William Clark (1784–1838)

Clark wrote the above paragraph in his journal late in January 1804. His purpose is unknown, but his source is certain. It appears under the word Sense in A New and Complete Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, published in 1764 by W. Owen, and commonly referred to as Owen’s Dictionary.^[2]A New and Complete dictionary of Arts and Sciences; comprehending all the branches of useful knowledge, with accurate descriptions as well of the various machines, instruments, tools, figures, and … Continue reading Along with other contextual evidence, such as the similarities between Meriwether Lewis‘s description of a certain species of salmon (13 March 1806) and that in Owen’s (page 2792), it helps to confirm the supposition that Lewis purchased a set of volumes for his small expeditionary reference library, even though there is no mention of it anywhere in his supply lists, nor in the known journalists’ writings.^[3]Donald Jackson, “Some Books Carried by Lewis and Clark,” Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society, Vol. XVI, No. 1 (October 1959), 3–13. Clark’s copy is almost verbatim, with relatively insignificant differences, as may be seen through a comparison of his version with a transcription of the original:

SENSE, a faculty of the soul, whereby it perceives external objects, by means of the impressions they make on certain organs of the body. These organs of sensation are commonly reckoned five, viz. The eye, whereby we see objects; the ear, which enables us to hear sounds; the nose, by which we receive the ideas of different smells; the palate, by which we judge of tastes; and the curis, or skin, which enables us to feel the different forms, hardness, or softness of bodies.

Clark’s exercise has no apparent relation to anything else in the expedition’s known journals, and so the question remains, Why did he choose this particular paragraph from among the entire 3538 pages comprising Owen’s?

Perhaps it is a crisp shadow of a conversation with Lewis about the challenges they faced as explorers. Otherwise, it may be related to something more personal, for its content is roughly parallel with that of a certain section of the Second, or Fellow Craft, Degree of the Masonic Order. Eight years before the expedition began, Lewis had risen quickly to the degree of Past Master Mason in the Door to Virtue Lodge No. 44 in Albemarle County, Virginia, and by 1799 to the status of Royal Arch Mason in Widow’s Son Lodge at Milton, Virginia. From time to time Lewis would reflect his own Masonic loyalty in his journaling,^[4]See on this site Lewis as Master Mason. and now, perhaps, he had begun to introduce his friend to the principles of the Order, and Clark was taking him seriously. In 1809, just a few months before Lewis’s tragic death, Clark was inducted into the St. Louis Lodge No. 111, which Lewis had helped to establish the previous year.

Clark the Scientist

At the same time, the paragraph Clark dutifully copied states in simple terms the practical basis of scientific method as it stood in the Age of Enlightenment. If Captain William Clark was not yet to become a Freemason, he was soon to become a scientist, of sorts. Indeed, immediately after his death in 1838, the Academy of Natural Science passed a resolution acknowledging his scientific achievements.

The explorers’ principal tasks, beyond the primary one of searching for a water route from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, were to observe, measure, and record what–and who–they saw along the way. And so, without benefit of microscope or petri dish, without satellite imagery or photography, without a speedometer or an odometer, they measured the Northwest. What is more, they brought back verbal snapshots of what they observed, many of striking spontaneity, color and beauty, and in fascinating and sometimes exhaustive detail. Yet taken as a whole, as raw data, the Expedition’s written records do not add up to what one would call “a good read.”

Clark’s Spelling

By merely browsing through the expedition’s journals, one notices that William Clark was, as historian Donald Jackson has said, “a creative speller” and “a versatile capitalizer.” His punctuation was haphazard, too, and his syntax sometimes baffling. There are several explanations for these foibles.

Clark grew up in a young nation where public education was in a prenatal stage, and that was still amorphous, in terms of language and culture. If there was an unspoken rule for spelling, it authorized and excused phonetic verisimilitude–”Spell it as it sounds.” The result was, as Noah Webster (1758–1843) perceived it, that the pronunciation of words, as taught in contemporary schools, lacked standardization, and spelling was correspondingly confusing. He therefore turned his vast energy and his eloquent pen to the challenge of demolishing “those odious distinctions of provincial dialects which are objects of reciprocal ridicule in the United States.” The initial outcome was his highly successful and amazingly durable American Spelling Book, which proved to be “a declaration of American cultural independence, conceived to unite Americans in peace, much as the declaration of political independence had united them in war.”^[5]Harlow Giles Unger, Noah Webster: The Life and Times of an American Patriot (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 55.

But William Clark was only thirteen years old when the first edition of the American Spelling Book appeared in 1783, and his formal schooling was nearly at an end, so he simply followed the old rule for the rest of his life. While some of his solutions were obvious, such as “looner” for “lunar,” words from foreign languages were exceptional challenges. He invented 14 different spellings of the name of Sacagawea‘s husband, Charbonneau, and 27 renderings of the name of the Indians the French had called Sioux. Perhaps his most valiant struggle was with the very word dictionary, upon which the ink in his pen nearly congealed with frustration and disgorged . . . Deckinsary.^[6]Jackson, 11-13.

Family Exigencies

He might have learned better, but in 1784 his family moved from Virginia, where the landed gentry were traditionally well educated, to Kentucky, which was then the virtual Western frontier of the United States. He was only fourteen, which was a bad time to have one’s formal education interrupted. Actually, terminated is a better word in this instance, for the basic demands of frontier subsistence overrode all other concerns. Nevertheless, William Clark was a highly intelligent man, and in terms of the practical knowledge required to make his way in the wilderness, to lead men, and to succeed in the world of frontier politics, he was highly educated and consummately effective.

William Clark was born in Virginia in 1770. He enlisted in the army at age 19, and served under General Anthony Wayne. After rising to the rank of captain, he left the army in 1796 to devote his full attention to the management of the family’s large land-holdings in Kentucky and Indiana. Around 1800 he spent some time on the east coast in the orbit of his friends Thomas Jefferson and Meriwether Lewis.

In June of 1803 he received an invitation from Lewis, then the president’s secretary, to share the command of the proposed exploratory expedition through the Northwest to the Pacific Ocean. Upon his return in September 1806, he, like Lewis, received $1,228 plus 1,600 acres of land for his services. He was also appointed Indian agent for the entire Louisiana Territory, and brigadier general of the Louisiana Militia.

By 1820 the whole intellectual and political foundation of Jeffersonism and the Enlightenment, which had made the Lewis and Clark expedition possible, was turned upside down. The new order, symbolized by the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829-1837), rejected national interests and instead gave free reign to the interests of the individual citizen, without governmental intervention.

Thus the stage was set for the reckless exploitation of the land and the peoples that Lewis and Clark had observed, measured, recorded and, on the whole, come to love and admire.

McKenzie’s Opinion of Clark

In the winter of 1804-05, Charles McKenzie, a young clerk with the North West Company of Canada, made the first of his four trips to the Knife River Villages on the “Mississouri” River. On that occasion he and his three companions—including François-Antoine Larocque—met Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. His impression of the two captains highlights an essential difference in their personalities.

We lived contentedly and became intimate with the Gentlemen of the American expedition; who on all occasions seemed happy to see us, and always treated us with civility and kindness. It is true Captain Lewis could not make himself agreeable to us—he could speak fluently and learnedly on all subjects, but his inveterate disposition against the British stained, at least in our eyes, all his eloquence. Captain Clark was equally well informed, but his conversation was always pleasant, for he seemed to dislike giving offence unnecessarily.^[7]W. Raymond Wood and Thomas D. Thiessen, Early Fur Trade on the Northern Plains: Canadian Traders Among the Mandan and Hidatsa Indians, 1738-1818 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), p. 238.

Ironically, Clark left quite a different impression with a majority of voters in the new State of Missouri, when he sought election to the office of governor in 1820. John O’Fallon commented on Uncle William’s status among the electorate in a letter to his cousin, Dennis Fitzhugh: “They accuse Governor Clark of . . . being stiff and reserved and unhospitable.”^[8]Cited in Jerome O. Steffen, William Clark: Jeffersonian Man on the Frontier (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977), p. 176, note 59.

Sources

Jerome O. Steffen, William Clark: Jeffersonian Man on the Frontier. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1977.

Robert B. Betts, “‘we commenced wrighting &c.’: A Salute to the Ingenious Spelling and Grammar of William Clark.” We Proceeded On, Vol. 6, No. 4 (November 1980).