William Clark (explorer)

William Clark was born on August 1, 1770, at Ladysmith in Caroline County, VirginiaVirginiaVirginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state whose capital is Richmond. It entered the Union on June 25, 1788, as the 10th state, and had a population of 8,631,393 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, the ninth of ten children of John Clark and Ann Rogers Clark, in a moderately wealthy slaveholding planter family. Five of his older brothers fought in the Revolutionary War, among them George Rogers Clark, a Revolutionary War militia commander who rose to brigadier general.⁠[1][2][3][4]

In 1785 the Clark family moved to the KentuckyKentuckyKentucky is a U.S. state bordered by Illinois, Indiana and Ohio to the north, West Virginia and Virginia to the east, Tennessee to the south and Missouri to the west; its capital is Frankfort and its largest city is Louisville. It entered the Union on June 1, 1792, as the 15th state and the first state west of the Appalachian Mountains, and had a population of 4,505,836 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry frontier and settled on a farm near Louisville. Clark had no formal schooling and was taught at home by his brother George Rogers Clark; he could read and write but struggled with spelling and capitalization throughout his life.⁠[2][5][4]

In 1789 Clark joined the Kentucky militia and took part in campaigns of the Northwest Indian War against Native peoples north of the Ohio River; the American Battlefield Trust biography notes that his unit attacked a peaceful Shawnee camp. In 1790 he was commissioned a captain in the IndianaIndianaIndiana is a state in the Midwestern United States; its capital and largest city is Indianapolis. It was admitted to the Union on December 11, 1816, as the 19th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 6,785,528.Open the full entry militia, and in 1792 President George WashingtonGeorge WashingtonGeorge Washington (1732–1799) was the first president of the United States, serving from 1789 to 1797. Earlier he commanded the Continental Army in the American Revolutionary War and presided over the Constitutional Convention of 1787.Open the full entry commissioned him a lieutenant of infantry in the army. Serving under Gen. Anthony Wayne, he helped build forts along the Ohio River, and in 1794 he commanded the Chosen Rifle Company at the Battle of Fallen Timbers.⁠[6][3][7][5]

Clark met Meriwether Lewis in 1795 and the two became friends; while they served in OhioOhioOhio is a state in the Midwestern United States; its capital is Columbus. It joined the Union in 1803 as the 17th state, the first carved from the Northwest Territory, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 11,799,448.Open the full entry, Clark was Lewis’s commanding officer. In 1796 Clark resigned from the army for health reasons and returned to manage his family’s plantation, where he stayed until 1803.⁠[1][8][3]

In 1803 Meriwether Lewis invited Clark to co-lead an expedition to the Pacific Northwest. President Thomas JeffersonThomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson (1743–1826) was the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States, serving from 1801 to 1809. He had earlier been governor of Virginia, minister to France, secretary of state and vice president.Open the full entry had charged Lewis with exploring the Louisiana Territory, documenting its natural history and seeking a water route to the Pacific. Lewis had promised Clark a captain’s commission, but Clark received a lieutenant’s; Lewis nonetheless treated him as an equal co-commander on the journey. Clark helped prepare the journey, recruited and trained the members of the Corps of Discovery, and spent the winter of 1803–1804 in camp at Wood River, opposite the mouth of the Missouri.⁠[6][3][7][1][5]

On May 14, 1804, the Corps of Discovery left camp under Clark’s command; Lewis joined it at St. Charles on May 21, and the expedition then ascended the Missouri River. In the winter of 1804–1805 the party stayed among the Mandan and Hidatsa, where it hired the French Canadian fur trader Toussaint Charbonneau and his Lemhi Shoshone wife, Sacagawea, as interpreters. In 1805 the expedition reached the headwaters of the Missouri, crossed the Continental Divide and traveled on foot and by canoe to the Pacific, wintering at Fort Clatsop on the coast of present-day OregonOregonOregon (officially the State of Oregon) is a state on the Pacific coast of the western United States; its capital is Salem and its largest city is Portland. It was admitted to the Union on February 14, 1859, as the 33rd state. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 4,237,256.Open the full entry before starting home on March 23, 1806.⁠[5][4]

Clark was the expedition’s principal waterman and cartographer; he also coordinated supplies, led hunting parties and kept a daily log of weather and river conditions. The National Park Service judges his map of the trans-Missouri West the most accurate of its time, and his journal became the main record of the expedition during the long stretches when Lewis stopped writing.⁠[6][2][8]

On the return journey, on July 25, 1806, Clark carved his signature into a sandstone formation along the Yellowstone River in MontanaMontanaMontana is a state in the northwestern United States, with the Rocky Mountains in the west and the Great Plains in the east; its capital is Helena and its largest city is Billings. Montana became the 41st U.S. state on November 8, 1889, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 1,084,225 residents.Open the full entry, which he named Pompey’s Tower. The site, now Pompeys Pillar near Billings, is described by the National Park Service as the only remaining on-site physical evidence of the expedition.⁠[8]

On September 23, 1806, the expedition returned to St. Louis; all of the original members survived except Sergeant Charles Floyd, who had died of a ruptured appendix near present-day Council Bluffs in 1804. Congress awarded Clark double pay and 1,600 acres of land.⁠[4][5][6]

After the expedition, Thomas Jefferson appointed Meriwether Lewis governor of the Louisiana Territory and gave Clark a dual appointment as brigadier general of the territory’s militia and principal U.S. Indian agent for the tribes west of the Mississippi. Clark moved to St. Louis and took up these duties in early May 1807.⁠[4][7][5]

In 1808 Clark established Fort Osage (also called Fort Clark) near present-day Sibley in Jackson County, MissouriMissouriMissouri is a state of the United States bounded on the east by the Mississippi River; its capital is Jefferson City, its largest city is Kansas City, and its second-largest is St. Louis. It was admitted to the Union on August 10, 1821, as the 24th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 6,154,913.Open the full entry, and with the help of White Hair concluded a treaty under which the Osage ceded tribal lands in present-day Missouri and ArkansasArkansasArkansas is a U.S. state bounded on the east by the Mississippi River; its capital and largest city is Little Rock. Arkansas was admitted to the Union on June 15, 1836, as the 25th state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 3,011,524.Open the full entry; the treaty was later renegotiated after tribal objections. In 1809 he co-founded the St. Louis Missouri Fur Company with Manuel Lisa and others.⁠[5][4]

After Meriwether Lewis died in 1809, Clark helped prepare the expedition journals for publication; he also cared for Sacagawea’s son Jean Baptiste for a time and became guardian of Sacagawea’s children.⁠[8][3][4]

Clark became governor of Missouri Territory in 1813 and held the post until 1820. The Missouri Office of Administration notes that his 87 months in office nearly equaled the combined tenure of all earlier territorial governors, and one historian has called him “Missouri’s best territorial governor.”⁠[7][6][4]

During the War of 1812, Clark led a small expedition up the Mississippi in 1814 into British-held territory and built Fort Shelby at Prairie du Chien in present-day WisconsinWisconsinWisconsin is a state in the north-central United States; its capital is Madison and its largest city is Milwaukee. Wisconsin was admitted to the Union on May 29, 1848, as the 30th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 5,893,718 residents.Open the full entry; the British and their allies later recaptured the outpost. After the Treaty of Ghent of 1814, Clark was named a peace commissioner, and in July 1815 he negotiated a series of treaties at Portage des Sioux.⁠[2][3][5][7]

As Missouri moved to statehood, Clark announced that he would be a candidate to become the new state’s first elected governor but did not actively campaign; his wife Julia died around the same time. In 1820 Alexander McNair defeated him handily.⁠[7][5][1]

In 1822 President James MonroeJames MonroeJames Monroe (1758–1831) was an American politician and diplomat who served as President of the United States from 1817 to 1825; his administration proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine.Open the full entry appointed Clark to the newly created post of superintendent of Indian affairs at St. Louis, which he held until 1838. His superintendency records, covering his official duties, weather and river data, steamboat arrivals and departures, a register of Native American visitors and local news, are held by the Kansas Historical Society.⁠[6][2][5]

Clark negotiated thirty-seven treaties, more than any other U.S.United StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry official, and an 1825 treaty completed the Osage cession of lands to the United States. BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry notes that he expressed sympathy for the uprooted tribes and promoted their interests as he understood them, yet agreed with and implemented the policy of Indian removal, while Missourians of his day considered him “too sympathetic to Native Americans.” In 1832, when the Sac under Black Hawk challenged the seizure of their lands, Clark, as William E. Foley writes in the Missouri Encyclopedia, “sanctioned a war of extermination against them.”⁠[5][6]

In his later years Clark kept a museum in St. Louis filled with Native American artifacts and other curiosities, through which he escorted visitors.⁠[5]

Clark died in St. Louis on September 1, 1838, and his funeral drew the largest outpouring in the city’s history. Two days later he was buried with military and Masonic honors on the farm of his nephew, Col. John O’Fallon, in what is now O’Fallon Park. On October 23, 1860, his remains were moved to Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.⁠[1][5][9]

Clark’s grave monument is a 35-foot gray granite obelisk designed and commissioned for $25,000 by his son Jefferson Kearney Clark; after Jefferson Kearney Clark died in 1900, his widow saw the memorial to completion. It was dedicated in 1904, the centennial of the Louisiana Purchase, and was restored and rededicated on May 21, 2004, the bicentennial of the Corps of Discovery’s departure from St. Charles. Clark’s burial place is a National Historic Landmark.⁠[9][2]

In 2001 President Bill ClintonBill ClintonBill Clinton (born 1946) is an American politician and lawyer, a Democrat who served as attorney general and governor of Arkansas and as the 42nd president of the United States from 1993 to 2001.Open the full entry promoted Clark from lieutenant to captain in the U.S. Army, 163 years after his death.⁠[8][2]

On January 5, 1808, Clark married Julia (also given as Judith) Hancock in Virginia; they had five children, one of them a son named Meriwether Lewis, and two of the children died in childhood. On November 28, 1821, he married Julia’s cousin Harriet Kennerly Radford, a widow with three children; they had two more children before Harriet’s death in 1831.⁠[6][4][5]

York was an enslaved man owned by Clark, close to him in age, whom Clark inherited as property when his father died. York traveled with the Corps of Discovery but was not considered an official member; he was allowed to hunt, was the primary caregiver to Charles Floyd, and risked his life to save Clark, Sacagawea and her son during a flash flood. In November 1805 York and Sacagawea both voted on where the Corps should camp for the winter.⁠[10][4][1]

After the expedition the other members received double pay and land, but York received neither and returned to slavery. Clark denied York’s first requests for freedom; the National Park Service records that York was freed sometime after 1815 and that Clark gave him a wagon and a team of horses, with which York started a hauling business. By 1832 Clark had informed the author Washington Irving that the business had failed and that York had died of cholera in TennesseeTennesseeTennessee is a U.S. state in the southeast-central United States, with its capital at Nashville. It was admitted to the Union on June 1, 1796, as the 16th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 6,910,840 residents.Open the full entry. The American Battlefield Trust biography, by contrast, judges that little evidence supports Clark’s later statement that he freed York, and that York may have escaped.⁠[10][3]

In the Missouri Encyclopedia, Foley criticizes Clark’s reluctance to grant York his freedom for his services on the expedition and writes that Clark occasionally used the whip as punishment.⁠[5]

Clark County in northeast Missouri, established two years before his death, is named for him.⁠[7]

The historian Jay H. Buckley argues that, despite his good intentions, Clark was “responsible for divesting Indians of more land than any other American.” The State Historical Society of Missouri’s article judges that Clark influenced federal relations with Native Americans and helped pave the way for westward settlement. Foley also notes that Clark at times sought to protect peaceful tribes and later had second thoughts about the harsh terms he had extracted from the Osage.⁠[3][4][5]

Bellefontaine Cemetery and Arboretum (William Clark’s grave): Web page: https://www.bellefontainecemetery.org/william-clark (opens in a new window).⁠[9]

Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail (National Park Service): Web page: https://home.nps.gov/lecl/learn/historyculture/william-clark.htm (opens in a new window).⁠[8]