Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacagawea
This brief, poetic volume places, side by side, the thoughts of Sacagawea with the actual journal entries of Lewis and Clark made during the legendary expedition. The author floats inside Sacagawea’s mind, showing us the dreams and memories of a young Native American woman who has been torn from her own Shoshoni people and sold to a French-Canadian trapper, where she is the second of two wives. Sacagawea struggles to stay alive and to keep her newborn baby alive on the long march, and her struggles are paralleled by the rough day-to-day of the expedition. As she gathers roots and berries or scrapes hides, she ponders the differences between White and Red, between male and female. The author followed the trail of Lewis and Clark as she wrote. Her dedication to a rediscovery of the most powerless—paradoxically, now the most famous—participant of that early nineteenth century journey shows in nearly every line.
