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Reviews
Dear Brother: Letters of William Clark to Jonathan Clark
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By William Clark, edited and with an introduction by James J. Holmberg
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Yale University Press, New Haven, Conn., 2003. Photographs, maps, index. 352 pages. $18.00 paper.
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Reviewed by Stephen Dow Beckham
Lewis and Clark College, Portland, Oregon
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| Over the past 110 years, several discoveries have contributed to the recovery of thousands of pages of manuscripts and over one hundred maps documenting the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806). From finds of the forgotten original journals of Captains Lewis and Clark in the holdings of the American Philosophical Society to bundles of letters in trunks in an attic to materials stashed for decades in an old desk, these items have deepened the understanding of the most famous of four expeditions dispatched by President Thomas Jefferson to explore the Louisiana Purchase. |
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During most of the first century following the explorations of Lewis and Clark, readers and scholars had but limited access to the experiences of the Corps of Discovery. The Message from the President (1806), the journal of Patrick Gass (first published in 1807), and the Nicholas Biddle and Paul Allen paraphrase of the journals kept by William Clark and Meriwether Lewis (finally published in 1814) were the materials that shaped understanding of the expedition. |
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This volume of William Clark's letters, ably edited by James Holmberg, a librarian of the Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky, presents the latest discovery of expedition-related materials and, in the larger sense, a much fuller picture of William Clark. The letters came to light in 1988 when descendants of Clark were clearing the attic of a family home in Louisville. The letters were primarily the correspondence between Clark and his elder brother Jonathan. The correspondence covers the years 1792 to 1811, with an appendix of nine letters to other Clark family members. Seven letters document William Clark's frontier military service and business interests prior to accepting Lewis's invitation to join him for transcontinental explorations. Eight letters connect directly with the expedition, supplementing and expanding the nineteen letters previously published by Donald Jackson in Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1978). The remaining letters cover aspects of Clark's life in the years after the expedition. |
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Clark was a straightforward, practical, cool-headed man and a terrible speller. He may be excused for his inexact communication because he was a product of the Virginia backcountry and did not have a formal education. He rendered words phonetically and inconsistently, a reflection of the times before the imprinting of Noah Webster's "Blue-Backed Speller" and An American Dictionary (1828). The reader of these letters thus has an encounter with the American vernacular between 1792 and 1811 and much more. |
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In these letters Clark provides interesting and heretofore unknown information about York, his slave and the first African American to cross North America north of Mexico. At one point in 1808, for example, Clark told Jonathan: "if any attempt is made by york to run off, or refuse to provorm his duty as a Slave, I wish him Sent to New Orleans and Sold, or hired out to Some Severe master untill he thinks better of Such Conduct" (p. 160). Clark also fretted about Lewis's delays in producing the expedition report, recoiled from but mused on the causes of Lewis's death in 1809, and recounted some of his labors in working with Dr. Benjamin Smith Barton and Nicholas Biddle to try to produce the expedition reports awaited by an eager public but never written by Lewis. |
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The editorial methodology is scrupulously ambitious. If there is any problem with this volume it is that the explanatory notes and biographical sketches of figures mentioned overwhelm Clark's letters. A two-page letter of Clark's, for example, evokes, in one instance, thirteen pages of editorial annotations by Holmberg. The reader, at times, is caught with an index finger on Clark's text and another finger holding open the pages with the notes. It might have been better, in some instances, to have written less about St. Louis, New Orleans, or the Missouri River and to let readers engage Clark's message. On the other hand, for readers seeking full information, this volume provides it. Holmberg has left no stone unturned in filling in the specifics and setting these letters in the context of American history. |
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