The Reports of his death may have been exaggerated

When I first started looking at Tilman Gooch, all that was known of his death was that he had been one of the militia on the Trail of Tears and reports had come back that he had died en route.  That was accepted in the family for a century or so, then modern genealogy came along and a woman discovered that a Tilman Gooch of about the right age appeared in Mississippi, near Tilman's brother William, in the 1840 census.  There was also a Tilman, possibly the same one, who died in San Francisco in 1850.  None of these men overlap with each other so they easily could be the same person. 

His daughter's bounty land application adds to the interest.  She was only tiny when he died so on her first go says that he came home from the wars and died.  Then, after talking to her older siblings, she amends that to say that Moses Justice had been with him in the militia and brought home the report that when he (Moses) left him, he was on the verge of death.  Which is a very different matter altogether.

Adding to the interest here is that Moses is probably a relative by marriage since Tilman's wife was Elizabeth Justice.  No way to tell across this much time but Moses could have been reporting factually or could have been sparing his sister/cousin's feelings by not telling her that her husband had just decided to not come back to her.