"One night I dreamed I was digging bitterroots and Sacajawea was there. I said 'Isn't it sad what happened to our people?' She didn't know, so she asked me what happened. When I told her we'd lost all our land, she started to cry. Then she asked me if it was her fault. I told her 'no, it would have happened anyway.' "
Rose Ann Abrahamson
or half a century after Sacajawea accompanied Lewis and Clark to her homeland in 1805, isolation preserved her people´s traditional way of life.
The next half century all but ended it.
In 1855, a Mormon mission was established in the Lemhi Valley. The missionaries built a fort about two miles from what is now the town of Tendoy and introduced the Lemhis, Bannocks, Nez Perce and other tribes that frequented the area to the ways of the white world. Some Lemhis converted to the Mormon faith. Others, alarmed by what they saw as the whites´ growing presence and exploitation of Indian land and resources, attacked the mission in 1858. It closed as a result, but the white incursion was just beginning.
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