![]() What’s more, the four-volume Dictionary of Arts and Science (sic) that the captains may have carried on the expedition defined bier as “A wooden machine for bodies of the dead to be buried.” Published in London in 1753 (2nd ed., 1764), it was known as Owen’s Dictionary, after the publisher, John Owen.The full title is A New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Science comprehending … Continue reading Certainly that’s the kind of bier Charles Floyd‘s body might have been borne upon to its grave on the bluff. ![]() The latest Merriam-Webster’s takes the etymology of bier back to the 12th-century Middle English word bere, from Old English br akin to Old English beran, to carry, and similarly defines it as “a stand on which a corpse or coffin is placed.” Noah Webster, the father of American lexicography, who published his first dictionary in 1806, the year of the Expedition’s return, defined bier as “a wooden hand-carriage used for the dead.” In his American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), he traced this bier’s etymology to the Latin feretrum, from fero–”to carry.” The bier in which the woman carrys her child and all it’s cloaths wer swept away as they lay at her feet she having time only to grasp her child.Ī footnote in the most recent edition of the Journals defines bier as “the cradleboard in which Sacagawea carried her child on her back.” Homonyms ![]() ![]() With his typical nonchalance, Clark himself documented the most terrifying moment of all: “the woman lost her Childs Bear & Clothes bedding &c.” Lewis filled in the details: A sudden downpour drove them to shelter under some overhanging rocks in a deep, dry coulee, which suddenly became the conduit for a flash flood that nearly swept them all into the river just above the first, highest and deadliest of the five waterfalls. York, Toussaint Charbonneau, and Sacagawea with her five-month-old boy, Jean Baptiste–later nicknamed “Pomp”–went along as sightseers. On 29 June 1805, having lost some of the field notes he wrote ten days earlier on his search for a portage route around the five falls of the Missouri River, Captain Clark set out to retrace his steps and fill in the blanks. Therefore, most Hidatsa elders have long maintained she would have wrapped her baby in a shawl and carried him facing forward over one of her shoulders, as shown in the coin below, and in the statue of her on the Capitol grounds in Bismarck, North Dakota. But since she was captured by Hidatsas at about age 12, and passed through puberty among them, it is believed that Sacagawea was prepared for adulthood–and motherhood–according to Hidatsa ways. That is what most writers and artists have assumed Lewis was referring to with the word bier. The … Continue reading The young mother is clutching her four-month-old infant son, who is securely bound in a Plains Indian cradleboard. It was published as a grayscale halftone in Wheeler’s two-volume Trail of Lewis and Clark, in 1904. Wheeler commissioned from Charles Russell. Russell (1864-1826) painted this scene showing Toussaint Charbonneau and Clark helping Sacagawea escape the water rising in that “deep rivene” above the Grand Fall of the Missouri. See also Wheeler’s “Trail of Lewis and Clark”.
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