_Clark's Birth and Parentage.--Wholesomeness of the Family's Home
Life.--Achievements of George and his Five Brothers.--George's
Lack of Book-learning.--How he became a Surveyor.--Great
Opportunities enjoyed by Surveyors in his Day.--His Introduction
to the West.--Learns of George Washington's Great Acquisitions
of Land.--How Clark acquired his Craving for Liquor.--His
Acquaintance with the Rev. David Jones, Missionary to the
Shawnees.--Their Encampment near the Site of Wheeling, W.
Va.--A Trip to Pittsburg.--His Claim for a Piece of Land on the
Ohio.--Takes Service in Dunmore's War.--His Work as a Surveyor
in Kentucky.--Becomes a Leader of Pioneers into Kentucky.--The
Conflict between Clark and the Transylvania Company.--He becomes
the Leader of the Kentucky Movement.--His Brilliant Military
Leadership in the Conquest of Illinois.--The Founding of
Louisville.--Clark draws a Plan of the Future City.--His Efforts
to induce Immigration to the Lower Ohio.--He is discarded by the
State of Virginia._
GEORGE ROGERS CLARK: FOUNDER OF LOUISVILLE
[Illustration]
ABOUT two miles east of Charlottesville, Virginia, and more than a mile
south of Thomas Jefferson's famous homestead, Monticello, on a sunny
knoll by the little Rivianna River, stood the humble farmer's home in
which George Rogers Clark was born, November 19, 1752.
The baby's father and mother, John Clark and Ann Rogers Clark, had
moved into Albemarle County two years before from King-and-Queen
County, Virginia, where they had been married in 1749. Their first
child was born August 1, 1750, and was given his grandfather's name,
Jonathan; this second son was given the name George Rogers, from one of
his mother's brothers--as though his parents had looked with prophetic
vision through the long years to a time when the baby should become the
idol and savior of Kentucky, and had named him from a Kentucky pioneer.
It was a busy farmer's home to which the young child came and in which
he received the first hard lessons of life. His parents were sturdy,
hard-working people, like their ancestors as far back as the records
went, even to the first John Clark, who came from England to Virginia
about the same time that the Puritans came to Plymouth Rock, or to
Giles Rogers, on his mother's side, who also came from England at very
nearly the same time. Giles Rogers's son John married Mary Byrd of the
well-known Virginian Byrd family, and George Rogers Clark's mother was
the second daughter of that union.
Who the boy's playmates may have been we cannot know; his brother
Jonathan was two years his elder, and the two were probably comrades
together on the nursery floor and on the green lawn before the
farmhouse. When George was three years of age his sister Ann was born;
and two years after that, in 1757, his brother John was born. It has
been said that George Clark may have had Thomas Jefferson as a playmate
by the Rivianna, but there is some doubt as to this, though the
friendship of the two in later life was undoubtedly warmer because of
the proximity of their boyhood homes. George's father's land ran down
and adjoined that of Randolph Jefferson--Thomas Jefferson's father. If
the two boys who were to become so famous met and played together it
was probably at the Jefferson Mill, where, it is said, George Clark
used to be sent with grist. As the Clark family moved away from this
neighborhood in 1757, when George was only five years old, it does not
seem likely that he was sent to mill with grist very often.
Soon after John Clark, Jr., was born, George's father and mother
determined upon removing from the Rivianna farm to land patented and
surveyed by Mrs. Clark's father in Caroline County, Virginia, on the
headwaters of York River and just south of the upper Rappahannock.
So, late in the year 1757, we find the father and mother and the
four children, with all their worldly possessions, on their eastward
journey to their new home. The Rivianna farm had been sold for fifteen
hundred dollars, and the family can probably be said to have been in
comfortable circumstances for those days. None of the four children
were of an age to share in the hardships of this removal, but for the
two eldest it must have been an epoch-making event. Jonathan and George
were old enough to enjoy the novelty of the long journey,---the scenes
along the busy roads, the taverns where all was bustle and confusion,
the villages with their shops and stores, the cities where the children
must have felt swallowed up in noise. But at last the new home was
reached, and the family was busily at work preparing for the next
year's crops.
Of the Caroline County home of the Clarks we know little save the
happy record of births of children; yet this in itself gives us a
large picture of the merry household, its great joys, and the host
of little troubles which intensified the gladness and hallowed it.
Within three years Richard Clark was born; Edmund was born September
25, 1762; Lucy, September 15, 1765; Elizabeth, February 11, 1768;
William, August 1, 1770, his brother Jonathan's twentieth birthday; and
Frances, January 20, 1773. Jonathan and George were soon old enough
to be little fathers to the younger children, and Ann must have been
able to help her mother to mend the clothes for her rollicking brothers
at a comparatively early age; and I do not doubt for a moment that
there was a good deal of mending to be done for these boys, for in
later life we know they loved adventure, and they must have had many
a boyish contest of strength and speed with little thought of how
many stitches it would take to make things whole again. This was a
fine farmer's family to look in at of a summer's morning or a winter's
night--just such a family as old Virginia was to depend upon in the
hard days of the Revolution now drawing on apace. And though you
looked the Colonies through from Northern Maine to Southern Georgia,
you could not have found by another fireside six boys in one family
who were to gain so much fame in their country's service as these six.
Jonathan was one of the first men to enter the American army, and he
became a lieutenant-colonel with a splendid record before the war was
ended. His brothers John and Edmund, and perhaps Richard, were in the
Revolutionary armies; all four were recipients of Virginia bounty lands
at the close of the war. George Rogers Clark in the meantime became the
hero of the most famous military expedition in Western history,--the
capture of Vincennes and its British fort and Governor; and William,
the next to the youngest in that merry crowd of ten children, was to
write his name high on the pillar of fame as joint leader of the
memorable Lewis and Clark Expedition through the Louisiana Territory to
the Pacific Ocean in 1804.
It was surely no accident that these lads grew into daring, able men,
for good blood will tell; and Virginia in that day was giving the world
her richest treasures lavishly on the altar of liberty. I know of no
picture of the father of these six boys; but the pictures of George
and William are remarkably similar, showing a strong mark which must
have come directly from one of the grandfathers, either on the Clark
or Rogers side of the family. We may be sure Farmer Clark and his wife
exerted, a strong, wise influence on their children, and Jonathan and
George were called upon at an early age to assist in the management
of the children, to settle disputes, to tie up injured fingers, to
reprimand, and to praise. And in the school of the home and the family
circle these boys received the best and about the only education they
ever had; and it would be well if many a boy nowadays would learn more
in the home of patient, wise parents and a little less from books.
The Clark boys, at least George Clark, would have been benefited by
a little more schooling in books, especially a speller. It is quite
sure that George did not take full advantage of even the few school
privileges that he did have; but while all his letters of later life
are poorly spelled, that may have been his principal weakness, and in
other branches he may have succeeded much better; we know he did in
one. For nine months he was under the instruction of Donald Robertson,
under whom James Madison, afterwards President of the United States,
studied at about the same time. Strangely enough this boy, who would
not learn to be careful with letters, became proficient in the matter
of figures and did well in that most difficult of studies, mathematics.
In Clark's day a boy proficient in mathematics did not have to look far
for a profession which was considered both honorable and lucrative,
and that was the surveyor's profession. It was doubly enticing to a
youth of brains and daring; the call for surveyors to go out into
the rich empire beyond the Alleghanies was loud and continuous, and
had been since Lord Fairfax sent that young Virginia surveyor into
the singing forests of the Upper Potomac before the outbreak of the
Old French War; and from George Washington down, you may count many
boys who went into the West as surveyors and became the first men of
the land. The surveyor had many, if not all, the experiences of the
soldier; and every boy in Virginia envied the soldier of the French
War. The surveyor found the good lands, and here and there surveyed
a tract for himself; this, in time, would become of great value. The
surveyor knew the Indians and their trails; he knew where the best
hunting-grounds and salt-licks were located; he knew where the swamps
lay, and the fever-fogs that clung to them; he knew the rivers, their
best fishing-pools, and how far up and down they were navigable; he was
acquainted with everything a man would wish to know, and he knew of
things which every man wished to escape,--floods, famines, skulking
redskins, fevers. For these reasons the surveyors became the men
needed by generals to guide the armies, by the great land-companies to
point out right fields for speculation, by transportation companies
and quartermasters and traders to designate the best paths to follow
through the black forests. The tried, experienced surveyor was in an
admirable position to secure a comfortable fortune for his labor. While
Washington (the largest landholder in America in Clark's day--and half
his lands in the West) selected in person much of his own land, yet, as
we have seen, the time came when he employed William Crawford to find
new lands for him.
Perhaps young Clark came but slowly to a realization that he could
enter the fine profession of a surveyor; but when the time came to
decide he seized upon the opportunity and the opening with utmost
enthusiasm and energy. Both of his grandfathers had been surveyors
to a greater or less extent; possibly their old instruments were in
his father's possession. If so, these were taken out and dusted, and
the boy was set to work surveying, probably, his father's farm. Its
dimensions were well known, and the boy could be sure of the accuracy
or inaccuracy of his experiments. In time George probably was called
upon to do odd pieces of surveying in the neighborhood in which he
lived; thus the days and the years went by, each one fitting the lad
for his splendid part on the world's stage of action. The first act in
the drama was Clark's introduction to the West--the land of which he
had so often dreamed, and which he now in his twentieth year went to
see.
We cannot be sure just when young Clark set out from his home, but we
find him in the little town of Pittsburg early in the summer of 1772,
and we can well suppose he made the long trip over Braddock's Road from
Virginia with some friends or neighbors from Caroline County, with whom
he joined himself for the purpose of looking at the land of which he
had heard so much, and possibly picking out a little tract of land in
the Ohio Valley for himself. As a surveyor of some experience he was in
a position to offer his services to any one desiring them, and thus
turn an honest penny in the meantime.
Of the wars and bloody skirmishes fought around this town every
Virginia boy had heard; through all of George Rogers Clark's youth
great questions were being debated here in these sunny Alleghany
meadows or in the shadowy forests--and the arguments were of iron and
lead. The French had come down the rivers from the Great Lakes to seize
the Ohio Valley; the colonists had pushed slowly across the Alleghanies
to occupy the same splendid land. Nothing but war could have settled
such a bitter quarrel; and, as the Clark boy now looked for the first
time upon the relics of those small but savage battles, his heart
no doubt warmed to his Virginian patriots who had saved the West to
America. How little did the lad know that there was another savage war
to be fought for this Ohio Valley, and that he himself was to be its
hero!
All along the route to Pittsburg the boy and his comrades, whoever
they may have been, kept their eyes open for good farm sites; perhaps
they were surprised to find that all the land beside and adjacent to
Braddock's Road was already "taken up." Washington himself had acquired
that two-hundred-and-thirty-two-acre tract in Great Meadows where
Fort Necessity stood; not far from Stewart's Crossing (Connellsville,
Pa.) Washington had the other piece of land with the mill on it.
Everywhere Clark went in the West he found land which had been taken
up by the shrewd Mount Vernon farmer or his agents. I do not believe
Clark begrudged Washington a single acre, but was, on the other hand,
pleased to know that the Colonel was to receive some good return for
all his hard campaigning in the West in addition to his paltry pay as
an officer.
Clark passed as a young gentleman among the strange, rough populace of
infant Pittsburg, where fighting, drinking, and quarrelling were going
on in every public place; I can see the boy as he went about the rude
town and listened to the talk of the traders and the loungers who
filled the taverns and stores. It might have been at this time that the
boy first began to satisfy an honest thirst with dishonest liquids,
which would in time become his worst enemy and sadly dull the lustre
of as bright a name as any man could win. Of course we must remember
that at that day it was highly polite and gentlemanly to take an
"eye-opener" every morning and a "night-cap" every night, and drink the
health of friends often between times; yet no young man but was injured
by this awakening of an unknown craving, and, in the case of our hero,
it was to prove a craving that would cost him almost all the great
honors that he should win.
The lad looked with wide-open eyes, no doubt, at the remains of old
Fort Duquesne, where many brave Virginians had lost their lives; for
many had been fiendishly put to death by savages driven to bitter
hatred by French taunts and made inhuman by French brandy. He must
have been greatly interested in little Fort Pitt, which had withstood
the wild attacks of Pontiac's most desperate hell-hounds of war, the
Shawnees. Here, if anywhere on the continent, men had been brave;
here, if anywhere, men had dropped into deathless graves. He was
greatly interested in the future, though the ringing notes of the past
must have stirred his heart deeply; and I can see the lad with bended
head listening to catch every word of a speaker who would talk of the
present feeling of the dreaded Shawnees, who refused to acknowledge
that the Six Nations had any right to sell to white men their fine
hunting-grounds between the Ohio and the Tennessee.
[Illustration: REV. DAVID JONES
_Companion of George Rogers Clark_]
When we hear directly of Clark in Pittsburg he was in admirably good
company and well spoken of; he had fallen in with the Rev. David Jones,
the enterprising Baptist missionary from New Jersey, who had come
into the West on a joint mission concerning both the possibilities of
missionary service among the Shawnees on the Scioto, and Franklin's
proposed settlement on the eastern bank of the Ohio River. He was,
therefore, a prospector for land and for missionary openings--a good
man for the lad Clark to know. Mr. Jones was thirty-six years of age,
enthusiastic and brave, or he would not have been on the Ohio in 1772.
He was old enough to remember well the story of the Old French War,
as well as Pontiac's Rebellion, and the story of the West from that
day down. Of this, no doubt, the two talked freely. Mr. Jones kept a
diary, and his record for Tuesday, June 9, reads: "... Left Fort Pitt
in company with Mr. George Rogers Clark, and several others, who were
disposed to make a tour through this new world." Gliding on down the
Ohio, the canoe and its adventurous pilgrims were glad to get safely
by the Mingo town near Steubenville, Ohio, whose Indian inhabitants
(remnants of the Iroquois Indians, in the West known as Mingoes) were
desperate savages, canoe plundering being the least harm that might
be expected from them. Farther down, at the mouth of Grave Creek,
near where Wheeling, West Virginia, now stands, the party camped;
here Mr. Jones's interpreter, David Owens, joined them, having come
across country from the Monongahela River. This spot was to become
an important point on the Upper Ohio; it was to become well known to
the young adventurer, who now looked upon it for the first time; it
was soon to become his first home in the West. But for the present he
went on with Mr. Jones. The party proceeded as far down as the mouth
of the Little Kanawha River, where Parkersburg, West Virginia, now
stands. Returning up the river June 24, they reached Grave Creek within
two weeks; the party, including at least Higgins and the interpreter
Owens together with Jones and Clark, started on an overland trip to the
Monongahela. Jones records:
"... Therefore moved up to Grave Creek, leaving there our canoes;
crossed the desert (wilderness) to Ten Mile Creek, which empties
into [the] Monongahela.... The season was very warm; all except
myself had loads to carry, so that on the 2d day of July, with
much fatigue we arrived to the inhabitants [at the settlements],
faint, weak, weary, and hungry--especially Mr. Clark and myself."
The size of the settlement can be judged from the fact that on the
second Sunday of Mr. Jones's stay on George's Creek he preached to a
congregation of about two hundred.
On July 14 the four travellers set out again overland for Fort Pitt.
They reached the fort on Wednesday, July 22, and the Virginia boy was
probably glad to leave the forests and the river for a while and rest
quietly in the little village of Pittsburg. For one thing, he had
some letters to write, and we can imagine how anxious the friends at
home were to hear from him. Would he like the country? Would he wish
to stay in the West? Would he want the other members of the family to
emigrate there too? These were some of the questions his parents and
brothers and sisters were asking in the old home in Caroline County
as the summer days went by. We are certain that Clark was immensely
pleased with all he had seen; whether it was pushing a canoe down the
rivers, or sleeping on a river's shore with the water babbling beside
him, or carrying a pack over the "blind" trails of the old Southwest,
he loved the land, its freshness, the freedom of its forests, the air
of hope and adventure which pervaded everything and everybody. All this
appealed to him and fascinated him.
After a good rest he hurried on home in the wake of his glowing
letters, to enforce them, and if possible to induce the home people
to come quickly to obtain the good lands before they were all taken.
Before he went it is probable that he entered his claim for a piece
of land on the Ohio near the mouth of Fish Creek, some thirty miles
below the present site of Wheeling. How interesting must have been
that home-coming! What a fine picture that would be, if we could see
the young lad, who was to be the hero of the West, sitting before
his father's doorstep, describing to a silent audience of relatives
and neighbors the grandeur and greatness of the West, the crowds of
immigrants, the growing villages, the conflicts between the white and
the red men! Perhaps he drew a rough map of the Ohio in the sand at
the foot of the front doorsteps, showing where his claim was located,
and where Washington's rich tracts were located. Then he told of the
Ohio, its islands and its fierce eddies, of the Indian trails that
wound along on the "hog-backs" from settlement to settlement, of the
great mounds which the ancient giants (as people once thought the
mound-building Indians were) built beside the Ohio. And then at last he
told of his purpose to return and live in that country and grow up with
it.
The records of the next few years were very much confused. Young
Clark visited various portions of the West, perhaps remaining longest
at a claim he took up near the mouth of Grave Creek, on the present
site of Moundsville, West Virginia, from which point he addressed
letters to his brother Jonathan, January 9, 1773. In the Spring of
the next year he formed one of Captain Cressap's party assembled at
Wheeling in readiness for service in Dunmore's War. In this war Clark
saw considerable service, following Dunmore's wing of the army, but
not participating in the battle at Point Pleasant, which was fought
by General Lewis. In the Spring of the year following, 1775, we find
Clark returning again to his original mission in the West,--that of
surveying land and securing tracts for himself. "I have engaged,"
he wrote his brother Jonathan from Stewart's Crossing, "as a deputy
surveyor under Cap'n Hancock Lee, for to lay out lands on ye Kentuck,
for ye Ohio company, at ye rate of 80£ pr. year, and ye privilege of
taking what land I want." Midsummer found him at Leestown, a mile below
Frankfort, seventy miles up the Kentucky River, where he said fifty
families would be living by Christmas time. The public, however, needed
the service of the young man, and it is plain that his experience
in the war had been serviceable, for he was made commander of the
scattered militia of Kentucky. During the next Winter, however, we find
him again in Virginia; it is probable that his constant moving about
had brought advantages, though his private affairs may have suffered
more or less from neglect. The Spring of the next year he was back
in Kentucky, and soon, in no uncertain way, the leader of the busy
swarms of pioneers. "He was brave, energetic, bold," writes William H.
English, "prepossessing in appearance, of pleasing manners, and in fact
with all the qualities calculated to win from a frontier people. The
unorganized and chaotic condition of the company needed such a man, and
the man had come."
It is interesting to notice the conflict which was precipitated between
Clark as leader of the pioneers and Richard Henderson's Transylvania
Company, and a pleasure to note that Clark never seemed to speak or
act in a vindictive way with reference to Henderson's questionable
purchase; in fact he wrote to his brother in 1775:
"Colonel Henderson is here and claims all ye country below
Kentucke. If his claim should be good, land may be got reasonable
enough, and as good as any in ye world. My father talked of seeing
this land in August. I shall not advise him whether to come or
not; but I am convinced that if he once sees ye country he will
never rest until he gets on it to live. I am ingrossing all ye
land I possibly can, expecting him."
It is plain from this quotation that Richard Henderson was the friend
of the Kentucky pioneer. But there was a very important question to
be settled immediately; did Kentucky belong to Virginia or was it
independent? What was its political status? It was decided to get at
the facts of the case, and Clark was instrumental before all others in
calling a mass meeting of Kentucky pioneers at Harrodstown, June 6,
1776, where he expected that two or more "agents" would be selected
by the people with general power to consult Virginia as to the legal
status of "Transylvania." Clark arrived late at this meeting, and
on arrival found that he himself, and John Gabriel Jones, had been
selected, not as agents, but as actual "members of the Virginia
Legislature," to represent a County of Kentucky. The Transylvania
Company had performed its important mission, and Richard Henderson was
reimbursed for any losses incurred. George Rogers Clark now steps into
the position occupied by Henderson as the leader and sustainer of the
Kentucky movement.
The brilliancy of Clark's military leadership during the next few
years, while he was effecting a conquest of Illinois, has entirely
put into shade the genuine influence and merit of his service
previously rendered. No herald of empire in the Middle West who was
especially prominent in military affairs did more to accelerate and
assure the victory of the army of axe-bearing pioneers than did George
Rogers Clark in these critical years, 1775, 1776, and 1777. He fell
heir, though a mere boy, to a day's responsibility and taxing toils
relinquished by Richard Henderson; and it would not be too much to say,
perhaps, that were we to omit the humble, less spectacular services
that were performed in these three years, or the renowned service
heroically performed in 1778 and 1779, the nation could more easily
spare those of the later period. But as Clark now went eastward as a
delegate to the Virginia Legislature, he appreciated more and more that
the danger of Kentucky lay in the two British forts at Kaskaskia and
Vincennes; not because of the proximity of the troops there located,
but because of the baneful influence exerted upon all the neighboring
Indian tribes by English officers and American renegades who occupied
them. The campaign in Illinois, prosecuted with so much brilliancy
and renown, had for its vital motive not the conquest of thousands of
forest-strewn miles of wilderness, but rather the salvation of the
pioneer settlers in _Ken-ta-kee_. Any other view of the matter would be
a serious error.
The proud city of Louisville dates its founding from Clark's famous
Illinois campaign, for while descending the Ohio River he left some
twenty families on Corn Island, May 27, 1778, who were the first of
their race to make a permanent home within the sound of the chattering
waters of the historic Falls of Ohio, first visited by La Salle over
a hundred years before. In less than a year the settlement was moved
to the Kentucky shore, and a fort was built at the foot of what is now
Twelfth Street, in what was then the town of Falls of Ohio, the present
Louisville. General Clark may be justly called the founder of that
city, as it was his decision that made "The Falls" the rendezvous and
metropolis of the Lower Ohio. "This action," writes Mr. English, "and
the security given by the forts he caused to be built there, attracted
the first settlers and fixed the future destiny of Louisville,
Jeffersonville, and New Albany.... Clark undoubtedly gave the matter
much thought, and looked far into the future in making this selection.
He expected two great cities to arise some day at the Falls; first
Louisville, to be followed later, as the country became populous, by
one on the other side of the river, which he hoped would bear his name.
But, until Virginia made the grant for Clarksville, the plan of what he
expected would be a great city at Louisville absorbed his attention."
One of his first acts was to draw a map of the future city, marking the
public and private divisions of land as he would have had them located;
in this plan he left a number of vacant spaces for public parks, and it
is one of the vain regrets of the citizens of the present city that the
plan of General Clark in this respect could not have been remembered.
It is important to notice that Clark believed that the best way to
maintain the conquest of Illinois was by inducing immigration to the
Lower Ohio and the building up of a strong pioneer colony, not in
Illinois, but along the river. "Our only chance at present," he wrote
to Colonel John Todd, the Governor of Illinois County, "to save that
country is by encouraging the families; but I am sensible nothing but
land will do it. I should be exceedingly cautious in doing anything
that would displease the Government [Virginia], but their present
interest, in many respects obvious to us here, calls so loudly for
it, that I think, sir, that you might even venture to give a deed for
forty or fifty thousand acres of land at said place at the price that
Government may demand for it."
The place referred to here is not Louisville, but near the mouth of
the Ohio River. In fact it is very plain from many sources that Clark
was the prime mover in the settlement of the Lower Ohio up to the year
1783, when he was wantonly and ignominiously turned adrift by the State
of Virginia, which then owed him thirty thousand dollars, with only
four shillings in its treasury. The latter portion of Clark's life
is not one which we are proud to remember, but he never sank so low
that the nation has been able to forget his brilliant and persistent
courage. There was ground for his bitter cry: "I have given the United
States half the territory they possess, and for them to suffer me to
remain in poverty, in consequence of it, will not redound much to their
honor." It is little comfort that nearly thirteen years after his
death the sum justly owed to the man was paid to his heirs. The memory
of Clark's leadership of the army that bore the sword is a precious
inheritance; the facts respecting his equally important enthusiasm and
earnestness in leading the scattered cohorts of the army bearing the
broadaxe should likewise have a place in history.