George Shannon gets lost twice on the Lewis and Clark Expedition

Joe Serres, a Creighton, Nebraska, artist created 13 life-size chainsaw-carved statues of Shannon, which are located in the communities along the 240-mile Shannon Trail. This site, near Lindy, Nebraska, on the Santee Reservation, marks the approximate site where Shannon was reunited with the Corps.

Captain Meriwether Lewis took a chance. While traveling with the keelboat down the Ohio in the fall of 1803, Lewis encountered John Colter and George Shannon when the party stopped at Maysville, Kentucky in October.

Shannon was just a kid, barely 18 at the time – the youngest member of the Corps of Discovery, at least until baby Jean Baptiste Charbonneau was born in the winter of 1805. Maybe it was due to his young age that Shannon became known as the soldier who got “lost” during the Lewis and Clark Expedition -- not once, but possibly twice.

His first “adventure” lasted for 16 days beginning August 26, 1804, near today’s Vermillion, South Dakota, when he and George Drouillard were asked to find the expedition’s few horses. In the process, they parted and Drouillard returned the next day without the horses or Shannon.

Later, the captains learned that the young man had caught the horses but, in the process, used up his bullets without hunting success. He finally carved a bullet from a stick and shot a rabbit – the only thing he’d eaten except for some wild grapes over two weeks. Finally, on September 11, the crew spotted him sitting along the river bank.

Shannon became separated again from the corps in early August 1805 in southwestern Montana. Captain Clark believed that the Big Hole River was the primary feeder of the Jefferson River, so he sent the private to hunt along the Big Hole and to wait for the canoes to catch up. But Captain Lewis chose to go up the Beaverhead River instead, and Reubin Field was sent to inform Shannon of the change in route. Shannon couldn’t be found.

Several days later, Shannon found the Corps on his own and this time he wasn’t starving, but was actually carrying the hides of three deer he had killed while searching for the party. So maybe he wasn’t lost, after all.