Otter Woman

Otter Woman (born 1786-1788, died before 1814) was a Shoshone woman who was wife of a French-speaking trader and interpreter named Toussaint Charbonneau. Otter Woman was likely stolen by the Hidatsa and purchased by Charbonneau, who is best known as the husband of Sacagawea. At the time of Sacagawea’s abduction and sale to Charbonneau, Otter Woman was already living with the trapper as his wife. Charbonneau and Sacagawea were to gain fame as part of the Lewis and Clark expedition that was supported by the Corps of Discovery.

On November 4, 1804, Charbonneau visited the Corps of Discovery’s camp on the bank of the Missouri River. Charbonneau had left a nearby hunting expedition to visit the encampment, “to here [sic] what we had told the Indians in Councl,” and more importantly, to apply for a job as the Corps’ interpreter. At the meeting, Charbonneau informed the two captains that he spoke Hidatsa, and that his two wives spoke Shoshone.^[1] Otter Woman is mentioned in one of the diaries of the Corps of Discovery: “today the wives of Charbono [sic] came to the Fort (Fort Mandan) bringing gifts of buffalo robes.” After that single nameless mention, Otter Woman disappears from all but oral histories.

During the Corps’ winter with the Mandan and Hidatsa people in 1803–1804, the journal keepers of the expedition were very clear that Charbonneau had two Shoshone-speaking wives. Four years after the Corps returned to St. Louis, Clark began working with Nicholas Biddle,^[2] editor of the expedition’s journals, for publication as a narrative. In response to a query from Biddle, Clark noted that of Charbonneau’s two Shoshone wives, the young woman from the Northern Shoshone was lighter skinned than the one from the “more Southern Indians”. Sacagawea would accompany the expedition as the Corps’ lone interpreter. There is no further evidence of Charbonneau’s first wife in the journals.

Otter Woman did not accompany Charbonneau and Sacagawea on the Lewis and Clark expedition. It is hypothesized by some historians that she stayed in St. Joseph and remarried.

References

Thorne, Tanis C., The Many Hands of My Relations: French and Indians on the Lower Missouri, University of Missouri Press, Columbia & London, 1996

Sources

Dye, Eva Emery, The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark, A. C. McClurg & Co., Chicago, 1902

Schultz, James Willard, Bird Woman (Sacajawea): The Guide of Lewis and Clark, Houghton, Mifflin, and Co., Boston, 1918

Hebard, Grace R., Sacajawea: A Guide and Interpreter of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with an Account of the Travels of Toussaint Charbonneau, and of Jean Baptiste, the Expedition Papoose, Arthur H. Clark Company, Glendale, 1932

Emmons, Della Gould, Sacajawea of the Shoshones, Binfords and Mort, Portland, 1943