Corps members ran gamut of ages, society

Although he was only 21, the ill-fated Sgt. Charles Floyd was not the youngest member of the group that departed Camp Wood in May 1804. George Shannon, all of 18, merits that honor. As their ages suggest, it was a generally youthful company, some of the men being soldiers in the regular Army and others hardy frontiersmen collected by Lewis and Clark as they made their way through the Ohio River valley.

Photo courtesy of Independence National Historical Park. Meriwether Lewis sat for a portrait by celebrated artist Charles Willson Peale in 1807, just a year after his return from the West. He was about 33 at the time and serving as governor of the Territory of Upper Louisiana. Two years later he was dead

The number of people in the group varied, and it actually is rather difficult to pin down a precise figure for the first leg of the journey -- the trip up the Missouri River from Camp Wood near St. Louis to the expedition's winter camp at Fort Mandan near Washburn, N.D. Historians believe about 40 men set out in May 1804 from Illinois Territory, but the number differs in the several expedition journals (besides Clark and Lewis, at least four other members of the expedition kept notes of the journey). One expedition biographer counts 51 men as having participated in some or all of the journey. They came from nearly every corner of the young United States: Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maryland, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Connecticut. Capt. Lewis was the organizer, entrusted and appointed by President Thomas Jefferson to assemble the expedition. He was only 29 as the journey began, already an Army veteran, and had served for two years as the president's private secretary. Lean, over 6 feet tall, he grew up in the same Virginia countryside as Jefferson, and was an experienced and hardy wilderness traveler. From his journals, it is clear he was a keen observer with an interest in natural history; from the comments of his friends, it is equally clear he was an introspective man prone to bouts of depression.

Photo courtesy of Independence National Historical Park William Clark sat for this portrait by Charles Willson Peale in 1810, four years after returning from exploring the West. Clark was about 40 at the time, and serving as brigadier general of militia and superintendent of Indian affairs for the Territory of Upper Louisiana.

Clark was four years older than Lewis, also a Virginian, and also an Army veteran. Like Lewis, he was over 6 feet tall and a hardy outdoorsman; unlike Lewis, he was gregarious, engaging, even-tempered. Although he at one time had served as Lewis' commanding officer, his official rank during the expedition was lieutenant. This made him subordinate to Lewis, who had invited him to share command and had promised -- with Jefferson's support -- that Clark would be commissioned a captain. When the War Department refused to make good on that promise, a chagrined Lewis insisted that Clark's true rank be concealed from the rest of the party, and that they be considered co-captains and co-commanders. Clark agreed, and the deception was maintained throughout the entire journey.

The commanders dubbed their outfit the "Corps of Volunteers on an Expedition of North Western Discovery." The more concise and catchy title "Corps of Discovery" was apparently coined by one of their sergeants, Patrick Gass, who used it on the title page of his published journal in 1807.

The corps was a military expedition, on the move through countryside inhabited by armed potential adversaries; it operated under the rules of war and was organized accordingly. Besides the ill-fated Floyd, there were two other sergeants when the journey began: John Ordway and Nathaniel Pryor. Ordway was from Hebron, N.H., well-educated and a trusted officer who often was left in command when Lewis and Clark were not in camp. Pryor was, like so many in the group, a Virginian; unlike most of the rest, he was married.

Floyd was born in Kentucky, and was one of the first to volunteer for the expedition. A cousin of Pryor, he was apparently well-liked by the men and trusted by the commanders; Clark referred to him as "a man of much merit." Two days after he died, the commanders held an election -- the first ever held west of the Mississippi -- to choose his replacement. The men selected Gass, a soldier and skilled carpenter from Pennsylvania, whose woodworking abilities proved valuable in construction of the expedition's three winter forts and in hewing dugout canoes in Montana and Idaho. Besides being the first to publish a journal of the expedition, Gass also is known for being the last surviving member of the Corps of Discovery, dying in 1870 at the age of 99.

Besides the sergeants, there were about two dozen privates. Twelve merited almost no mention in the expedition journals during the entire 28-month trip, but a few stand out.

There was the young Shannon, for example. Related to the governor of Kentucky and considered mature for his years, he frequently got lost while hunting or scouting. William Bratton and John Shields were blacksmiths and gunsmiths, whose metalworking skills would come in handy in repairing the party's firearms and in fabricating knives and tomahawks from scrap iron for trade to the Indians. (Shields, 35 years old when the expedition began ascending the Missouri, is believed to have been the oldest of the enlisted men.) John Collins was one of the first to be court martialed, after he broke into a whiskey barrel while on guard duty and got drunk. John Colter, a fine hunter and expert woodsman, later found fame as a mountain man and the first white traveler to return from the Yellowstone country with tales of geysers and boiling mud.

There were the Fields brothers, Reuben and Joseph, born in Culpepper County, Va., but raised in Kentucky, such excellent hunters and woodsmen that they almost invariably accompanied the captains on every advance scouting foray. George Gibson was the best shot, and one of two fiddle players. Pierre Cruzatte, the other musician, was a French-Omaha fur trader and talented boatman skilled in Indian languages. Small and wiry, he had only one eye, and his poor vision would eventually cause Lewis considerable grief.

Two of the soldiers achieved notoriety for less savory reasons: Privates Moses Reed and John Newman were dismissed before the expedition reached North Dakota, although they were allowed to remain with the group until the next spring. Reed had deserted and was recaptured, and Newman committed "mutinous acts" including refusing to obey an order.

Besides the military men, the expedition included a number of civilians, including a crew of French Canadian boatmen, hired in and around St. Louis to help guide the expedition's little fleet up the treacherous Missouri, and a changing cast of interpreters. Among the latter were George Drouillard, son of a French Canadian father and a Shawnee mother, who was with the expedition from the beginning and would eventually prove to be the expedition's best hunter, and Toussaint Charbonneau, a French Canadian fur trader hired during the expedition's winter camp in North Dakota.

Charbonneau, at 47 the oldest member of the group, comes across in the expedition journals as a feckless and sometimes abusive man with no particular skills. He would become well-known mainly as the husband of Sacagawea, the Shoshone woman whose relatives in the mountains of Idaho would provide horses critical to the expedition's crossing of the Continental Divide.

There were two other civilians of note: Jean Baptiste Charbonneau, infant son of Sacagawea, and York, euphemistically referred to in the journals as Clark's "manservant" but in actuality his slave, bequeathed to Clark by his father.

Jean Baptiste, nicknamed "Pomp" or "Pompey" by the captains, was later adopted and raised by Clark, schooled in St. Louis and made his way across Europe in the company of royalty before returning to the United States, coming to California during the gold rush and ending his life in Oregon.

York was treated as an equal during the expedition, being allowed to handle a firearm and given a vote in deciding the group's plans. Nevertheless, upon his return to civilization, York again found himself a slave; although he asked Clark for his freedom, citing his substantial contributions to the expedition's success, Clark rejected his entreaties for 10 years -- even complaining bitterly to his brother that York had become "surly" and that beating him did not help -- before finally relenting. (Some authors suggest Clark never freed York.)

Although many of the expedition members' biographies are brief, they help counter the tendency to mythologize historical figures, to gild their memories and turn them into heroic caricatures. The Corps of Discovery included drunks and deserters, a slave-owner and a periodically depressed Army officer -- which is to say it was a collection of real people, complicated and imperfect, who together proved capable of surviving the worst the wilderness could throw at them.