General Notes

Fifth of the Ten Brothers. According to John F. Shields, John was a scout
and gunsmith and was one of the 29 members of the Lewis and Clark
Expedition to Oregon in 1803. John F. Shields says he appears to have
never married and was a wanderer all his life.
In 1784, John went with his family to live in the Shields Fort in
Tennessee. Later, he ran a mill and blacksmith shop for Sam Wilson. He
was the gunsmith for the Lewis and Clark Expedition. His ingenuity at the
forge in making knives, hatchets and trinkets for trading with the Mandan
Indians near the present site of Mandan, North Dakota and his diplomatic
skill in treating with them saved the expedition from starvation and
massacre, according to John A. Shields. He walked, scouting for hostile
Indians, all the way from the mouth of the Kansas River to the headwaters
of the Missouri, then down the Columbia to the Pacific Ocean, being one
of the first to make that perilous transcontinental journey, probably the
first white man to do so since, as scout, he was a distance ahead of the
other members of the expedition. He is praised highly in the official
reports of Merriweather Lewis and William Clark.
Clark at Clarksville, Indiana recruited John in October 1803. At 35, he
was the oldest man signed on for the expedition.
On returning from the Far West, he spent a year trapping with Daniel
Boone in Missouri and another with Boone in Indiana. The fatigue,
exposure, starvation and other hardships of his long trip with Lewis and
Clark ruined his health and that of most of the members of the
expedition. Efforts to secure relief from the government failed. John
Shields spent his last years as a pauper and invalid among his relatives
and died relatively young about 1815. He is buried in an unmarked grave
in a rural cemetery near Athens in McMinn County, Tennessee.
John A. Shields reports that John's "only child, Jennie, married her
cousin, John Tipton" (son of Janet).
Christine Brown says a land survey made for John Shields 8 July 1836
makes doubtful the about 1815 date for John's death. The survey by John
Mullendore was for 5 1/2 acres on the west fork of the Little Pigeon
adjoining land of Robert Shields. She does not indicate how she knows
this was 10 Brother John.
Excerpts from "Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and
the Opening of the American West" by Stephen E. Ambrose, Simon &
Schuster, 1996:
"So Lewis and Clark could be highly selective. Clark was an excellent
judge of men. He first gathered seven of the best young woodsmen and
hunters in this part of the country--these were the men awaiting Lewis'
approval before being accepted. They included Charles Floyd, Nathaniel
Pryor, William Bratton, Reubin Field, Joseph Field, George Gibson and Jon
Shields." p. 129.
"Lewis went off to St. Louis, conducted business and returned a week
later. Sergeant Ordway reported to him that Privates Reubin Field and
John Shields had refused to mount guard duty as ordered because they
would be damned if they would take orders from anyone other than the
captains." p. 130.
"On the afternoon of the 29th, Lewis crossed over to Wood River. Clark
had alarming news. There had been fights between the men. John Shields
had opposed an order and had threatened Sergeant Ordway's life and wished
to return to Kentucky . . .. These young heroes were in great shape,
strong as bulls, eager to get going, full of energy and testosterone--and
bored. So they fought and drank--and drank and fought . . .. But fighting
among them was one thing. Threatening a sergeant quite another. On March
29, the captains put Shields and Colter on trial for mutiny. The privates
'asked the forgiveness & promised to doe better in future.' The captains
relented. No punishment was noted. And two days later, Shields and Colter
were welcomed into the permanent party." p. 165.
September 1804, in what would later become