On the Trail of Sacagawea #11
By Peter Lourie

Lourie, Peter. ( ). On the trail of sacagawea.

Awards: Young Reader’s Choice Award; IRA Children’s Book Award; Outstanding Books for Children; History Book of the Year.

Grade Level: 2-6

Author’s Credibility: The author visited The Three Affiliated Tribes Museum, Fort Berthold Reservation, Idaho Chapter of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Fountain, and the Fort Clatsop National Memorial to collect data for this book.
Peter was also the illustrator for this book.

Illustrations: He used colorful photographs that he did and also used paintings and archival photographs.

Access Features: Maps, contents, prologue, epilogue, and notes.

Standards: History (Exploration and discovery, Ethnics, Native Americans, travel and location. Science (foods, animals, weather, classifying)

Summary: This was a book about the Indian guide, Sacagawea, which helped Lewis and Clark on their expedition to the Pacific. The author traveled and visited the places that the Corps (the name that Lewis and Clark called the group) would have visited during their journey. Lourie wanted to compare the places today with the places that the Corps would have two centuries ago to see how they had changed. He also wanted to hear the Native American’s side of what happen with Sacagawea during this expedition.

Writing Style: The author offered coherence through addition background information in the epilogue and in the additional notes. He also admitted some gaps because there were different versions about what happened to Sacagawea. The text was a nice size and children would not get tire of reading it. The photographs and headings followed the text which made the flow of the story easy to understand.

Voice: Passion; enjoyment

Tone: Conversational; humorous

Additional Books: They Call Me Sacagawea, Joyce Badgley Hunsaker; Sacagawea’s Son: The Life of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, Marion Tinling; A Picture Book of Sacagawea, David Adler.

Response: I enjoyed reading this book probably because I like to read about Lewis and Clark. I was reading a similar book, York for my literature group. It had some beautiful photographs. They make a good read together. It had some to the same facts and stories in it as the book York did. But, it never mentioned York, Clark’s slave that also went on the expedition. I thought that was a smart way to kill to birds in one, the way the author used these trips as his vacation. So his family had a vacation as well as learned about history. I could also make some connections. My church took our youths on a trip to Cherokee, North Caroline to visit an Indian reservation and I have also visited the reservation in Philadelphia, MS. I would use this book to discuss the different tribes and customs in the Native American families. I would discuss with my students how they could make their vacations become an expedition by writing and recording all the events that take place on their vacation.

Science Skills:
Classifying: Different classes of Indian tribes.
Inferring: Who was Sacagawea?
Predicting: Weather
Communicating: Translating the different languages