George Shannon
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George Shannon (1785–1836), the youngest member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, was born in Pennsylvania. He joined the Corps of Discovery on October 19, 1803, as one of the "nine young men from Kentucky". During the trip, he got lost, twice. On August 26, 1804, he was sent to retrieve two pack horses; he was lost for sixteen days and nearly starved, as he went without food for twelve days except for some grapes and a rabbit. At first he thought he was behind the expedition, so he sped up thinking he could catch up. Then, getting hungry, he went downstream to look for a trading party he could stay with. Finally John Colter was sent to find him.
He got lost again August 6, 1805, when the expedition was at the Three Forks. He was dispatched up a fork the party had named Wisdom (the middle fork was named Jefferson and the placid fork, Philanthropy). He rejoined the party after three days by backtracking to the forks and following the trail of the others.
In 1807 he was with a party led by Nathaniel Pryor that was attempting to return the Mandan chief Sheheke to his people. He was wounded in an encounter with the Arikaras and lost a leg; he would eventually receive a government pension.
In 1810 he assisted in Nicholas Biddle's history of the expedition. Later, Clark asked him to join a fur trading enterprise, but Shannon chose to study law instead. By 1818 he had a law practice in Lexington, Kentucky, and was later elected senator from Missouri. He died in the middle of a lawsuit without any warning at all, and was buried in Palmyra, Missouri.
