William Clark

William Clark (1770-1838), American explorer, Native American agent, and frontier politician, who served as co-leader, with Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-1806), the first overland exploration of the American West and Pacific Northwest. Clark was born in Caroline County, Virginia. In 1784 the Clark family moved to the Kentucky frontier, establishing a plantation called Mulberry Hill near present-day Louisville.

Clark followed the powerful examples of his brothers Jonathan and George Rogers Clark, both of whom made military life the path to success. In 1789 William joined a militia company and soon became an infantry officer in the army of General Anthony Wayne. During service in the Indian wars in the Ohio Valley, Clark gained a reputation for leadership and courage. He met Meriwether Lewis at this time when Lewis served briefly in Clark's rifle company. Under General Wayne, Clark took part in the Battle of Fallen Timbers (near what is now Toledo, Ohio) in August 1794, which destroyed the power of the Native Americans in Ohio. Clark also grew to be an experienced frontier diplomat, earning Wayne's praise for a dangerous scouting mission in 1796. When debts incurred by George threatened Clark family lands in Kentucky and Indiana, William resigned his commission and spent the next eight years defending family interests.

In June 1803 Lewis asked Clark to join him as co-leader on a government-sponsored expedition through the Louisiana Territory to the Pacific Ocean. Clark was promised a captain's commission to match Lewis's rank, but bureaucratic confusion made him a lieutenant. Despite this, both Lewis and U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, who commissioned the expedition, always considered Clark an equal partner in command.

As commanding officers on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Lewis and Clark informally divided leadership responsibilities. Clark was the expedition's mapmaker. Years of frontier experience had taught him to understand and record intricate terrain—land, rivers, and mountains. Clark's army experience also prepared him to be the expedition's most able negotiator and diplomat, a role he played in many meetings with Native Americans.

The expedition to the Pacific made Clark both famous and influential. For the rest of his life he played a key role as a federal Native American agent and territorial politician. In 1807 Clark was appointed agent for the tribes west of the Mississippi River. During the War of 1812 (1812-1815) Clark worked to organize western defenses against British and Native American attacks. At the end of the war Clark and other federal officials negotiated a series of Native American treaties that reestablished American power in the West. As a Native American agent and governor of the Missouri Territory (1813-1821), Clark earned the respect of many native people who knew him as “the red-head chief.”

After Lewis's death in 1809, Clark assumed responsibility for completing the report of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Clark employed American financier and diplomat Nicholas Biddle to prepare the two-volume collection, finally published in 1814. The large map of the West that Clark drafted for the report is a landmark in the geographic understanding of the American West.

When Missouri became a state in 1821, Clark was defeated in his bid to become governor. Although his power in Native American affairs was much diminished, Clark continued to act on behalf of the federal government. At the time of his death, Clark had a national reputation as an authority on the West.