Robert Lee, a professor of U.S. history at Cambridge University, contends that early American explorer William Clark — famed for the Lewis and Clark Expedition — was involved in stealing 10.5 million acres of Native American land in what is now central and northern Missouri.
Lee worked for four years amassing evidence for a peer-reviewed article that was published Feb. 5 in a 130-year-old journal of early American history. His research sheds new light on how an 1816 map drawn by Clark helped legitimize an illegal land grab under the color of U.S. law and allowed for an influx of new white settlers.
Here’s what to know about the map, how it was discovered and how it changed the course of Missouri’s history.
Get the full story: ‘Scheming’ explorer William Clark drew a map for a massive land grab, stealing Native American land
Lee contends that sometime in 1815 or 1816, while Clark was serving as Missouri Territory governor, he drew a rough map that fudged a key boundary line between the U.S. and the Osage, Sauk, Meskwaki and Iowa peoples who were then living in and around the Missouri River valley.
Clark then sent the map — unsigned and undated — as an enclosure with a letter to his superiors in Washington, D.C.
Lee cites several reasons in arguing the map was Clark’s work, including quirky symbols attributed to Clark and that he was a “master misspeller” who, for example, always rendered “Shawnee” as “Showonee.”
Roughly half a decade before Missouri was admitted to the Union as a state, the United States expropriated 10.5 million acres of land north of the Missouri River, an area that now contains all or part of 32 Missouri counties. The acreage includes present-day Columbia, North Kansas City, Kirksville and Chillicothe.
Communities of Sauk, Meskwaki and Iowa people who lived on those lands in the early 1800s were soon displaced by a flood of white settlers, many of them slaveholders.
Clark’s role in securing the land has long been known. Lee said his research focuses on the manipulation of the boundary after Clark had tried (and failed) to purchase the desired territory from its actual owners: the Sauk, Meskwaki, and Iowa peoples.
The map Clark drew to justify U.S. intervention was only recently discovered by Lee, who said he found it in 2018 while scrolling through endless microfilm reels in the National Archives while working as a Harvard University research fellow.
“Anyone who has worked on a microfilm project knows this drill,” Lee wrote for his new journal article. “Manuscripts scroll by for hours that turn into weeks, which is incredibly tedious, until it is not.”
Lee told the News-Leader, “I knew this map was significant from the moment I laid eyes on it because I was familiar with the Osage treaty of 1808, which the map depicts, and had already found evidence of Clark’s boundary manipulation, which took place in 1815 and 1816.”
Lee believes that at some point in the 19th century, Clark’s 1816 map was separated from a letter that accompanied it to the War Department, though “it’s impossible to tell for sure,” he said. The collection that includes the map is usually only accessible to researchers. It contains tens of thousands of letters and enclosures, reproduced on 317 reels of microfilm.
“Military cartographers and topographical engineers had access to these old files with tens of thousands of letters,” Lee said, “many with map enclosures, and would sometimes riffle through the old maps for whatever they were working on. They weren’t thinking about future historians wanting to consult this stuff.”
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Clark’s 1816 map played a role in shaping the political geography of the state of Missouri, Lee said.
The influx of settlers promoted slavery and aided in creating the conditions that later caused the Missouri Compromise between “slave states” and “free states” ahead of the Civil War, he argues.
Had Clark’s plan failed, Lee said, “it’s unlikely this would have stopped slavery from becoming entrenched in Missouri, but it’s likely the Missouri Crisis over slavery’s expansion would simply not have happened as we know it.”
For Native Americans, the price of the expansion was high.
The Iowa tribe alone numbered about 4,000 in the Missouri River valley at the time of the map’s drawing, according to Lance Foster, vice-chair of the Iowa Tribe of the Iowa Reservation of Kansas and Nebraska.
After Iowas were removed from the Missouri River valley, they were pushed into northwest Missouri. In 1836, Foster said, they were pushed entirely out of Missouri into Kansas. By 1900, they nearly died out.
Foster said Lee’s work is good news for Iowas. “We’re really happy that more of the story has been uncovered by (Lee’s) hard work and finding that map,” he said. “And we just know there’s more out there to be found, just like he noted in the article. Maybe someday we’ll meet him and shake his hand.”
Reach News-Leader reporter Gregory Holman by emailing [email protected]. On Twitter, find him at @GregHolmanNL. Please consider subscribing to support vital local journalism.
