Pigeon Forge woman has link to Lewis and Clark

John Shields, great-great-uncle of Nettie Maples, went on historic trip

By FRED BROWN
February 22, 2004

PIGEON FORGE - Meriwether Lewis wrote this about John Shields:

"He received the pay only of a private. Nothing was more peculiarly useful to us, in various situations, than the skill and ingenuity of this man as an artist, in repairing our guns, accoutrements, and should it be thought proper to allow him something as an artificer, he has well deserved it."

Nettie Kate Shields Maples, 86, of Pigeon Forge says this about her great-great uncle John Shields: "He was important to the expedition. We are proud to be part of his family."

Maples and her sister, Ruth Shields Ownby, 90, are the nearest descendants of John Shields, blacksmith, hunter and all-around important person on the Voyage of Discovery by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark from 1804-1806 across the continental United States and into the interior of what was then an unknown world.

The voyage was, in a word, breathtaking, like traveling to the moon and back. The great achievement of this journey by Lewis and Clark, however, might have fallen somewhat short had Shields not been along. He proved to be not only the man who kept the guns firing, but he also produced other objects from his portable forge, bellows and anvils that helped to feed the men on the epic 28-month, 8,000-mile exploration between the mouth of the Missouri River to where the Columbia River empties into the Pacific Ocean.

Maples has little more than family lore about her famous great-great uncle, and she isn't quite sure where he is buried.

"The family always heard he was buried in Athens (Tenn.)," she says, laying out lunch for her husband and visitors.

Maples, a retired schoolteacher, like her sister Ruth and husband Freeman Maples lives on a farm along Birds Creek Road in the Shady Grove Community east of Pigeon Forge.

Robert and Nancy Stockton Shields settled the area where Kate grew up. They had 11 children - 10 boys and one girl - which included both John and Robert, Kate Maples' great-great grandfather. Robert Shields and Nancy Stockton had been part of the great migration into the area in 1784. Robert Shields settled near Pigeon Forge at the foot of what is now Shields Mountain.

John Shields' excellent adventure on the Voyage of Discovery was a circuitous route. He was born in 1769 near Harrisonburg, Va., the sixth son in that tribe of 11 children. After his family moved to Pigeon Forge, he learned the trade of blacksmithing and also ran a gristmill with Samuel Wilson.

Shields enlisted with the expedition in October 1803 as part of what became known as the "nine young men from Kentucky." Clark handpicked them for their skills, woods lore, hunting prowess, and toughness and tenacity. They joined Lewis at the Falls of the Ohio near Louisville, Ky. The Kentucky reference also implied that several of the men were from Blue Grass country. Not all were, including Shields, who is also mentioned in some historical accounts as having been stationed for a time at Southwest Point, now Kingston.

He was given the military rank of private in the Corps of Discovery, some 29 men who participated in the basic development, recruiting and training for the voyage at the 1803-1804 winter staging ground at Camp Dubois, Ill. The Corps of Discovery, which included the Kentucky nine, journeyed up the Missouri River, stayed at Fort Mandan, and then made it to the expedition's 1804-1805 winter headquarters.

Shields was said to have been a tall rangy man who was good with a gun or a hammer. He could hunt down game, build a cabin or even cure the sick, which he did on the expedition.

At 35, he was the elder statesman of the permanent party, older even than the two leaders.

At Fort Mandan in the winter of 1804, he is credited with hammering battle axes from iron lumps, which were in turn traded to Indians for food. Lewis reported that the battleaxes went a long way toward preventing the men from starving with the bitter cold locking their boats in vaults of ice and snow.

Gary E. Moulton, the Thomas C. Sorensen Professor of American History at the University of Nebraska and an award-winning author, says Shields was not only important to the success of the voyage but played an and integral role.

"John Shields was a very active member of the voyage," says Moulton. "He was an ironmonger and was very helpful as a blacksmith. As a matter of fact, during their time in Mandan, John Shields was an essential member. They ran out of foodstuff and had to trade iron goods for corn. That is when they traded the axes."

Moulton says Shields didn't live many years after the cross-continent adventure.

"Those men were in a dangerous occupation, and he had been the oldest member of the party."

J. B. Finger, retired head of the University of Tennessee Department of History, says it should not be all that surprising that someone like Shields was on the great trek.

"East Tennessee and Middle Tennessee were part of the frontier at that time. It was only logical that some of the men should come from here," he says.

"They had experience with frontier conditions and experience with Indians. That is why they were so important to Lewis and Clark."

For that reason, says Finger, it probably is not historically significant that a soldier from this area was on the trip.

"But it is just not generally known that a soldier from this area was involved in such a prominent and major way," Finger says.

At Fort Mandan during that brutal winter of 1804-05, Shields not only proved his worth with tools of the trail, but also with the musket.

In February 1805 at the fort, Clark set out with several of the men to hunt for food. Lewis writes the joyful results: "Shields killed three antelopes this evening." He also wrote that Shields took a "considerable quantity of corn for payment of his labor. The Indians are extravagantly fond of sheet iron of which they form arrow points and manufacture into instruments for scraping and dressing their buffalo robes."

Maples has lived all of her life in the Sevier County community where the Shields family first arrived. Tilting cantilevered barns, red-painted sheds, fading gray smokehouses and grazing cattle fill in as a backdrop of the past to a scene that is slowly yielding to highways and subdivisions.

She keeps a thick book of genealogical records of the Shields family, which she won't let out of her house in fear of losing touch with her past.

Maples was a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in the community. She recalls teaching about Daniel Boone and other great pioneers, including her own kin.

After journeying to the western end of the continent those two years with Lewis and Clark, Shields returned to Sevier County briefly and his home was not far from Birds Creek Road where Kate Maples lives.

But he had not been a young man when he set off with Lewis and Clark, and when he returned to the Shields farm, he was not well. The journey had taken a toll.

Shields died at age of 40, three years after his return. It has been recorded he was buried with several of his brothers in the Little Flock Baptist Burying Ground south of Corydon, in Harrison County, Ind.

Maples and her relatives believe he is buried in Athens, Tenn., in an unmarked grave. The whereabouts of that grave may never be known, and somehow seems just as lonely a final note as the death of Meriwether Lewis, who died on a forlorn stretch of the Natchez Trace in Tennessee in Grinder's Inn boarding house, where it is thought he took his life with his own pistol.

Lewis was troubled after the success of his expedition, a trip so far removed from the realities of the time it was as if he had jumped over the moon.

The night of Oct. 10, 1809, inn residents heard two gunshots. The next morning, they found the famous explorer clinging to life.

"I have done the business," he is supposed to have said.

"My good servant, give me some water." At the age of 35, Lewis was dead.

His trusted blacksmith died just two months later.