The success of the Lewis and Clark Expedition was due to its many members and the people they met, including politicians, Eastern gentleman scientists, traders, and the many people already living in the American west.
Featured People
The Interpreters
Several languages were needed to communicate with the many peoples between St. Louis and the Pacific. At times, long translation chains involving several interpreters were used.
Lewis’s Friends and Mentors
Thomas Jefferson not only brought Meriwether Lewis under his own tutelage, he made sure Lewis was trained and befriended the best minds of the day. Lewis appeared to be an eager and quick learner.
Seaman
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?
Fur Traders
The captains met many fur traders who provided help and information. Several were enlisted as interpreters and diplomatic envoys.
Native American Nations
The Lewis and Clark Expedition benefited from the Indians’ knowledge and support. Maps, route information, food, horses, open-handed friendship—all gave the Corps of Discovery the edge that spelled the difference between success and failure.
The St. Charles Boatmen
by Jo Ann Brown-Trogdon
The earliest baptism, marriage, and burial registers of St. Charles Borromeo parish help explain the identities and family connections of several of the french boatman from St. Charles.
Meriwether Lewis
Explore the complex character and history of Meriwether Lewis before, during, and after the expedition.
Expedition Members
Whether they be boatmen, interpreters, traders, privates in the U.S. Army, diplomats, or cultural guides, the contribution of the French men already living in the Illinois and Louisiana region was “mission critical.”
William Clark
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.
Two years after the conclusion of the historic Lewis and Clark expedition, York and his enslaver, the Virginia-born patrician William Clark, were at odds.
Sacagawea
Articles and journal entries
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.
Related Naturalists
As describers of the natural world they encountered on the expedition, Lewis and Clark influenced—and were influenced by—several people who could now be called naturalists.
Jean Baptiste Charbonneau
by Kristopher K. Townsend
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.
Related Explorers
Lewis and Clark were among several significant explorers of North America both before and after the expedition.
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In 1792, André Michaux approached members of the American Philosophical Society informing his potential sponsors that he was “ready to go to the sources of the Missouri and even explore the rivers that flow into the Pacific Ocean.”
The Audubon Family
John James Audubon drew inspiration from Lewis and Clark’s writings and aided by his sons, published Quadrupeds of North America with 150 hand-colored plates.
Important for the history of the scientific accomplishments of the expedition, its first plant specimens were consigned to Barton’s care. Here began the disassembling of the collection, and his promised volume on natural history was never written.
Nicholas Biddle
by Arlen J. Large
Nicholas Biddle (1786–1844), the first editor of the Lewis and Clark journals, was a seventeen-year-old college graduate and student of law in 1803. The work was published seven years after the return of the expedition.
The two captains and ten of the enlisted men climbed the hill to visit the grave of one of the most notorious and controversial leaders of the Omaha Nation, whose name was Washinga Sahba—Blackbird.
Karl Bodmer
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Swiss artist Karl Bodmer, was employed by Prince Maximillian von Wied (1809-1893) to accompany him on a journey to the upper Missouri River. By virtue of the timing of the 1832 trip, his drawings—and the paintings and engravings derived from them—have also become associated with the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
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.
Daniel Boone was sixty-nine years old in 1803, too old to go traipsing out to the Pacific Ocean. But Lewis’s “qualifycations” suggest that Boone would have been precisely the kind of hunter he hoped to find.
On 11 May 1805, Bratton appeared, running toward the river and yelling to be taken aboard quickly. He had shot a grizzly through the lungs, and the wounded bear had chased him for half a mile. The bear had lived at least two hours after first being shot.
Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, was the most influential biologist of the 18th century. The title of Count was bestowed not by birth, but by Louis XV in recognition of his accomplishments.
Charles Chaboillez
The Northwest Company manager, or bourgeois, at Fort Assiniboine was Charles Chaboillez, to whom Lewis and Clark sent a cautiously cordial letter via free trader Hugh McCracken on 31 October 1804. Chaboillez replied in due time, expressing “a great anxiety to Serve us,” Clark noted, “in any thing in his power.”
Toussaint Charbonneau
by Barbara Fifer
The fur trade had put Charbonneau in place to meet the captains and join their expedition. He was the oldest expedition member would outlive most of his fellows as he followed the rigorous life of a fur trader, guide, and interpreter.
Auguste Chouteau
On 28 December 1809, Toussaint Charbonneau and Sacagawea were in St. Louis to baptize their son Jean Baptiste. Auguste Chouteau was listed as the child’s Godfather and signed the baptismal record.
Pierre Chouteau
Pierre Chouteau and his half-brother Auguste dominated the St. Louis-based fur trade when the Lewis and Clark Expedition arrived in 1803. While the expedition winter over at St. Louis, Pierre organized the first delegation of Missouri-based Indians to travel to Washington City.
He had gotten off to a bad start, but apparently, the captains, or at least Clark, saw something in him that was worth saving. They would name Idaho’s Lolo Creek, Collins Creek.
Colter left a legacy of western lore, not the least of which was his famous run from the Blackfeet Indians and his exploration of “Colter’s Hell.” Yet his contributions to the expedition were also many.
Concomly was a prominent Chinook citizen and leader whose people lived on the north side of the Columbia estuary, on the shore of Haley’s Bay. On November 17, 1805, he introduced himself to Lewis and Clark at Station Camp.
Lewis Crawford
In April 1804, trader Lewis Crawford was asked by Meriwether Lewis to be a diplomatic envoy to the Iowas and Yanktonai Sioux. Lewis gave Crawford a “parole and speech” and blank Indian vocabulary forms.
Cruzatte’s skills in piloting boats were called on frequently during the expedition. As the main fiddle player, his music brought life to many a celebration. In addition, he could speak Omaha.
In Cuvier’s time, the idea of extinction was entertained, but it was still in dispute. What was most difficult to ascertain was what extinction meant in understanding the history of the earth.
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.
As Secretary of War during the expedition, Henry Dearborn made several decisions critical to the it’s success, and he was the one who gave Clark’s the military rank of lieutenant.
Dehault Delassus
Carlos Dehault Delassus served as the Spanish lieutenant governor of Upper Louisiana and resided in St. Louis at the time the Lewis and Clark Expedition wintered there in 1803–04. He played a critical role in transferring Upper Lousiana to the American states.
Dickerson, Philadelphian man-about-town, regarded Lewis as “the most sincere friend I ever had.” Lewis’s visit to Philadelphia in 1802 seems to have been a consequence of meeting Dickerson at Jefferson’s table in Washington.
Pierre Dorion, Sr.
Dorion had previously lived with the Yankton Sioux for twenty years, and he proved to be a gifted interpreter and knowledgeable diplomat. The captains commissioned him achieve their objectives for the Yankton Sioux.
No other botanical explorer in western North America is more famous than David Douglas. His name is associated with hundreds of western plants, and may also be found on mountains, rivers, counties, schools and even modern-day streets.
Drouillard was one of the captains’ three most valuable hands. He was also the highest paid member after the captains, he shared the Charbonneaus’ tent with the family and the captains, and he was the only man Clark seemed to call by first name in the journals.
John Evans provided maps of the Missouri River and Rocky Mountains, the most significant outcome of the Mackay-Evans Expedition.
Joseph Field
by Barbara Fifer
Joseph yelled to his brother Reubin, who was instantly awake, and the two sprinted for fifty to sixty paces after the natives who were clutching their guns.
Reubin and his brother Joseph (about a year older) were among the best hunters, but Reubin was possibly the better shot. He was, at least, at Camp Dubois on 16 January 1804, when Clark’s men set up a shooting match with some local residents.
Charles Floyd
(1783–1804), Sergeant
Floyd began his journal on 14 May, the day of the expedition’s departure from Camp Dubois. On August 18th Floyd wrote his last entry. Shortly after noon on the 20th, Charles Floyd died “with a great deal of composure.”
At a place where “one false Step of a horse would be certain destruction,” Frazer’s pack horse took that fateful step, lost its footing and rolled with its load “near a hundred yards into the Creek,” over “large irregular and broken rocks.”
Albert Gallatin
America's forgotten statesman
To help the Lewis and Clark expedition, Gallatin asked Nicholas King to prepare a new map of western North America incorporating the main features of nine of the most recent maps by other explorers.
Starting out as a private with a specialty of carpentry, Gass was soon elected a sergeant after the death of Sergeant Charles Floyd. His was the first expedition journal to be published. He was also the last surviving member.
The captains sent four men to retrieve Gibson, “who is so much reduced that he cannot stand alone and…they are obliged to carry him in a litter.” They arrived on February 15, and Lewis went to work sweating the “veery languid” Gibson with saltpeter and dosing him with laudanum for sleep.
Silas Goodrich
(possibly 1778–unknown), Private
Silas Goodrich was the expedition’s principal fisherman. He also did well when trading for food with Indians from time to time.
Charles Gratiot
Charles Gratiot was a fur trader in Illinois before moving to St. Louis in 1781. There, he married into the Chouteau family and became one of the town’s most prominent citizens. During the winter of 1803–04, he was especially helpful to the expedition and a key actor in the transfer of Upper Louisiana.
Joseph Gravelines
by Clay S. Jenkinson
The Arikara-resident trader and interpreter Gravelines proved to be so reliable and so good at the immediate tasks put to him that long after the Lewis and Clark Expedition he was employed by the United States government to represent its interests among the Arikara.
Hugh Hall
(b. 1772 and d. between 1820 and 1831), Private
As if to confirm the captains’ poor evaluation of the new arrivals from Fort Southwest Point, a scant nine days after his arrival, Hall was among a group of six or seven men who got drunk on New Year’s Eve.
The son of a farmer and merchant in Philadelphia, Richard Harlan became a leading American figure in anatomical studies. He would become the man who named the only fossil that now survives from the Lewis and Clark expedition.
John Hay
With his considerable experience with Native American Nations and the Missouri-Mississippi fur trade, John Hay provided the captains significant information and advice.
Hugh Heney
by Joseph A. MussulmanHeney expressed his willingness to help the Americans in dealing with the Indians—perhaps seeing this as a way of subverting the Hudson’s Bay Company’s power among the Indians in that part of the continent.
On 23 January 1806, Lewis dispatched Howard and Werner to the Salt Camp on the ocean beach, to bring back a supply of salt. When they had not returned by the 26th, Lewis feared they had gotten lost.
Nicholas Jarrot
Meriwether Lewis met Nicholas Jarrot in Cahokia on 7 December 1803. The next day, he and Cahokia postmaster John Hay served as translators when Lewis met the Spanish Governor of Upper Louisiana, Carlos Dehault Delassus.
To understand the Lewis and Clark Expedition, one must understand this complex American leader.
René Jusseaume
One the many traders encountered at the Knife River villages, free trader René Jusseaume offered his services as an interpreter. He also accompanied Sheheke’s delegation to Washington City and thus traveled with the expedition on the final leg between the Knife River Indian Villages and St. Louis.
La Liberté
Engagé and deserter
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.
Labiche performed all the regular duties of an army private, but also performed well as a French and English interpreter. He would continue serving as an escort with Lewis for Chief Sheheke’s delegation to Washington City.
François-Antoine Larocque
The fourth literate explorer to go up the Yellowstone (and before Clark) was François-Antoine Larocque, who is important to the story of Lewis and Clark on the Middle Missouri for several reasons.
At the age of 43, Lepage was the oldest member of the expedition. He was a French-Canadian trapper and had lived among the Mandan prior to the expedition. His most embarrassing moment may have been losing the pack horse with Lewis’s winter clothing.
Charles-Alexandre Lesueur
Lesueur spent 10 years in Philadelphia, where he was an associate of Academy of Natural Science founder William Maclure. He gathered and drew many zoological specimens a few of which are used on this site.
Even in Lewis and Clark’s day, new species were being classified using a system developed by naturalist Carl Linnaeus.
Manuel Lisa
by W. Raymond Wood
After founding the Missouri Fur Company (1807-1814) Lisa made four trips up the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers to exploit the richness of the northern Rockies, and he dominated the upriver trade until 1820, two years before his death.
In 1802 George Logan had finished his first year as a United States Senator and had figured in the history of the Expedition by his membership on the three-man committee that approved Jefferson’s request for funds.
Régis Loisel
The information Loisel gave the captains seemed to take root. Throughout their journey to and from the Knife River Indian Villages, the expedition met and made use of several Loisel partners and employees: Pierre Dorion, Sr., Pierre-Antoine Tabeau, Joseph Gravelines, and Hugh Heney.
James Mackay
Showing the way
James Mackay provided the captains the most current and accurate map and information about the upper Missouri River available.
McKean, Pennsylvania governor, was the first pro-Jefferson, anti-Federalist governor in the nation. As Pennsylvania chief justice, he assumed it the right of the court to strike down legislative acts it deemed unconstitutional.
Charles McKenzie
Charles McKenzie was a clerk for the North West Company assigned to the Knife River Villages in the winter of 1804–05. His journal provides useful information about the Missouri tribes as well as the expedition’s stay at Fort Mandan. Several excerpts are included on this site.
Lewis wrote that “McNeal had exultingly stood with a foot on each side of this little rivulet and thanked his god that he had lived to bestride the mighty & heretofore deemed endless Missouri.”
We may never know the full historical impact of Lewis and Clark’s discoveries upon nineteenth-century scientific inquiry, but this example highlights how just a series of conversations with the returning explorers allowed a significant earth science discovery to be revealed to the scientific community.
John Newman
(ca. 1785–1838), Private
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.”
Everywhere Nuttall went he found new and curious plants. Unlike most who came before him, he collected even the unattractive plants. From him, long-leaved sage and white sage, first collected by Lewis, became known to science.
Ordway’s journal is the only one carries an entry for every one of the trek’s 863 days. Just after the expedition ended, Ordway had purchased the land warrants issued to Jean-Baptiste Lepage and William Werner.
Robert Patterson
by Charles F. Reed
Patterson had established a school for establishing longitude from lunar observations. One of his most able students was Andrew Ellicott; one of the most prominent was Meriwether Lewis, for whom he prepared the study manual now known as the Astronomy Notebook.
Charles Willson Peale
Peale’s Museum showcased the natural treasures of the new country such as mastodon fossils from Big Bone Lick and the first public display of artifacts from the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
Like his contemporaries Lewis and Clark, Pike also provided information on flora and fauna and discovered several new species. His southern exploration paved the way for a viable route linking the United States and Santa Fe.
Posecopsahe (Black Cat)
In response to the captains’ requests for a Mandan-Arikara peace agreement, exclusive trade with St. Louis, and a Mandan delegation to visit Washington City, Posecopsahe initially gave favorable responses.
John Potts
(ca. 1776–1808), Private
At Long Camp, Potts nearly drowned when the dugout canoe he was in was swamped in the Clearwater River. But Potts’s worst accident happened when the Corps retraced the Northern Nez Perce Trail through the Bitterroots.
Pryor was assigned several special missions from exploring the Sandy River to escorting Mandan Chiefs to Washington City. He would barely survive his adventures on the Yellowstone River.
During the winter of 1807-1808, Pursh lived at the home of Bernard McMahon in Philadelphia. Here he worked on the drawings and descriptions of Lewis’s western plants.
Rafinesque took a scientific interest in the plants and animals mentioned by Lewis and Clark. In addition to the six species of conifers, he also established the scientific name for the prairie dog, the white-footed mouse and the mule deer.
Where Reed came from and where he went, no one knows, but as an expedition member, he lasted only until August 1804 when he deserted.
John Robinson
(ca. 1780–unknown), Corporal
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.
Rush was the most famous physician in America in 1803, the year Meriwether Lewis, at the behest of Thomas Jefferson, visited him in Philadelphia, where Rush would advise Lewis on how to keep his men healthy.
François Saucier
by Kristopher K. TownsendFrançois Saucier established a settlement at Portage des Sioux, a strategic part of the St. Charles district.
Antoine Saugrain
by Robert R. Hunt
Called the “First Scientist of the Mississippi Valley,” Saugrain was a chemist and naturalist and the only physician in the frontier community of St. Louis when Lewis and Clark arrived there.
Shannon had found the horses, then “Shot away what fiew Bullets he had,” failing to get any meat. Eventually, he carved a bullet from a stick and got a rabbit–his only food other than wild grapes during more than two weeks.
Sheheke and Yellow Corn
Sheheke and his wife, Yellow Corn, would visit Washington City at the request of the captains. It would be years before they could safely be returned to their people.
John Shields
(1769–1809), Private
During the damp winter at Fort Clatsop and throughout 1806, the journals speak more and more often about Shields’ life-sustaining work as gunsmith. Certainly the guns had seen hard use.
Amos Stoddard
Captain Amos Stoddard commanded the U.S. military presence in the Illinois territory and would serve as the commandant of the Upper Louisiana Territory after its transfer to the United States.
Pierre-Antoine Tabeau
Tabeau was an experienced trader with the Arikara when the expedition encountered him on 9 October 1804.
Tetoharsky
Tetoharsky, along with Twisted Hair, accompanied the expedition down the Clearwater and lower Snake Rivers, acting as river guides and interpreters. They continued down the Columbia to The Dalles.
On 8 October 1805, the canoe split open and took on water. The Corps encamped for two days to dry out the goods, allowing Thompson to heal a bit.
The life and times of these three explorers intertwined in a number of odd and interesting ways, often brought together by far-reaching hand of Thomas Jefferson. Tracing these connections opens a window onto every conceivable aspect of the period.
Toby, the name used by Lewis and Clark for the Shoshone guide who took them across the Bitterroot Mountains on their journey to the Pacific, was one of the more important, if enigmatic, of the many Native Americans who assisted the explorers on their epic trip.
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.
Twisted Hair
Twisted Hair helped Clark locate a canoe-building site, drew maps of the route to the mouth of the Columbia, and along with Tetoharsky, traveled with the expedition to The Dalles of the Columbia.
Baron von Steuben
No other individual shaped the military aspects of the Lewis & Clark Expedition than Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben. Until he presented his services to General Washington at Valley Forge, the Continental Army still consisted merely of a number of state-sponsored militias that were entirely independent of one another, each operating according to its own rules and regulations.
Richard Warfington
(1777–unknown), Corporal
Weiser was a member of Sgt. John Ordway’s detachment that paddled the canoes back to the Great Falls. During the 1806 portage around the Falls of the Missouri, he suffered a disabling accident.
William Werner
(unknown–ca. 1839), Private
He went with Clark to Ecola Creek on the January 1806 blubber-trading expedition, afterwards being dropped off to take a turn at Salt Camp. He returned to his home state to become a well-established Virginian farmer.
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 journal begins, “about 3 Oclock P.M. Capt. Clark and the party consisting of three Sergeants and 38 men who manned the Batteaux and perogues. we fired our Swivel on the bow hoisted Sail and Set out in high Spirits for the western Expedition.”
James Wilkinson was one of the most duplicitous, avaricious, and altogether corrupt figures in the early history of the United States. At the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, he was a paid agent of the Spanish government.
Including a court martial, charging grizzlies, and a mile-long swim down the Missouri River, Willard’s adventures are well-documented in the journals. He survived them all, crossing the Missouri a final time on his way to California, at age 74.
Perhaps the naturalist most influenced by Lewis and Clark was Alexander Wilson. Considered by many as the “Father of American Ornithology” he actively used their writings and specimens to complete his own works.
Windsor helped recover three orphaned grizzly bear cubs of a sow they killed on a hunt in early April of 1806. According to Lewis, they traded the cubs to some coastal Indians, who, “fancyed these petts and gave us wappetoe in exchange for them.”
