The Thomas Jefferson Hour; #0440

Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with our third president Thomas Jefferson. Today's program is about William Clark, the co-captain of the 1803-1806 Lewis and Clark Expedition. The Thomas Jefferson Hour is produced by High Plains Public Radio and New Enlightenment Radio Network, a non-profit organization dedicated to the search for truth and the tradition of Thomas Jefferson. Please join us as our host Bill Crystal speaks with Humanity Scholar and Lewis and Clark Scholar Clay Jenkinson. Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with the third president of the United States. Today we have a special program. This is of course the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and we're going to talk today with Clay Jenkinson, our scholar who represents Thomas Jefferson normally but who was also, I don't know if many of you realize, an expert on Lewis and Clark. He's the author of a short biography of Maryweather Lewis and he has been traveling about the country discussing various aspects of the expedition. Good day Clay.

Good to see you Bill Crystal, my dear friend. I hear on the 22nd floor of the New Enlightenment Radio Network tower. I really I suffer from acrophobia in this building. Yeah, vertigo. I think I think Mr. Clark is undergoing something of a renaissance. Wouldn't you say there have been several biographies that have appeared of of Captain Clark? Is this is this a normal phenomenon in a bicentennial year for everyone to to be explored from every aspect or would you say that with our additional knowledge of Maryweather Lewis the role of Clark is becoming more and more significant in the eyes of many scholars. We've needed a good standard biography of William Clark for a very long time and it hasn't existed. Really there's not a great biography of Lewis either. There are difficulties in the biography of both of these men. Of course there are hundreds of biographies of Thomas Jefferson but Lewis has two one by Richard Dillon which was published a generation ago and more recently the famous book Undaunted

Courage by Stephen Ambrose was in a sense of biography of Maryweather. Lewis had certainly followed his life much more closely than it did that of Clark. Clark has been neglected for a number of reasons. There is a book that's more than a generation old about Clark as a Jeffersonian Indian agent but there has not been a standard birth to death biography of Clark and a number of people have sort of moved towards doing one and then have thought better of it and here's the reason why. Clark lived too long to be a hero. Clark came back from the expedition on September 23rd 186 but he actually lived till 1838 and during that immense period of three decades he was probably one of the three or four most important agents of American dispossession of Indians, relocation of Indians, treaties that that ceded Indian lands to the United States government, wars particularly around the time of the War of 1812 that helped

to subjugate the recalcitrant freedom loving Indians of the Illinois country. So Clark's subsequent his post expeditionary career is one that is very difficult to fathom extremely complex the number of records, the letters, the memos, the accounts that have to be sorted through by any biographers is a huge herculean task and I think it's fair to say that and this sounds awful but the more we know about Clark in a sense the less admirable he becomes at least on the surface because he is associated with really three things. Number one he's a Virginia slaveholder and he transferred his status as a slave master and a buyer and seller of slaves from his native Virginia to his adoptive Kentucky and eventually to Missouri and when Washington Irving comes to see him in the early 1830s the American man of letters Washington Irving visits

Clark on a western tour and he sees a little Virginia plantation set in the middle of the state of Missouri. So number one Clark is a is a planter slaveholder and that's not particularly admirable in our eyes. Number two Clark is a patriarch. You know he marries a woman who is 21 years younger than himself. His first marriage, his second wife, his 18 years younger than himself. His first wife Julia Hancock is 15 at the time that he marries her. So she's a child by our standards. Now people married much earlier in this era but still if he married her at 15 he must have met her when she was 11 or so and so there's something we would not find it particularly healthy to see a 31-year-old man marrying a 15-year-old girl. He'd be in jail in our time. I mean we would discern that it's against the law for someone at age to have relations with a woman that young. I mean it is in our time it's statutory rape even if it's

consensual and so you know we would we would find it difficult to accept that and there's a certain patriarchal quality in terms of the sort of feminist notion of patriarchal of the strong male household figure that dominant the domineering male at the center of the household that's also a part of Clark's life and then third he signed more than 30 treaties with native tribes more than any other single agent of the United States government in the 19th century. I mean of all the treaties that were ever signed with Indians. Clark played a personal role in more of them than any other single individual and the net effect of all those was to buy Indian lands for the lowest possible price and then once the price had been agreed upon the United States government frequently reneged upon the delivery of those goods or when those goods were delivered they were shoddy or spoiled. Now I don't want to sound cynical but wasn't Clark really as you suggested earlier a Jeffersonian Indian agent wasn't that really the policy of Jefferson and virtually all of the presidents that

followed him? You're absolutely right and this is one of the paradoxes I mean we're as you well know we are living through a reassessment of the life and achievement of Thomas Jefferson and I think it's fair to say that Jefferson's reputation is in some decline you know it'll probably plateau out at some point and begin to climb again but but at the moment I would say that Jefferson's reputation is diminishing and diminishing rapidly in the eyes not just of the American people but of historians. Clark in some respects was a much better Jeffersonian than Maryweather Lewis. Lewis is the one with the personal connection he's Jefferson's neighbor and private correspondent secretary and protege he lived with Jefferson both before and to a certain degree after the expedition. He's Jefferson's pet project in his hand-picked adventurer but in some regards Lewis is an imperfect Jeffersonian but Clark is a very reliable Jeffersonian. First of all what is a Jeffersonian? A Jeffersonian is a writer is a keeper of records. Clark kept his journal all but 10 days of the 28 months

that they were on the journey and he summarized those 10 days on the 11th. Clark provided a complete record he was he was prompt in his accounts he noted down everything in the course of his time as the territorial governor of Upper Louisiana and the territorial governor of Missouri. He's an extraordinary man a record keeper a correspondent someone who who maintains the lines of communication. He took down India data he had an Indian museum he had a museum at his office slash home in St. Louis which was one of the first museums in that part of the world and it's very reminiscent of Jefferson's lobby at the entryway at Monticello where which Jefferson called his own Indian hall. Clark is also the exponent of Jeffersonian Indian policy. Jefferson's Indian policy is essentially feel sorry for the Indian study them do some sort of rescue archaeology and anthropology on what's left of their cultures. He's them as gently as possible into assimilation but if they resist show a

streak of ruthlessness and that is what Clark did all of his adult life as an Indian superintendent and agent in St. Louis and then finally of course Jefferson is a slaveholder. It's quite of all Jefferson's rhetoric he bought and sold slaves all of his life and really one of the last acts of Jeffersonian statesmanship is that Jefferson threw his enormous prestige behind the extension of slavery into the Missouri country into the new Louisiana territory. So in some regards Clark is a much more complete exemplar of the Jeffersonian element in American life than was his partner in Discovery Maryweather Lewis. And clearly there would have been no Clark if it had been up to Mr. Jefferson. He thought that Captain Maryweather Lewis could could handle the expedition on his own and if it wasn't Lewis's own I guess on its own sense of either the difficulties or his own limitations there would have been no Clark. It's true Jefferson chose Lewis chose Clark Lewis had served under William

Clark in the Frontier Army in a rifle company and Lewis had been court marshal he had had a dispute with a fellow officer a man named Elliot and Lewis had been court marshal normally under mad Anthony Wayne's command these things were handled by duels and Anthony Wayne hated to see them become official business but somehow this one became official business in Lewis's court marshal for behavior on becoming of an officer essentially drunkenness and aggression and he's transferred out he's he's he's acquitted in the court marshal found not guilty but he's transferred out of mad Anthony Wayne's commanded to another one and it turns out that the man he serves under is William Clark William Clark that's the first time we know of that he met him Clark is four years older than Lewis he's the younger brother of a very famous man George Rogers Clark the Clark family is a very important family much more important than the Lewis family George Rogers Clark is the hero of the American Revolution and so he's he's a he's an modified American hero living

out at the last years of his life and William Clark is the younger brother of such a person and Lewis serves under him and Lewis must have seen something in Clark either friendship or capacities map making command capacities leadership qualities he saw something in Clark that he realized was extremely valuable and when Lewis had the chance to create his own exploring party the first thing he did was ask Clark to service his partner in discovery and this is what he said I just love this he wrote him a letter on 19th June 183 so relatively late in the game he says if there is anything under those circumstances in this enterprise which would induce you to participate with me in its fatigues its dangers and its honors believe me there is no man on earth with whom I should feel equal pleasure in sharing them as with yourself and Clark then gets this letter in Kentucky he writes back and says this is an undertaking

freighted with many difficulties but my friend I do assure you that no man lives with whom I would prefer to undertake such a trip as yourself and so this the most famous partnership in American history is formed by these two acquaintances slash friends and I think it's it's kind of a cliche but I say it everywhere I go and I know most Lewis and Clark scholars say it too the greatest decision that Mary whether Lewis ever made in the whole course of his life was to hire Clark as his co-captain and as you've already suggested he was the steady one Lewis seemed to have had even during the expedition his ups and his downs Lewis was famously Murkuriel it's sort of fashionable these days to say he might have been a manic depressive or that he was bipolar or that he was suffering from whatever this or that that that he was he needed psychotropic drugs but we don't really know those are these are our ways these are our

attempts to struggle with what we see when we read about Mary whether Lewis and frankly you know I think that these attempts to psychoanalyze Lewis using our terms our drugs our diagnoses is a mistake because if you had said to Thomas Jefferson I think this Lewis is a manic depressive he would have said I have no idea what you mean and there were no drugs to treat this sort of thing in those times and and it was also the case as I as I suppose it is to a certain degree even now Bill that Melancholia was slightly fashionable as a as a temperament you know the Melancholy man the man who's so he's so aware of the world situation that he feels a kind of a burden of it that there's that's as we say in cultural studies that's been a socially privileged attitude and we we associated with genius and with people of high achievement and so on you know we don't really know what Lewis was all we know is this that he performed

admirably on the expedition no evidence from any of the journal keepers that he was ever incapacitated by moods melancholy depression mental disease or anything else no evidence of any sort that Lewis ever even had a mentally unstable day on the course of the expedition no not a jot of evidence also we know that Lewis was silent for extensive periods that 441 days of journals are missing out of 28 months for for Clark 10 days are missing and they're summarized on the 11th no such summary from Lewis so something's going on because we know that Lewis was instructed by Jefferson to keep an active journal so something something broke down there either the journals have been lost or Lewis couldn't do them or didn't do them or he had Clark do them we were not sure it's a mystery but there's that we also know that Lewis committed suicide three years after the expedition and that Lewis could never write his book that that was the main thing that he had to do after the expedition and he didn't do it and problem was catching up with him because you can lie about not finishing a work for a certain amount of time but at some

point those deceptions ceased to be credible and so Lewis is on a collision course with with the limitations of his own character when he when he commits suicide on October 11th 189 meanwhile Clark is sort of steadily walking through life he comes back from the expedition he gets married Lewis never does he starts having children Lewis never does Clark supervises the education of Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau in a sense takes in the Charbonneau family to to be their patron Clark is able to keep up his accounts he has disputes with the war department and every other department back in Washington but they don't lead to any crisis Clark is steady enough to do this he gets a house Lewis is basically living in quarters Clark is successful in every way that Lewis appears not to be and Clark can even get along with Lewis's enemy his lieutenant Frederick baits Clark doesn't like this baits but he knows how to get on with them because that's what Clark does so Clark is the is clearly the steady one Lewis is clearly the mercurial one and somehow they formed a friendship that was able to survive that whatever

that tension is and I mean it seems to be clear that Clark covered for Lewis in important ways all of Lewis's short life I know in the past clay you've compared what happened with with Lewis and with Clark to what happened to some of the people who went to the moon and then came back and attempted to carry on with their lives and you've noted the same tendencies among our our astronauts that some were steady and have done very well but others had periods of angst and a great deal of upset they do it's clear that they do Edwin Buzz Aldrin is the most famous example of somebody but there are others that came back and had John Glenn had a quasi mystical experience in space and was ridiculed for it and had to sort of climb back from that from one of his mercury trips and several of the astronauts became spiritualists and were involved in what we would call new age investigations and and many of them had crises in their lives which are of a much simpler sort what do you do after

you've done that you know what do you what do you do you work for GM do you sell insurance do you become an engineer or consultant how do you ever top a spacewalk or walking on the moon or docking with a Soyuz space capsule so this is true of course not just in space although that's the most exact analogy but it's true of Olympians it's true of people in the army you know I suppose we would say that and I don't mean to use this term too loosely but there's kind of a post-traumatic or post-peak stress syndrome that sets in for almost everybody who's done something like this but Clark was somehow able just to get on with it and I think marrying was a big part of that that's certainly grounded him I'm sure you're listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour Clay Jenkinson our scholar is talking today about William Clark the co-captan of the Lewis and Clark expedition I guess co-captan was really in Lewis's mind and in Clark's Jefferson really really never adopted that vision did he no he didn't and

these new biographies which are fascinating one is by Landon Jones who's terrific formerly the editor of People Magazine a wonderful man and he's speaking all over the country based upon his biography and William Foley a Missouri historian has written a more academic biography and a man named Jay Buckley has written an administrative biography so we have three very different new biographies of William Clark and we'll post those on our website www.th-Jefferson.org but what's interesting is that they look at this and several interesting things first of all it looks as if Jefferson never actually promised Clark a captaincy that this is part of the mythology of Lewis and Clark but Lewis said to Clark I can get you this captaincy but the new sense from the historians is that probably Lewis did not clear this with the great one before he offered it he assumed that it could be done and when he went to Jefferson Jefferson was either evasive or lukewarm or positively negative about it under any circumstances we know that the war department

refused to give Clark the captaincy and they made him a lieutenant in artillery instead and as you know Bill rank really matters in the military it's not a it's not a floating or loose sort of construction it there is a great precision about this and when when Lewis learned that he had first of all to tell Clark you know you're not getting the captaincy but he also said by God you will be treated as if my co-captain and and that happened they were co-captains but the the really interesting part is that later when Nicholas Biddle the man who wrote the first edition of the Lewis and Clark journals was about to publish he said to Clark he sure and you sure you want me to call you captain because you know you weren't really a captain and these things sort of matter it's kind of a delicate issue and Clark wrote back and said we were equal in every respect and so he toughed it out and allowed himself to be called captain in the official account of the expedition Clay will be back in just a little while we're talking about William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition today many new

biographies will be back in just a moment you have been listening to the Thomas Jefferson Hour please visit our website www.th-jeperson.org please stay tuned we will be back in just a moment welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson Hour today Clay Jenkinson Lewis and Clark

Scholar you didn't know that in addition to his day job as Thomas Jefferson he has this completely different career on the side Clay Jenkinson has Lewis and Clark Scholar is talking about William Clark and the the sudden explosion during this bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition an explosion of biographies of William Clark Clay just before he went to break we were indicating that Clark really wasn't a co-capped and along with Mayor Wythe Lewis but it's clear that Jefferson certainly held him no grudge even if he never officially promoted him that he in fact took over Lewis's job as the governor of Upper Louisiana the territorial governor you're absolutely right Bill Jefferson came to have more respect for William Clark over time Jefferson was also something of an opportunist and Lewis was his man and Jefferson continued to call it the Lewis expedition long after they had returned and he even had the affrontary to call the map Lewis's map which was done by Clark but Jefferson

was so loyal to his protege is that he really couldn't see Clark in a certain way but then two things happened Lewis dies and now Jefferson needs a new governor for Upper Louisiana and he needs someone to see the journals through the press and so he says to Clark you do it and poor Clark has to go off to Philadelphia must have been terribly frustrating because he literally doesn't know what Lewis had done by way of preparation Lewis had gone there and gotten a publisher and written a prospectus and hired artists and scientists to examine the minerals and the plants and he'd gotten all these things started he'd gotten a number of plates spinning and in Philadelphia and then he disappears and dies and but he's left no record of all this and so Clark has to go around and say do you know anybody who is doing work for our publication project and first tries a man named William Wirt who's a Virginia man of letters who won't do it but they eventually carc settles on a man named Nicholas Biddle who is a lawyer and man of letters in Philadelphia what we would call a ghostwriter and

Biddle agrees to take on the publication project because Clark felt that he was inadequate to that he didn't think that he was a well well enough educated man a good enough grammarian a good enough Speller literary enough to handle this he was probably right although Charles Wilson Peel the great first director of the museum in Philadelphia said Clark could have done a splendid job so that's one thing that's a burden that Clark has to take on and if you read the correspondence carefully you can even see a little annoyance by Clark that Lewis left it in such disarray that he had not brought Clark yet on any of the details of all of this so Clark starts from nothing and the first edition of the journals of Lewis and Clark is published in 1814 that's fully eight years after the fact that's an eternity for that'd be like the Armstrong and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin coming back and the results not being published in Life Magazine for eight years you know it's a long long time after a geopolitically important exploration secondly Clark becomes the governor of Upper Louisiana so Jefferson gains some respect for Clark over the

course of time but never had the same respect for William Clark that he had for his older brother George Rogers Clark and never had the same respect for William Clark that he had for his protege Mary whether this even though Clark was reliable and Lewis was not interesting we've mused before in past years on this program as to whether Jefferson might or might not have contributed to the demise of Mary whether Lewis with the demands and pressures that he placed when can we expect your three volume account the definition how'd you like to receive that letter about once every three weeks that Jefferson was demanding you'd think that when someone was capable of meeting his demands though that that person would gain his favor what's a key to Clark Clark was one of ten children and he had a number of older brothers I think he was the youngest male child in this family and that's a huge family and when one of your older siblings is a is a famous national hero the Hannibal as he was called of the American Revolution it doesn't leave a lot of room for you William Clark now what what's your role if your brother is the

world famous freedom fighter what are you going to do and so Clark went into the army like his brother the key to Clark is that he spent his life in service to others who were more egotistical than himself he begins by serving his brother George Rogers Clark who is by the time this all happens as a mass he's an alcoholic and his his a financial affairs are desperate and he's he has legal troubles and William Clark spends a lot of time trying to sort out his brother's life all thankless all nameless that's just behind the scenes work that he's doing and it doesn't pay off well to a certain degree it does he probably saves the family from bankruptcy but then he then he somehow connects himself to this Lewis who is you know an unusual human being and a troubled one by any standard and part of being Clark with Lewis had to be how do you handle Lewis because Lewis is always flying off the handle Clark is the steady one so managing Lewis is probably a big part of of their expedition then Lewis kills himself and

leaves Clark holding the bag now Clark has to cobble together everything that all these fragments knows nothing about it he has to piece this together and see the journals through the press that had to be a terrible burden and then he goes off back to St. Louis and he becomes the chief exponent of Jeffersonian Indian policy for three decades you know that's one thing for Jefferson to talk that way at Monticello you know he's sitting around drinking Bordeaux and playing chess and looking out his palladium windows at a serene landscape parks out there with these wild men and we're St. Louis at this time is like a it's like a mining town on the Alaska Canadian frontier during the gold rush or it's like an oil patch town in Wyoming I mean we're talking about a rough and ready all the pictures you have a sort of the old west at its worst with murders and people literally gouging out each other's eyes and drinking and falling down drunken prostitution and in addition to this you have the old

St. Louis Ferrer aristocracy of French and Spanish who liked it when there was no government and suddenly the Jeffersonians have come in and they want a prohibit liquor from the fur trade and they want order and you have the Spanish land grants now suddenly budding up against American settlement policies and the rectangular survey grid system and you know do you honor squatters or don't you and justice out there was if an Indian if an Indian tribe does something to a settler you go kill an Indian not necessarily even of the same tribe and you hang people with either show trials or no trials so suddenly Clark is trying to say look fellows you know we're gonna have a Jeffersonian culture out here it's gonna be the rule of law and we're all gonna get along there's gonna be negotiation and we're not gonna send liquor on the on the fur trade and you know they're gonna be actual trials of Indians and so on and these guys these fur aristocrats the you know the wealthy the halibutans that were out there were saying yeah you go ahead and try you know we're not gonna bend to this where's your government is 2000 miles away we

want to do things the way we've always done them because that's how we get rich and we'll deal you in William Clark for wealth if you will cooperate with us and to a certain extent Clark did align himself with these old monopolists and so imagine the burden of being trying to enforce Jeffersonian Indian policy so far from Jefferson when it wasn't even realistic in Jefferson's little micro world it's got to be you know Clark should have had an angry man but he wasn't and that may have been his genius that he had the equanimity of temperament that carried the expedition if you were to write the two captains the co-captains what what kind of a grade would you give each of them Clay I'm I'm I have to say that you can't answer this question rationally deal because we're not talking about this is not you know the question of whether Socrates is a greater man than Plato this is this is right at the center of American mythology and so people have favorites and they choose

sides and there are if you go to one of these national conferences it's it's very nearly idiotic because there are Clarkies who love Clark and and it cannot abide Lewis and there are Lewis aficionados who who defend Lewis against all of the charges and there are some people who see Lewis and Clark as interchangeable guys and Buckskins but it's very hard to get a rational assessment of these of these two men and I have to say just so I get my prejudices on the table when I hear people say are you a Clarkie and this is the equivalent of Trekkie so what Trekkie is to start trek Clarkie now has become for Lewis and Clark it makes my skin crawl and it makes me unhappy not about Clark but to think that I mean I think Trekkies are idiots how about people who are less than Trekkie who are fascinated to the point of obsession about Lewis and Clark I don't get it so I don't like that kind of talk but Clark is the net Clark is King right now Clark is the hero Lewis is as seen as the arrogant aloof troubled detached suicidal one and Clark has seen as the

master I don't rank it that way here's what I would say I would say that Lewis is the genius of the expedition he's the scientist he's the philosopher and residents he's the he's the the destiny man who's always saying if this doesn't happen the whole fate of the expedition might collapse he's the one who bears the burden of success he's the president's friend and protege he's them he's the geopolitical mastermind of the thing he's the Frodo Baggins of the expedition who's Frodo Baggins lord of the ring oh there's another you're not a Trekkie but you're a ringy a ringy even worse Clark is the day-to-day manager you know he's the one you know Lewis is off on shore I'm not trying to caricature this but Lewis is on shore with his dog see men and his notebook and his his specimen bag and he's conducting latitude and longitude and he's examining the vain structure in a the leaf of a cottonwood or he is examining the the testicle sack on a grizzly bear to describe for the learned world or

he's he's examining the clouds whatever it is but Lewis is trying to be the scientific observer of the expedition and he is in command I mean all decisions have to go through him but he doesn't want to mess with who drank too much who didn't take care of his guard duty or should we go to the next cove or should we stop at this cove those things are beneath Lewis's regard you know that's that's that's for a lesser frankly for a lesser person in the command structure so Lewis is is that and he he performs his duties very admirable except that he's missing for four hundred forty one days so you know if Lewis had kept a daily or nearly daily journal that would have meant a very admirable job description for Lewis but this this lack of something there's something missing and nobody can quite figure out why he was silent Clark meanwhile sees his job as I'm working with about fifty rough and tumble young bachelor's who any one of whom can spin out of control at any

time because this is hard work and it's tedious work and these are young men who are without women and without adequate supplies of liquor and tobacco and these young men are gonna fight with each other and they're going to be recalcitrant and they're gonna be they're gonna be upset a lot and Clark's duty is to keep the lid on this thing and keep the boats moving and he does that and then it what emerges even more than that is that Clark is the better one with the Indians with Lewis Lewis knows how to write the big speech about the great father and the seventeen great nations and so on and so forth but when it really comes down to it Clark's the one that knows how to actually face a tribe and do so in a way that doesn't upset the tribe and it's very interesting to watch well part of the mythology I think historically has been the mythology of Clark being sweet on Chicago Wea isn't it too you know people this all goes back to a series of novels that were written at the turn of the 20th century and there's I should say there's there's really no

solid evidence either way on this but it used to be thought that Clark and Chicago Wea or Clark and Sakaju Wea as we used to say had a romance you could make I mean I think that people have been too quick to dismiss this all together I don't think they did have a romance but I don't think you can simply rule it out out of hand for example when the party split up and Lewis takes one group and Clark takes another group on some activity or errand the Charbonneau family Chicago Wea her child John Batiste and her her somewhat rascally husband Charbonneau invariably go with Clark and never with Lewis so if you people are it's like you know back in great school when you're choosing sides for the volleyball game know whatever chooses Lewis you know Lewis is Lewis he has to ask people he has to command people to go with him but with the Charbonneau's go with Clark. Chicago Wea gives Clark for Christmas you know a holiday how does she know about Christmas but for Christmas at Ford

Clats if she gives Clark two dozen weasels tales no evidence that she gave Lewis even a lump of coal you know but two dozen weasels tales and we know that this can be seen as a sign of deep affection she also gives Clark a piece of moldy old awful piece of bread that she's been saving for her child and they're hungry at some point and she pulls this this little awful piece of bread out and gives it to Clark she brings in berries and she's always doing something for Clark and he's doing some things for her. What does he do for her? Well he protects her from her husband who actually beat her at least once and maybe more he stops this he probably protects her from the men because imagine 40 some 20-year-olds on a two and a half year mission with one calmly woman you know this is gonna create some tensions and I think Clark made it clear early on you know whatever you do you know you don't harass the Indian woman you know I'll protect you from this I think that he served as

sort of her guarantor of her own sexual security or her own privacy and so he did that for her and then he befriended them I he loved her child he I mean he I mean we don't know whether he loved her that would be a stretch we know he loved her child because he says so and at the end of the expedition he writes this extraordinary letter to Sharma now who's the only one who can read of the three and he says that he has formed this deep attachment to what he calls my dancing boy Baptist so just that little phrase my dancing boy Baptist gives you this lovely picture of the two of them not just the boy who presumably danced a fair amount around the fire but of William Clark you know it doesn't sound like Lewis I don't hear Lewis saying my dancing boy anybody you know for Lewis it's Lewis is instrumental how can this boy help us achieve our goal can this boy do anything that we can value as we proceed towards the Pacific Coast for Clark it's sort of the heart the heart comes out and he says

you know I love this boy and he offers to raise him and adopt him which he literally does I mean he the boy the family eventually comes to St. Louis and doesn't really work out for the parents but the boy stays behind and Clark doesn't adopt him in the fullest sense of the term but he basically adopts him as his own and sees to it and I just read in the book by William Foley this new biography of Clark but when Clark and his wife Julie Hancock had a child later in their lives they didn't name it for over a year which in itself is staggering they had a boy and didn't name him for over a year but in the meanwhile they called him Pomp which was the nickname the Clark had given to John Batiste so it seems like he's projecting out some love of that Indian child or some memory of that love or just became fond of that name but he names he provisionally names his son Thomas Jefferson Kerney Clark Pomp for over a year before the formal name is attached to him so there's a big heart in Clark you don't see it quite in Lewis and yet when it comes to slavery there's no big heart you know

on the expedition York plays a not insignificant role actually helps Clark on a number of occasions probably was shaving him you know but but probably he's still a slave in every essential way but exotic to native peoples when they come back we know from contemporary accounts in St. Louis York became became a kind of celebrity in the tavern culture of St. Louis and he would go out and tell stories of his adventures and he became a kind of rac contour and got free drinks and you know you get a wonderful picture of York kind of hamming it up in the in the taverns of St. Louis and apparently we don't really know these are all sort of murky but we only have Clark's version of it not York's but apparently York asked for his freedom and Clark said no then York asked if he could stay in Kentucky where he actually had a wife and children and Clark said no so you know Clark has separated York from his family to keep him with him in St. Louis so York became recalcitrant and Clark then became in rage that his property his slave was not behaving as a slave is supposed to

which is to accept whatever is put in front of you essentially and so Clark decides to sell York downriver into the deep southern sugar plantations and at that point Maryweather Lewis who's normally seen as the less sympathetic of the two steps forward and says no you're not doing that don't do that that's not right you'll regret that and so then Clark finds another alternative he beats York severely and says I I trounced him and sort of knocked some of the uppityness out of him but it's a sad icky story and what the two great historians landed Jones and and William Foley conclude is that if you scratch a Virginia slaveholder no matter where he is on earth he behaves like a Virginia slaveholder ooh that's not a very optimistic thought but they couldn't help it it was deep in their characters and Jefferson too as we know you know Jefferson for all of his talk at core as a Virginia slaveholder Clay we need

to take a short break we'll be back in just a few moments to continue our discussion of William Clark of the Lewis and Clark expedition you have been listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour please stay tuned we will be back in just a moment. You Welcome back to Thomas Jefferson hour today Clay Jenkinson serving in the role of

Scholar of the Lewis and Clark expedition has been talking about William Clark kept in William Clark Interesting story Clay much more the steady man, but certainly not always steady in ways that we appreciate No, I mean that's that's why I started by saying the more we know of them in a way the less admirable he is and he would have been more of a national hero had he died earlier because The story with York is very upsetting to us. I mean, it's upsetting no matter what But it's more upsetting now than it would have been 10 years ago or a hundred years ago You know now we are particularly attuned to diversity questions and racial justice at least we say we are and Suddenly York is one of the most prominent members of the Lewis and Clark expedition even though in any history up until the 1960s he would have been seen as a very minor figure and by the way, he was frequently caricatured York was as a kind of Minstrel sexual athlete he was made a kind of buffoon figure in the earlier mythology of the expedition without any evidence Just because that's what white people did when they wrote about black people and now there's been this

Transformation and he's seen as one of the key players of the expedition and to a certain extent He's even seen as kind of a black freedom fighter which is Pushing it a little there's a huge heroic statue to him in Louisville, Kentucky and he's become central Well, that pleases us. I mean history works really History's about the people writing it at least as much as it's about the people about whom they're writing good point You ought to repeat that Maybe I can sort it out History is at least as much about the people writing it us as it is about the people about whom we write them So when we write about Lewis and Clark in the in the year 2004 we're essentially writing what we Have to hear for our own time and place and what in our own time and place matters York matters a lot Clark matters more than Lewis because we're in a period and I don't mean to start a fight with you my friend Bill Crystal, but the same reason that we love John Adams right now is the reason that we will love William Clark

We like the steady ones. We like the realists We like the ones who have their feet on the ground more than the more high-flown unreliable types Like Jefferson and Maryweather Lewis so Clark and Adams are sort of part and parcel of the same Renaissance of the of the Grounded man that's that's part of the disillusionment that we're going through at this at this point in American history and the other person who's Extremely prominent right now. So Kaga. We are So Kaga. We are so minor in the actual expedition is probably not to register with someone like Thomas Jefferson and yet now So Kaga. We is at least the third most important member of the expedition proto feminist proto feminist accommodationist guide You know, she's been many different things in York has been some different things and just to show you You know, what what our times look like seem in the dog As had his day I'm glad you brought that up because when I give talks around the country If there is a child in the audience or if I go to a school the first question that I ever get

Is what happened to the dog and that is amongst the top five questions that I get from any audience of adults And this is when you're portraying Maryweather Lewis or talking about him But I mean people when you say what's on your mind? The question that seems to pop almost immediately even before Chicago. We are York is What happened to the dog seaman and of course there's no answer to this question because the dog Simply disappears from the journals on July 15th, 186 or after July 15th, 186 and we don't know what happened there after but It sort of tells you where they hungry at that point. That's that's that's the usual speculation. I don't think it's very likely to be the case that they ate the dog They were now on the buffalo plains of Montana, but You know, we don't know is the point and you mean you sort of think well You spend your life as a Lewis and Clark scholar and then you give these talks and what people want to know is Did Clark marry the Indian woman and what happened to the dog?

You think, well, man, we may be in trouble here as a patient of Of students of history Well, what should we learn from history? I mean as we look at William Clark What are the lessons that that one really ought to take away? Well, that's a great great question that I had not anticipated What should we learn from William Clark? We should learn that In many respects goodness is better than greatness. I mean, that's sort of the story of the friendship that Clark's steadiness and goodness and perseverance and stamina and good capacity even though they're at a lower plateau than those of Lewis or Jefferson in some respects Are equally or more important to their genius because He was a man of who fulfilled his commitments and I think good and so it's the first lesson is goodness is more important than greatness the second lesson is that Lewis May have had problems, but he understood his own weakness and he found the right partner So when this is important because it's about volunteerism

You know today if we send two men to the moon we don't ask for them to choose each other You know, they're assigned to each other and so we don't know what the chemistry is going to be like But Lewis got to choose Clark and it was a really extraordinary choice and so there's a lesson here about About friendship volunteerism the private and the public realm that's sort of hard to tease out But I think that if you take Clark out of the picture and just put in army lieutenant x We wouldn't be having this conversation today that that somehow there was magic in the friendship It's Lenin and McCartney You know, there's something it's Adams and Jefferson or Jefferson and Madison It's one plus one equals four or six and that's that's I think the thought that was running through my mind is that We need we need to know we need other people we need other people and and we need and Lewis saw that and I you know for some For someone of Lewis's pride and he had enormous pride for him to see I'm going to need somebody and that person's going to be equally important to myself and I'm going to fight for him

Even when he's not treated fairly by our system. I think that is Lewis's greatest single Act of generosity of spirit the next lesson that I think we learn is that even a very very very fine man like William Clark has a dark side He is a slaveholder and a slave beater. He's a racist. He is a He's an Indian removalist When when the when the black hawk war occurred in 1832 He was so enraged that he said we should exterminate them the sacks You know so that here's a very good man one of the exemplars of his time But he is also capable of evil and I think this is kind of a right-old neighbor sort of notion that right on neighbor the great social and And theologian social thinker and theologian the mid-20th century I mean argued is you know better than anybody else that No matter how progressive we get we're still human beings Which means that there is a very dangerous unresolved dark side you see it in William Clark And so that I think there's that I think also

We see something that really could illuminate our our own lives and our foreign policy as we move into the 21st century that There's a continuity in American history and that continuity is this that the white angles With carrying the bill of rights in the Constitution have always arrogantly believed that they knew more than anyone else on earth And that every other people on earth would want to be like us if they could and if they didn't want to be like us Then they must be benighted and ignorant and probably savage But that all rational peoples want to be precisely like us and why don't they like us? Why do they hate us? Why do they resist us when we Represent the acme of human achievement and culture and virtue that that feeling runs through William Clark and Mary Whether Lewis and the era and we see it today in our foreign policy at the beginning of the 21st century It's interesting on the on the on the cusp of of William Clark one has manifest destiny I mean, I wonder if if the two go hand in hand when one starts to to imagine that one is the acme one begins to wonder if that's the next most logical step Well, it is because I mean Jefferson said it in a and a slightly more benign form

But he said the little flame that we you've heard this a thousand times you know the little flame that we live on the fourth of July is destined to To burn up all the despotisms of the world and you know Of course, that's true. We all see that that's true that That the natural right philosophy that the Americans came to in seven in the 1770s is the answer to almost all Geopolitical problems, but the problem comes in when we believe that I guess it's our duty then to To tell you this and maybe impose it upon you if necessary and to blame you if you're not at the same stage of your own National or tribal development than we are well, and if from a numberian perspective then you fail to recognize the log in your own eye Continuing with great clarity to see the spec in your neighbors and then it seems to me one can get into real trouble Indeed and in fact, so those are lessons of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and I but I also think that the final lesson of the Lewis and Clark expedition with respect to Clark is that Loyalty is an amazing quality in human beings because Clark was loyal to Lewis

He was loyal to Jefferson. He was loyal to his older brother Loyalty mattered more to him than his own achievement and you don't see that too often But I would say that is the mark of a truly remarkable person not necessarily a hero But something maybe even better a remarkable person, but let me turn to two scenes from the journals bill And I think you're just going to love they sound like Lewis, but they actually turn out to be Clark There's the 4th of july 184. They're basically just north of Kansas City, Missouri and here's what Clark said he said He's talking about the landscape the planes of this country are covered with a leak green grass well calculated for the sweetest and most nourishing Hey interspersed with Cops' of trees spreading their lofty branches over pools springs or brooks of fine water groups of shrubs covered with the most delicious fruit Has to be seen in every direction and nature appears to have exerted herself to beautify the scenery by the variety of flowers delicately and highly flavored Raised above the grass which strikes and profumes the sensation and amuses the mind so he's in paradise and then he says listen to this It throws the mind into conjecturing the cause of so magnificent to scenery in a country thus situated far

Remove from the civilized world to be enjoyed by nothing but the buffalo elk deer and bear in which it abounds and savage Indians So how can the garden of Eden be here and until now no one's ever been here to No one civilized has ever been here to appreciate it and its fullness That's I think there's we don't agree with the politics the cultural politics of that But there's something really beautiful in that and here's one that I Even love more. He says um, he's this is now the 19th of july. They're just entering. What's now? Iowa and Nebraska and he's it carc says that He's out in the same kind of a prairie small branches covered with grass 18 inches or two feet high Little of anything else except as before mentioned so now it's a more treeless prairie But it's nevertheless. It's the Midwest and he says this prospect Was so sudden and entertaining that I forgot the object of my pursuit And turn my attention to the variety which presented themselves to my view so

He's so enchanted that he forgets what he's about That would be a Jeffersonian moment. I suspect two Jeffersonian moments right there. I mean this sense that I mean that really takes you back to the wonder of the Lewis and Clark that you know Lewis is normally the poet Clark is normally says you know the boat sprung a leak and we had 18 mosquitoes and stuff like that But here's Clark Overwhelmed by the What what Jefferson would call the sublimity of the American West? Let me ask a perhaps silly but nonetheless hypothetical question What if Clark had been appointed captain and he had found a suitable co-captan to handle all of the details? Would he have risen to a You know to a mindset similar to the one that Lewis Operated out of hard question. I don't think so. I think frankly if Jefferson had appointed William Clark we would not be having this conversation But it would be about the same as the Stephen Long expedition of 1820 or the Zambielin Pike expedition of 185 or 186 Of Hunter and Dunbar in Arkansas or Thomas Freeman in Texas that we would know about it

And we would think well of it and we would study it to a certain extent But there would not be a giant national bicellentennial. I think it's the Lewis and Clark combination or Lewis and Clark and York and Chicago Wea and Sharma now and then say black buffalo and you'll let it and cut nose and Don't forget to come away and see him in the dog There's something about this story that There's a magic that comes from the combination and the the primary combination is Lewis and Clark And I think it's sort of paradigmatic isn't it? I mean we have it's sort of the story of the prodigal son We have the the mentally stable and the mentally unstable We have the poet and the realist. We have Donkey Hote and Sancio Panzo. We have Jefferson and Adams. We have this combination of one man who is Incredibly sensitive but troubled and another man who is somewhat less sensitive but but Solid and that is sort of a paradigmatic Relationship between human beings and I think that that there's something magical about that

And that if it were just the Lewis expedition or just the Clark expedition We wouldn't have that and that would change the equation dramatically And thus we have in our own time the word synergy I think it was it was designed for those two wasn't it? Well, it was by maybe I mean you could say that in a sense history Pressed them into this combination but if Jefferson had had his way it would have been Lewis and I have to save And though I much prefer Lewis to Clark and I'm deeply fascinated by Lewis in a way that I'm not by Clark I sometimes wake up in the middle and I thinking what would have been like if Lewis had been alone out there You know if Lewis hadn't had Clark if he had just had three sergeants beneath him It's hard to imagine that the thing could have succeeded in full measure. I mean Lewis Just I don't think has the stamina To do it day after day after day with all the things that are required He needed someone who really understood the role of executive officer Yes, that's what Clark was. He was an ideal exec

He knew that if he in order to be indulged as Lewis he needed Somebody who could be his Clark Clay another interesting program this discussion of William Clark's life next week I trust you'll be Thomas Jefferson again talking the issues. We'll see you all next week. Good day The recommended reading list for William Clark is wilderness journey the life of William Clark by William E. Foley University of Missouri press and William Clark and the shaping of the West by Landon Y Jones by Hill and Wang We have a save the date announcement for Williamsburg and Norfolk, Virginia Clay Jenkinson will be performing on January 21st, 2005 in Norfolk, Virginia All other details are still being worked out but save the date January 21st, 2005 Music for the Thomas Jefferson Hour was provided by Steven Swinford of Reno, Nevada To ask Mr. Jefferson a question or to donate $9 and receive a copy of today's program on CD

Please call 1-888-458-1803 Again the numbers 1-888-458-1803 The Thomas Jefferson Hour is produced by High Plains Public Radio and New Enlightenment Radio Network A non-profit organization dedicated to the search for truth and the tradition of Thomas Jefferson Humanity scholar Clay S. Jenkinson portrays Thomas Jefferson The producer of the program is Janie Guil and the host of the program is William Crystal of Reno, Nevada Thank you for listening and we hope you join us again next week for another entertaining, historically accurate and thought-provoking commentary through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson