Private John Boley
Sketch copyright by Michael Haynes.
P.S. I got in trouble at Camp Wood and so the captains made me one of the "return party" - I only went as far as the Mandan Villages and helped bring the journals and scientific discoveries of the first year back to St. Louis in the spring of 1805. But my adventures were not over. When I returned to St. Louis, I volunteered to go on another journey with a lieutenant named Zebulon Pike. We traveled up the Mississippi River to find its source, and camped in freezing cold Minnesota for the winter. In the spring of 1806 we returned to St. Louis, but Pike was sent out once again and I went with him. This time we went out across the Kansas plains. Pike's party split in western Kansas. Most of them went on to explore Colorado and got captured by the Spanish. I was part of the party that went down the Arkansas River and returned to St. Louis. I later married and settled in Carondelet, Missouri.
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Did You Know?
On September 10, 1804 on Cedar Island, in South Dakota, William Clark discovered the fossilized remains of the ribs, backbone and teeth of a plesiosaur. Plesiosaurs were animals who lived at the same time as the dinosaurs, but swam rather than walking on land. Clark thought it was a giant fish bone! More...