The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West
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Although his mother was terrified of the natives, Malcolm evinced sincere interest in them from an early age, captured nicely in a story recounted by his sister. One morning during the winter of 1825–26, the two children attempted to track a wounded wolf that had preyed for some time on their family’s livestock and pets but that had escaped the steel trap the siblings had set near the barn. After following the wolf’s bloody trail for more than a mile, they were about to give up the chase when they came across an Ojibwa boy, whom Malcolm, speaking in the Indian tongue, promised to reward if he could catch the animal and bring it to them at the fort. The children were delighted when the Indian arrived at the garrison a few hours later with the haggard wolf, and they treated their guest to “a royal breakfast.”20
Not all encounters with natives yielded such fond memories, however. Indeed, Malcolm, Charlotte, and other children of the post witnessed an infamous episode in the spring of 1827 that haunted the Clarke siblings ever after. In late May a band of Ojibwas pitched their lodges near Fort Snelling, having come to trade maple syrup and other goods with the soldiers. A few days later they were joined in camp by a party of Sioux, the apparent comity a result of the Treaty of Prairie du Chien, a pact signed in 1825 that established discrete hunting grounds for the tribes. The mixed group spent the evening sharing food and passing the pipe, trading stories about hunting and warfare. When the festivities ended around nine o’clock on 28 May, the Sioux bid their hosts goodbye, walked a few paces, but then turned and fired into the teepees, killing two Ojibwas and wounding six others. Charlotte was particularly affected by one of the injured, a young girl just a year or two her senior who lingered in agony for a few days before expiring.21
Mortified that such a slaughter should take place in the shadows of his post and with friendly Indians as the victims, Colonel Snelling ordered the capture of the perpetrators, and the next morning two of the guilty were hauled before him. The pair were then tied together and forced to run the gantlet on the prairie near the fort, an exercise in which freedom was assured to those among the condemned who managed to outrun the bullets of a nearby firing squad. Both men were immediately cut down by the Ojibwas, and their bodies dismembered. A few days later, the Sioux delivered the principal offenders, insisting that—in the unlikely event that the Ojibwas declined—they would kill the two men themselves because of the dishonor they had brought upon the Dakotas. The murderers were sentenced to the same fate, but took the news differently: one of them, known as Split Upper Lip, wept and pled for mercy; but the other, a tall and handsome warrior called Little Six, rebuked his companion and calmly gave away his worldly possessions in preparation for death.
As in the first execution, the convicted men were forced to run the gantlet, but this time the children at the fort were heartbroken when they recognized Little Six as one of the accused, for he had become a favorite visitor to the post, often distributing gifts to the youngsters. Six decades later, Charlotte still trembled at the memory of that day, when she watched with horror as the shackled men struck out across the field, headed for a line of trees representing freedom and from which their tribesmen shouted encouragement. She and her peers briefly experienced hope, when, in a stroke of luck, the bullet that struck down Split Upper Lip severed the cord binding him to Little Six, who lurched forward toward safety. “But the [Ojibwas] were cool in their vengeance,” and after calmly reloading their rifles they shot him down just before he reached the copse, reducing the children to tears.22
As it turned out, the execution itself was merely a prelude to greater horrors. Charlotte vividly recalled that the corpses were dragged to the top of a nearby hill and scalped, with the gory prizes presented as a souvenir to an Ojibwa headman. Indian women and children then descended upon the fallen Sioux, tearing open their bodies and drinking handfuls of blood before leaving the carcasses to rot in the afternoon sun. That night, as the corpses were hurled into the Mississippi, Malcolm and Charlotte lay awake in bed, “awe-struck and quiet,” lamenting the fate of their cherished Little Six and trying to imagine what the people of New Orleans would make of the desecrated bodies if they managed to float that far downriver.23
Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve, 1899. Clarke’s younger sister, Charlotte, pictured here at the age of eighty, witnessed with her brother the killing of two Sioux Indians forced to run the gantlet at Fort Snelling in 1827. Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society.
Notwithstanding such occasional brutality, the eight years the Clarkes spent at Fort Snelling were essentially happy ones. Their stay there ended swiftly, however, in the summer of 1827 when Nathan, by then a captain, and several companies were sent downriver to Wisconsin to quell an insurrection by the Winnebagos. It was the last time the family would ever be together at Fort Snelling. Years later, after many intervening moves, Charlotte relocated to St. Paul and spent much of her adult life there. In her autobiography, she recalled that whenever she passed the spot near the fort (which was eventually engulfed by the Twin Cities) where her family had bidden farewell to their friends in 1827, “a tender, reverential awe steals over me, as when standing by the grave of a friend long buried.”24
ON AN APRIL DAY in 1834, Malcolm and Charlotte Clarke embarked with their father on a trip to the East Coast, a voyage that epitomized the transportation revolution that remade America in the early years of the nineteenth century. The first leg of their journey began at Fort Winnebago and involved an open boat crowded with soldiers and civilians and buffeted by wind and rain as it traveled down the Fox River to Fort Howard, located at the southern end of Green Bay. There the Clarkes boarded a schooner that ferried them across Lake Michigan, through the Straits of Mackinac, down Lake Huron, and up Lake Erie to Buffalo, where they marveled at the sight of Niagara Falls. No less impressive to Charlotte than the “hoary, magnificent” cataract were the modern conveyances they used to complete the last segment of the trip: the new Erie Canal, the Albany and Schenectady Railroad, one of the nation’s first lines, and finally a steamboat, which carried them down the Hudson River to West Point.25
Though thrilling to the children, the trip was long, requiring more than a month’s time. And yet the journey from the Old Northwest to the U.S. Military Academy was simpler for Nathan Clarke than getting his son admitted to the school in the first place. Having received no extended education of his own, Captain Clarke had ascended through the military ranks at a slow and frustrating pace, and he resolved early on that his only boy would not suffer the same disadvantages. Thus he initiated a campaign—which started long before his son had reached sixteen, the minimum age for entry at the USMA—to secure a berth for Malcolm at West Point. Despite Captain Clarke’s distinguished record of service in the U.S. Army, he nevertheless faced a daunting task, given the intense competition for the few seats in each class.
Clarke sensed an opportunity to advance his son’s candidacy in the summer of 1831 when President Andrew Jackson appointed Lewis Cass as his secretary of war. Clarke knew both men well: he and Cass had been stationed together at Fort Detroit fifteen years earlier, and then in 1828–29 Clarke had served as a recruiting officer in Nashville, Tennessee, where he met Jackson and his adored wife, Rachel, in the heady days between Old Hickory’s election and his departure for Washington, D.C. The couple left quite an impression on the Clarke children. Young Charlotte provided one of the most famous and oft-invoked descriptions of the homely Mrs. Jackson, whom she recalled as “a coarse-looking, stout little old woman, whom you might easily mistake for his washerwoman.”. Doubtless she paled by comparison with her husband, remembered by Charlotte for his “keen, searching eyes, iron-gray hair … [and] a face somewhat furrowed by care and time.”26
In any event, heartened by Cass’s appointment, Clarke wrote his old friend in December of 1831 to register Malcolm as an applicant for the class of 1837, but nothing materialized. Clarke tried again in the summer of 1833, to no avail. Driven to desperation, he then took a three-month leave of absence in the spring of 183
4 and journeyed from his post in Wisconsin to New York in order to lodge a personal appeal. In the end, it took the direct intervention of General Winfield Scott, whom Captain Clarke had met years earlier at Fort Snelling and who was a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Black Hawk War, to place his son in the class of 1838.27 Malcolm enrolled just a few days shy of his seventeenth birthday. Among his fellow plebes was a handsome French Louisianan named P. G. T. Beauregard, who later graduated third in the class and became notorious when he accepted the surrender of Fort Sumter at the start of the Civil War and led Confederate troops to victory in the First Battle of Bull Run.
U.S. Military Academy. After his father pulled every conceivable string to have him admitted, Malcolm Clarke had a brief and tumultuous career at West Point, marked by fighting and indifferent academic performance and ending in expulsion. Courtesy of the U.S. Military Academy Archives, Stockbridge Collection.
Malcolm, of course, enjoyed a much shorter stay at the USMA. Perhaps his only comfort was that his father did not have to endure the debacle of his expulsion. Exhausted by two decades of military service and constant relocations throughout the Old Northwest, Nathan in the autumn of 1835 suffered an undisclosed illness and died the next February at Fort Winnebago, leaving his family “crushed and desolate.” Charlotte was at his side, along with her fiancé, Horatio Van Cleve, a lieutenant in the Fifth U.S. Infantry and a West Point graduate, class of 1831. On his deathbed, Nathan Clarke must have found solace in the belief that his two eldest children had secured the sort of exalted positions in military society that had eluded him in his own career. And so it was at least with Charlotte, whose husband won renown as a general in the Union Army during the Civil War and later served as the adjutant general of Minnesota. Malcolm would follow another path.28
AS NATHAN CLARKE slipped away, momentous events were occurring some one thousand miles to the south, in Texas. The preceding October a bitter conflict had erupted there between the Mexican government and the Anglos it had invited to settle in the northern portion of their republic over the past decade and a half. At first, federal officials in Mexico City hoped that these newcomers would provide a buffer between raiding Indians on the southern Plains and residents of the Mexican interior. Yet the Anglos soon chafed under Mexican rule, especially after President Antonio López de Santa Anna attempted to exert greater control over outlying regions of the country, including the province of Coahuila y Tejas. When Mexican troops tried to seize the cannon at the small southern Texas hamlet of Gonzales on 2 October 1835, the Anglo residents drove them off, sparking the Texas Revolution.29
Word of the conflict spread quickly to the United States and exerted an almost centripetal pull on adventuresome young men who headed off to join the fray. Many hailed from Tennessee, none more famous than Davy Crockett. The forty-nine-year-old politician and frontiersman was already celebrated as a legend in his own time, much like Buffalo Bill Cody later in the nineteenth century; both were products of relentless self-promotion and the fabrication of tall tales, but they also had legitimate ability in the outdoors. Following a defeat in his bid for reelection to the House of Representatives in 1834, Crockett allegedly told his constituents that they could “go to hell” while he went to Texas.30 His celebrity reached untold heights when he and the approximately 180 defenders of the Alamo, a small fortified mission in the sleepy town of San Antonio, were killed by Mexican troops on 6 March 1836, following a two-week siege.
Also from the Volunteer State was Crockett’s good friend Sam Houston, former governor of Tennessee and one of Andrew Jackson’s favorite protégés. Houston had fled Nashville in 1829 following the embarrassing breakup of his short first marriage, hounded by accusations of reprobate personal conduct. After recuperating from his divorce among Cherokee friends in what is now Oklahoma, Houston made his way to Texas in 1832 and soon became involved in the Anglo struggle against Mexico. At a convention organized to declare the independence of Texas held on 2 March 1836, four days before the fall of the Alamo, Houston was named commander in chief of the Texas army. Seven weeks later “the Raven,” as the Cherokees called him, brought an unlikely but decisive end to the war by leading his ragtag troops in a rout of Santa Anna’s forces at the Battle of San Jacinto in eastern Texas.31
As it is for most men who came to Texas during the chaotic period of the revolution and its aftermath, it is difficult to fix with certainty when and how Malcolm Clarke arrived. One thing is sure: he did not see any of the fighting, for at the time that Sam Houston’s men swarmed the battlefield at San Jacinto with their cries of “Remember the Alamo!” Clarke was finishing his second year at the USMA.32 The first indication of his presence in Texas is a payment claim for service in the revolutionary army for a period from August to December 1837, suggesting an arrival sometime in the summer of that year.33 This seems plausible considering that, after his expulsion, Clarke probably visited his widowed mother in Cincinnati (a good bet, given the Queen City’s location on an obvious river route from West Point to Texas), before making his way down the Mississippi to New Orleans and then across the Gulf of Mexico to Galveston.34
Though he was twenty years old and widely traveled, nothing had prepared Malcolm Clarke for what he saw upon his arrival in the new Lone Star Republic. With the end of hostilities, most of the volunteers—heavily armed, shiftless young men—roamed the towns and countryside, and with little to do they turned to gambling, drinking, and much worse. Given this unpromising demographic, President Sam Houston and his military leaders were doubtless pleased to fill the ranks of their professional army with more-seasoned soldiers like Clarke, which perhaps explains how Clarke, despite his late appearance on the scene and total lack of combat experience, was made a captain. Though additional details of his service are unknown (for instance, which company he commanded), he was likely deployed in eastern Texas, protecting the settlements there as well as the state capital at Houston from Indians and desperadoes.
While in Texas, as if out of a scene from a novel, Clarke seems to have encountered his old West Point nemesis, Lindsay Hagler, whose tenure at the USMA had been even shorter than his own (no surprise, perhaps, given Hagler’s eighty-nine demerits during the 1834–35 school year; Clarke had less than a third that number).35 Enlisting as a captain in the Texas army in June 1836, Hagler served through the end of the following year and spent at least some of his time recruiting for the cause in the United States. According to an account offered by Clarke’s sister Charlotte, one day the two men found themselves on the same stretch of lonely road, riding in opposite directions. Clarke, who carried two pistols, had fired earlier at a prairie hen, but could not remember which gun he had discharged. Not wanting Hagler to see him fumbling with his weapon, a sure sign of cowardice, Clarke simply placed his hand on one of the revolvers and stared coolly at his enemy. The two passed each other without a word, though Clarke tensed in anticipation of a shot to the back (he expected nothing less from the craven southerner). Hagler remained in Texas and later served three terms in the state’s house of representatives, but died in 1846 during a street brawl in the small town of Goliad.36
Clarke, however, did not linger in Texas. After mustering out of the army in December 1837, he signed on for a short stint as a private in the Houston Volunteer Guards, a unit composed mostly of outlaws under the command of Reuben Ross, a veteran of the Texas Revolution. Although his military service made him eligible for a land grant in the new republic, by the end of 1838 Clarke had returned to the United States, having determined to fulfill his father’s wish that he obtain a commission in the U.S. Army.37 With the help of a Missouri congressman named John Miller (who may have taken an interest in Malcolm’s case because, like Nathan Clarke, Miller was a veteran of the War of 1812), Malcolm received an invitation to interview with the army’s board of examiners. Before such a meeting could take place, however, Secretary of War Joel Poinsett wrote Miller an apologetic note on 31 December 1838 to explain that it was all a mistake: Clarke’s expulsion fro
m West Point rendered him ineligible for further service.38
As the New Year began, Malcolm Clarke surveyed the wreckage of his life: no job, no property, not even a family of his own. Like Sam Houston and Davy Crockett before him, he looked to the West for a new start, but this time he set his sights far beyond Texas.
To the Upper Missouri
In 1843 the painter and naturalist John James Audubon traveled up the Missouri River with his eldest son, Victor, for research that led ultimately to his final published work, The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. Having just issued the octavo edition of his celebrated Birds of America the year before, the fifty-eight-year-old Audubon was at the height of his fame, renowned throughout Europe and the United States for the precision and beauty of his work. With dark eyes, flowing gray hair, and a matted beard, Audubon looked every bit the quintessential U.S. frontiersman. He thus fit in nicely at Fort Union when he and his party arrived in June. Alexander Culbertson gave them a warm welcome there. Over the next two months, the artist hunted, sketched, and even executed portraits of Culbertson and his wife, Natawista, all of which he meticulously described in his journal.
Fort Union and its environs fascinated Audubon; one day in mid-July proved particularly memorable. Following an afternoon meal, the painter watched from the fort as the Culbertsons and several others—including Owen McKenzie, son of the post’s legendary former bourgeois, and Lewis Squires, Audubon’s New York neighbor and personal secretary—put on Indian dress and rode out onto the prairie. The riders thrilled the audience with a show of equestrian skill, which ended abruptly when a “fine Wolf” trotted into view. All at once, the mounted party gave chase to the animal, each member hoping to claim it as a trophy. Though a crack shot with a gun, McKenzie let fly with an arrow instead and missed, but Culbertson overtook the terrified creature and dropped it with a blast from his musket. The group then ran their horses at full gallop all the way back to the gates of the fort, despite the blazing summer heat. While Audubon was pleased that Squires had held his own with the others, he confessed to his journal that the paint Natawista had applied to his assistant’s face gave him the appearance of “a being from the infernal regions.”39