Pony Girls Surveying The Headwaters Of The Columbia

In 1805, when Lewis And Clark left the upper Missouri country en route to the Columbia River valley, they took with them a slave woman, the “wife” of a French voyageur named Touissant Charbonneau, who had originally purchased her from the Hidatsa Indians. You’ve heard of this slave wife; her name was Sacajawea.

Ultimately Sacajawea proved very useful to the expedition, helping it secure horses from her original people, the Shoshone. But in a different universe, only slightly different, Lewis and Clark would have had their own slave wives, and maybe they didn’t ever get the horses they needed. So they would have had to put the women to work, fitting them with bits and harnesses and stout shoes and decorative horse-tail butt plugs. In that universe, all the dramatic etchings and statues of “Lewis and Clark Surveying the Headwaters of the Columbia” would have been overshadowed by the nineteenth-century equivalents of this photograph: