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Charlottesville, Virginia's cancellation of history and art continued Saturday with an emergency meeting to bring down a statue featuring explorers Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacagawea. The Charlottesville City Council voted unanimously in a meeting hastily called on 20 minutes notice to take down the explorers after toppling statues of confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson on Saturday. "I feel that it should just be melted down," a Sacagawea descendant Rose Ann Abrahamson said during the council meeting, The Daily Progress reported. “I feel that it's entirely offensive and it should be obliterated." Sacagawea was a 16-year-old...

The city of Charlottesville, Va. followed up its removal of two controversial Confederate statues Saturday with the lightning-fast toppling of a third local landmark: a monumental tribute to explorers Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and Sacagawea. In an emergency meeting called with 20 minutes’ notice, the Charlottesville City Council voted unanimously to cancel another piece of public art targeted by left-wing activists. “I feel that it should just be melted down,” Rose Ann Abrahamson, a Sacagawea descendant, said during the council meeting, The Daily Progress reported. “I feel that it’s entirely offensive and it should be obliterated.”

The City Council of Charlottesville, Virginia has voted to remove a statue of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and Sacagawea, their Shoshone interpreter, from a street in the city: The city council voted to direct city staff to create a plan for the removal of the West Main Street statue commemorating the Lewis and Clark expedition during a work session Friday. *** At the work session, councilors discussed the statue with Native Americans and some of Sacagawea’s descendants, who traveled to Charlottesville from Idaho. Rose Ann Abrahamson, a descendant of Sacagawea and a Shoshone-Bannock woman, said she has seen nearly every...

Lewis and Clark Stop celebrating. They don't matter. By David Plotz Posted Friday, August 16, 2002, at 7:40 AM PT The American infatuation with Lewis and Clark grows more fervent with every passing year. The adventurers have become our Extreme Founding Fathers, as essential to American history as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson but a lot more fun. Last month, President Bush announced the Lewis and Clark bicentennial celebration, a three-year, 15-state pageant that begins Jan. 18 in Virginia and could draw as many as 25 million tourists to the Lewis and Clark trail by the time it wraps up...

In a dimly lit underground vault a block from Camden Yards, the Federal Reserve is holding millions of dollars in cash that nobody wants... But a 2005 law requires the reserve bank to keep ordering coins regardless of its stockpile, and so vaults in Baltimore and around the country are filling up. ... a 2008 Harris poll that showed 76 percent of Americans prefer paper money. It costs 30 cents to make a $1 coin, but the Fed purchases it for face value - and the U.S. Treasury pockets the difference. In 2010, the Mint put about 400 million $1...

Descendants of Sacagawea will be on hand Saturday as a Navy resupply ship bearing the Indian guide's name will be christened and launched into a bay. "This is a very humbling experience, not just for our family but for the whole tribe," said Rod Ariwite Sr. of Pocatello, Idaho, a descendant of Sacagawea and member of the Shoshone people. "This ship will be out there carrying Sacagawea's name long after I am gone." The Sacagawea will carry a crew of 172 and has the largest flight deck in the Military Sealift Command's Naval Fleet Auxiliary. The 41,000-ton vessel also is...

Born Feb. 11, 1805, at Fort Mandan, Jean Baptiste Charbonneau was the son of French Canadian interpreter, Touissant Charbonneau, and his Shoshone wife, Sacagawea. Lewis and Clark arrived in the Hidatsa-Mandan territory in October 1804 and hired the elder Charbonneau and Sacagawea as an interpreter team. The captains had learned that the Shoshones had a large herd of horses. They were eager to have Sacagawea, who spoke Shoshone, to accompany them to negotiate for horses needed to cross the western mountains, despite that she was six months pregnant at the time. While the expedition wintered at Fort Mandan, Lewis, on...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Putting the faces of U.S. presidents on dollar coins would entice collectors, but there still would be challenges in getting the coins into cash registers and people's pockets, the chief of the U.S. Mint said Wednesday. The comments of Mint Director Henrietta Holsman Fore came during a House hearing that, among other things, explored a legislative proposal aimed at breathing new life in the little-used Sacagawea dollar coin, also called the Golden Dollar because of its golden color. The proposal would replace Sacagawea, a Lemhi Shoshone Indian who helped Lewis and Clark find their way to the...

WASHINGTON - The golden Sacagawea dollar coin was supposed to be jingling in pockets across the country by now. Instead, the U.S. Mint is cutting back on production because people just aren't interested. For now, the Mint won't make any more new dollar coins for banks, retailers and others to use to make change. But it will produce some coins for collectors. Since their much ballyhooed debut just more than two years ago, the golden-colored dollar coins have struggled to catch on and become a staple in cash registers, change purses and pockets. But the sour U.S. economy, which ended...