'William Clark and the Shaping of the West'
by Landon Y. Jones
Hill and Wang, 394 pp., $25
There are few more revered figures in American history than William Clark and Meriwether Lewis, explorers of the American West. Although Lewis died within three years of his return from the Lewis and Clark expedition, Clark lived a long life in military service to the United States. In "William Clark and the Shaping of the West," Landon Jones delivers a revealing portrait of Clark's entire life, not just the famous journey.
Jones, a former managing editor at People magazine and contributor to Life, Time and Money, is on the board of the National Council of the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial. But his fascination for the expedition notwithstanding, Jones' work is an unflinching and frankly unflattering portrait of a beloved American hero.
Clark was born in 1770 and was raised in a country still struggling with its newfound independence. Joining the American military when he was just 19, Clark served the federal government for several decades, securing outposts in the West, leading men into the wilderness and, above all, fighting the Indians.
Jones' masterful biography brings to life the gritty and brutal existence of life on the American frontier. Arriving pioneers found fertile land abounded as they pushed westward, but with the land came the Native American tribes who resented the arrival of white settlers, particularly when it was "guaranteed" by earlier treaties that the settlers refrain from further encroachment. The weak national government was unable to control the settlers, who moved far beyond treaty-established boundaries. When the inevitable hostilities arose, it was the Indians who were blamed as "savages" and were attacked by the military - including at times Clark himself - and then guaranteed peace only in exchange for land and resettlement further west.
The story, familiar as it is, is difficult to read without disgust. Jones' narrative is superb at bringing the conflict to life: American soldiers digging up Indian corpses to scalp or burn them, pregnant Indian women hung and mutilated, and enormous fields of Indian corn burned to starve the tribes into submission (the same tactic used by the British during the Revolutionary War and decried as "barbaric" by the colonies). While Jones does not attribute any of these incidents to Clark himself, Clark plainly was deeply involved in the conflict throughout his military career and could not have been unaware of them. To modern Americans, it seems almost absurd to question that the young United States would bridge the continent. But, from Clark's perspective, the outcome was far from certain. French, English and Spanish armies maneuvered and manipulated Native American tribes, shifting alliances to balance power in the unsettled West.
Clark was 33 years old when he was invited by Meriwether Lewis to join him on an expedition to explore the Western interior. The Lewis and Clark expedition has been the subject of scores of books, but Jones manages to cover it in a brisk 30 pages, drawing heavily from the expedition's journals and correspondence.
Upon his return from the expedition, Clark married 15-year-old Julia Hancock, was appointed principal Indian agent for the U.S. government and settled in the former French city of St. Louis. In his remaining years, Clark acted as the federal representative in negotiating countless treaties with vanishing Native American tribes as they were pushed inexorably westward and toward oblivion.
In 1831, a band of Sauks attempted to return to their tribal homeland on the east bank of the Mississippi in what is now Illinois. As the conflict escalated, the Sauks tried to escape back west but, unable to negotiate peace terms because the pursuing Americans had no interpreters, the Sauks "put up little resistance, as most were attempting to find shelter or help the women and children scramble across the river's mud flats and small islands. ... The carnage was terrible; men, women, and children were shot indiscriminately, and their blood-streaked bodies floated downriver."
The few who escaped were hunted and killed. Clark - at the time the Indian superintendent for the West - was delighted to hear the "glorious news."
Clark died in 1838 at age 68. He outlived Lewis by more than 29 years. By the time of his death, Clark had personally signed 37 separate Indian treaties, more than anyone in American history, and supervised the removal of 81,282 Indians from the East. As Clark lay dying, the U.S. Army began moving the 17,000 Cherokee Indians west, on a thousand-mile forced march known as the "Trail of Tears." Four thousand of them died. It was the culmination of a process started, facilitated and enforced by William Clark.
Clark's many contributions, including the Lewis and Clark expedition itself, will not soon be forgotten. But this thoughtful biography suggests that Clark's entire life was a more complex, and decidedly less heroic, affair.
