Best known as: The Indian woman who accompanied Lewis & Clark
Sacagawea was a Shoshone Indian who travelled with the Lewis and Clark expedition from 1804-1806. She was the slave wife of the expedition's French-Canadian guide, Touissaint Charbonneau; the only woman in the party, she also carried with her an infant son, Jean Baptiste. Her native knowledge and her relations with her own tribe proved invaluable to the explorers. Sacagawea is depicted on the front of the U.S. gold dollar coin first released in the year 2000.
Extra credit: A Wind River Shoshone woman who claimed to be Sacagawea lived until 1884, but most scholars now believe that the Sacagawea who accompanied Lewis and Clark died in 1812... The Sacagawea dollar is often compared to the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin, which was last minted in 1999.
