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'Sacajawea' by Anna Lee Waldo is the most detailed historical fiction novel I have ever read. The rumor is it took Waldo ten years to write the novel. Yet, despite that Waldo includes every aspect of life - hunting, building shelters, marriage, raising children, social customs - for various North American Indian tribes between the Mississippi and the Pacific Northwest, she never neglects the inner life of human joy, love and suffering of all of her cast of characters. The personalities are each finely drawn and vivid to the eye and heart.

Sacajawea was one of the child wives of Toussaint Charbonneau, a 19th-century French-Canadian hunter and trapper reknown for his braggart blowhard speeches, his crude manners and general lazy negligence. Middle-aged Charbonneau treated his twelve- and thirteen-year-old wives like packhorses and slaves - which is why he preferred native girls. For Sacajawea, he was her fourth master. She had been traded to tribe after tribe after she was kidnapped from her murdered family, the Shoshonis (lived in what is now Montana), when she was about ten or eleven, ending up in the Dakotas with the Mandans. She first was raped while enslaved with a Minnetaree tribe. Charbonneau won her when her Mandan owner lost her in a gambling game at a Native-American trading fair. She was thirteen, most likely.

Two years later, the Lewis and Clark expedition traveled up the Missouri River, arriving at a trading post where Charbonneau was living. The two explorers asked around for an English-Shoshoni translator. Charbonneau got the job. It apparently was not understood his wife was the Shoshoni translator as Charbonneau claimed her accomplishments for himself. Captain Meriwether Lewis did not want a woman along on the exploratory trek across the new territory America had bought from the French emperor, Napoleon, but he reluctantly gave his assent. Time, and various adventures, soon exposed Charbonneau's true character to the expedition. Everyone soon realized Sacajawea was an enormous asset, knowing the sign language common to many northern and plains tribes, knowing the territory, knowing how to prepare killed animals for food and clothes, knowing the plants which were medicinal or edible. She was smart as hell. Arguably, her biggest contribution was simply being a female with a baby. Yes, a baby. She had had her baby at the beginning of the gig. Tribes saw the armed White men had a woman and a baby with them, and so put their weapons down, thinking no war party would have women and children with them. Charbonneau got the paycheck and the peace medal from President Jefferson, however, when they returned from the Columbia River and the Pacific Ocean beach.

The foregoing is not the end of the story. This is what happens to Sacajawea up to page 700. The novel has 1,408 pages in total.

When Lewis and Clark return to Washington D.C. to hand in their maps, journals and animal/plant/Indian artifacts, Sacajawea has become aware each Indian tribe treats women differently and has learned the different Indian customs regarding what is right and wrong. Upper-class Lewis and Clark are very different from the rude White and half-breed trappers with whom she has become familiar. Captain William Clark offers Charbonneau a job, land and a paid education for his now family of two boys (one from Sacajawea). Charbonneau finally accepts Clark's offer a few years later, which was still open, after some business matters trapping and interpreting do not go well. In St. Louis, Missouri, Sacajawea learns how White women live.

Before Sacajawea's story is over, she spends time with the Comanche, finds true love, learns Spanish in addition to her English, French, Mandon, and other Native-American languages, has more children, meets the Mormons in Utah, and lives through a few more attacks. She saw the famous Mandan ceremony of hanging from a ceiling suspended by skewers inserted under their skin, exactingly described. She endured multiple incidences of starvation, wildfires and awful weather.

Wow.

While this is a fictionalized biography of the real Sacajawea's life, it is often backed by hard evidence as well as rumors, stories and myths. The hard evidence is collected from many witness journals, letters, and third-hand tales written down in family histories. The author researched many Native-American tribal histories and lore as well as anything mentioning Sacajawea. To call this book in-depth does not do it justice. It is encyclopedic.

One of the stories say Sacajawea died at age 24 of a fever, but there is evidence she lived to an old age, scattered as it is. The author assumes Sacajawea lived a long interesting life of adventures, and follows the more opaque written records of her travels after she left the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Waldo mostly avoids taking a stance or opinion on cultural customs and beliefs, but she makes obvious what those customs involved. I think she also minimizes the growing knowledge of Native-Americans that their land was being stolen with the resulting aggressive reactions and sorrows. Waldo puts in Sacajawea's mouth late in the book dialogues and thoughts about accepting change and reservation life simply because it was inevitable due to the superior force of many more White people. She notices Native-Americans were beginning to fail as a culture because of the transmission of European diseases to natives, many of which were fatal, the despoiling of animal life and hunting. She is told of one tribe with whom she lived no longer exists. When Sacajawea is old, she sees mountain men, trappers and Indians despairing about all of the civilians moving in.

'Sacajawea' is a wonderful book I highly recommend about the American West and the Native-Americans of the early 19th century, before what we now call the Wild West period. This time period is just before and during when many Western native tribes met White men for the first time, just before the years covered wagons and steam engines pulled households across the plains, when buffalo and other types of animal life were plentiful in the warm seasons. However, we readers often romanticize the Indians and the cowboys and the trappers and the mountain men - but I suspect most of us women would not actually want to return to the old social customs expected of women no matter the society. Wow, was it hard being a female in earlier centuries, even when one was a woman whose personal qualities were recognized as being above the common crowd.

The book includes an extensive non-fiction fact-based epilogue, a Notes section and a Bibliography.