William Clark, Map of Extent of Settlement in Mississippi Valley (1816). Credit: National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
A once-in-a-lifetime archival discovery reveals {that a} uncommon map hiding behind a false id in Washington D.C. was the work of William Clark, the as soon as revered however now more and more controversial American explorer, Indian agent and territorial governor.
The sketch, newly reattributed, re-dated and painstakingly decoded by University of Cambridge historian Dr. Robert Lee exposes Clark’s scheming on the coronary heart of a pivotal second in Nineteenth-century American historical past. This occasion robbed indigenous Americans of land the scale of Switzerland in what’s now Missouri, and fuelled the enlargement of slavery.
Dr. Robert Lee was scrolling by means of yet one more microfilm from the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington D.C. when an intriguing map—filed within the secretary of battle’s correspondence archive beneath the authorship of Captain Eli B. Clemson—stopped him in his tracks. Lee shortly seen that the essential geography of the Osage treaty of 1808 depicted by the map clashed with accepted knowledge about that main cession of land.
In a brand new research, revealed at this time within the journal, William and Mary Quarterly, Lee argues that this map was really drawn by William Clark, then governor of the Missouri Territory, and exhibits how he grafted 10.5 million acres of Sauk, Meskwaki, and Iowa territory onto the United States after the War of 1812 by reinterpreting the 1808 Osage treaty. This little-known land seizure violated the Treaty of Ghent with Great Britain, triggered a stampede of slaveholding emigrants, and reshaped Missouri’s political boundaries.
Dr. Lee, an assistant professor of historical past and Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge, says:
“This astonishing map exhibits how William Clark leveraged the U.S.–Indian treaty system to advertise settler supremacy within the United States at a time when he is been praised for attempting to guard Indigenous land from squatters. Now we are able to see simply how scheming and disingenuous he actually was.”
The unsigned, undated map sketched in ink and pencil accommodates about fifty named options, roughly half of them rivers, the remainder cities and settlements, mines, salt licks, springs, and boundary traces. There are additionally greater than 150 unnamed options, most unidentified settlements alongside nondescript streams.
A handful of the landmarks show that Captain Clemson can not have drawn the map—Lee believes this misattribution was made within the Nineteenth century—and that it will probably solely be a settlement map William Clark composed in 1816, which historian Clarence Edwin Carter declared lacking in 1951.
The map’s type, spelling and symbols all level to Clark. But probably the most revealing function is a line between the Arkansas and Red Rivers, which Clark described within the 1816 letter that accompanied the map earlier than the 2 received separated.
With the true supply recognized, Dr. Lee was capable of decode the shocking significance of one other unlabelled line on the map: Clark personally orchestrated a little-known scheme to steal half of what’s at this time the state of Missouri from its indigenous house owners.
Lee says: “This stray line appears to be like just like the cartographic equal of a Freudian slip. It’s the closest factor we’ve got to an admission in Clark’s personal hand that he dispossessed the Sauks, Meskwakis, and Iowas of an enormous tract of land to hasten settler supremacy in Missouri. Clark did not talk about this plan in his 1816 letter and it stays largely unknown at this time regardless of enjoying an integral half in Missouri’s colonization.”
In 1815, after failing to buy land north of the Missouri River from the Sauks, Meskwakis and Iowas, Clark withdrew recognition of their possession and asserted by proclamation that the United States had already purchased this area from the Osages by treaty in 1808.
By taking it upon himself to redraw an Indian treaty line proper after the War of 1812—that unlabelled line on the map—Clark secured an invasive squatter settlement and added tens of millions of acres to the U.S. public area in violation of the Treaty of Ghent. In doing so, he intentionally circumvented official orders to revive prewar Indian boundaries.
Lee says: “A naïve interpretation may say he discovered an enormous loophole within the Treaty of Ghent. A sensible one would say he broke it to grab a landmass triple the scale of Connecticut.”
“Clark’s land seize labored by denying that his post-war interpretation of the Osage treaty was new. He rigorously maintained the fiction that he had clarified an outdated boundary, not manufactured one. This plan labored so nicely that historians have tended to both imagine him or neglected the incident fully.”
Thousands of emigrants, a lot of them slaveholders, flocked in to take benefit and the settler inhabitants on the stolen lands skyrocketed. This inflow drove Missouri towards statehood and drowned out the protests of the Sauks, Meskwakis, and Iowas.
Clark ultimately cleared their title to the land on a budget—treaties made in 1824 paid out lower than half a cent an acre for the territory, which was already promoting for 4 to 12 {dollars} per acre. For the Sauks, Meskwakis and Iowas, the land seize contributed to generations of hardship.
Over the course of his profession, Clark is now thought to have hyperlinks to the taking of 419 million acres of indigenous land, nicely over a 3rd of the dominion claimed by the United States on the time of his dying in 1838. Nevertheless, questions linger about whether or not he was a “sentimental imperialist,” a hard-nosed proponent “of white settler imperialism and ethnic cleaning,” or one thing in between.
That a publicly accessible map by William Clark has gone unnoticed for thus lengthy is extraordinary. Inspired by the celebrity of the Corps of Discovery—the core of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-6—researchers have avidly sought out all issues Clark-related. Since the late nineteenth century, Clark manuscripts have turned up in a trash heap in Kansas, an condo in New York City, a basement in Washington, D.C., and attics in Minnesota and Kentucky. But the final authentic maps surfaced amongst personal papers in Saint Paul in 1953.
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More info:
R. Lee, ‘”A Better View of the Country”: A Missouri Settlement Map by William Clark’, William and Mary Quarterly (2022). DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.79.1.0000
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University of Cambridge
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American ‘hero’ plotted large land seize and broke peace treaty, map discovery reveals (2022, February 4)
retrieved 5 February 2022
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