Wooden Dollar

I have come to debase the coinage.

--Diogenes

1. I am wronged by the United States Mint, as are all those Americans who might have hoped that the "golden" coin stamped with a likeness of the Indian maid Sacajawea was meant not merely to inspire but to represent them, and who dared to believe by the close of the twentieth century that the Mint's worst work lay well in its past. Buffalo nickels, which seemed a denial of the fact that we had killed off most of the buffaloes and stocked our boutique ranches with the remainder, and their Indian Head faces, which likewise seemed to imply that we had never poisoned or starved or hung or gutshot the greater share of the Indians and ranched them out too, were themselves all but extinct and corralled in our grandfathers' dusty coin sets. Walking Liberty half-dollars were confined there as well, along with Standing Liberty quarters and varied treatments of Liberty's detached head. I assumed that the Mint had learned to hold itself to likenesses of party hacks murdered by their own countrymen while still in office, or by time and the bottle once retired, and to stray from this plan only after hard thought, lest we be forced to ignore another Susan B. Anthony at great public outlay. Had it done so the Mint might yet have created the same Sacajawea dollar we disregard today, and are unable in some places even to exchange for candy, but it would not then have had the foolishness to argue that the figure on the coin, a Shoshone girl enslaved by the Minnetarees and sold if not gambled away to a French-Canadian fur trader later employed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, was a beacon of aid and virtue, wholly free of taint and flaw; that is to say, in no real sense an American.

In the three years that the Sacajawea dollar has been among us, the Mint has spent the equal of 67 million Sacajaweas to convince us to use just one of them, and the effort has failed so thoroughly that the Mint has for now stopped pressing the coin and at least one congressman, a Senator Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, has announced a personal stake in the native girl's rescue. The senator seems to think that she was a resident of, and not a captive in, the territories his state now comprises, and I do not therefore rate his help very highly, but I agree that the coin is worthy of salvage, if only because it is the first with the potential to reflect something of the ordinary American since those days when the Mercury dime seemed to embody, no doubt by chance, his penchant for haste, and the fickleness of his desires, and the unholy speed with which the national industry would abandon his blanched and hollow husk. The Mint has heretofore imagined that the American and his deeds must be whitewashed or idealized or avoided al together if its product is to be welcomed into the nation's pockets, but the American, despite a clear taste for being pandered to, can tolerate some shame, and he does not care to be hoodwinked: had the Mercury dime displayed the word HASTE above its principal's head, and had the Buffalo nickel read DEAD BUFFALO on one side and DEAD INDIAN on the other, these coins might still be in demand today. I cannot remove the LIBERTY that floats above Sacajawea's head, and I cannot retrieve the tax dollars squandered on her promotion as a worthless cartoon saint, but I can, and with relative ease, sketch a portrait of her as an actual human being and a true American: deprived and imperfect and even, in her way, somewhat likable. Whether my fellow citizens will find this of use, and come to see a suggestion of themselves in the dull relief of a dollar shunned too soon, it is beyond my power to say.

2. Sacajawea was by birth a Snake, or Lemhi-Shoshone, and prior to her capture by the Minnetarees at the age of ten or so, she made her home in what is now the state of Idaho, which for many years had a legal drinking age lower than, and therefore amenable to the youth of, its neighbors. The youth of Sacajawea's day (she was born in or around 1790) also would make for Idaho with an eye toward violence and the theft of local women, though often enough the Shoshones would transport their wives and daughters into western Montana so as to place them more directly in the path of the marauders, an accommodation, I believe, unique to that time. The Minnetarees, situated just upriver from historic Bismarck, lived in a sort of five-towns format with the Wattersoons and the Mandans, the latter of whom had learned from protracted defeat at the hands of the Sioux to employ a rhetoric of peace with all who came near. The Minnetarees claimed likewise to attack only those who had done them grave insult, yet since nearly everyone within a day's ride and even as far away as western Montana evidently had, Lewis and Clark were obliged, upon their arrival in the autumn of 1804, to settle a dispute now and then so as to maintain a climate suitable to the procurement of necessities. When not courting slaughter these villagers practiced a species of free love (or prostitution: the record is unclear), and there seems to have been a steady stream of visitors to the expedition's fort with offers of a wife or two to be "used for the night," as well as invitations to orgiastic rites related in some fashion to the buffalo hunt. (Clark: "We Sent a man to this Medisan Dance last night, they gave him 4 Girls.") So comfortable did the whites become with the arrangement that when an Indian man beat and stabbed his wife for the very behavior he had formerly encouraged in her, Clark simply ordered the company not to fornicate again with this particular woman and advised the couple to "live hapily together in future."

I understand why this sort of thing is kept out of the schoolbooks, but might not some of our more bored and poverty-stricken adults find themselves on familiar ground here? Are such scenes to be tolerated in our trailer communities, and on our television sets, and at times on our own patios, but recast in the national pageant with all-wise chiefs and noble-hippie braves and Land O'Lakes maidens and clean tepees? Sacajawea was several months pregnant when the group first encountered her as the wife, or property, of the trader Touissant Charbonneau, and she may have opted out of, or been excused from, the round-robins, but we gain little by the insistence that she was untutored in her captors' ways, and I suspect that the innocent dignity with which she has been shellacked in our popular histories serves not some larger truth but rather the coward's disinclination to offend. I myself owe my presence in this world to the fact that some fifty years after Sacajawea had left it my great-great-great-grandfather Joshua thought nothing, or