Not surprisingly, Labiche found work in the fur trade. As late as 1827 he was hiring out his services as a ‘boatman, voyageur, and winterer’ to the American Fur Company. His home base was St. Louis, where he owned property and was listed in the 1821 city directory as a boatman. He married Genevieve Flore, and they had seven children. He may have died in the mid-1830s, when he was about 60.

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The earthquake struck the farming hamlet of New Madrid, Missouri, at 2:30 a.m. on December 16, 1811. Within seconds, houses and barns collapsed, spontaneous geysers erupted, and the ground rippled in waves from the tremendous quake (later estimated at between 8.0 and 8.8 on the Richter scale). Among the stunned residents were two veterans of the expedition — John Ordway and William Bratton.

During the expedition Ordway had served as a sergeant and performed his duties well. He was, for example, the only diarist to record an entry for every single day of the journey. During the return trip, he commanded a contingent of 10 men from Three Forks to Great Falls, Montana (Lewis and Clark were both on separate scouting missions of their own). Similar duties continued after the expedition, when Ordway assisted Lewis in accompanying a delegation of Osage and Mandan Indians (including Sheheke) to Washington, D.C.

By the fall of 1807, Ordway had married and obtained 1,000 acres of good farmland near New Madrid. He wrote to his brother that he was breeding horses and cattle and had ‘two plantations under good cultivation peach and apple orchards, good buildings &c &c.’ When Ordway turned 36 in 1811, his future looked bright, but everything changed when the earthquakes hit (five major quakes in a six-week period). Ordway’s sister-in-law wrote that it was a ‘dreadful Sight to see the ground burst and threw out water as high as the trees and it threw down part of our houses.’ The flooding Mississippi, quicksand, and sand boils wreaked havoc on the farmland, and Ordway, like many others, apparently lost everything. By 1818 he had died, leaving a widow, Elizabeth, and a son and a daughter.

Bratton, by contrast, was on a keelboat at the time of the earthquake and was not seriously affected.

By August of 1812 the man whom Shields had cured of back problems had joined the Kentucky militia to serve in the War of 1812. Although taken prisoner at Frenchtown, he survived the war without injury. Bratton married Mary Maxwell in 1819, and they had eight sons and two daughters. In 1824, Bratton was elected the first justice of the peace in Waynetown, Indiana. He died in 1841 at the age of 63.

Just over a year after the New Madrid earthquake, on December 20, 1812, at a frontier trading post on the Missouri River in present Corson County, South Dakota, trapper John Luttig recorded a historic journal entry: ‘this Evening the Wife of Charbonneau a Snake Squaw, died of a putrid fever she was a good and the best Women in the fort, aged abt 25 years she left a fine infant girl.’ Luttig was a clerk for Manuel Lisa with an eye for detail, even listing the cause of death — ‘putrid fever’ — which probably meant typhoid fever. But Luttig also ignited a long controversy by not naming the wife (Charbonneau had more than one), leaving some to doubt that he was describing Sacagawea. The best evidence indicates, however, that the teenage Shoshone companion of Lewis and Clark indeed perished as a young woman in 1812.

Born south of present Salmon, Idaho, Sacagawea was only 16 when she joined Lewis and Clark. Four years earlier, she and a friend had been kidnapped by a Hidatsa raiding party near present Three Forks, Montana, and carried into North Dakota. (The friend escaped, and in one of the most memorable moments of the expedition, she and Sacagawea were unexpectedly reunited.) The Hidatsa sold her to a French-Canadian trader and interpreter by the name of Toussaint Charbonneau. After discovering that Charbonneau spoke Hidatsa and that his young wife Sacagawea spoke both Hidatsa and Shoshone, Lewis and Clark hired Charbonneau as an interpreter — with the understanding that Sacagawea would accompany him.

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