This 9-page series examines the life of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau—the infant son of Sacagawea who traveled across the continent with the Lewis and Clark Expedition. He was educated in St. Louis and Europe, a mountain man, military guide, and California miner.
Each squad formed a mess responsible for cooking and their own encampment. Privates reported to their sergeant and only sergeants communicated directly with captains Clark and Lewis. When Sergeant Floyd died, private Patrick Gass was elected to replace him.
Speaking Hidatsa and Shoshone, she was an interpreter beyond value yet never on the payroll. Still, Sacagawea remains the third most famous member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
Whether he was Lewis’s pet or the expedition’s working dog—or both—he was likely smaller than today’s Newfoundland dog. Did he get lost on the way home or was he present at Lewis’s death?
There may have been one good personal reason why Clark carried an umbrella. Beneath our skins we’re all supposed to be pretty much alike, but at the epidermal level there are some conspicuous differences that we owe to melanin.
Four portraits and one statue by five different artists show a diverse interpretation of the likeness of William Clark.
It has been remembered as “the most gloomy self-examination of the entire journal,” and “a passage of unreasonable melancholy,” of poignant sadness and self-doubt.
As the President’s private secretary, the 28-year-old Army captain wasn’t in the same league with the political heavy-weights on the new American Board of Agriculture.
Lewis’s meteoric progress through the first three degrees of Masonry signified confidence on the part of the most prominent men of Albemarle that the 23-year-old Lewis was similarly destined for moral, civic, and political leadership.
Land management introduced the pupil to the practical aspects of natural history. Jefferson recalled Lewis’s “talent for observation, which had led him to an accurate knowledge of the plants and animals of his own country, would have distinguished him as a farmer.”
Clark was a highly intelligent man, and in terms of the practical knowledge required to make his way in the wilderness, to lead men, and to succeed in the world of frontier politics, he was highly educated and consummately effective.
Lewis had made a habit of abandoning Clark in quests for exploratory triumph. It was no coincidence that Lewis was the first to see the Great Falls or the Continental Divide; he engineered those moments.
Explore the complex character and history of Meriwether Lewis before, during, and after the expedition.
The captains sent La Liberté to invite chiefs to meet them farther north on the Missouri River for a council. The Frenchman rode one of the expedition’s two horses. And that was the last most of the men ever saw of La Liberté.
A Pennsylvanian, he had transferred from Fort Massac into the expedition in the fall of 1803, and was a good member of the expedition until October 1804 when he was convicted of “having uttered repeated expressions of a highly criminal and mutinous nature.”
The laborer from Boston was to take the boats to the Mandan Villages and then return to Fort Kaskaskia. He may have never gotten that far.
His name appears only one time, when he is listed as a member of Corporal Warfington’s detachment bringing the keelboat back from Fort Mandan. He may not have even made it that far.
This man is perhaps the most mysterious of the expedition’s mystery men. Journal entries indicate he may have left the expedition on 12 June 1804 riding back to St. Louis with Chouteau Fur Company traders.
Dame’s sole claim to notice in the captains’ journals was the fact that he shot an American white pelican at what the captains named Pelican Island, near today’s Little Sioux, Iowa.
For John Boley, assigned to the return party, the Corps’ 1804 travels apparently whetted an appetite for frontier exploration. After reaching St. Louis on the keelboat in 1805, he volunteered for Zebulon Pike’s expedition that was to leave on August 9.
This page was funded in part by a grant from the National Park Service's Challenge Cost Share Program.
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Unless otherwise noted, journal excerpts are from The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, edited by Gary E. Moulton, 13 vols. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983-2001).