Sacajawea

Native Americans fascinated me when I was a kid.  I did multiple middle school projects on Sioux Indians and Crazy Horse was my hero. As is usually the case, I had a pretty romanticized view of Indian life and mostly envisioned it as a cross between "Dances With Wolves" and "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman."  Of course, real life is never that neat and Anna Lee Waldo does a really excellent job intertwining the harshness of living off the earth with the spirituality of Native American culture in her biography about Sacajawea.  On the other hand, her writing style drove me nuts and I sort of just wanted to Wikipedia Sacajawea instead of finishing the 1300 page book.  She was trying to weave historical authenticity into her language use, but it was just hard to get through. 

It's an exhaustive study and I am sort of mind-blown by the amount of research Waldo must have had to do to write the book.  Plus there's very few primary sources from the early 1800s and what's available is pretty hard to decipher.  (Waldo includes some original transcripts of diary entries from Lewis and Clark and it's barely intelligible.)  The most interesting thing about the story is that what we all know about Sacajawea leading Lewis and Clark across the Louisiana Purchase to the Pacific Ocean all happened in her mid-teens and that part of the story is wrapped up in the first third of the book.  The rest of the book is the other 60+ years of her life and her interactions with the white man, her role as a matriarch,  and her life on a reservation.