During the return journey, Gibson served in Clark’s party descending the Yellowstone River. He suffered a serious injury when he fell on a sharp snag while mounting a horse, driving a stick nearly two inches into his thigh. Despite this painful wound, he recovered and continued the journey.

Gibson was also one of the expedition’s salt-makers at Fort Clatsop, helping to boil seawater on the Oregon coast to produce the salt the party desperately needed for preserving food on the return trip.

After the expedition, Gibson died in St. Louis in 1809 under circumstances that are unclear. His death came just a few months before Lewis’s own death on the Natchez Trace.

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