Continuance

Continuance Fall / Winter 2003-2004

William Clark's Letters to his "Dear Brother"

James J. Holmberg, Curator, Filson Historical Society

In September 1792, the explorer William Clark began an extraordinary nineteen year correspondence with his brother Jonathan Clark that continued until the latter's death in 1811. These letters, more than any other known source, reveal William Clark on a more personal level. They open a window not only to the man, but to his world.  

The vast majority of the known letters--46 of them--are in the collection of The Filson Historical Society in Louisville, Kentucky (a few others are at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin).

 In 19 years, William Clark rose from a young army officer serving on the frontier during the Indian wars of the 1790s to territorial administrator on the edge of the frontier. In between was a crowded life that included the "Western trip" to the Pacific with his friend and co-leader Meriwether Lewis. Jonathan Clark was twenty years older than William. Not only was Jonathon the archetypal "big brother," he was also a father figure to William. The younger Clark's letters bear this out. William assured Jonathan that he wished him to "See & know all"; and that he wrote to him "without reserve," feeling "no restraint either in stile or grammar." William's letters are a priceless source of information about the man, his contemporaries, and his times.

 Among the correspondence are five previously unknown Lewis and Clark Expedition-date letters, including his first report home in December 1803 since pushing off from the Falls of the Ohio in October 1806, and his communication in April 1805 from Fort Mandan before setting off into a country that was "extencv and unexplored." It is because of these letters that we know the reason for the alienation between Clark and his slave, York and York's sad post- expedition experience. These letters also reveal William's reaction to Meriwether Lewis's death and his belief that his friend had taken his own life. Whenever he received a report on Lewis in that fateful fall of 1809, he passed the news on to Jonathan. And there is much more in the letters, from observations on love and the joys of domestic life to Indian affairs and dueling. William's letters to Jonathan provide a wonderful window to peer back into our past.

 I first learned of this cache of William Clark letters in December 1988 and saw them for the first time on February 15, 1989. For a historian, especially someone who had grown up following parts of the Lewis and Clark Trail and reading about the explorers, seeing those letters was a coincidental birthday gift. To hold them in my hands and to read the answers to questions that had bedeviled historians for some two hundred years was electrifying. I had been familiar with available Lewis and Clark sources and knew these letters were not only unpublished but unknown. I decided that, if I should have the opportunity, I would edit the letters for publication. In 1990 the owners (descendants of Jonathan Clark) donated the letters to The Filson Historical Society and I began to edit them. This personal project soon became a professional endeavor as well.

 In 1998, when the donors presented the bulk of the family papers to The Filson, four more William Clark letters were discovered. I suspected there may be additional letters in the collection and upon their discovery included them in the almost completed edition of William's "Dear Brother" correspondence. In 2002, Dear Brother: Letters of William Clark to Jonathan Clark was published by Yale University Press in association with The Filson.  

The letters are pieces of our heritage and our nation's collective memory. Each time we lose one, we lose something of our history and ourselves. Those who went before us--famous or not--help define who we are today. William Clark's letters to his brother, like pieces of a puzzle or tiles in a mosaic, help create a more complete image of our past and allow us to have a better understanding of our nation's heritage and who we are today.