-Sacagawea is Tarnished-

A few months ago I wrote a piece on two sacagawea coins.

Now that I've read The Best American Essays of 2003, Ben Metcalf's 'Wooden Dollar' essay has me wanting to revisit the topic briefly. Not out of a sense of my own historical inaccuracy, mind you. Any high school student writing a paper with my meager research in hand deserves their fate.

As you can see in that September post, it was the allure for the coins that interested me; the reasons why people didn't want to spend them lightly. I'm every bit as guilty of romanticizing them, too.

Metcalf's study is a compelling argument against the very minting of the coinage in the first place, fueled in large part by the journals of Meriweather Lewis, and to a lesser extent the anthropological knowledge on the Lemi-Shoshones - All pointing to a very unflattering portrait of the great maiden.

(The best he can say about her is that she was less of a burden to the expedition than her husband/owner Touissant Charbonneau.)

What I particularly enjoy about Metcalf's essay is the use of alternative inscriptions. He initiates the device by giving us the true inscription in capital letters and spaced like so:
L I B E R T Y.

Over the course of the essay, he derides and demolishes the idealistic portrait of Sacagawea, finding her ideal to be non-representative of the country. Time and time again he gives the same treatment to far grittier words describe Sacagewea and her little family, and us:

T E E N M O T H E R
E N A B L E R
B U R D E N
D R A I N O N R E S O U R C E S
V I C T I M O F A B U S E
F E D E R A L E M P L O Y E E
U N F I T P A R E N T
F O S T E R C H I L D
P R I S O N G U A R D
N A S C A R

It might be time to read the copy of 'Undaunted Courage' that my relatives keep trying to push onto me.