William Clark, Map of Extent of Settlement in Mississippi Valley (1816). (Nationwide Archives and Data Administration, Washington, D.C.)
An archival discovery has revealed a uncommon map in Washington D.C. that exhibits American explorer William Clark was behind an enormous land seize from Indigenous nations and broke the peace treaty with Nice Britain to do it.
The map, which was painstakingly decoded, re-dated and examined by College of Cambridge historian Robert Lee within the U.Okay., exposes Clark’s position in a Nineteenth-century land seize, which robbed Indigenous peoples of territory the dimensions of Switzerland in what's now Missouri, and fuelled the growth of slavery.
Whereas doing analysis with some microfilm from the Nationwide Archives and Data Administration in Washington, D.C., Lee noticed a map filed beneath the title “Captain Eli B. Clemson” that didn't match the essential geography of the accepted model of occasions in regards to the treaty of 1808 generally often known as the “Osage Treaty”.
The Treaty of Fort Clark was signed at Fort Osage in November of 1808 the place the Osage Nation ceded all of the land east of the fort in Missouri and north of the Arkansas River to america. The Osage signed seven treaties with the U.S. between 1808 and 1839.
In a brand new examine printed within the journal William and Mary Quarterly, Lee posits that the map was drawn by Clark in 1816, who was then governor of the Missouri Territory, and exhibits how he stole 10.5 million acres of Sauk, Meskwaki and Iowa Indigenous territory and added it onto america after the Warfare of 1812 by reinterpreting the Osage Treaty.
This land seizure violated the Treaty of Ghent with Nice Britain, led to slave-holding emigrants flocking to the territory, and reshaped Missouri’s political boundaries.
“This astonishing map exhibits how William Clark leveraged the U.S.–Indian treaty system to advertise settler supremacy in america at a time when he’s been praised for making an attempt to guard Indigenous land from squatters. Now we will see simply how scheming and disingenuous he actually was,” Lee stated in a information launch.
The unsigned, undated map is sketched in ink and pencil, and accommodates about 50 named options, roughly half of that are rivers. The remainder embody cities and settlements, mines, salt licks, springs, and boundary traces. There are additionally greater than 150 unnamed options, most of that are unidentified settlements alongside nondescript streams.
Lee argues that the map is Clark’s 1816 map, which earlier historian Clarence Edwin Carter declared lacking in 1951.
The map’s type, spelling and symbols all level to Clark, particularly a line between the Arkansas and Purple rivers, which Clark described within the 1816 letter that accompanied the map earlier than the 2 obtained separated, in keeping with the discharge.
Lee was capable of decode that Clark personally orchestrated the scheme to steal half of what's at present the state of Missouri from its Indigenous house owners.
“This stray line seems just like the cartographic equal of a Freudian slip. It’s the closest factor we now have to an admission in Clark’s personal hand that he dispossessed the Sauks, Meskwakis, and Iowas of an enormous tract of land to hasten settler supremacy in Missouri,” Lee stated within the launch. “Clark didn’t talk about this plan in his 1816 letter and it stays largely unknown at present regardless of taking part in an integral half in Missouri’s colonization.”
In 1815, after failing to buy land north of the Missouri River from the Sauks, Meskwakis and Iowas, Clark withdrew recognition of their possession and asserted by proclamation that america had already purchased this area from the Osage by the treaty in 1808.
By redrawing a treaty line proper after the Warfare of 1812 — that unlabelled line on the map — Clark secured an invasive squatter settlement and added hundreds of thousands of acres to the U.S. public area in violation of the Treaty of Ghent, and he intentionally ignored official orders to revive prewar Indigenous boundaries.
“A naïve interpretation would possibly say he discovered an enormous loophole within the Treaty of Ghent. A practical one would say he broke it to grab a landmass triple the dimensions of Connecticut,” Lee stated.
The stolen land attracted many slaveholders and emigrants, which pushed out generations of Indigenous nations within the space. Over the course of his profession, Clark is now thought to have hyperlinks to the taking of 419 million acres of Indigenous land.
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