In the spring of 1806 the homeward journey was begun. On the Missouri side of the mountains the Bird-woman was detailed to help Captain Clark find a separate trail, to the Yellowstone River.
And this she did, in splendid fashion; for when the party knew not which way was the best way, out of the surrounding hills, to the plains, she picked the landmarks; and though she had not been here in many years, she showed the gap that led over and down and brought them straight to the sunken canoes.
On August 14 the whole company was at the Mandan towns once more. After her absence of a year and a half, and her journey of six thousand miles, bearing little Toussaint (another great traveler) Sacagawea might gaily hustle ashore, to entertain the other women with her bursting budget of stories.
The captains offered to take Chaboneau and Sacagawea and Toussaint on down to St. Louis. The Bird-woman would gladly have gone. She wanted to learn more of the white people's ways. She wanted to be white, herself.
But Chaboneau respectfully declined. He said that it would be a strange country, and that he could not make a living there; later, he might send his boy, to be educated by the captains. That was all.
So he was paid wages amounting to five hundred dollars and thirty-three cents. Sacagawea was paid nothing. The captains left her to her Indian life, and she followed them only with her heart.
Nevertheless, she did see her great Red Head Chief again. Captain Clark was appointed by the President as Indian agent with headquarters in St. Louis. He was a generous, whole-souled man, was this russet-haired William Clark, and known to all the Indians of the plains as their stanch friend.
So it is probable that he did not forget Sacagawea, his loyal Bird-woman. In 1810 she, the boy Toussaint, and Chaboneau, visited in St. Louis. In 1811 they were on their way up-river, for the Indian country. Life among the white people had proved too much for the gentle Sacagawea. She had tried hard to live their way, but their way did not agree with her. She had sickened, and she longed for the lodges of the Shoshonis. Chaboneau, too, had become weary of a civilized life.
Sacagawea at last returned to her "home folks" the Snakes. No doubt Chaboneau went with her. But there is record that he was United States interpreter, in 1837, on the upper Missouri; and that he died of small-pox among the Mandans, soon afterward.
The Bird-woman out-lived him. She and her boy removed with the Snakes to the Wind River reservation, Wyoming; and there, near Fort Washakie, the agency, she died on April 9, 1884, aged ninety-six years, and maybe more.