The Corps of Discovery: After the Expedition

Like Drouillard, Pierre Cruzatte was half French and half Indian. Hired as a boatman and an interpreter for the expedition, Cruzatte became better known for his fiddling. ‘In the evening Cruzatte gave us some music on the violin,’ reads a typical entry by Lewis, ‘and the men passed the evening in dancing singing &c and were extreemly cheerfull.’

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Cruzatte achieved fame — or infamy — by accidentally shooting Lewis. The two men were hunting elk toward the end of the expedition when the one-eyed Cruzatte took aim and fired at a brown patch in the willows. ‘Damn you!’ yelled Lewis an instant later, ‘you have shot me.’ The ball had hit him in the backside, probably knocking him down; ‘the stroke was very severe,’ Lewis wrote. Though he was in a good deal of pain and possibly in shock, Lewis kept his wits. After calling for Cruzatte several times and hearing no reply, he feared that Indians had shot his companion. Mustering his strength, he scrambled for the river and ‘called the men to their arms to which they flew in an instant.’ A scouting party found no Indians but returned with the befuddled Cruzatte, who claimed to know nothing of Lewis’s wound. Luckily, the ball hit no bones, passing through Lewis’s left buttock an inch below his hip joint — otherwise, he may well have been doomed. Still, Lewis endured considerable pain and once fainted when Clark changed the dressing.

Cruzatte virtually disappeared after the expedition. Some speculate that he and John Thompson were part of John McClallen’s fur expedition of 1807. The same year, he received a summons from a St. Louis court for bad debts. Otherwise, the record is silent, and it is unknown whether he married or had children. According to Clark, Cruzatte was killed by the mid-1820s, possibly dying around age 40.

Two expedition veterans who definitely headed west with the fur trade were Peter Weiser and François Labiche. Weiser was with the 1807 Manuel Lisa party (along with Colter, Drouillard, and Potts) that built Fort Raymond at the mouth of the Bighorn River. About the same time Colter discovered Yellowstone Park, Weiser was on a scouting trip, possibly ascending the Madison River to southern Montana and crossing the Continental Divide into Idaho, where he found fertile beaver territory on the Snake River. Two years later, trapper Andrew Henry relied on Weiser’s information to follow the same route into Idaho, where his crew found a picturesque lake just south of the Divide — now called Henry’s Lake. On a tributary of the Snake River — now called Henry’s Fork — they built the first American fur trading post west of the Rocky Mountains. When heavy snows came that winter, they ate their horses to survive.

It is also possible that Weiser followed the Snake River all the way to western Idaho. When Clark later drew up a map of this area — an area he and Lewis had not explored — he named a tributary of the Snake Weiser’s River, indicating Weiser may have explored the area and reported back to Clark. When settlers established a town at the confluence of the Snake and Weiser Rivers, they named it Weiser. The last known record of Peter Weiser is his one month of army service during the War of 1812 — he was paid $7.81 per day and named St. Louis as his place of residence. Fifteen years later, Clark listed Weiser as ‘killed’ but gave no details. He was probably between 30 and 40 when he died.

François Labiche was reportedly half-French and half-Omaha. He was an expert boatman and hunter, as well as an interpreter. When the expedition met the Flathead Indians in western Montana in September of 1805, Labiche played a key role in the complicated translation chain that must have brought smiles to at least some members of the party. The captains spoke ‘to Labieche in English — he translated it to Chaboneau in French — he to his wife [Sacagawea] in Minnetaree — she in Shoshone to the [Flathead] boy — the boy in Tushepaw [Flathead] to that nation.’ After the journey, Lewis recommended a bonus for Labiche because of his ‘very essential services as a French and English interpreter.’