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REVIEWS
WILLIAM CLARK: INDIAN DIPLOMAT
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by Jay H. Buckley
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| University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2008. Illustrations, photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 320 pages. $29.95 cloth. |
| Jay Buckley trods well-worn paths in this new biography of William Clark from the University of Oklahoma Press. In keeping with the press's recent catalog, the book favors an accessible narrative over a provocative academic analysis. Clark was a seminal figure in the nation's history, and Buckley misses few opportunities to connect his life to the largest events of westward expansion from the 1770s to the American empire of the 1830s. |
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Buckley positions Clark as a "Jeffersonian man in a Jacksonian world" and a "pragmatic imperialist," well-intentioned toward the Native peoples of the sprawling St. Louis Indian District but ultimately the architect of their dispossession, cultural destruction, and, tragically, often their deaths (p. 239, 241). |
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Buckley paints a complex portrait of Clark, who was particularly ambivalent about race. Buckley asserts that, contrary to Clark's claims, he never manumitted his famous slave, York, though he seems to have mostly avoided abject cruelty to him and other slaves. Similarly, regarding Indians, Buckley provides many illustrative examples of Clark's attempts to block squatting on Indian lands, land speculation, and liquor trading as well as his efforts to promote the supposedly beneficial Christian civilizing mission and to ease the pains of migrating Indians who had been removed from their homes to Indian Territory. Still, Clark was a skilled Indian fighter and a manipulative diplomat whose main charges were procuring Indian lands cheaply and facilitating American colonization. Most infamously, perhaps, Buckley notes Clark's "extermination order" against followers of Black Hawk in 1832, though he seems to dismiss it as a "fit of self-righteous rage" by an apparently frustrated paternalist, rather than a white supremacist who accepted the inevitability of Native extinction (p. 209). Generally, Buckley is content to provide occasional references to "cultural genocide" regarding the promotion of Christian civilization than to offer a sustained examination of Clark or the United States as genocidal on the whole. |
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Missing is any sustained analysis of either the American empire or Native culture as historical phenomena. Buckley outlines many of Clark's ideas regarding administration and policy but provides little discussion of how he engaged congressmen and Washington bureaucrats to realize his goals. Both Clark and the American empire often seem curiously apolitical and, consequently, ahistorical. Lines of distinction between the Virginia Dynasty and Andrew Jackson are blurred. Buckley offers vague assessments of the apparent fairness of Clark's and American actions, condemning the "paradox" of Indian removal — an effort to save Indians killed many of them (p. 24). This is not a paradox but, rather, the result of the practical realities of American colonialism and empire building, which need to be detailed and explained as contingencies, albeit with likely outcomes. Buckley sketches the history of the factory system, but the political and ideological strife that ultimately doomed it is nearly absent. Similarly, individual treaties over time seemed removed from senatorial politics; they were approvable or not via some unmentioned calculus that apparently Clark knew from the field. |
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Buckley bemoans that Americans did not consider "the possibility of preserving Indian cultures intact," a statement that reflects little understanding of culture (p. 24). Like his use of the term "curiosities" for Native material culture, Buckley seems not to have distanced himself sufficiently from his subject's sentimentality, reifying early modern concepts (p. 120). Culture, an inherently problematic and slippery term, roughly describes particular norms, values, mores, practices, economics, and language that are themselves adaptations to changeable factors such as ecology, climate, and relations with biological kin and neighboring peoples. How, for example, could Shawnee culture have been preserved "intact"? From Buckley's own work, one can see that the Shawnee peoples — scattered across a thousand miles from the eastern woodlands to the Great Plains, victims of multiple removals (forced and voluntary) — variously promoted radical pan-Indianism and worked in every pursuit of the colonial economy from fur trading to farming to soldiering to transporting goods. They interacted with English, German, and Anglo-American missionaries and intermarried with other Indian peoples, African Americans, Euro-Americans, and every combination thereof. Which of these various experiences dating to their initial displacement in the 1600s should be freeze-framed as their "culture" and could have been "preserved"? One could ask similar questions of the Osage and others who are featured in the narrative. This problem is indicative of the paucity of critical Indian history throughout most of the text. |
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The subtitle of "Indian diplomat" suggests that the narrative would include more Native perspectives than previous biographies of William Clark. Still, Buckley offers a highly readable biography of a truly important man that is richly contextualized in the well-established narrative of American westward expansion. |
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| GRAY H. WHALEY
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| Southern Illinois University-Carbondale |
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