I suppose there are two factors contributing to the obscurity of the Clark whose exploits won for America the rich Midwest:
First, the printing presses which ground out what became the history of the Revolution were east of the Alleghenies. Clark’s brilliant deeds on the other side of the mountains were so distant from the instruments of publicity that they might have been conducted on the moon.
The other reason for his obscurity is, ironically, one which should reflect all the greater glory on him: his victories were almost bloodless. He was an officer who, using surprise and bluff and mercy as his weapons, made great conquests without killing hundreds or thousands of human beings in the process. He secured the Northwest Territory in 1778 and 1779 without losing a single man in combat. With that kind of cleverness he assured his place as the hero history forgot.
It was exactly two hundred years after George Rogers Clark’s bloodless capture of Kaskaskia when I drove down to the Ohio to see the places where he spent his last years. I had just completed the first draft of this novel; I was spent; my imagination was charged with the events of his career. I live, as I have almost all my life, in the heart of what used to be the old Northwest Territory, so it was a short and beautiful trip down through the Southern Indiana hills to the Louisville area.
I wanted to go first to Clarksville, on the Indiana side of the Ohio River, to find the place known as Clark’s Point where the first chapter of this novel was set. I knew there was a stone monument there marking the site where his log house was thought to have been.
My map having no notation on it of a Clark Memorial, I stopped at a Shell service station and made inquiry of its proprietor, whose petroleum-smudged face gleamed oily in the July sunlight.
“A what? Memorial?”
“Yes. A marker that’s supposed to show where he lived in his old age.”
“Where who lived?”
“George Rogers Clark. The founder of this town, and of Louisville.”
“A monument, eh?” He seemed to be anxious to get back to draining crankcases.
“Yes. A stone marker.”
“Only monument I know of is over to Jeffersonville. Take this road, veer right till you hit Tenth Street, then go left. Somebody there could prob’ly tell ya. Might be the same guy.”
A succession of such encounters followed as I drove among shopping centers, roller rinks, mobile home parks, chain restaurants, filling stations, discount stores, and ice cream shops where men and women with listless eyes and overstuffed shorts waited in line to be served. I had talked with a dozen persons before I found a youth in an auto parts store who had gone to George Rogers Clark School and knew where the monument stood. He gave me directions to the place on the flood wall along Harrison Street where the marker stood. The sun was low when I reached the site.
The marker stood across the street from a row of modest residences. The evening was full of the snarling racket from a chain saw somewhere nearby. The words on the monument’s bronze plaque were dwarfed by the spray-painted declaration, “I hate Debbi.” Cars rolled by on the street; the river flowed below. Two tanned blonde girls rode by on bicycles, looking back to smile and giggle at the sight of this man standing on a flood wall gazing at a monument. The air was dirty. Upriver and downriver, great steel bridges spanned the Ohio. Smokestacks jutted into the horizon. Louisville’s tall, square downtown buildings crenellated the skyline to the south. High-tension lines spanned the river, like a string of Eiffel Towers. There was no Falls of the Ohio anymore, nor any Corn Island; locks and dams and erosion, I knew, had smoothed them out many decades ago. The wide river was slate-gray, fast and eddying. Trotline fishing floats were strung along the near shore. The roadside was strewn with empty beer six-packs. Traffic droned and whispered by; spillways of the hydroelectric plant across the river hissed and hushed. Rock music was coming from somewhere.
My imagination strained against all this to see the Ohio from Clark’s Point as the old soldier had seen it in my first chapter. I was about to give up. But the sun was descending just as I have described it; the broad river curved away south and west; the wooded ridges diminished into the hazy distance. And then, I’ll swear, a flock of martins swooped down past me toward the river. Yes, it was the same evening I had described from my imagination. The detritus of the twentieth century had faded momentarily to let me see through my real eyes what my imagination had seen through the failing eyes of that embittered old hero.
A panting black and tan beagle came by and explored me. A man and a woman in a pickup truck drove into a lovers’ lane among the horseweeds and parked and watched impatiently for me to leave.
The sun had set. The gray haze in the west held a fading rose stain. My pilgrimage had been a success after all. It was time for me to fold up my imagination and go.
Bibliography
Temple Bodley. George Rogers Clark—His Life and Public Services. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1926.
Allan W. Eckert. The Frontiersmen. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970.
William Hayden English. Conquest of the Country Northwest of the River Ohio. Indianapolis: The Bowen-Merrill Co., 1896.
The French, the Indians, and George Rogers Clark in the Illinois Country. Proceedings of Indiana American Revolution Bicentennial Symposium. The Indiana Historical Society, 1977.
James Alton James, ed. The George Rogers Clark Papers. Illinois Historical Collections, 1912.
———. The Life of George Rogers Clark. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928.
Ross F. Lockridge. George Rogers Clark: Pioneer Hero of the Old Northwest. World Book Co., 1927.
Fredrick Palmer. Clark of the Ohio. New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1930.
Milo M. Quaife, ed. The Capture of Old Vincennes. New York: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1928.
Dr. George Waller. The American Revolution in the West. Chicago: Nelson-Hall, Inc., 1976.
They came to North America 300 years before Columbus, mingling their blood, their legends, and their dreams with the New World’s Native peoples.
THE CHILDREN
OF FIRST MAN
by
James Alexander Thorn
Sweeping from the blood-soaked castles
of medieval Wales to the
landmark expedition of Lewis and Clark,
from virgin wilderness to native villages,
based on the legendary story of the
Madoc people.
Published by Ballantine Books.
Now in bookstores everywhere.
A Ballantine Book
Published by The Random House Publishing Group
Copyright © 1979 by James Alexander Thom
Map copyright © 1986 by Anita Karl and James Kemp
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published by Avon Books in 1979.
Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 85-91880
eISBN: 978-0-307-76316-7
v3.0
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