Things We Saw Today: The Very Best 5th Grade Essay on Sacagawea You’ll Ever Read

A fifth-grade student named Emma was recently asked to undertake a creative writing assignment to write a diary entry from the point of view of one of the people involved in the Lewis and Clark Expedition. She was instructed to not just demonstrate knowledge of the historical event, but also to “make inferences on what you think the person would have been thinking and feeling at the time.” And boy did she deliver.

While Meriwether Lewis and William Clark receive the bulk of the credit for the westward expedition (the thing was named after them, after all), Emma didn’t choose to write about either of them. Instead, she chose the underappreciated and sometimes maligned Sacagawea. Fortunately, Emma’s mother posted her essay (which obviously got a perfect score) on Facebook so we could all enjoy.

The essay reads:

I am so mad! I took 3 annoying men who were very stinky to find the best rout to the Pacific Ocean, found horses, food, and peace so tribes wouldn’t attack up! I did that whole journey, but the thing is, I did most of the work, not Lewis, or Clark, or my husband! It should have been called the Sacagawea expidition! I DID THIS ALL WITH A BABY ON MY BACK YET THE MEN DID MORE COMPLAINING!! And I got zero $! Like come on! I’m never doing that again.

Emma 2044 indeed.

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  What a difference a day makes
  24 little hours. #TrumpCaved pic.twitter.com/au1c5tlmEb

  — Ragnarok Lobster (@eclecticbrotha) January 25, 2019

What did you all see out there today?

(image: Matthew Henry/Burst)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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