Empty Spaces

Taking down statues of "Indian fighters" and "frontiersmen" raises new questions.

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The other day in Charlottesville, Virginia, a statue of George Rogers Clark was removed, and many people probably said “George Who Who?” (or “Who Who Clark?”). Why the statue came down, though—that can be figured out simply by looking at it, in the photo above.

The inscription reads “Conqueror of the Northwest.” That’s old-school blunt, and the image shows Clark, at the head of a militia, bluntly riding down on indigenous inhabitants of the Northwest Territory, the region north of the Ohio River, out to the Mississippi and up to Canada. Or it would be blunt, if Clark hadn’t basically failed to conquer the Northwest. In the process of failing, he did make war on indigenous nations, on behalf of both Virginia and the United States, and enjoyed certain qualified successes that made him a founding hero of Virginia for a long time.

It's the kind of adventure that used to be popular. At only nineteen, the youth lit out from Charlottesville, where he grew up, for the village of Pittsburgh at the headwaters of the Ohio River, then floated downstream to the big region known as Kentucky, on Virginia’s western border and the Ohio’s southern shore. Kentucky had long been managed as a hunting ground by, among others, Shawnee living north of the river, in what were known by Europeans as the Ohio and Illinois countries. Now the whole region, north and south of the river, was being encroached on by American real-estate speculators encouraging floods of white settlement. The Shawnee didn’t like it, but Clark, with others of his kind, thrilled to the opportunities for vast personal gain in the expansion of Virginia.

So as a captain in the Virginia militia, he soon joined a war of expansion. The war was started by the colony’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, operating on behalf of his upscale Virginia allies in real-estate speculation—including George Washington and Patrick Henry—and in opposition to royal policy, with two goals: kick Pennsylvania out of the Ohio headwaters; suppress the Shawnee down the river. Clark, charismatic, young, and supremely confident, impressed both his superiors and elder Kentucky men like Daniel Boone. When the anti-Shawnee aspect of Dunmore’s war overlapped, weirdly enough, with the thirteen colonies’ decision to fight British colonial government as a whole—in part because that government was restraining Americans’ speculations in the Ohio Valley—Clark persuaded Patrick Henry, now the revolutionary governor of Virginia, and now his old partner Dunmore’s bitterest enemy, to claim Kentucky formally for the newly independent state. Then, having gotten Henry’s permission to raise troops and lead militia, Clark crossed the river from Kentucky into the Ohio and Illinois countries, fighting the Shawnee and Miami, and their allies the British, and seizing two British forts in the southern part of the region.

Those forts had been thinly staffed, weakly defended, even falling apart. The British had pursued a policy of military withdrawal from the West because who needed the colonial headaches. Seizing the forts shouldn’t have been all that impressive, but Clark, super-impressed, officially made a present of them to the Continental Congress, in what was really a message sent from Patrick Henry to the Congress to say that his state would have military autonomy in the western regions it claimed. To that end, Clark vowed to seize Fort Detroit too. But it was far away, at the very top of the region. And unlike the southern forts, it was well defended. Long story short: the British wouldn’t evacuate Detroit until 1796.

Clark did go on fighting the indigenous nations of what the U.S. thought of as the American West, which is now the Midwest and the upper and western South. After British surrender in 1783, he became one of the U.S. officials charged with informing those indigenous nations that they, too, had surrendered, by default, and handing them a long list of everything they must now sign over to the U.S. as a consequence. The nations didn’t see it that way. To them, the events that Americans called the War of Independence amounted to only the most recent phase in a struggle against American encroachment that had been going on since 1763. The U.S. had defeated the British—not them. So the long war went on, and it would go on and on, change locations and disputants, for more than another century as the U.S. pursued the expansionist, developmental gains that had brought it into being in the first place through the efforts of men like George Rogers Clark.

For his service, the U.S. gave Clark land grants in the region. He blasted through his holdings, started drinking hard, and died poor in Kentucky in 1818.

If we want to stop celebrating and glorifying the militant settler type—the “Indian fighter,” long fabled in story, song, and monument—then getting rid of a statue of George Rogers Clark, in the act of attacking Native people, makes all kinds of sense. I mean, even monuments to Confederate leaders and soldiers don’t show them in the act of enforcing enslaved black labor (the Daughters of the Confederacy were trying to blur that stuff out!). Celebrating U.S. victories over indigenous nations has operated on levels other than those of the Lost Cause memorials that assert white supremacy even while trying to hide the real purposes of the Confederacy and the real life of a romanticized antebellum South. The real purposes of the Indian Wars aren't hidden. Frontiersmen like Clark are frankly depicted in violent action against the enemy, with native fighters beaten by or nobly allied with the white hero, or both.

That stark difference in the two kinds of depictions causes some weird strains in our new public framework for celebrating statues’ removal. The “reckoning” mentality of the moment likes to gang the two kinds together—and maybe the two peoples, black and indigenous?—under the single, restorative purpose of white confrontation with and rectification of bad truths. The old “but where do you draw the line?!” on removal thing can therefore crop up pretty hard, because regarding U.S. invasions, the question can’t be resolved with resort to the simple formula applied to Confederate monuments, which goes something like: “We draw the line at glorifying traitors to our country.”

Clark, Boone, and others like them were hardly traitors to our country. They were the frontline fighters against people whose land our country wanted and whose conquest is inextricable from the cause of American Revolution, of American independence, of American nationhood. Those men were among the makers of our country, and yet some far better-known makers of our country, whose monuments don’t seem likely to come down any time soon, were at least as important as George Rogers Clark to conquering what became the Midwest. Clark worked under the aegis of Patrick Henry, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson, to name three of the famous founders whose involvement in taking the American West from its inhabitants, a goal at once personal and national, made them responsible at levels far higher than Clark’s.

Imagining ourselves capable of processing that contradiction can lead to some fantastical statements. Here’s a tweet kvelling over the removal of the Clark statue: “The last of Charlottesville's two monuments to settler colonialism & the conquest of Native American nations is being removed right now.” But Charlottesville of course has a statue of Jefferson, who gave Clark his orders for attacking the Shawnee, Miami, and others. “Nothing is more desirable,” said Jefferson, “than the total suppression of savage insolence and cruelties.” Jefferson told Clark that the goal was “extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes,” and he looked to a big-picture future. “The same world,” he reminded his subordinate, “will scarcely do for them and us.”

When it came to what’s called settler colonialism, Jefferson’s imagination was characteristically vast. Not long after the Revolution, he asked Clark whether he’d like to lead an expedition to explore Virginia’s supposed sea-to-sea land claims as far as the Pacific Ocean (wherever that might have been—nobody in Virginia knew for sure). That expedition stayed on Jefferson’s mind. As president, with land claims now shifted to the U.S., he assigned the job to Clark’s younger brother William. A statue of William Clark and his partner in the expedition, Meriwether Lewis—with a subservient Sacajawea, their Native guide—has also just been removed from Charlottesville. Jefferson, the mastermind, still stands.

It’s true that statues of Jefferson, Washington, and others who made the policies and gave the orders for expansion and conquest don’t depict them in the physical act of subordinating Native people. It’s also true that attacking the Shawnee and the Miami (and the British) is pretty much all that George Rogers Clark did; the big guys did other important stuff. Still, removing the statues of the Brothers Clark clearly doesn’t reflect any real coming-to-terms with founding U.S. forces behind the white conquest of the American West. Removal only shifts blame to the on-the-ground guys and away from the most powerful beneficiaries, who sat behind the desks and signed the paperwork and made the money.

I’m not saying there’s any good resolution to the contradiction I'm pointing to. But instead of a lot of fake reasons for why it supposedly isn’t a contradiction, I’d like to hear somebody say, “Look. Bill. We’re just not going to take down monuments to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Nor are we about to take down statues of Grant and Sherman and, of all people, Lincoln, despite their policy of extermination on the Plains. We take down Clark because we can. Because nobody cares about him. Because he’s just not that big a deal.”

I’d shrug. If somebody's got to be the fall guy, who better than George Rogers Clark?

I’ll close with a photo of the empty space left by his statue. Maybe it should stay empty. That might be a fitting memorial to the erasure of certain memories that we have no no way of confronting in our public spaces, despite having, supposedly, the very best of intentions.

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Further Reading

My most recent book, Autumn of the Black Snake, tells the story of the war of conquest carried out by Washington, Jefferson, Knox, Hamilton, Anthony Wayne, George Rogers Clark, and other founders against Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, and the most successful Native confederation in our history, for the territory that would become the industrial Midwest. It was quite a thing.

Thomas Jefferson to George Rogers Clark.

And Clark to Jefferson.

A quick story on the removal of the Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea statue.

For some time now I’ve had my eye on statues and memorials to Mad Anthony, a major character in my book linked above. This substantial piece by New York Times reporter Charlie Savage on battles in the city council of Fort Wayne, Indiana, among other things, gives a lot of interesting context.