Clark, beyond the expedition

Like other great pairings in American history, ranging from Mason and Dixon to Simon and Garfunkel, the names of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark are welded together as a single phrase. But some of the most vivid and resonant episodes in Clark’s life took place long before and long after the vaunted Lewis and Clark expedition.

William Clark’s remarkable life story is told with color, panache and authority by veteran journalist and historian Landon Y. Jones in “William Clark and the Shaping of the West.” As it was understood in Clark’s lifetime, “the West” was a boundary in motion that started along the western stretches of the original 13 colonies and moved steadily across the continent. When the Clark family decamped from Virginia, for example, the western wilderness was to be found in the Ohio River Valley, and the family seat was established in “a bustling hamlet of about a hundred log cabins” called Louisville.

In describing the world in which Clark was born and raised, Jones presents us with a rich and often strange glimpse of “America’s First West,” as he calls it. Native Americans, for example, came to know when white settlers were approaching their tribal grounds by the appearance of what they called “white man’s fly” -- that is, the honeybees that were driven westward as the newcomers cleared the old-growth forests to make room for farms and towns. “The honeybees were thought to keep about a hundred miles in advance of white migration all the way across North America,” explains Jones.

The Native Americans too were driven out. Much of the narrative, in fact, focuses on the bitter, sustained conflict between native dwellers and the practitioners of what would soon be known as Manifest Destiny. And it is here that Clark makes his first appearance in the annals of American history. Among the earliest entries in the journals that Clark kept is an account of a firefight with a party of Indians that left four men and four “squaws” dead, and “2 children 16 horses and 100£ worth of plund’r” in the hands of the frontiersmen.

“There was no room for Indians in Jefferson’s empire of liberty,” writes Jones. Indeed, Thomas Jefferson himself spoke frankly of what we would today call genocide. “We must leave it to yourself to decide [whether] the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal,” Jefferson once wrote to Clark’s older brother, the storied Indian fighter George Rogers Clark. “The same world would scarcely do for them and us.”

Clark first met Meriwether Lewis when they were both serving in the long war that was waged against the Native Americans, an encounter that prefigured their famous expedition. Jones invites us to see the Voyage of Discovery on which they embarked at the invitation of Jefferson in 1804 as an expression of Jefferson’s geopolitical ambitions -- a water route “from sea to sea” would allow the United States to dominate the continent of North America to the exclusion of Britain, France and Spain.

Lewis committed suicide a few years after the end of the expedition, and Clark struggled to turn his celebrity into cash. His dubious reward was a job as the superintendent of the Indian Office, a government agency charged with keeping the conquered nations and peoples of Native America under control and supervising their “removal” from the path of white settlement; significantly, he reported to both the secretary of State and the secretary of War. Later, as governor of the Missouri Territory -- “the most powerful American in the West,” as Jones puts it -- he directed a series of punitive expeditions against the “Hostile Indians” who refused to submit to his authority. At the same time, Jones credits him with “struggling to find a balance between his conflicting constituencies,” including “the land-hungry citizens of his territory, and the Indians he was supposed to protect.”

Some of the most charming moments come when Clark sits down with Nicholas Biddle, the highborn Philadelphia attorney who would edit his journals. Biddle interrogated Clark on every detail of the expedition: “Did both Indian men and women have the venereal? Are there oysters on the Pacific coast? How do Indian mothers flatten the heads of their babies? Does [Clark’s slave] York have a wife?” The touchiest question focused on what Biddle delicately called “the point of rank and command” between Lewis and Clark. “Equal in every point of view,” insisted Clark, still bitter that he had been denied the rank of captain that Lewis enjoyed.

Jones is a resourceful researcher. He found his way to “Billy” Clark’s childhood lesson book, where the marginalia includes some handwritten doggerel (“William Clark is a spark / And he loves to shoot a gun ... “) that ends with a bit of coarse schoolboy humor on the subject of flatulence and a ribald story about a farmer’s wife. More chilling is a note from Billy’s father, a few months before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, serving as a safe-conduct pass to permit a house slave called Cupid to attend church services.

Clark himself was a slave owner, as Jones points out. One of Clark’s journal entries recorded the deaths of “Nan[c]y’s Child, and Bens horse,” thus “pairing the loss of a slave child and a domestic animal in a single sentence.” And he boasted that his cook had become “a very good wench since she had about fifty” -- 50 lashes of the whip, that is. “Indeed, I have been obliged [to] whip almost all my people. And they are now beginning to think that it best to do better and not Cry hard when I am compelled to use the whip.”

This is a very different figure from the man we met in Stephen Ambrose’s “Undaunted Courage.” Clark was famously accompanied on the Voyage of Discovery by York, who was regarded as “the bravest of the party” by the Native Americans whom they encountered along the way. After their return to civilization, however, Clark complained that York was “insolent and Sulky” -- “I gave him a Severe trouncing,” he wrote, threatening to sell him off, although he confided to his journal that “I cant sell negrows here for money.”

Jones has given us a life of William Clark that rescues him from the dusty pages of high school textbooks and more hagiographic biographies. His vocabulary and point of view are thoroughly modern: He refers to the widowed Clark as “an active single father” and he uses the fashionable term “borderlands” to describe what we used to call the “frontier.” Above all, Jones allows us to see a familiar and even fusty figure in a wholly new if sometimes troubling light. *