Alexander H. Willard was 26 when he volunteered for the Lewis and Clark expedition, serving mainly as a blacksmith and hunter while also using his carpentry and gun repair skills during the Corps of Discovery's journey. The men endured severe hardships, including a month-long 18-mile portage around the Great Falls in present-day Montana, where they faced grizzly bears, rattlesnakes, mosquitoes, cactus, intense heat, storms, and hail. Willard was once chased by a grizzly to within 40 yards of camp and escaped, and in August 1805 the captains named Willard's Creek in his honor. In August 1806, on the return journey, the canoe he was in struck submerged logs on the Missouri River, throwing him into raging water, and he survived by clinging to a log, tying sticks together into a rough raft, and floating a mile to shore. After the expedition, he married Elinor McDonald in Missouri in 1807, and they had 12 children. Elinor's sister was married to Henry Dodge, the future 1st and 4th governor of Wisconsin Territory. By the mid 1820s, when this area was part of Michigan Territory, Alexander, Elinor, and their large family had settled nearby in Meekers Corners, where they lived until 1849. In 1832 Alexander Willard and three sons fought in the Black Hawk War, and in 1836 his son George Clark Willard was murdered by a disgruntled neighbor while trying to protect the man's son from a beating. A survey begun in 1832 mapped the Willard family homestead and Willard's lead diggings a few miles to the north. Lead mining, long practiced by Native tribes including the Ho-Chunk, Sauk, and Fox, expanded rapidly after the Willards arrived, and shortly afterward more than 4,000 miners in the area were producing 13 million pounds of lead each year. Around 1849 the Willards moved to a house at this site that they bought from a son leaving for the California gold rush, and they lived there until 1852, when a wagon train made up of nearly all of the extended Willard family left Wisconsin for California; Willard was 74 then.