Civilians of the Expedition

Sacagawea was either 16 or 17 years old when she joined the Corps of Discovery. She met Lewis and Clark while she was living among the Mandan and Hidatsa in North Dakota, though she was a Lemhi Shoshone from Idaho. She had been taken during a raid by the Hidatsa when she was either 11 or 12, and had lived at the Awatixa (Sakakawea) Village.

In the midst of overseeing the construction of Fort Mandan, the Captains were visited on November 4, 1804 by the Hidatsa-speaking French trader Toussaint Charbonneau, who had just returned to the area from a hunting trip.

Sacagawea and her husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, joined the Lewis and Clark Expedition from their home in Mandan and Hidatsa villages.

On February 11, 1805, Sacagawea gave birth to a baby boy. She and her husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, named him Jean Baptiste Charbonneau.

The Corps of Discovery reached Pompey's Pillar on July 25, 1806. Having already reached the Pacific, they continued to explore and make new discoveries on their return. The Corps stopped at Traveler's Rest from June 30 to July 3, 1806, and split into separate exploratory parties.

Born on February 11, 1804 at Fort Mandan, in today’s North Dakota, Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau lived a remarkable life. He wouldn’t remember it, but he was the youngest member of the Corps of Discover to travel to the Pacific Ocean and back.

Word of the demise of Jean Baptiste Charbonneau arrived at the office of the Auburn, California newspaper, “The Placer Herald,” about 50 days after the youngest member of the Corps of Discovery died in the high desert of eastern Oregon.

George Drouillard first met Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in November 1803 when the Captains made a recruiting trip to Fort Massac, in today’s southern Illinois. They seem to have been immediately impressed with the French-Canadian-Shawnee. Drouillard’s skills, confidence, and experience would clearly benefit the Corps of Discovery, so Lewis offered him a civilian position.

George Drouillard, whose father was French-Canadian and mother was Shawnee, was critically important to the Lewis and Clark Expedition as an interpreter and diplomat.

If Lewis and Clark had a “go-to” guy, it was most certainly George Drouillard, a Shawnee and French-Canadian outdoorsman. But what happened to this valued expedition member after the Lewis and Clark Expedition returned?

The red pirogue was sometimes referred to as the “French pirogue” because when the Corps of Discovery departed in May 1804 from Camp River Dubois, it was filled with French hired boatmen, or engagés.