to close the school in 1849. Two years later, the Hentzes moved to Marianna, Florida, where Caroline spent her remaining years caring for her husband and writing stories and novels at a feverish pace to support her family.

Hentz wrote her best known works in the 1850s. She was a major literary figure who contributed to the advancement of domestic fiction - novels written by, for and about women that flourished during the mid-nineteenth century. It began with New-England Tale (1822) by Catharine Sedgwick and remained a dominant fictional genre until after 1870.

Along with other southern novelists, such as Caroline Gilman and Augusta Jane Evans, Hentz wrote and helped to popularize domestic fiction. Also called "women's fiction," these novels focus on the daily domestic lives of young, mostly middle-class white girls and deliver life lessons that are considered useful in preparing female readers for their lives as adult women.

Hentz rapidly became one of America's most popular writers. Between 1850 and 1853, Hentz's books sold more than 93,000 copies. Although much of the fiction of this genre has been criticized as overly sentimental, newer generations of feminist scholars have reevaluated the challenges it poses, however subtly, to male domination.

Hentz's challenge to Southern patriarchial society was subtle for a reason. She created female characters that are both assertive and independent, but tones them down by the end of her novels. This shows that Hentz thought the cost of coming out strongly against male chauvinism was too steep, and not worth ruining her literary career.

She questioned traditional paternalism but not enough to cause a critical uproar among the mostly male critics of the time. In Eoline, for example, the heroine rebels against her father by refusing to marry his choice of suitor, even though the penalty is the loss of her inheritance. In the end, Eoline marries the chosen suitor of her own free will.

Hentz's work has also been examined for its promotion of Lost Cause ideology. Her most widely known novel, The Planter's Northern Bride (1854) is a chilling rebuttal of Harriet Beecher Stowe's enormously popular antislavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin. On its surface, the novel offers readers a marriage plot that covers a deeper theme of defending the institution of slavery through the eloquent rhetoric of the main male character and idyllic scenes of slave life.

The Hentzes did not live long to enjoy her success, however. When Nicholas's health grew worse, he moved to St. Andrews, Florida to live with their daughter Julia. Caroline stayed in Marianna, traveling to St. Andrews occasionally to tend to her husband.

Caroline Lee Hentz contracted pneumonia and died February 11, 1856, in Marianna, Florida, at the age of 55. She was buried in the cemetery of St. Luke's Church there. Her husband died nine months later and was buried beside her.

After Hentz's death, her sons Thaddeus and Charles served in the Confederate army during the Civil War. In 1846 Hentz's daughter Julia had married Dr. J. W. Keyes. In 1857 they moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where Dr. Keyes became an officer in the Confederate army. After the war they took their family to Brazil, where they joined other southerners attempting to establish a slave-holding society, but they returned in 1870.

Works by Caroline Lee Hentz
Lovell's Folly (1833)
De Lara, or, The Moorish Bride (1843)
Aunt Patty's Scrap-bag (1846)
Linda or, The Young Pilot of the Belle Creole (1850)
Rena, or, The Snow Bird (1851)
Eoline; or, Magnolia Vale; or, The Heiress of Glenmore (1852)
Ugly Effie, or, the Neglected One and the Pet Beauty (1852)
Marcus Warland, or the Long Moss Spring (1852)
Wild Jack, or the Stolen Child (1853)
The Planter's Northern Bride (1854)
The Banished Son and Other Stories of the Heart (1856)
Courtship and Marriage (1856)
Ernest Linwood; Or, the Inner Life of the Author (1856)
The Lost Daughter and Other Stories of the Heart (1857)

SOURCES
Caroline Lee Whiting Hentz
Wikipedia: Caroline Lee Hentz
Encyclopedia of Alabama: Caroline Lee Hentz

Eliza Leslie

2012-01-31T18:35:00.000-05:00

19th century Author of Cooking and Etiquette Books

Writing under the name Miss Leslie, Eliza Leslie (1787–1858) was an American author of popular cookbooks. Her 1837 manual Directions for Cookery: Being a System of the Art, in Its Various Branches, was the most popular book of the 19th century, having gone through fifty printings. Her books on etiquette and domestic management brought her the greatest fame. She also wrote short stories and articles which were published in children's books and women's magazines.

Childhood
Eliza Leslie was born November 15, 1787 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Lydia Baker and Robert Leslie, a watchmaker who was a personal friend of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. She was the oldest of five children.

In 1793, Leslie and her family moved to England for six years, so her father could develop an export business in clocks and watches. A talented man, he was the chief influence on Eliza Leslie's early intellectual life, encouraging her precocious reading ability and teaching her to write and draw.

Leslie loved to read, and advanced rapidly from children's stories to reading literature. She wrote poetry at an early age, though by age fourteen became discouraged. She later stated, "I then for many years abandoned the dream of my childhood, the hope of one day seeing my name in print."

After her return to the United States in 1800, she resided chiefly in Philadelphia. Her first compositions were in verse. When her father passed away in 1803, the family suffered financial hardship. They bore the burden cheerfully; she and her mother earned income by taking in boarders.

Literary Career
Possibly to improve the cooking at the boarding house, Eliza attended the first American culinary school, Mrs. Goodfellow's cooking school in Philadelphia, in the early 1820s. Copying Goodfellow's recipes for friends led to her first publication, Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes and Sweetmeats (1828) - one of the earliest American cookbooks - by "a Lady of Philadelphia."

Like so many of her contemporaries, Leslie was motivated to put pen to page by her love of language and a desire to see her name in print, but also by financial necessity. Her writing was easy to follow, clear in its directions and distinctly American - an important attribute in the ambitious and proud young republic of the United States.

Her publisher, Mr. Francis of Munroe and Francis of Boston, urged her to try her hand "at a work of imagination" and soon published her first series of juvenile stories, The Young Americans; or, Sketches of a Sea-Voyage (1829), which was published anonymously.

The success of her stories in children's books and women's magazines encouraged her to publish under her own name. She began using the name 'Miss Leslie' on her next work, American Girl's Book (1831), and on all the juvenile stories, fiction, magazine articles, editorial work, etiquette guides and cookbooks to follow in the next twenty-five years.

In 1832, after obtaining a prize for her story "Mrs. Washington Potts," which was published in the magazine, Godey's Ladies' Book, Leslie adopted literature as a profession. Her humorous writing style and knowledge of cooking, social manners and housekeeping made her books very popular for many years.

During the 1830s, Leslie served as editor for The Violet and The Gift, annual publications which included contributions from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Elizabeth Ellet, Lydia Sigourney and others. For a time, she was also Sarah Josepha Hale's assistant editor at Godey's.

Leslie produced most of her income through her books on domestic management, volumes such as Miss Leslie's Behavior Book (1834), The House Book (1840), and Miss Leslie's New Cookery Book (1857). Young wives who were separated by hundreds of miles from the guidance of their mothers and sisters looked to Miss Leslie for advice on cooking, etiquette and childrearing.

Leslie is best known for having written the most popular cookbook in nineteenth century America, Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches (1837), which sold at least 150,000 copies. Her approach to cooking instruction, simple yet comprehensive, is inviting even to the modern reader.

Leslie writes in the Preface of Directions for Cookery:

The author has spared no pains in collecting and arranging, perhaps the greatest number of practical and original receipts that have ever appeared in a similar work; flattering herself that she has rendered them so explicit as to be easily understood, and followed, even by inexperienced cooks.

She included a number of relatively lavish dishes, such as "Rich Brown Soup", which calls for six pounds of lean, boned beef and is "suited to dinner parties." Yet also included are the labor-intensive methods for making butter and several kinds of cheese.

A sequel followed: The Lady's Receipt-Book: A Useful Companion for Large or Small Families (1847). This marked a turn toward a more genteel audience. Half the book is dedicated to cleaning silver, laundering white satin ribbon, preserving white fur and oil-paintings, as well as tips for traveling by sea and writing a proper letter.

Later Years
During the final decade of her life, Eliza Leslie took up residence at the United States Hotel, where she became something of a Philadelphia celebrity. Holding court among the hotel guests, she was venerated by her admiring readers:

She had the reputation of a brilliant woman with a sarcastic wit and heady opinions who frequently offended strangers but was warmly affectionate to relatives and friends and generous to the needy.

During this time Leslie was writing a work about the life of John Fitch, who built the first steamboat in the United States in 1787. She reportedly suffered from being overweight, and could not walk easily.

Eliza Leslie died January 1, 1858, at the age of 70, and was buried in St. Peter's Churchyard in Philadelphia.

Eliza Leslie Cookbooks
Seventy-Five Receipts for Pastry, Cakes and Sweetmeats (1828)
Domestic French Cookery (1832)
Directions for Cookery, in its Various Branches (1837)
The Indian Meal Book (1847)
The Lady's Receipt-Book: A Useful Companion for Large or Small Families (1847)
Miss Leslie's Lady's New Receipt-Book (1850)
Miss Leslie's Directions for Cookery (1851)
More Receipts (1852)
Miss Leslie's New Receipts for Cooking (1854)
Miss Leslie's New Cookery Book (1857)

Other Publications
The Young Americans; or, Sketches of a Sea-Voyage (1829)
American Girl's Book (1831)
Pencil Sketches; or, Outlines of Characters and Manners (1833)
Miss Leslie's Behavior Book (1834)
Althea Vernon, or, The Embroidered Handkerchief (1838)
Henrietta Harrison (1838)
The House Book (1840)
Amelia; or, A Young Lady's Vicissitudes (1848)
The Dennings (1851)
The Behavior Book (1853)

SOURCES
Eliza Leslie
Wikipedia: Eliza Leslie
Feeding America: Eliza Leslie
Appleton's Cyclopedia of American Biography
Portraits of American Women Writers: Eliza Leslie