Lewis's Branding Iron

Width, 5.5 in.; Height 4 in.; Inside Depth, 1.5 in.
Reproduced from
Olin D. Wheeler, The Trail of Lewis and Clark, 1804-1904
( 2 vols, New York: G. P. Putnam¹s Sons, 1904), Plate 60.

ewis may have had this branding iron custom-made before he left the East, perhaps at Harpers Ferry, although there is no mention of it in existing records. Such tools commonly were used for marking wooden packing crates and barrels, and on leather bags, until the early 20th century. The frame below Lewis's name would outline a space in which details such as numbers or letters could be burned into the wood or leather. It was a distant forerunner of the rubber stamp, a sort of pre-digital barcode.

It is frequently inferred from information in the journals that it was also used to blaze the expedition's trail, so as to notify later travelers that others had preceded them. Private Joseph Whitehouse, for instance, wrote that the captains "had several Trees branded, with their Names" on June 4, 1804, near the mouth of the Moreau River, about 140 miles up the Missouri. And when the men hid the red pirogue on an island at the mouth of the Marias River on June 10, 1805, Lewis recorded: "Put my brand on several trees standing near her," and Sergeant Ordway added, "to prevent the Savages from disturbing her."

On April 20, 1806, while camped above the Long Narrows of The Dalles, near today's Horsethief Lake State Park, Lewis mentioned that he had traded some elk skins, "old irons," and two canoes for beads, thus reducing his inventory and gaining a little capital. This may explain why his "signature" iron was found in the Columbia River in the vicinity of The Dalles, Oregon, in the early 1890s.¹

Roy Appleman supposes it was made by Private John Shields, who might well have had sufficient skill to craft it.² "We have been much indebted to the ingenuity of this man on many occasions," wrote Lewis (June 10, 1805). "Without having served any regular apprenticeship to any trade, he makes his own tools principally, and works extreemly well in either wood or metal, and in this way has been extreemely servicable to us."

Serious students of horse lore and tack maintain that Lewis's branding iron would not have been used to brand horses. It was unnecessarily large and detailed, and the empty rectangular outline would have served no purpose.³ Upon leaving their remuda with the Nez Perce Indians en route west in October of 1805, Whitehouse wrote: "Got up our horses and cropped their fore mane, and branded them with a Sturrup Iron on the near [left] fore Shoulder, So that we may know them again at our return." A "stirrup iron" is the D-shaped metal loop in which the rider's foot rests. When heated, the bottom of it would burn a plain line into the horse's flesh, and one or more additional lines could have been added to make a distinctive design. The term also refers to the iron rod from which a stirrup could be made. When heated, the rod could be used to draw any sort of symbol on an animal's hide. Prior to the 1830s there was no official brand for Army horses.

The author thanks Hank Mathiason, Clancy, Montana; historian Robert Moore of the National Park Service; and artist Michael Haynes for their assistance.

--Joseph Mussulman

1. Gary E. Moulton, ed., The Journals of the Lewis & Clark Expedition (13 vols., Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983–2001), 4:277n. Lewis's branding iron is now in the possession of the Oregon Historical Society.

2. Roy E. Appleman, Lewis & Clark: Historic Places Associated with Their Transcontinental Exploration (1804-06 ) (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1975), 373 note 120.

3. Robert R. Hunt, "Hoofbeats & Nightmares: A Horse Chronicle of the Lewis and Clark Expedition," We Proceeded On, Vol. 21, No. 1 (February 1995), 4–9.