Jean Baptiste helped guide Colonel Philip St. George Cooke and his Mormon Battalion across New Mexico and Arizona in 1846. He spent his later years near the Sacramento area and was there when gold was discovered. In 1861 Jean Baptiste was clerking at the Orleans Hotel in Auburn. He is not known to have married or had children. Five year later a California newspaper announced ‘the death of J. B. Charbonneau, who left this country some weeks ago, with two companions, for Montana Territory…Mr. C. was taken sick with mountain fever…and died after a short illness.’ Jean Baptiste died in southeast Oregon, near the Idaho border. He was 61.

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The War of 1812 was a perilous time for Alexander Willard and Patrick Gass. When hostilities erupted between American forces and the Shawnee tribe led by Tecumseh, General William Clark assigned Willard to bring military dispatches from St. Louis to Prairie du Chien, a key frontier outpost in present Wisconsin. Clark wrote that a band of Winnebago Indians ‘fired on my Express [Willard]…who was on his return from Prairie de Chien…an American Family of women & children was killed on the bank of the Mississippii, a fiew minits before the Express passed the house.’ Meanwhile, Gass was one of 300 men serving under Colonel James Miller who charged a British battery near Pittsburgh. The Americans prevailed after hand-to-hand combat. Curiously, both Willard and Gass lost an eye. Details of Willard’s injury are unknown; Gass’s injury occurred while he was helping build a fort.

A blacksmith who assisted John Shields during the expedition, Private Willard married Eleanor McDonald six months after the Corps’ return to St. Louis and settled in Missouri. The couple had seven boys and five girls. Willard, who early in the expedition had been sentenced to 100 lashes for falling asleep while on guard duty, kept in contact with Lewis and Clark and was advanced $61 for a government blacksmith assignment in 1808. A year later, Clark listed Willard as a blacksmith for the Shawnees and Delawares. Willard and his family moved to Wisconsin in the 1820s and lived there until 1852, when they traveled west by covered wagon to California. When Willard died in March of 1865, he was 86, living longer than any expedition member except two: Jean Baptiste Charbonneau and Patrick Gass. Sergeant Gass, the first to publish a journal of the expedition, farmed, ran a ferry, hunted stray horses, and worked in a brewery after the war. Then, in 1831, when he was 60, he took a 20-year-old wife, Maria Hamilton, and settled in West Virginia. They had three sons and four daughters. When Maria died of measles in 1849, Gass raised his young family alone. Several years later, Gass went to live with his daughter Annie near Wellsville, on the banks of the Ohio River. He ardently supported the Union during the Civil War.

Annie reported ‘how, up until the very end, he was accustomed to walking the four miles to the town…for the mail,’ carrying a hickory cane he had made himself. As he walked near the river, the sole survivor of the expedition must have thought of the time Meriwether Lewis took the new keelboat down that same river 66 years earlier; when a grizzly bear chased several men into the Missouri and stopped only after it had taken eight balls; how Lewis’s dog diverted a buffalo as it charged straight toward a group of sleeping men. As Gass walked with hickory cane in hand, he must have remembered the excitement of leaving St. Louis — and the thrill of returning two and a half years later. On April 2, 1870, almost a year after a golden spike had completed the transcontinental railroad linking Lewis and Clark’s west with the rest of the country, Patrick Gass died, two months short of his 99th birthday. The expedition had truly ended.

This article was written by Larry E. Morris and originally appeared in the January/February 2003 issue of American History. For more great articles, subscribe to American History magazine today!

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