The Man Who Won the Midwest

George Rogers Clark was born in 1752 near Charlottesville in Albemarle County, Virginia, two and a half miles from where Thomas Jefferson was born. He grew up on a small farm in Caroline County. He received eight months of formal schooling in his entire life. His schoolmaster, his uncle Donald Robertson, concluded that the rambunctious boy was “not very apt at learning” and recommended his parents invest their money elsewhere.

His father disagreed with the schoolmaster’s conclusion. Recognizing his son’s potential as an outdoorsman, he secured him an apprenticeship with a surveyor.

That decision changed the continent.

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What the frontier built.

Clark learned surveying from his grandfather. By age nineteen he had become a surveyor. He developed an interest in history, geography, and natural phenomena and acquired a large library. He almost invariably bought books when he returned to Williamsburg. The man the schoolmaster had dismissed as unfit to learn became one of the most well-read men on the Virginia frontier.

In 1772, just turning 20, Clark left on a surveying trip to the West. During the next four years he located land for himself, his family, and other friends in Virginia and acted as a guide for settlers. He explored down the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers. He read the land the way his grandfather had taught him. He learned the terrain, the rivers, the distances, the native tribes, and the British fortifications the way a man learns things when his life depends on the accuracy of the knowledge.

He participated in Lord Dunmore’s War in 1774 and gained recognition as a formidable Indian fighter. He was twenty-two years old. He had received a captain’s commission and his first taste of actual command. He was learning what formed men learn on the frontier: how to move, how to read terrain, how to manage men under pressure, how to make decisions with incomplete information in conditions where the cost of failure was death.

The schoolmaster had said he was not apt at learning. The frontier said otherwise.

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What he saw that nobody else was looking at.

By 1776 Clark was the ranking militia officer in Kentucky County. He was twenty-four years old.

He looked at the map of the war and saw something that the commanders in the East were too busy to see. The British were using their forts in the Northwest Territory, in what is now Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin, to arm and coordinate the Indian tribes raiding the Kentucky settlements. The frontier was bleeding from the north. The war in the East would eventually end one way or another. But if the British held the Northwest, the territory west of the Appalachians would remain under their influence or control regardless of what happened in Philadelphia or Boston or Yorktown.

Clark understood that the Northwest Territory was the future of the American republic. Not a strategic footnote. The continent itself.

He wrote to Virginia Governor Patrick Henry: “Great things have been effected by a few men well conducted. Perhaps we may be fortunate. We have this consolation that our case is just, and that our country will be grateful and not condemn our conduct, in case we fall through.”

He was twenty-five years old. He was writing to the man who had said give me liberty or give me death. He was asking for permission to win the continent.

Patrick Henry commissioned him a lieutenant colonel and authorized him to recruit troops. Virginia provided minimal support. Clark was largely on his own.

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What 175 men accomplished.

Image courtesy of Virginia Places

In May 1778, Clark led an expedition of about 175 men.

One hundred and seventy-five men to take the Northwest Territory.

The men drilled and trained at Corn Island near present-day Louisville, Kentucky. On June 24, 1778, the time had come to move further west. Using flatboats the men made their way down the Ohio River, before disembarking and marching to Kaskaskia on the Mississippi River, arriving on July 4, 1778, without firing a single shot.

July 4, 1778. The second anniversary of the Declaration. Clark took Kaskaskia on that date without a shot fired.

The following day one of Clark’s companies captured Cahokia, about 40 miles away, in a similar manner. In August the British-controlled French garrison at Vincennes, 240 miles east on the Wabash River, surrendered to Clark after learning of the French-American alliance.

Then the British retook Vincennes.

What Clark did next is one of the most extraordinary military decisions of the entire war.

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The winter march.

It was February 1779. The ground between Kaskaskia and Vincennes was flooded. The winter had been brutal. The rivers had overflowed their banks across miles of Illinois and Indiana terrain. A march to Vincennes in February through floodwater was considered impossible by every military calculation available.

Clark knew that the British would make an advance toward Kaskaskia in the spring. He made the decision to complete a winter march and retake the fort. Clark and his men left Kaskaskia on February 6, 1779 and began their march to Vincennes.

What followed was eighteen days of marching through freezing floodwater, sometimes chest-deep, in February. Clark’s men were exhausted, hungry, and soaked to the bone for days at a time. Clark himself waded at the front of the column, setting the pace, refusing to show what the march was costing him.

He reached Vincennes on February 23rd.

The British commander, Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton, had 79 men inside Fort Sackville. He did not know how many men Clark had outside it. Clark made sure of that. He marched his force in circles around the perimeter at night with torches lit, giving the impression of a much larger army.

Hamilton surrendered on February 25, 1779.

The Northwest Territory belonged to the United States.

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What it cost him.

Throughout the war Clark and his men received no pay for their services. Clark was held responsible for debts incurred for supplies, since Virginia, despite its promises, never reimbursed him.

He had personally funded portions of the campaign. He had borrowed from friends. He had pledged his own credit for supplies that Virginia had promised to provide and never did. Virginia owed him nearly £3,400 in back pay and out-of-pocket expenses. He spent decades trying to collect it.

He was hounded by creditors for the remainder of his life and finally held in his own name only the land he retired to in Clarksville, Indiana in 1803. He built a two-room cabin on a beautiful point of land overlooking the Falls of the Ohio.

The man who won the Northwest Territory lived in a two-room cabin on the banks of the Ohio River, in debt, largely forgotten, watching the country he had secured grow up around him.

He suffered a stroke. His right leg was amputated. He became disabled. His younger brother William had gone west with Meriwether Lewis and become famous for it. George Rogers Clark had gone west a generation earlier with 175 men and won a continent, and almost nobody knew his name.

In 1812, in belated recognition of Revolutionary War services, the General Assembly of Virginia granted Clark a sword and half pay of $400 a year, though many believed this to be too little too late.

He died in 1818.

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What this means for Indiana.

If you live in Indiana, you live on ground that George Rogers Clark bled for.

The state of Indiana exists because a twenty-six-year-old surveyor from Virginia looked at a map, saw what the East could not see, marched 175 men through February floodwater, and took a British fort without the army, without the pay, and without the recognition he deserved.

Clark’s successful attack against British forts in 1778 and 1779 served as the basis for the American claim to the Northwest Territory during the negotiation of the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Without Clark’s campaign, the territory north of the Ohio River stays British. The border of the United States runs along the Ohio River. Indiana does not exist as an American state. Ohio does not. Illinois does not. Michigan does not. Wisconsin does not.

The American heartland was not inevitable. It was won. By one man with 175 men and no pay.

His name was George Rogers Clark and he spent the last years of his life in a two-room cabin on the river he had crossed to win it.

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The formation argument.

Clark was not formed by a school. He was formed by a grandfather who taught him to read land. By a father who recognized that the classroom was not the right place for this particular boy and found him an apprenticeship instead. By four years of surveying the Ohio Valley before the war began. By Lord Dunmore’s War where he learned command at twenty-two. By the frontier itself, which does not grade on a curve.

The schoolmaster said he was not apt at learning.

He spent his adult life acquiring a large library, mastering geography and natural history, reading everything he could find, and applying what he learned to problems no school had taught him to solve.

The formation was not in the classroom. It was in the work. In the terrain. In the decisions made under pressure with no one above him to confirm or correct them.

That is the colonial formation tradition operating exactly as it was designed to. A boy formed by a specific apprenticeship, a specific body of practical knowledge, and a specific set of experiences that built him into the man the situation required.

The situation required someone to win the Northwest Territory with 175 men and no support from the government that sent him.

George Rogers Clark was ready.

Your son is being formed right now. Not for February floodwater and British forts. For the moments in his life where the situation will require something the school did not teach him and the government will not provide.

The formation is yours to give.

Clark’s grandfather gave it to him with a surveying chain and a willingness to take a rambunctious boy seriously.

That is all it takes.

Get to work.

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Value for Value

George Rogers Clark won the ground beneath Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. He died in a two-room cabin, in debt, largely forgotten. The transmission of that story is ours now.

If this essay gave you something worth having, give something back. Send it to one father in the Midwest who needs to know whose ground he is standing on. Post it. Pass it forward.

The book behind this essay is Forge the Son. The formation manual for fathers who understand that the wilderness is the curriculum and the time is now.

Order on Amazon: https://a.co/d/0ezYbsTX

If you want to sustain this work through July 4 and beyond, become a paid subscriber. Every essay in this series is one argument built piece by piece toward the 250th anniversary of the Declaration.

The republic is rebuilt one household at a time.

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~ Brett Hahn, AmRev Resurrected 🇺🇸

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Brett Hahn is the founder of AmRev Resurrected and the author of Forge the Son: A Father’s Manual for Raising Sons by the Spirit That Built America.

Paperback: https://a.co/d/0ezYbsTX Kindle: https://a.co/d/05b5zdEL

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