Gibson’s wound, through the fleshy part of his leg, was not life threatening, but the ball that hit Shannon struck bone. He was near death by the time the group returned to St. Louis, and a doctor amputated the leg above the knee. Shannon’s frontier adventures were over, but he went on to become one of the more prominent veterans of the Lewis and Clark expedition. He assisted statesman and writer Nicholas Biddle in the publication of the Lewis and Clark journals, served in the Kentucky House of Representatives, and was named U.S. attorney for Missouri. ‘Peg Leg’ Shannon and his wife, Ruth Price, had seven children. He became friends with Texas colonist Stephen Austin and politician Henry Clay. In August of 1836, at the age of 51, Shannon fell ill while attending a trial. ‘He sustained his illness with a great degree of moral courage,’ reported the Palmyra (Missouri) Journal. ‘On the morning of Tuesday the 30th he sunk into the arms of death without the slightest emotion.’

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George Gibson also recovered from his wound and married Maria Reagan. By January 1809, however, the man who had delighted Indians with his fiddle playing fell ill. Fearing imminent death, Gibson made out his will and left everything to his wife. He requested a Christian burial and expressed faith that he would rise in the Resurrection ‘by the all Mighty power of god.’ He died within months, probably before reaching his thirtieth birthday.

Five years after his encounter with the Arikara, Nathaniel Pryor made another narrow escape. When Winnebago Indians attacked his trading post near present Dubuque, Iowa, they killed two of Pryor’s men. Pryor escaped by crossing the frozen Mississippi River. He later served under General Andrew Jackson in the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812 and rose to the rank of captain. Pryor spent the latter part of his life trading with the Osage Indians in the Arkansas Territory, and he had three daughters by his second wife, an Osage woman. He established a reputation for integrity and served as an Indian agent in all but title, although the government offered him little in the way of position or compensation. In 1830, former Tennessee governor Sam Houston — then living among the Cherokee in Arkansas and soon to depart for Texas — drafted letters to President Jackson and others, pleading that Pryor be ‘no longer neglected by his country.’ Houston described Pryor as an ‘honorable and faithful servant’ of the United States who was ‘in poverty with spirit half broken by neglect.’ Pryor was 59 and had just received a long-hoped-for government post when he died in 1831.

Meriwether Lewis returned from the expedition as a conquering hero. At 32 he was an eligible bachelor, a prominent landowner, and governor of a huge territory. His prospects seemed limitless. No one could have guessed that three years later he would die a lonely death in the Tennessee wilderness.

Lewis had commanded the Corps with singular efficiency; his tenure as governor was a different story. After his appointment, he inexplicably lingered in the East for a year. When Lewis finally arrived in St. Louis, his long absence had made the Herculean task of governing the territory virtually impossible. Adding trouble to trouble, Lewis mismanaged his personal finances and fell into debt. Then he neglected to write the promised expedition history, and though he had resolved to marry, the famed explorer failed in courtship.

Lewis’s resentful secretary, Frederick Bates, began undermining him at every turn. But from Lewis’s perspective, the most vicious cuts had come from the administration of new president James Madison, which had rejected certain of his expense vouchers associated with the return of Sheheke to the Mandan. Deluged by these troubles as the summer of 1809 waned, Lewis determined to redeem himself by traveling to the nation’s capital to personally appeal the rejected vouchers and also to begin publishing the expedition’s history.

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