Wilderness Journey: the Life of William Clark/William Clark and the Shaping of the West

Abstract

Wilderness Journey: The Life of William Clark. By William E. Foley. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004. Pp. xiv, 326. Preface, acknowledgments, epilogue, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.) William Clark and the Shaping of the West. By Landon Y. Jones. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. Pp. xi, 394. Maps, prologue, notes, bibliography, acknowledgments, index. $25.00.) This assignment looked like an easy day at the office: two biographies of the soldier, explorer, businessman, and administrator William Clark, one by William Foley, who brings to the project a lifetime of scholarship on frontier zones, the other by Landon Jones, former managing editor of People magazine. Praise the first for its careful scholarship, trash the second for popularizing, case closed, work done, early lunch? No. Jones, it turns out, has been doing People as a day job, spending his off hours as a scholar of the early national period. And while this may irk the lazy reviewer, to readers it is fine news, for the bicentennial of the Louisiana Purchase now becomes the occasion for not one but two very strong studies of an individual whose life is well worth the time. It must be said first, however, that most readers will find that time passing much more enjoyably in the company of Jones. With Foley, the war against cliche has lost a skirmish. Deaf ears get turned, or get lent sympathetically; people don't die of disease if they can succumb to its ravages; intents never travels without purposes-the reader starts to search and count (and to wonder what it is that an editor does). Jones's prose gets a boost by comparison, but it is plenty good on its own. His talent for characterization is striking. A short paragraph on Nicholas Biddle, for example, conveys the depth of the man who took over the journals of the overland expedition. When Jones discovers in the minor figure Judge John B. Lucas not only an angry man but a brilliantly vituperative one, he knows to give him room to lambaste Clark, creating for the reader a better feel for both of them. In Foley's hands, Clark's world has only people; Jones gives it a cast. Much of this he does on his own, but when he finds help he uses it, and with the superb observers passing through the landscapes of Clark's life-Charles Dickens, Washington Irving, Alexis Tocqueville, among others-there is much help available. And Jones doesn't limit himself to the big names. Henry Marie Brackenridge, small stuff beside Dickens, certainly, but a fine journal keeper, delights in the image of the conniving entrepreneurial sharpie Manuel Lisa out on the Missouri reading Don Quixote, and, through Jones, the reader does too. But Foley sticks to his work, and his conventionality is often a strength. Though Clark is nineteen years old by the second chapter of both books, Jones more or less gives birth to him at that age, having used his first chapter to introduce William's famous older brother, George, the hero-turned-drunken-burden who staggers constantly, disastrously, in and out of his younger brother's life. Here Foley's more cradle-to-grave approach offers more information, following William's childhood as thoroughly as the documentation will allow. This is useful for at least two reasons. First, it gives one a chance to appreciate how thickly webbed the Clark family was, and how this affected William throughout his life. (Among other things, it explains as certainly nothing else can what kept William at any number of points from floating brother George down the Ohio in a coffin.) Second, it offers much material on Clark's education. That the spelling lessons didn't take is one of the best-known facts about the man, but with the rest he was studious and retentive, and in analyzing it Foley lays a good base for later presentations of the remarkable range of William's talents. Given Clark's involvement in every conceivable facet of life in the trans-Appalachian West in the early decades of the nineteenth century, either of his biographers might have ended up with a sort of walking metonym. …