On or near this date Patrick Gass delivers a letter from William Clark addressed to his brother Jonathan in Louisville. The letter would be printed in the next edition of the Frankfort Palladium and later reprinted in newspapers throughout the country.
Writing Letters
© 2026 by Kristopher K. Townsend. Permission to use granted under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
Gass Delivers Clark’s Letter
Wellsburg, W. Va.
Dec. 1st 1866Lyman C. Draper, Esqr.
My Dear Sir:Your favor of Nove. 16th is before me, and with pleasure I will endeavor to reply, but will state here that the information which you seek, will, I fear, be very limited from this quarter.
. . . . .
I seen Genl. George R. Clark in 1790 [1793]. believe it was after he had taken fort Charters [Fort Chartres], again in 1806. I carried a letter from Capt. Clark (his Brother) which I delivered to him (the Genl.) at the falls of the Ohio, and which he published. it contained an account of the heavy snows on the mountains.
I am &c.
Yours Respectfully
Patrick Gassper Jas. W. Gass [His son wrote]
There has been uncertainty as to whether Clark wrote this soon-to-be famous letter to George Rogers Clark or Jonathan Clark, but most likely, it was addressed to Jonathan in Louisville. Based on Gass’ letter, he may have delivered to George Rogers with the expectation it would reach Jonathan or the Frankfort press.
The news of the expedition’s return had already been published in the Palladium‘s 2 October 1806 edition. This breaking news came from a letter written by John Mullanphy of St. Charles. The St. Charles letter letter was also reprinted in several other newspapers.[1]Patrick Gass to Lyman Draper, 1 December 1866, Draper Manuscripts, 34J61, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin (microfilm edition The Filson Historical Society collection); Gass … Continue reading
Heavy Snows on the Mountains
A draft of Clark’s letter written in Lewis’s hand indicates that Lewis wrote the original or more likely, that the two captains worked on the letter together after their arrival in St. Louis. Of the “heavy snows”, they wrote:
We arrived at this place at 12 oClock today from the Pacific Ocian where we remained dureing the last winter near the entrance of the Columbia river. This station [Fort Clatsop] we left on the 27th of March last and should have reached St. Louis early in August had we not been detained by the snow which bared our passage across the Rocky Mountains. . . .[2]William Clark to Jonathan Clark, St. Louis, 23 September 1806 in Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents: 1783–1854, ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana: University of Illinois … Continue reading
Notes
| ↑1 | Patrick Gass to Lyman Draper, 1 December 1866, Draper Manuscripts, 34J61, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin (microfilm edition The Filson Historical Society collection); Gass to Draper, 11 January 11, Draper Manuscripts, 34J62. See James J. Holmberg, “Getting Out the Word”, We Proceeded On 27, no. 3 (August 2001), 12–17, available at lewisandclark.org/wpo/pdf/vol27no3.pdf. |
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| ↑2 | William Clark to Jonathan Clark, St. Louis, 23 September 1806 in Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents: 1783–1854, ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 1:325–26. |
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