William Clark Chapter 3 Summary

Jones’ William Clark… chapter 3 starts with George Rogers Clark (GRC) declining Jefferson’s offer to lead a military excursion westward, suggesting that a few men could sufficiently do the job. Jones then writes of the Clark family’s belated travels across the Appalachians and down the dangerous Monongahela and Ohio rivers before landing outside Louisville and building a farm. He then writes about more problems with Indians, prompting GRC to lead an unsuccessful military campaign after a forced peace treaty was disregarded by non-invested tribes. William Clark is also written about: his joining of and exploits in the Kentucky militia, his journalizing of these exploits and the areas they took him, his self-taught education and naturalistic writings, and his commissioning as a lieutenant in the newly reformed, post-St. Clair’s Defeat US Army. Clark’s early duties as a lieutenant, Jones writes, involved ferrying soldiers and supplies around western outposts and forts, and even to the Chickasaw Indian tribe once. Within a few years, Clark became quartermaster of one of the four Sub-Legions of the US Army, joining the campaign into northern Indian lands that culminated in the Battle of Fallen Timbers, the final and deciding battle in the Northwest Indian War. Jones then recounts General Anthony Wayne’s successful
Jones recounts the atrocities, hardships, and motives of both the Indians and the Americans in a far more balanced manner than either Zinn or S&A. He also doesn’t shy away from or overemphasize facts for the sake of pushing an agenda, though that maybe just as much to do with having to keep a more narrow focus on biographical material as it does with not advocating a sociopolitical agenda. As equally enjoyable is the privilege I get to learn about a man whose influence on the shaping of America extended beyond his trek across the areas west of the