The world over which Clark presided from his office in St. Louis—the world represented on his map—was increasingly shaped by the fur trade, most notably by the American Fur Company and its St. Louis principal, Pierre Chouteau, the grandson of Auguste, the founder of the imperial city. Among the directives given the Corps of Discovery by Thomas Jefferson was to “decide whether the furs of [the Pacific Northwest] may not be collected advantageously at the head of the Missouri.” Beaver pelts especially were valued in the markets of the eastern United States and Europe for the animal’s fibrous undercoat, which was pounded into felt. Felted beaver fur was pliable enough to be shaped and yet resilient enough to make warm, waterproof hats that held their form. By the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition, beaver hats had been a standard accoutrement of metropolitan elites and military men across the Atlantic world for over a century. When they returned, Lewis and Clark reported that the headwaters of the Missouri were “richer in beaver and otter than any country on earth.”19
By the first decades of the nineteenth century, the fur trade linked cities like London, Paris, Vienna, and New York to St. Louis and thence to the deepest reaches of the North American interior. Fur trading in these years was one of the largest sectors of the global economy, and worth over $200,000 a year in the city of St. Louis, one of its principal hubs. The Indians of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains were its primary producers. Beyond St. Louis in the first decades of the nineteenth century, the global economy followed the centuries-old pathways of Indian trade and operated on “native ground”: the trapping was done by Indians who set the terms for the trading that followed.20
In these years, as a historian of the fur trade, David Wishart, has shown, white traders in the Missouri Valley worked “within the framework of the existing Indian system.” Beaver pelts were prepared according to Indian methods, and bargaining over the exchange rate—between beaver pelts and beads, for instance—began only after the whites had provided gifts denoting their respect. “The Indians are good judges of the articles in which they deal,” wrote one St. Louis trader, “and have always given a very decided preference for those of English manufacture.” St. Louis traders, particularly Pierre Chouteau and his extended network of family members and associates, maintained a presence all over the West, but the initial locations of their forts were determined as much by Indian needs as European ones—and sometimes they were moved according to specifications of the trade’s Indian producers.21
Pierre Chouteau embodied what the historian Anne Hyde has termed the métis world of the fur trade. Chouteau had grown up in present-day Missouri and along the Arkansas River among the Osage, to whom he maintained a connection through an Osage wife. He spent most of his time, however, in St. Louis, where he lived with another wife, a French Creole woman. Chouteau’s brother, A.P., who spoke Osage and Pawnee as well as English, French, and Spanish, took the opposite course and left St. Louis to live with his Osage wife. St. Louis’s first family, able to move between the Indian and European worlds at the heart of the continent, embodied the tactical alliances, restless mixtures, and practical in-betweenness of the fur trade world. Scratched out on paper, the organizational chart of the American Fur Company bore a striking resemblance to the Chouteau family tree. Unlike a family tree, however, the American Fur Trade Company transmitted wealth backwards rather than forwards: the levy followed the bloodlines backwards toward St. Louis.22
The métis practices of the borderlands were framed by imperial frontiers. Just as the Osage relied on their relationship with the United States to help them hold off their rivals in Missouri and along the Arkansas River, the Quapaw and the Delaware, the United States relied on its relationship with the Osage to help them hold off the Spanish in the Southwest. Likewise, and of even greater concern to William Clark, the Indians of the Upper Missouri Valley had to be kept in alignment with the economic and diplomatic purposes of the United States. Throughout his career, Clark manifested an almost obsessive concern that the Indians of the Upper Midwest not be drawn into the orbit of the British by traders based north of the border. “Whoever enjoys the Trade of the Indians will have the control of their affection and power,” Clark explained in a letter to his brother. Clark conceived of the fur trade as an aspect of the realpolitik of the plains, a mode of imperial maneuver as much as a method of accumulation, but the fur trade was, at its heart, a trade, and eventually the imperatives of racial capitalism came fully to define its pathways and practices.23
The world that Clark worked so hard to maintain—the world of the fur trade and the shifting military alliance between imperialists and Indians—was built, as it had been intended, upon impermanent premises. According to Thomas Jefferson, the power-balanced reciprocities that defined the world of the fur trade—the choreography of gift-giving and bargaining, of rhetorical dominance and practical dependence—were never intended to last forever. In February 1803, as he worked to arrange a secret congressional appropriation to fund the expedition of the Corps of Discovery, Jefferson outlined his vision of the future in a letter to William Henry Harrison, then the governor of the Indiana Territory: “We shall push our trading uses, and be glad to see the good and influential Indians… run into debt, because we observe when these debts get beyond what the individual can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of land.” Jefferson imagined a long game: the Louisiana Purchase lands would be used for the resettlement of eastern Indians driven out by white settlement along a westward-moving debt frontier (imperial racial capitalism) that might take several generations to reach and cross the Mississippi. Indeed, as long as the western Indians remained valuable to the United States, men like William Clark might encourage men like Pierre Chouteau to roll Indian debts over for another year and keep doing business: the competing imperatives of the United States to expand, the American Fur Company to make money, and the Osage or the Mandan to benefit from their relations with whites and defend their position from Indian challengers might be rebalanced by the deferral of any final accounting. But once the parameters that framed those common interests began to change, so too did the choices and the incentives facing William Clark.24
The War of 1812 changed the ground beneath Clark’s feet. While Francis Scott Key was busy writing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in Baltimore, much of the war was fought in the Upper Midwest. The city of St. Louis spent 1813 and 1814 on high alert in anticipation of attack by those Indians allied with the British. Indeed, in St. Louis, as in the Midwest generally, the War of 1812 was less a war with the British than a war between Indians in which American settlers were allied with one side and British settlers with the other. In the summer of 1813, there were rumors in the city that as many as a thousand hostile Indians were gathered in St. Charles County preparing for an assault on St. Louis. Clark, who had been appointed governor of the Missouri Territory by President James Madison in 1813, and Pierre Chouteau arranged with the Osage to establish a garrison above the city, and for the duration of the war St. Louis was defended by 260 Osage soldiers as well as its own historically unreliable white militia.25
The War of 1812 was a multilateral conflict: both the British and the Americans had Indian allies, and the Indian parties to the conflict tried to use it as a way to advance their position against Indian as well as imperial rivals. But the Treaty of Ghent, signed in December 1814, restaged the war as if the only combatants had been the white ones. It reestablished the imperial boundaries between the United States and Great Britain along the lines said to prevail status quo ante while ignoring the claims of the Indians who had fought to be included in the negotiation of the “peace.” As a corollary, it undermined the ability of the Indians of the Missouri Valley to play the Americans against the British. Henceforth, men like William Clark and Pierre Chouteau would worry less that dissatisfied plains Indians would pursue trade and diplomatic alliances with their British rivals.
The fur trade world had been built not only on an evanescent political foundation but also on finite resources. The American empire in the West was extractive rather than productive, and it soon destroyed the ecological conditions that had enabled the fur trade in the first place. Almost as quickly as it took shape, the unstable order of the fur trade world was upset by European demand for beaver hats. Western Indians refused to trap in the numbers that the fur companies wished, and so the companies tried to establish their own upriver operations, shifting the center of gravity in the political economy of the trade from Indian to white trappers. The immediate result was war. When the St. Louis trader Manuel Lisa tried to establish an upriver fort in 1810, it was attacked and destroyed by Blackfeet. Twenty of the thirty-two men in Lisa’s employ died in the failed venture; shortly after, Lisa’s Missouri Fur Company was dissolved.26
In 1822, the fur trader William Ashley advertised in the Missouri Gazette and Public Advertiser for “one Hundred Men to ascend the river Missouri to its source, there to be employed for one, two or three years.” His intention was to conquer the fur trade—to replace the existing supply chain and its complicated reliance upon Indian suppliers and diplomacy with a more directly commercial set of linkages to the west, that is, with an alternative racial capitalism. In the summer of 1823, Ashley’s trappers were attacked on the Upper Missouri, between the Grand and Cannonball Rivers in what is today South Dakota. Twelve of Ashley’s men died, and Ashley immediately wrote to nearby Fort Atkinson to seek the aid of the US Army in supporting his commercial venture. By August, the US Army had defeated the Arikara. But further upriver the Blackfeet continued to defend their control over the river and the trade, forcing the St. Louis traders to look for another route. In the second half of the 1820s, the St. Louis trade began to run from the Lower Missouri Valley westward to South Pass in the Rockies. Gradually, the St. Louis traders succeeded in transforming the fur trade on the east side of the Rockies into a more thoroughly capitalist business: longtime trade and diplomatic relationships with Indians were thrown into disarray and replaced with frequent skirmishes and periodic war; hunters were transformed from traders into workers, and the limits that the Indians had placed on trapping were undermined in a frenzy of profit-taking. By 1840, the western beaver had been pushed to the margin of extinction.27
As the fur companies pushed upriver, propelled by global demand and fueled by racial entitlement, and the Indians pushed back, it was left to William Clark to contain the disorder unleashed from St. Louis and keep the racial capitalism of the trade under the control of the United States. As superintendent of Indian affairs, Clark oversaw the relationships of white traders and Indians. Up until 1822, he controlled trade through a network of Indian Agency “factories,” which had sole license to trade with Indians. When a white man killed an Indian or an Indian stole a white man’s horse, Clark (or, more accurately, his network of agents) was responsible for trying to broker a resolution, often through the provision of gifts. He held regular councils to negotiate boundaries and hunting rights among the western Indians under his charge. At his downtown office, on his farm eight miles outside the city, on Beaver Pond, and at Portage des Sioux, thirty miles north of the city near the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, Clark’s councils were a normal aspect of life in St. Louis in the decades after his return from the West.28
As early as 1814, when he had to be defended by his Indian guard against a mob of land-hungry white settlers, Clark must have realized that his roles as superintendent of Indian affairs and as territorial governor (of the white settlers) of Missouri were ineluctably at odds. As white migration to Missouri, especially from Virginia, increased in the years after the War of 1812, Clark’s constituents demanded that he renounce the traditional practices of Indian-agent diplomacy and the fur trade and let white men go wherever they wanted and do whatever they wanted, at least as far as Indians were concerned. In 1816, white settlers were outraged at Clark’s decision to order the removal of two hundred white settler families along the Arkansas River because the farms they were building were located on Indian lands. When the whites refused to move, Clark was forced to admit that his order was “impracticable.” Settlers interested only in Indian lands were outraged by the costs of Indian diplomacy. They had no interest in paying for the standard-issue tools of frontier reconciliation and pacification in which Clark put so much stock—medals embossed with the face of the president, vermillion from China, wool blankets from the British Isles, glass beads from Venice, and calico in a variety of prints. For these settlers, firearms were to be used to kill Indians, not as trade goods to secure alliances with them. When Clark ran for reelection as governor in 1820, he was painted by his opponents as a tool of the Chouteau family and their “Junto” of has-been French aristocrats, and as a race traitor who would rather pamper Indians than recognize the soundness of Alexis de Tocqueville’s description of what the Frenchman took to be the animating spirit of settler whiteness in the United States: “This world here belongs to us, they tell themselves every day: the Indian race is destined for final destruction which one cannot prevent and which it is not desirable to delay. Heaven has not made them to become civilized; it is necessary that they die.” Clark lost the election by a margin of two-to-one.29
Though Clark was never as bloodthirsty as his political opponents, as superintendent of Indian affairs up until the time of his death in 1838, he negotiated increasingly harsh land cessions and removal treaties with the Indians of the Midwest. Many of the thirty-seven land cession treaties he negotiated—imposed—in these years were signed in the council grove on his farm by Beaver Pond in today’s Pine Lawn, just to the northwest of the present-day city limits of the city of St. Louis. As early as 1808, he began negotiating the removal of the Osage from Missouri. In 1815, he presided over a treaty with the Kansas; in 1816 with the Sauk, Sioux, Winnebago, Ottawa, the Ojibwa, and the Potawatomi; in 1817 with the Menominee; in 1818 with the various factions of the Pawnee, the Quapaw, and most of the remaining Osage; in 1825 with the Shawnee and the final Missouri Osage; in 1832 with the Kickapoo; in 1835 with the remaining Shawnee, the Delaware, the Kaskaskia, and the Peoria, and with the Sauk and the Fox in the so-called Platte Purchase, which added the tiny flange of territory east of the Missouri to the northeast corner of the state. Taken all together, Clark’s treaties added some 419 million acres to the domain of the United States and removed over 81,000 Indians from their homelands. Many of these treaties were with Indians who were being dispossessed for the second time, the white settlers having caught them from behind even after their first forced westward move.30
The 1825 treaty with the Osage was perhaps the most notorious; the stench of its self-dealing delayed its passage through Congress for months. Hundreds of thousands of acres belonging to the Osage—to whom Clark had entrusted the defense of the city of St. Louis during the War of 1812—were transferred directly to his friend Pierre Chouteau, earmarked as payment for the debts supposedly accrued by the Osage in their years of business with the American Fur Company. Indeed, as the margins tightened in the fur trade, the Chouteau family began to diversify its holdings by opening up a side business in Indian removal: contracting to transport and provide for the Indians with whom they had once negotiated and intermarried.31
During the first third of the nineteenth century, the city that had once been the economic center of the fur trade was transformed into the administrative center of midwestern Indian removal—the largest forced relocation camp on the continent. By the time Clark died in 1838, the protocols of Indian trade and diplomacy, the type of calico favored by the Osages, or the different personalities of the various Mandan chiefs, were of no more interest to most white men in St. Louis than the best method of trapping the last of the rapidly dwindling beaver population (for which there was no longer any market in any case). It mattered a good deal less how much a white man in St. Louis knew about Indians than it did how much he hated them.32
During these years of unceasing extraction, overhunting, and ethnic cleansing, great fortunes were made in St. Louis, most notably by the Chouteau family, but also by the Ashleys, the Sublettes, the Herefords, and the Bents. The wealth that was drained from the Missouri Valley and its inhabitants pooled along the levee in St. Louis and then spread westward toward the suburbs that began to grow on the surrounding prairie in the 1830s. Between 1810 and 1820, the population of the city grew by more than 200 percent (to a total of 4,598), and the population of the surrounding county increased by around 75 percent during the same period, reaching almost 10,000 in 1820. As the population of the city grew, real estate speculation emerged as a significant sector of the local economy. Both Pierre Chouteau and his commercial rival J.B.C. Lucas subdivided and sold large lots of what had once been the city’s common field (about thirty square blocks behind the built-up area on the riverfront, including the site of Busch Stadium today). Lucas had turned a 1,000 percent profit before he sold even half of his lots. Between 1815 and 1821, the number of wood-framed buildings in the city grew by 50 percent, and the cost of pine lumber in St. Louis in these boom-time years was eight times what was being asked in Pittsburgh.33
By 1821, the city had forty-six mercantile houses, fifty-seven groceries, three large hotels, three newspapers, twenty-seven lawyers, four hairdressers, twelve tailors, thirteen physicians, and three midwives, as well as a portrait painter, a handful of blacksmiths, and “several musicians.” In 1822, the city government adopted a new policy for naming streets. Instead of the names based on existing landmarks (Rue D’Eglise), the city began to employ a system based on tree names and numbered cross-streets—a system that, because it corresponded to nothing specific about the city, was susceptible of infinite expansion. As the fur trade declined through the 1830s under the pressure of first overhunting and then changing demand—silk hats, another imperial good, but this time from Asia, not America, were now the rage—the capitalists of St. Louis began to turn the capital they had accumulated on the plains to other sectors of the economy: to real estate speculation, to the processing and distribution of agricultural goods, and to manufacturing, especially of military hardware.
In the aftermath of Mexican independence (from Spain) in 1821, St. Louis merchants developed increasing commercial ties to Santa Fe, and through the following decades it was the Santa Fe Trail as much as the Missouri Valley that shaped the economy of the city. Furs, woven wool from the interior of Mexico, silver, horses, and the mules that came to be identified nationally as “Missouri mules” all made their way to St. Louis in exchange for cotton fabrics, linens, silks, and manufactured tools like axes and knives. The “Gateway to the West” had once been the passageway through which Indian goods traveled on their way east, to the Atlantic seaboard or farther on to Europe. It increasingly became instead the point of embarkation for white settlers (heading to Texas in the 1830s, to Oregon in the 1840s, and to California in the 1850s) and the Indian fighters of the US military who followed in their wake for the balance of the century: the epicenter of the nation’s nineteenth-century empire. And the Louisiana Purchase Territory, once the site of the type of complex and volatile diplomatic and economic interchange that had framed the career of William Clark and the arc of the fur trade, came increasingly to be viewed, at least among white people, as a vast open space into which they could drive the Indians who lived on the eastern half of the continent—the geographical precondition for the idea of the “white man’s country.”34
On September 13, 1832, Washington Irving set out from the levee in downtown St. Louis to visit the famous explorer William Clark. Intent on writing a book about the West for readers curious about the nation’s emergent empire, Irving began in St. Louis with a visit to the most famous living symbol of “discovery.” The morning was cool and clear, although the city was overhung by the smoke of the tanneries, brickworks, and smelters built up along the levee. The life of the man Irving had come to meet encapsulated the history that had transformed the city of St. Louis from frontier post into the metropolis of the nation’s western empire. In a way, the visit marked the end of an era.35
Clark’s farm was about eight miles from the bustling St. Louis levee, on a little pond known then as Marais Castor (Beaver Pond). To get there, Irving rode though the “scrub oak and marshy weeds” that marked the boundary of the riparian ecosystem and out onto the flowering prairie beyond the city limit. As he traveled, Irving passed a circle of ancient Indian mounds. At the summit of one of them, the fur trader William Ashley had built a mansion with a fountain in the front.36
The famous explorer was not at home when Irving arrived. Unlike Clark, who wrote reluctantly and spelled chaotically, Irving encountered the world through words, and while he waited he jotted down notes about Clark’s surroundings and his possessions: the embers on the hearth; the long gun and game bag in the corner; the Indian calumet on the mantle; the trees bending under the weight of their fruit in the orchard; a grove of walnut trees in the back, a dovecote, and a beehive; “little Negroes whispering and laughing”; “Negroes with tables under trees preparing meal”; a “civil Negro major domo” spreading a tablecloth for dinner outside.
The man himself arrived “on horseback with dogs,” “a gun on his shoulder,” his grandson beside him “on a calico pony, hallowing and laughing.” Clark was, as Irving recorded him, a “fine, healthy, robust man—tall—about 50—perhaps more—his hair, originally light now grey—falling on his shoulders.” Over a “hut rustic” meal of fried chicken, bacon and grouse, roast beef, and potatoes, the two men sat in the grove where Clark had held countless councils with the Indians of the West, beneath the trees under which the delicate balance of reciprocity and extraction that had governed the world of the fur trade had been dismantled over the past two decades. Irving recorded little that Clark said about Indians, no more than a notation that “Gov. C. gives much excellent information concerning Indians.” Like the calumet in the corner, the codes of the frontier must have struck Irving as nostalgic reminders of a distant past. He recorded instead the story of how Clark came to emancipate his slave York, whom Clark sarcastically called “the hero of the Missouri expedition and adviser of the Indians.”37
Historians know more about York’s life than they do about most of the millions of other men, women, and children who lived as slaves in the United States. York had belonged to Clark’s father on the Virginia plantation where the two boys—the one a slave, the other the youngest son in a famous family—grew up together. York had accompanied Clark through his young adulthood, his career as an Indian fighter in Indiana, and famously on the expedition with Meriwether Lewis up the Missouri to the Rockies, across the Continental Divide, and down the Columbia River to the Pacific. Throughout the expedition that accounted for Clark’s renown, York had walked along the riverbanks with Clark and his native guide, Sacagawea, and her infant son, Jean-Baptiste. He had suffered the heat and mosquitoes of the Upper Midwest summer; the freezing, hungry winter at Fort Mandan; and the torturous, uncertain passage over the mountains. He had rowed a boat upstream against the current of the river and portaged the expedition’s goods around the Great Falls of the Missouri. He had cared for his owner when Clark was disabled for days on end by the irritable bowel that left him not only physically incapacitated but also unable to control the crew of mountain men allegedly under his command. York had seen his owner utterly dependent upon Indians for food and for the directions that guided him along the trail that today bears the white man’s name. York had been celebrated by Indians, who had never seen a man with skin so dark as his, who wondered at it, caressed it, and understood it as a sign of his vitality and his potency.38
Two years after the expedition, when William Clark traveled to Virginia to court his first wife and bring her back to St. Louis, York went with him. On the way back, the newlyweds stopped in Louisville, where Clark’s family had settled and kept York’s wife enslaved. When Clark began to prepare for the final leg of his homeward journey, York told his owner that he wanted to stay behind in Louisville with his own wife. Upon Clark’s departure for St. Louis to set up housekeeping, however, York and nine other Clark family slaves were forced to leave their own families behind. Many were hired out on their arrival in St. Louis. One, Scipio, was traded for a lot on the corner of Main and Spruce (near the riverfront) on which Clark built his in-town house. Their tears were stanched with violence. “I have been obliged [to] whip almost all my people,” Clark wrote to his brother shortly after his return to St. Louis, “and they are now beginning to think that it is best to do better and not Cry.” The few traces of York’s life in Clark’s correspondence after 1808 express mostly Clark’s bitterness toward and resentment of his onetime companion. In November 1808, he wrote that he was planning to sell York down the river to New Orleans or “hire [him] out to Some Severe Master,” if he did not “provorm his duty as a Slave.” A month later he wrote that Meriwether Lewis had convinced him to hire York out in Kentucky rather than selling him in Louisiana, and he advised his brother to find the slave a “severe master” who would make him grateful to return to Missouri and “give over that wife of his.”39
Although historians have disputed Clark’s veracity, the story he told Irving that afternoon was that he had emancipated York and provided him with “a large wagon and team of six horses to ply between Nashville and Richmond.” According to Clark, York had been too lazy and too stupid to be free. “He could not get up early enough in the morning—his horses were ill kept—two died—the others grew poor. He sold them and was cheated.” “‘Damn this Freedom,’” said York, according to Clark, “‘I have never had a happy day since I got it.’” The old man continued, talking about his former slave and the perils of Black freedom: “He determined to go back to his old master—set off for St. Louis, but was taken with the cholera in Tennessee and died.” Indeed, Clark declared, he had emancipated several slaves, and always the story had the same moral: “They all repented and wanted to come back.” They could not live without him.40
The story Clark told in the orchard that afternoon was not about his own dependence upon his slaves and his outsized pique when they did not “provorm” as he wished. Still less was it about the way the famous frontiersman had depended upon the kindness of strangers as he and his ragtag reconnaissance unit struggled across the mountains.41 It was instead a parable about personal responsibility—the life lessons drawn by a man oblivious to the way his own success had depended upon the actions of others. It was a white man’s moral, one of a kind increasingly likely to be drawn by white men who lived in the place St. Louis was becoming: a place—on the plains, in the Upper Midwest, and in the city itself—where the complicated web of cross-cutting relationships (familial, para-familial, parasitical; commercial, diplomatic, imperial) that had supported Clark’s famous journey west and his early career was subordinated to a racially fundamentalist understanding of the world (red, white, and black) and the politics of white settler imperialism and ethnic cleansing.42