- So welcome to another program of the Mill County History Club. My name is Michael Carter and welcome
- to my wife Paulette, my cousins and my brother over there to support me. Also should welcome our class
- of 64 people that support this. The guys over here and the gals over here. We're all over 39, just a
- little bit. I left some sheets of paper on all the tables as you know,
- you share amongst yourselves, take a picture of it, of our coming programs. We're scheduled through
- January next year, so barring cancellations, we're scheduled pretty far ahead. I want to thank the American
- Legion for allowing us to have these programs for so many years. We've been coming here a long time
- now, 13 years.
- And thanks so much to the white staff, to the girls serving us. Be generous with them. And I'd also
- like to thank CATS TV, our partners over there, for recording these programs for over 10 years. And
- Dave back there has been here for a lot of them. All this stuff allows us to preserve our local history
- for future generations.
- and thanks to our loyal history enthusiasts who attend these programs. And we're really grateful to
- them. A lot of diversity, a lot of great programs, a lot of different types of programs. Any new visitors
- today? Anybody new? OK, there's a couple. If you want to get on our regular email list, if you wish
- to, our regular email, just let me know. I can put your address on there.
- And Steve Brewer will send out the invitations like he does every month. Now, right now, we have a public
- service announcement from Jonathan back there.
- Well, good afternoon. Thank you for the invitation. I'm Jonathan Michelson, and I have the pleasure
- of directing a play called Another Revolution. And this is a play that deals in history, true events.
- And so that's why I got the invitation to come and talk to you. You know, I'm sure you're familiar with
- the Mark Twain quote, history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes, right? And this play is set
- in 1968 on the campus of Columbia University. And for those of you that may remember that time, like me,
- There were major protests that took place on Columbia during that spring and into the summer. And so
- this play deals with that. And of course, the rhyming part comes in. This was a time that the country
- was deeply divided, right, 1968. The Vietnam War was raging.
- Certainly this play deals in that, that sort of bifurcation of the population in terms of people for
- the war and against the war. And then this sense of a college campus, and it hasn't, where the police
- are ultimately called in. The protests at Columbia then turned violent in certain ways when the police
- interacted with people. And we start to, rhyming again,
- on some of our college campuses recently, including Columbia, but including our own IU campus where
- there was some difficulty in terms of peaceful protests. So the play really is important in that way.
- And in coming to see it, one, you get a wonderful sense of this time. And remembering back, it's been
- quite a journey for me to think through that time.
- And then also this sense that is something that makes a difference to us now. Then on top of that,
- you know, I'm a stage director, so I get to work with a wonderful group of people. We collaborate. I
- have a great group of designers that have put this show together.
- And then I have a wonderful cast that I get to work with. One cast member just graduated from our graduate
- program at IU with an MFA. And the other is an actor that we hired in from New York to come and be part
- of this community. So it's a wonderful piece. It deals in college students.
- going through the same rhyming, again, the same thing that our graduate students go through in terms
- of funding, in terms of making it through school, but then also this sense of time and how certain events
- that we think back, oh, well, that happened in the 60s, well, here we are again in certain ways. So
- I hope you'll join us. We open June 5th, no, June 4th.
- June 4th, I'm looking back at somebody that dates better than I do. June 4th, and it runs three weekends
- here in Bloomington. So I hope you'll come and join us. I think if you like history, it'll be something
- that you truly enjoy and have fun with. Okay, thank you very much. And now Daniel Slegel from the Monroe
- County History Center would like to say a few words.
- Thank you, Michael. Hi, everyone. We're really excited to be here again. There's a lot going on at the
- History Center if you haven't been here yet. I'll touch on a couple things before I get to the really
- big one. But Dr. Roger Rott, there he is, brought some more editions of his book about the Hoosier hysteria.
- So if you missed buying it on the first printing,
- Roger has a second printing, and we have some for sale. And then we're also very lucky, because I know
- many of you look for books that you don't have yet or that have not been out very long. And we're very
- lucky that Penny Matheson, one of our researchers, is also an amazing writer. And she did a whole book
- about the Worley Mansion from Ellitsville that was torn down in the 70s, I believe. 1940. I was a little
- off its history.
- But it took me longer than it normally does to read this book, just because with her descriptions and
- what Penny found, I would flip back to the maps or the pictures she's included to figure out where everything
- was or where rooms were as you looked at the building. I've not read a book and had so much fun reading
- it in a long time. So if you want a new book, Penny published this. She brought them in for us to sell.
- She's been very generous. So if you want a great book to read,
- Please feel free to stop by at the table. I think I brought about all 20 copies we have left. So Ann
- Penny is here if you'd like to talk with her or have her sign the book as a gift to a friend or a family
- member or yourself. I know someone that does that. Please make sure to stop by. We have a lot of exhibits
- that have opened recently. We have one on Sarx Tarzian. We did a refresh to our cook exhibit. We have
- one about all the Civil War.
- American Revolution veterans that moved west, and so they settled and died here in Monroe County. So
- we have an exhibit about that. We have a lot of different things on display. About a month ago, a lady
- came in and said, oh, I just brought my friends in. I've already seen upstairs. I don't need to go up
- there. And we kind of laughed and said, ma'am, just head up there. If you find everything up there that
- you've already seen before, then you can come back down, no admission fee.
- And she came back down and gave us $20 and said, I hadn't seen half of that stuff. I'm coming back when
- they're not here. So just to emphasize, we really do try to change things up in there, and things are
- always looking different. So please make sure to come by. And the other very big thing we have going
- on, it's through this week, are donations going to our garage sale. So if you're doing spring cleaning,
- not that anybody here would procrastinate, but should that have happened,
- Please know we are still accepting donations out at the garage sale. And then I have more flyers for
- the garage sale that it's here next month. It's going to be here really, really soon with June 10th
- being member day. If you're a Monroe County History Center member or cook or Simtra employees. And then
- Friday, June 12th, Saturday, the 13th and Monday, the 15th.
- But if you're like me, I won't remember that by the time I get to my car. So I have a bunch of quarter
- sheets. If anyone else needs a little reminder, I'm very much that way. So I'm not ashamed to say it.
- So feel free to stop by and see me and come get some of these. What are the hours for accepting donations?
- Excellent. Thank you, Pam. The hours are from 10 AM until 2 PM. So there's about a four hour window
- to stop by and make donations.
- But again, if you have any questions, if you want to know more about the exhibits, or you'd love to
- read a new book, I'm happy to make a recommendation. But stop over and see me. Thank you, everyone.
- Thanks, Daniel. Real quick, I want to mention next month's program. It's by our own Clay Stuckey here.
- It's called The Male Murders of 1946.
- It's about race, sex, and murder. And that's all I'm going to tell you about it. But if that doesn't
- draw people here, I don't know what else will. So anyway, that's next month, June 30. Today we have
- a fellow associate professor of history at IU, Constantine Dirk. And although I'm on a first name basis,
- I can call him Con. I've been told. So hello, Con. So he's going to talk about a person
- We all grew up knowing this name, George Rogers Clark. We've probably all been to Vincennes and seen
- the memorial down there. But I'll let Constantine go ahead and start with his program. Everyone, thank
- you so much for being here.
- I'm really, really excited to see such a large, large crowd of people devoted to history. I have been
- watching a bunch of videos. Am I close enough to the mic? Sorry. Am I doing OK to the mic? OK. I'm not
- used to talking with a microphone. And I'm a hand talker, so I'm going to try to talk only with my left
- hand and not with my right hand. And I'm also a wanderer, because I often have a dog when I teach. And
- my little dog accompanies me and follows me around the classroom.
- Anyway, I'm really pleased. I watched a bunch of videos, actually, that are on the YouTube site for
- the History Club, which is really, really interesting. I've learned an amazing amount of this part of
- the world and all the things about it. I noticed that a lot of speakers who come focus on Monroe County
- and the area. I'm not going to be able to do that today. I also noticed that people have some amazing
- old photographs from earlier in the 20th century.
- of trains and all kinds of things, which are really, really beautiful. I am talking about the late 18th
- century. There are going to be no photographs at all. But I'm going to try to sort of valorize, talk
- about George Rogers Clark as a figure as it relates to the American Revolution, the War of Independence,
- and the American Revolution as it relates to Indiana and it relates to a larger world.
- And what I'd really like to concentrate on doing today is something unusual, which is really concentrate
- on how history is made. Because I think there are a lot of misconceptions about how history is made,
- how it changes over time, et cetera, et cetera. And I want to look at how Georgia Rogers Clark was invented
- effectively, not as a person, but as an image and as a reputation, and how that image and reputation
- have changed over time through the 19th century and into the 20th century.
- and what the meaning assigned to George Rogers Clark, how that meaning has changed rather dramatically.
- So that's what I'd like to focus on and I'd like to circle back at the end and again, talk about how
- important that is for what you do. Oh, okay, sorry. Thought that was for me. The kind of appreciation
- of history that you cultivate here and protect and preserve and how important that is for history.
- So I'm going to circle back to that. My screen is gone already. There it is. All right, this is the
- only surviving painting of George Rogers Clark from his lifetime. This is in 1810 when he's 58 years
- old. You can see he has a rather ornate cane there at the bottom. He is not the happiest person in the world.
- maybe just inclined to smile. If you know anything about photographs, early photographs from later in
- the 19th century, they're mostly unsmiling people, because to sit for a photograph in 1850, you had
- to sit for many, many minutes, and to hold a smile for that long was rather difficult. So there are
- a lot of unsmiling photographs for a long time before it became normal for people to smile. In a portrait,
- he could have made his choices, but this is the choice that he made when his life had become very, very,
- very difficult.
- This is the memorial that many of you know and have been to. It's a rather remarkable place. Imagined
- to be very, very important as a contribution to the history of Indiana in the 1930s. Actually started
- in the 1920s. I'm not sure why that is happening. Please come back.
- OK, this is the inscription on it. And this is where I'd like to begin. This is on the rotunda. This
- is the text that's on there. And this is part of the reasoning behind the image that's created in the
- 1930s. And if you know anything about historical films, historical films often are about not the moment
- that they show in the past, but they're about the moment in which they are made. And that's certainly,
- this tells us a lot about the 1930s and what they wanted George Rogers Clark to be.
- And it's that desire that I'd like to focus on today, why people wanted George Rogers Clark to be a
- certain kind of person. This is another memorial to George Rogers Clark. I'll show the inscription in
- a minute. This is at the University of Virginia, which is the origins of his life in that part of the
- world, Alpenmoral County in Virginia. This is sort of a classic kind of statue. This was built in 1921.
- in the same era in which there's a lot of memorialization of George Rogers Clark. This is sort of a
- very standard kind of statue in this time period where you have the main figure in the center and you
- have very prone people. You have armed frontiersmen, I'll call them, there and you have very prone indigenous people.
- who are part of the statue. And this kind of iconography appears in statue after statue after statue
- this time period. I'm not sure why that's happening. There it's back. But this kind of the prone and
- unarmed indigenous people and the standing and armed frontiers people are, again, it's very, very standard.
- This is the inscription, Conqueror of the Northwest on the Charlottesville Memorial.
- And a lot of these statues and inscriptions become complicated. And I'll talk about that in a moment.
- A lot of this has been to memorialize how George Rogers Clark intersects with Indiana history, of course.
- And that is, of course, in Vincennes and the seizure of two small towns in Illinois and then crossing
- Illinois in a very harsh winter
- and coming to Vincennes and taking a British outpost, what became a British outpost at Vincennes in
- the late summer of 1778 into the early winter of 1779. And that's the real claim to fame and that's
- what a lot of the commemoration is about. This is the route that he took from the very beginning coming
- from Western Pennsylvania below Fort Pitt and crossing, crossing, crossing by boat and then ultimately by land.
- to go to Kaskia and Cahokia here, where two places were French outposts for a long time, but belonged
- at this point to the British, and were given over very, very handily. And then there's the walk across
- Illinois to get to Vincennes and Fort Sackville, or take Fort Sackville, which surrendered rather quickly.
- This is the claim to fame at the moment.
- And this is why I looked at there's a really wonderful historical marker database where I discovered
- there are 255 historical markers, many in this part of the world, that commemorate George Rogers Clark
- and the conquest of the Northwest and his heroism. There are also counties in several states.
- There's a town, of course, in his honor that was granted to him for his service. And there's a bridge
- which I've crossed over
- actually between Jeffersonville and Louisville. And again, it's disappearing, sorry. Seems to be coming
- back. So this statue and this kind of commemoration became rather complicated at the University of Virginia.
- This statue was built in 1921. And in 2021, this is what happened to this statue. Yeah, it'll come back.
- But it was removed because it was rather, again, this kind of portrait
- iconography is over and over and over and there are a lot of people who felt very very uncomfortable
- with this kind of iconography in 2021 and so this statue was removed and this is the part of the changing
- image and reputation of George Rogers Clark and I'd like to really track through that changing image
- and reputation and think about how history is made because George Rogers Clark is a historical figure
- but there are many many just George Rogers Clark's
- over the course of history. His image changes rather dramatically, what people know about him and what
- he is made to represent in terms of how he represents Virginia or Kentucky or Indiana or Illinois or
- the Northwest, et cetera, et cetera. What does George Rogers Clark mean? And what does Indiana mean?
- What does Kentucky mean? What does Virginia mean? What does Northwest mean? And this happens over and
- over and over. And so here you have what is really, really important to
- two elements. One is a detective work of history, and that's simply going through all the old records,
- some of which are stored in the Monroe County History Center, local records, for instance, are so, so
- very important. I'll talk about that some more. Part of it is that kind of detective work, finding the
- records that enables us to understand the past, and part of it is the analytical work of understanding
- the past. I'd like to emphasize both today as George Rogers Clark changes. But I know you all know George
- Rogers Clark from
- from high school, et cetera, et cetera, hopefully. But I'll do a little bit of background of his life.
- He's born in Virginia in 1752. As a very young man, he does some surveying in Western Virginia and Eastern
- Kentucky. Then he becomes a militia officer and works his way up the ranks. Then you get to the famous
- moment where he's quite, you can see he's quite a young man when he does what he does in Illinois and Indiana.
- After that, he leads another military expedition against the Shawnees in 1780. He becomes a brigadier
- general in command of two fascinating places that Virginia names all of Kentucky, Kentucky County, that
- belongs to Virginia at this time period, and they name all of Illinois, Illinois County, and claim both
- of those places that become future states, of course.
- But in this moment of time, until 1784, when Virginia cedes all this territory, these are large counties
- of Virginia for a while. In 1782, Clark leads two military expeditions against the Shawnee again.
- And after, given the difficulty of those, he's relieved of his military command. He becomes a surveyor
- of military bounty lands. He leads one more expedition.
- In 1786, that is not sanctioned by any government, and it proves to be quite a disaster. And then he
- falls into greater obscurity. There's a moment in 1793, which we now know much more about, where he
- offers his services to the French. And Edmund, if you remember, it's about Genet, who's the French diplomat
- who tries to
- recruit Americans to fight the Spanish Empire, and George Rogers Clark falls prey to that and is willing
- to expatriate himself in response. He settles in Clarksville in 1803. He has enslaved people and land
- earlier, but he's in serious financial struggles, so he signs over all his land and slaves to his younger
- brother, who was very, very famous, William Clark,
- of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Because Indiana is a free state at that point, Ben McGee is emancipated
- before William Clark comes to live with his brother for a little while. And Ben McGee is an indentured
- servant who's supposed to serve for 30 more years. In 1809, he suffers a terrible axe stroke and an
- accident, loses a leg.
- And it gets closer to the painting that I started with, where he's struggling. He moves in with his
- sister in Locust Grove, Kentucky. I don't know if you've ever been there, but I'll show you a picture
- in a moment, where again, he's tended in Kentucky. Slavery is legal, so he has a slave who takes care
- of him. And then he dies. This is a reconstruction, or this was a reconstruction of his cabin in Clarksville.
- This is where he ended up for a while.
- It was actually destroyed in 1854 by accident and then reconstructed and then destroyed again, unfortunately,
- I think in 2021. And then Locust Grove, where his sister lived with her spouse, who was once a subordinate
- of George Rogers Clark, but who became very successful and one of the interesting books that's been
- read rather recently is to look at the trajectory of George Rogers Clark, which sort of goes like this.
- and his brother-in-law, William Krogan, and his brother-in-law has a nice place in Locust Grove, Kentucky.
- And this is where he ends up in his life as a ward of his sister and brother-in-law. In order to understand
- George Rogers Clark, one of the most important documents that survives is his own memoir that he wrote
- in manuscript. But it disappeared for long stretches of time.
- And it was in different kinds of hands. It was used by different people. One of the first is Mann Butler,
- who wanted to write a history of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. There was a person who wanted to write
- the first biography of George Rogers Clark, who was anti-slavery and then was killed in a duel for being
- an anti-slavery activist as an editor of a newspaper. That memoir was again used, and it was again in
- odd hands for a good while.
- by one of the first historians of this part of the world, John P. Dillon. And then it's really uncertain
- where those papers are, but they end up in the hands of Lyman Draper, who makes excellent efforts to
- preserve historical records across the 19th century. Upon his death in 1891, he donates his massive
- collection of documents to the Wisconsin Historical Society, and that's where George Rogers Clark papers end up
- in 1891 and become accessible to other scholars, not through informal means of appealing to the family,
- but as a place where any researcher can go. And that's when you have much more serious use of the documents.
- There's a person who tries to write one of the first histories of the Northwest and to emphasize how
- important the Northwest was to American history.
- That's his main point and he uses George Rogers Clark. Then the papers are fully, all of his papers
- including the memoir are published in 1912 in the first collection of his papers and they are published
- separately in full in 1920. So I just give you, I'm not sure how you can see on the wings, but this
- is one of the, it's just a marvelous, marvelous collection.
- of George Rogers Clark's papers that were assembled in 1912 in the second volume in 1926. And this is
- one of the first books that really, really tried to put George Rogers Clark into the public eye and
- to make a case for his importance to the history of Kentucky when this historian was trying to emphasize
- the importance of Kentucky. And this is where you come in in a lot of ways, and this is where
- the image and reputation of George Rogers Clarkman, but there's such an effort in this time period to
- preserve papers. And there's a sense that the papers that are really, really important to understand
- history are disappearing. And Mann Butler was one of the people who tried to collect the papers. How
- do you write the history of George Rogers Clark? How do you write the history of Kentucky when the papers
- are all scattered and the papers are disappearing?
- And how do you actually write history? How do you preserve history? And this is what you do, right?
- This is what your organization does. It preserves the value of history to our culture. And this is the
- moment of Man Butler. Sorry, these things are disappearing. And so one of the things that Man Butler
- does is try to find the documents. He's one of the first to write an account of the Illinois campaign.
- And he uses those papers in order to do that, in order to emphasize
- settlers coming from Kentucky and having a relationship with Illinois and Indiana because Illinois and
- Indiana have British presence and British presence is coming down with indigenous allies into Kentucky
- and there's a lot of conflict over settlement. He thinks to write the history of Kentucky, you also
- have to write the history of Illinois and Indiana and Michigan because these things are bound together.
- And so he's really the first to do this. And as you can see, Butler laments the conduct of Clark and
- does not seek to justify his hero. So there's a lionizing of what George Rogers Clark accomplishes in
- 1778 and 1779, and that's the focus of what he's able to do. And then there's an acknowledgement that
- George Rogers Clark made mistakes at the same time. And this is part of the complexity of history right
- away, and this is part of the grappling of who is George Rogers Clark?
- What is he? And again, in the 1920s and 1930s, when all those memorials went up, there's a great deal
- of emphasis to try to lionize him and romanticize him and turn him into a hero. And already in the 19th
- century, I just want to emphasize for a long time, there's a real grappling with who George Rogers Clark
- was and what did he do. And this is important for Man Butler because Man Butler wants to say not just
- who George Rogers Clark is, but who is, what is Kentucky?
- What is Kentucky and who are Kentucky and what kind of people are they. What kind of people are Westerners.
- Who are they. And he's using George Rogers Clark is one avenue into trying to grab with that question.
- And you can see here I'll just read this a force and impetus there is enough in the Western.
- character, all that is lacking is direction, a deep reverence for truth, a profound respect for law,
- a ready submission to write, a loyal allegiance to duty. These will make the Western character as perfect
- as humanity could ever hope to become." And so he's trying to hold up examples. How do you make people
- in Kentucky and in the Old Northwest, how do you make them better? And this is part of the purpose of
- history. You show history as an inspiration or as a lesson
- to making people better. That was the purpose of writing history. That's why history, they felt, was
- really important. And this is why he felt George Rogers Clark was important. How do you create an image
- of someone, a real image of someone, in order to make a whole region, a whole state and a whole region
- better? And again, this is the interesting thing that happens right away. It happens well before the
- memorials and what the memorials are supposed to mean in the 1920s and 1930s.
- this already happens here is what does a person mean? What does a place mean? What does a state mean?
- What does a region mean? And how does it fit into the United States? I know we're in Monroe County and
- most of what you do here is how does Monroe County fit into larger stories of the railroad, et cetera,
- et cetera? And this is the same dilemma. How do you fit something and assign it meaning so that the
- meaning strikes a chord with people in whatever way it strikes a chord?
- And how do you do that? How do you make history come alive for people so that it matters to them? And
- this is the purpose of what history was supposed to do. It was supposed to measure character. And this
- happens over and over and over and over in the 19th century. And I'm only going to do some greatest
- hits of this process. But I want to show you again how the image of George Rogers Clark mattered so much to
- and why they wrestled with it and why they tried to collect documents about it and why they tried to
- look at it from preserve that history and put it forward. And here this is sort of the lamentation tradition
- that George Rogers Clark was not given the credit that it was due and this is why he became such a bitter
- person. That he had sacrificed so much as a young man and then he was discarded and he ended up, you know,
- deep financial struggles, and terrible, terrible health alone, award of other people. And so everything
- seemed to go horribly wrong for George Rogers Clark, and he should be given his due for what he accomplished
- as a young man. And that's what this article, I'm just doing articles, there's so many articles about
- him across the 19th century. And part of that tradition is how do we give him his due? The hero of the
- heroic age of the West deserves a biographer.
- And so the origins of the Northwest were the heroic moment. And how do you write a biography of the
- hero? And this is one version of George Rogers Clark. There's another version in here that disappeared.
- And this is about, this is a piece, this is another notes on the early settlement of the Northwestern
- territory. Again, what does this part of the world mean? And this historian said, went and looked in,
- You can see nine lawyers who were at the bar when Mr. Burnett came to the territory. Eight died confirmed
- Sots and a large proportion of the officers under St. Clair, Wayne and Wilkinson were hard drinkers.
- The greatest man of the early West, George Rogers Clark died a drunkard. And so the lesson here was
- the first generation struggled and struggled and struggled and the second generation was able to lift
- the Northwest up. The first generation just struggled and lapsed into hardship because
- just didn't know what they were doing and they were in the in the rough initial conditions and it was
- a second generation that was able to go up in the third generation and that was the argument of this
- book. The first generation does what it did and the second generation builds on what the first generation
- did and again it's meant to inspire how do you you don't want to end up like the first generation you
- want to be the model here is the second generation the second generation is the one the people that
- things that the first generation was unable to imagine and unable to do. And this is how you're supposed
- to inspire the next generation. Then there's the heroic tradition, which is not a lamentation for him
- or Jeremiah. And this tradition lasts a long, long, long time. And that is that among the many things,
- Clark was in the West where George Washington was in the East, the unrivaled champion of the Revolution,
- and he may be held with great propriety the Washington of the West.
- And this is the trope that appears over and over and over. You've waged the great battle of Western
- civilization against the savages of North America. And there are so many biographies, and I've read
- more than a dozen biographies, and most of them have this trope that you have civilization versus savagery,
- and he's on the side of civilization, and this is what he's able to do.
- And this is the heroic tradition that appears over and over and over. And this is what appears in the
- speeches in 1921 in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia. When that statue goes up, it's what
- hearts in the speeches that are given by the President of the United States in 1936 when Vincennes is
- opened up. And it's the heroic tradition that George Rogers Clark was a hero. But this is really complicated.
- It's already, as you can see, in the 19th century,
- some appreciation of the complexities of George Rogers Clark. That he was not just what he did in 1778
- and 1779 and whatever heroic actions, however you want to describe those actions, he was a much more
- complicated figure and this becomes what becomes more and more obvious as more and more of the historical
- records are found and preserved and collected and looked at and are analyzed. And so George Rogers Clark
- It gets more and more complicated. Here's someone writing in 1875 the truth concerning the expedition
- of George Rogers Clark. Sorry, it's going to keep disappearing. But it's the truth about it, right?
- It's not the myth of it. It's not the heroic myth. It's what really happened. And this is what every
- time more documents are discovered, people can make this claim that you think you know George Rogers
- Clark, but you don't know George Rogers Clark. This is the real George Rogers Clark. And this is what
- really happened.
- And this is, again, the process of history. And so Henry, William Henry, he was complaining about who
- was the greatest historian of the 19th century in the United States, George Bancroft, who wrote a magisterial
- multi-volume set, History of the United States, from the beginning. And so many editions of this, so
- many multi-volume editions that people were able to pay for a 10-volume set and a 12-volume set because
- they just appeared over and over and over.
- And William Henry says, no, he got the expedition all wrong. And the problem is, George Pankow spent
- a lot of time trying to write, putting the history of the United States and world history, and he neglected
- the American archives. And if you look at the American archives and the new documents about George Rogers
- Clark, then you understand that George Rogers Clark was important. He was not nearly as important as
- the soldiers.
- we emphasize officers too much, we don't emphasize the rank and file too much. And that was the truth
- about the George Rogers Clark. The George Clark is, yes, he's important, but he's not as important as
- you think he is. Then there's another, then Samuel Evans writes, and you can't see, but he writes in
- quotes the truth concerning George Rogers Clark, because he thinks William Henry is wrong. William Henry
- is correcting George Bancroft and,
- Samuel Evans says, well, you're emphasizing Virginia way, way too much. It's really Pennsylvania, the
- important stuff. And if you look at the records that you haven't looked at, because you're looking only
- at the Virginia records, but you look at the Pennsylvania records, it's really what mattered to the
- whole thing was what Pennsylvania did. And so these kinds of battles happen again and again and again.
- Again, what does George Rogers Clark mean? Who was George Rogers Clark? How important is Virginia or
- Kentucky or Indiana or Illinois, et cetera, et cetera, to this history?
- What is the old Northwest? And who are these people? It's always about the character of the people.
- What are they capable of? What did they actually do? How important are they? And this measure happens
- over and over and over. And so again, I'm only going to give you a little taste. I'll give you a little
- more taste of this because I want to lead to some more magnificent debates and then to what our modern
- understanding of George Rogers Clark is and why that's important.
- And then that's going to lead to why you are so important. This is Theodore Roosevelt. Anyone heard
- of Teddy Roosevelt? So he was a president who it's hard to imagine that a president could speak a coherent
- sentence or write a coherent sentence. But Teddy Roosevelt wrote a four volume set, The Winning of the
- West. It's a rather beautifully written book, actually. Teddy Roosevelt was himself a very complicated
- person with lots of
- complicated things about him. But this is his contribution to putting the West, which at this time was
- the Northwest and the West, into American history to say that even though he was an East Coast kid,
- et cetera, et cetera, he wanted to say that the whole country was valuable to the United States and
- to American history, not just the East Coast. And he made a strong, strong argument in the book that
- you can't see.
- for this, and this is volume two, as you can see, from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi, and he's
- gonna keep going, there's four young, he's gonna keep on tracking that history. People, Teddy Rose,
- Frederick Jackson Turner, does that name mean anything to people? So not a President of the United States,
- but an incredibly important historian. In 1892, wrote an amazing essay about the significance of the
- frontier in American history. Made the argument, of course, that the frontier would be stopping.
- in 1892, there's no longer any more frontier, and this was gonna be problematic for the United States,
- that the United States and the character of the United States, what it was capable of, was premised
- on having a frontier, having the next step. And he was fascinated, of course, he's now, he's a younger
- historian, Teddy Roosevelt's still a youngish enough man, before becoming president, before the Navy,
- et cetera, et cetera. And Frederick Jackson Turner reviewed his book,
- And he said, this is a pretty amazing book because what Teddy Roosevelt does is he takes all of his
- local history that people have written about Virginia and about Kentucky and about Illinois and Indiana,
- and he's looking at the big picture. And this is what we need more of. We need more of the big picture
- to understand George Rogers Clark, to understand Indiana, to understand Kentucky, to understand Virginia.
- You need the big picture. And this is what Teddy Roosevelt manages to do in this book. It's a magisterial,
- again, it's four-volume sets,
- It's a magisterial book. He's also able to appreciate the American Revolution, that there were two American
- Revolutions. And now we're in the semi-quincentennial of 1776, right? We're having debates. What does
- the American Revolution mean? What does 1776 mean? I hope you're all going to the Lilly Library on campus
- or the university and looking at one of the 26 copies of the Declaration of Independence, which is just
- an incredibly beautiful document that you can look at and appreciate.
- But we're having debates about what does 1776 mean? What does the Declaration mean? And this is what
- Frederick Jackson Turner appreciated about Teddy Roosevelt to say that there were two American revolutions.
- There was one on the East Coast, which faced the British, and there was one in the West, what was then
- the West, which faced Native peoples and the British Empire, which was still in Canada, and the Spanish
- Empire, which was as close as St. Louis.
- It was all in New Orleans, and it was in St. Louis, and it was all around. So this was another American
- Revolution that faced in a very, very different direction. And this has become what more and more historians
- have been writing about recently, which is the American Revolution in the West. It happened all over
- the place. It was not just a revolution that faced a British. And if you look to Ken Burns' series,
- Ken Burns also has multiple American Revolutions over the wars. The wars faced different theaters and
- faced in different directions.
- But this was not fully appreciated, and this is why historians in this part of the world wanted to say,
- actually, the Northwest mattered even to the War of Independence, right? It didn't just happen here,
- there, and everywhere on the East Coast in New Jersey and in South Carolina. It also happened out here.
- And then there's Frederick Jackson Turner saying, Teddy Roosevelt gave too much credit to
- George Rogers Clark. He tried to overestimate it, what George Rogers Clark accomplished. And he imagined
- that it mattered. And if you look at the diplomatic records of what happened at the peace treaty of
- 1783, the Treaty of Paris between the British and the new United States, George Rogers Clark did not
- figure in any of that. What he did in Vincennes did not figure in any of that. All of those negotiations
- happened in a very, very different way.
- so you cannot you can say George Rogers Clark did what he did in Illinois and in Vincennes but it did
- not matter to the American Revolution so you can be grateful for this much but you can't be grateful
- for that much or this sorry this is what Frederick Jackson Turner wants to argue needless to say this
- does not make everyone happy
- And so the question just always becomes, I wanted to walk you through the 19th century rather than the
- 20th century. But in the 20th century, there's still all this discussion about who George Rogers Clark
- is. And I'm going to show you very quickly the changing image of George Rogers Clark again and how that
- process happened. And then I want to circle back to you. But how do you tell the history of a person?
- do you tell it through their memoirs? And for a long time, the emphasis was, let's look at what George
- Rogers Clark, what he said about what he did. And how do we get that? And how do we put that before
- public? And again, that wasn't very few historians had access to that, but they had to find William
- Clark and ask permission. For a long time, Lyman Draper had it and didn't give anyone permission until
- it got into the Wisconsin Historical Society. People couldn't give you what George Rogers Clark thought
- of what he did.
- and that was one of the great imperatives. And then just gathering the documents, where are the documents
- and which documents do you emphasize? Kentucky historians emphasize all the Kentucky documents. Virginia
- historians emphasize the Virginia documents. Illinois historians emphasize the Illinois documents. Indiana
- historians emphasize the Indiana documents. How do you tell that history? And how do you give it context?
- And so what has,
- expanded is a lot of the early work focused on 1778 and 1779 and what George Rogers Clark did. And slogging
- through the prairie in winter in terrible conditions across Illinois is not an easy task. So that was
- one reason why he was lionized. He was able to inspire his troops to do this and to do this action and
- go and make a difference
- and get rid of Henry Hamilton, who was the British commander there, who had a terrible reputation for
- cruelty, et cetera, et cetera. And he was able to do that. And that was the emphasis. And then you look
- a little further at his life, and you see before what happened before and what happened afterward. And
- then you look at the rest of his life. And so to look at George Rogers Clark is not just to look at
- this one moment, but it's to look at the entire life and the course of his entire life. And his entire
- life is quite complex.
- The one moment is an important moment, but it's not the only moment. So that's chronologically. Then
- it's geographically. To look at this history of George Rogers Clark, you have to go to Virginia, where
- he started. You have to go to Kentucky, where he spent some time. You have to go to Illinois, where
- he was briefly. You have to go to Indiana, where he was briefly. You have to go to Ohio, where he was
- briefly. You have to go to Michigan, where the British were. And then you have to keep going. You have
- to go to Missouri, because in St. Louis was the Spanish Empire and supposedly
- George Rogers Clark fell in love in St. Louis, unrequited falling in love. It didn't happen. But there
- was an important Spanish commander there. He's going to come back. You have to talk about Louisiana
- because the French in this part of the world, they were very oriented toward Louisiana rather than to
- the British in Detroit, needless to say. And there were a lot of French in this part of the world, not
- even Vincennes, et cetera. There are a lot of these little trading posts that were the most
- non-indigenous populations in this part of the world. And they were already very oriented to Louisiana.
- You have to talk about Tennessee. Why Tennessee? George Rogers Clark never went to Tennessee. There's
- no Clark County in Tennessee. But while George Rogers Clark was going to Illinois and into Ohio and
- into Indiana, George Washington was sending other people down into Tennessee from Fort Pitt. And so
- George Rogers Clark didn't know
- as other campaigns were going on, but they were very, very important for how the Continental Army organized
- resources, supplies. George Rogers Clark complained about limited recruits and limited supplies, and
- there was multiple things going on that were beyond his knowledge that we have to know about, because
- they affected George Rogers Clark. New York, you have to know about New York. George Rogers Clark never
- went to New York.
- But at the time, again, there was a massive campaign that George Washington was orchestrating into upstate
- New York to deal with the Iroquois in his version of it. It was a rather brutal scorched earth campaign,
- a very, very notorious Solomon campaign. But this was really important, again, for attracting resources,
- for affecting Fort Pett, for affecting what the instructions to the Continental Army in the West who
- were stationed in Fort Pett were told not to do anything.
- George Rogers Clark wanted to go up to Detroit and forfeit was said, no, no, no, no, we're not doing
- that because all of our resources are being concentrated in New York. George Rogers Clark did not know
- this. Again, he was not aware of what else was going on. But to understand him and the pressures on
- him, et cetera, et cetera, you have to go to these other places. You'll have to look at multiple empires.
- You have to look at the French, what was left of the French Empire, the French was no longer present.
- The British were obviously in the French Empire in 1763.
- You have to know about the French, and you definitely have to know about the British Empire and all
- the things they were doing, not just in Michigan and Detroit, but elsewhere. And you had to know about
- the Spanish Empire, because they were in St. Louis, they were in New Orleans. So much of Illinois was
- oriented toward that part of the world, that that's where the trading was. And these were the people
- actually who helped George Rogers Clark. And you have to know about multiple native nations. And native
- nations were struggling with encroachment,
- from settlers into their part of the world. They had very different responses to it. There were divisions
- within communities like the Cherokee, for instance, were very divided about how do you respond when
- people are coming to take over your land? What do you do? And if you can imagine I'm going to come and
- I'm going to take over, I'm going to find out where each of you live, and this weekend I'm going to
- come with an army and take over your land, you would have to figure out what to do. Some of you would
- defend your homes, maybe?
- Some of you would get the heck out, because I have a gazillion guns, and you have very few.
- What do you do? So this is what the problem with the Native nations was at the time. How do you respond
- to this encroachment? What do you do? Do you fight? Do you flee? Do you negotiate? And there are divisions
- among those between different Native groups and within different Native groups. And you have to understand
- all of that. And that becomes very complicated.
- You have to look at so many different places in order to tell the history of George Rogers Clark, not
- just where George Rogers Clark went, but all the kinds of places that he didn't go that affected him,
- like New York, et cetera, et cetera. So you have to do dig and dig and dig, not just in one local historical
- society in one state, but you have to keep going and follow George Rogers Clark, and you have to follow
- all these other things that are happening that did not involve George Rogers Clark, but affected George
- Rogers Clark. And you have so many different people.
- And among the fascinating things, you have the French. It was a French person who helped George Rogers
- Clark. George Rogers Clark did not go to Vincennes the first time around. He sent, there was a French
- person who went to Vincennes who paved the way, for instance. There was a Spanish, an Italian, actually
- an Italian officer who was trading there. There was an Italian person there. There are British people,
- there are people, Spanish people in St. Louis. He went to St. Louis to try to get,
- Spanish support against British. And so you have to look at all of these different figures that, again,
- had to be discovered. You have to find them, and they're mentioned, somebody's mentioned, and then you
- have to figure out who the heck is this person that's mentioned in this document. And all your detective
- work has to go and go and go to figure out who is Francis Vigo. Anyone heard of Francis Vigo? Still?
- A little bit? Yeah? Okay. Right. It worked.
- do this kind of work over and over and over to figure out who everyone is. And there's a lot of, I'm
- just giving you a few of these people, but there's a lot of people to put into the history. And the
- dilemma continues. This is one of the first, one of the great institutions, I think, is the Indiana
- Magazine of History, which all of you read. It's had many, many editors. This is one of the first editors,
- Mr. Essaray.
- very early on in the 1910s when the magazine was first started in this part of the world to try to preserve
- Indiana history. And he tried to write a history of Indiana, as you can see from Exploration 1850. And
- I'll just give you, this is what you can't see. It'll come back, sorry. But I'll just read the preface,
- because the preface is rather remarkable. This is 1914.
- In the preparation of this book, several unexpected obstacles have been met. In the first place, many
- traditional stories popularly regarded as substantial history have been found to be without historical
- foundation. In the second place, there is no considerable collection of historical material to draw
- upon. Other states have published their documentary materials and thus made them available to historians,
- but that work remains to be done in Indiana. In the third place, many of the state publications have
- been found after close study to be unreliable.
- Others are bound without indexes, table of contents, or even continuous pagination. In many cases, it
- is necessary to turn through a record page by page to find any desired information. These conditions
- have made it necessary to found every material statement on a primary source. Such work is slow and
- very tedious. And so this is 1914, and this again is why it's so important to have the Monroe County
- History Center.
- why it's so important to have the Indiana Historical Society and when it became a stable institution
- and not just a sort of private gentleman's club. And when it opened up its archives, which is now it's
- just an amazing place, it's why historical societies are so important in so many different places,
- local ones, town ones, county ones, state ones, national ones, like the magnificence of the National
- Archives and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
- and preserving all of those documents. And this task remains. How do you save these? I can just give
- an example from my first book. I wrote a book about letter writing as my first book in the 18th century.
- Who wrote letters in the 18th century? Who was able to do so? And the argument was that very few people
- were able to do so, but more and more people. And I remember going to one historical society, and I
- was saying,
- I'm interested in letters. I know these exist, which are post office records, and post office records
- have all kinds of random people. So I'm interested in letters written not by famous people, but by ordinary
- people. And the person, the archivist there said, oh, we don't buy those. We only buy letters by people
- that we become famous, who are state legislators or something like that. We don't buy letters. We don't
- have the money to buy letters by ordinary people. They don't matter as much as
- state legislators matter. How many of you are state legislators here? So you are all the people who
- don't matter, right? You are the people who don't matter and aren't part of history. And this was the
- argument that was made earlier about officers are important and soldiers are not important. And the
- person tried to make an argument, actually soldiers are important, not just officers. And so ordinary
- people matter. And how do you tell the story of
- everybody in history, all the people who are involved in history. And what gets preserved? What gets
- put in an archive? And what is usable in an archive? And I know I've come where I've been given boxes
- of just miscellaneous stuff that's going to have to go through the whole box and it just takes all day
- long and you don't find anything. You don't find something you need because the box is unmarked. And
- part of the project of archives is to make things usable so that people can find the things that they're
- can explore, even to know what you can explore is so important. And this dilemma is in the 19th century,
- and it's a part of the project of these amateur historians in the 19th century, and it remains the project
- into the present day. How do you tell the history of a state? That's why papers like this are so important,
- but they're selective. These are the papers about George Rogers Clark that were to or from George Rogers
- Clark. But there are so many other papers
- don't have not to or from George Rogers Clark that relate to George Rogers Clark. And so this is where
- you can start your research. This is the first month of your research. But once you're done with this,
- then you have to go on and do so much other work to figure out all the other names, all the other places,
- et cetera, et cetera. This is the hard, hard work of telling the story of George Rogers Clark, or telling
- the story of Indiana, or telling the story of the Old Northwest, or telling the story of the American
- Revolution.
- or telling the story of the early American Republic, or telling the story of American history. You need
- all of these different perspectives to understand any one, even one person, even George Rogers Clark,
- you need to do so much work to learn about George Rogers Clark. It's not there, but it'll be there in
- a moment. So there's history with an imperative. People have said, Indiana needs to have a history.
- If you're a people without a history, you're a people who don't matter, right? That's what Mr. Essaray
- was doing. He wanted to write the history of Indiana. It hadn't been written for a long time in a way
- that had garnered respect. And he wanted to do it. And he found how hard it was to do that. Same with
- people in Kentucky. Same with people who were invested in the Northwest, the old Northwest, or what
- became eventually from what was called the West for a long time in the 19th century. It's not called
- the Midwest until much later. And then it becomes the Midwest, which is where we all live. Why does
- the Midwest matter?
- and if it doesn't have a history, how does it fit into the story of the United States? And this is what
- you can see people try to do. James Woodburn, Indiana History and its Celebration, 1913. Bodley, sorry,
- who was a kin, George Rogers Clark was his ancestor. He wrote the national significance of George Rogers
- Clark. He wanted George Rogers Clark to have a meaning and importance. The recognition, Louise Kellogg,
- the recognition of George Rogers Clark. The argument was that George Rogers Clark
- what he accomplished was not given enough recognition. And that became the imperative of history. An
- appraisal of the contributions of George Rogers Clark to the history of the West by James Alton James,
- 1930. And this was a project, I'll just give you four examples. This was the project of so many people
- that say, Indiana matters. And you're part of the project for saying Monroe County matters. What happened
- in this place needs preservation because it matters to the history of this state.
- It mattered then and it matters now. This place matters. Indiana matters. The Northwest matters. The
- West matters. And that's what these people tried to do. And that's what drove their history. Then there's,
- I'm not, I wrote a title, The Invention and Reinterpretation of George Rogers Clark. George Rogers Clark
- has been reinterpreted already.
- And people have added, two people have really written terrific things. James Fisher wrote a piece, and
- it was all about, here's this heroic tradition of George Rogers Clark, and here's the real George Rogers
- Clark. And the real George Rogers Clark did some very, very terrible things, and the real George Rogers
- Clark ended really, really unhappily. He had his heroic moment in his mid-20s, and everything went downhill
- from there.
- And so George Rogers Clark again became a complicated figure. James Madison is right there. A wonderful
- colleague of mine who's now retired. I'm assuming he's been here, actually. He gives talks, and he's
- an amazing speaker. He's done amazing work at the Indiana Magazine of History. He's written an amazing
- history of the state of Indiana, which I hope you've all read. And he again wanted to look at the history of how
- Indiana Magazine of History has changed in how it's presented the history of Indiana. And for a long
- time it was about heroes, and this was the way to create value for Indiana. If you have heroes, then
- you're a valuable place. And we need to find heroes, and then other people will appreciate this place.
- And then over the course of Indiana Magazine history, it became something different. It's not just the
- heroes that valorize Indiana. It's all its complex history that valorizes Indiana and fits Indiana into
- a larger story.
- And so that piece includes George Rogers Clark, but includes many, many other things. And then there's
- all kinds of wonderful books now that I would encourage all of you to read. One of the first people
- to write about the indigenous perspective on the American Revolution was Colin Calloway. And now there
- are many such books, but he wrote one of the first one in 1995. I highly recommend it. It's still a
- brilliant, brilliant book. It pried open possibilities. One thing people looked at George Rogers Clark
- and did not look at
- what it was like to be on the receiving end of George Rogers Clark. And that maybe things look rather
- differently from that vantage point and that perspective. And Colin Callaway was instrumental for starting
- that process. Andrew Caton, a wonderful historian who ended his career at Ohio State. He wrote a number
- of books about the Midwest, including a really, really terrific earlier book in his career called Frontier
- Indiana, which I highly, highly recommend. And again, it gives you appreciation of the complexity of
- this part of the world.
- Patrick Griffin, who teaches at Notre Dame, has written American Leviathan, Empire Nation and Revolutionary
- Frontier. Bethel Saylor, who teaches at Haverford, I believe, that settles empire colonialism and state
- formation in America's old Northwest. Rob Harper has run Unsettling the West, Violence in State Building
- in the Northwest. And these are the books now that I think I would
- encourage all of you to read, because these are the books that really help us to appreciate the complexity
- of this part of the world. So we don't need heroes to valorize this part of the world. We need to understand
- this part of the world and how it fits into the story. So George Rogers Clark did not conquer the Northwest.
- He did not even come close to conquering the Northwest. He made so many mistakes, even in 1778 and 1779,
- And now, when historians have plumbed through this, starting in the 19th century into the present day,
- he had just a limited grasp of pretty much everything. He was a human being. He was not a hero. And
- he didn't understand Native nations the way he thought he did. There were American traders already in
- Cascascia that helped him. He didn't know anything about them. He didn't know about the French settlers.
- He did not like the French settlers. He didn't know about the British. He didn't understand the Spanish empire.
- He didn't understand what else was happening in the war. He didn't understand what the Continental Army
- was doing. He didn't get along with people. He alienated, he was supposed to be defending Kentucky.
- He did that really badly because he wanted to be so obsessed with attacking Detroit that he was actually
- neglecting the people in Kentucky. The people in Kentucky were really angry with him and disappointed
- with him. So he just made mistake after mistake, which is why in 1782 he was gone.
- They did not conquer the Northwest because the conflict in the Northwest continued into the 19th century,
- and you know Matt Anthony Wayne does really problematic, it's a nice way of putting it, things in Ohio
- and in Fort Wayne is named after him, obviously in this part of the world to have to do that work again.
- That work continues with the Battle of Tippecanoe and William Henry Harrison, et cetera, et cetera.
- That process of dispossessing people continues
- And so George Rogers Clark did not conquer anything. And he was very good at crossing Illinois in terrible
- conditions, but he had a very, very limited understanding of logistics and finances. He was terrible
- at finances, terrible at administration. He was not a good diplomat. He was not a good strategist. He
- did not know how to sustain these things. What he did accomplish relied on the help of others over and
- over and over.
- If you look at his taking of Kaskaskia and Cahokia, there was no resistance there, but the French settlers
- did not like the British, and they were very happy to have something gone from there. When you look
- at what he did in Vincennes, of course, he publicly executed indigenous people at the gates there, which
- became a very notorious episode and became a harbinger of what he did later on in Ohio.
- where he participated in scorched earth tactics. And when I say that, it's like what happened in New
- York and what happened elsewhere, scorched earth tactics come with a lot of atrocities. And they kill
- babies, among many other things, things that aren't so appreciated. Maybe were ignored at the time,
- but not appreciated in the present. He was dismissed because he had
- reputation for neglect for alcohol abuse already in 1782 and then again 1786. 1786 was a disaster when
- he did something without any sanction but he was already known as an alcoholic then and which is why
- he was relieved of command. 1786 proved a disaster and in 1793 he was so financially desperate that
- he wanted to, he was willing to sell his soul to the French and effectively commit treason
- And so, and this was not known in the early histories, but this has become known, these documents have
- come out as part of his history, which is why a lot of, like you can see, I'll go back to this book,
- but you can see the papers are 1771 to 1781, the papers I collected do not go past 1784, and other
- to do the work of collecting the other material that was proving to be quite embarrassing to George
- Rogers Clark. So why study a hero that is not a hero? Why study George Rogers Clark? Why does George
- Rogers Clark matter? George Rogers Clark is a complicated figure, has always been a complicated figure,
- but he's a window into
- because he's been looked at and he intersects with so many different things in so many different places.
- He's a window into the complexity, especially of the Western theater of the War of American Independence.
- And that's really important to appreciate all of the War of American Independence, not just some of
- it, not just what happens on the East Coast, but what happened in all the places and involved all the
- different kinds of empires and all the different kinds of indigenous peoples. And George Rogers Clark
- gives us access to that, but he was part of that story.
- So the American Revolution becomes or the War of American Independence becomes something different.
- The Northwest becomes something different because you can appreciate what it meant for land speculation
- companies to hire surveyors like George Rogers Clark to try to survey something. And settlers just come
- in there and they go without surveys and without titles, et cetera, et cetera. And they do terrible
- things to indigenous peoples in a time period. And you have to watch this process and how clean and
- unclean this process was.
- And you have to understand how this part of the world develops. And George Rogers Clark is a window
- into that. He's a window into conflict that continues and takes many, many years of conflict before
- dispossession becomes conquest. And conquest is a really, really ugly term. You think of if you conquer
- something, to be on the receiving end of conquest is never a very good thing. And if you only look at
- the conqueror part of the equation,
- You're not looking at all of that history. But you have to look at the conflict and the dispossession
- that carries over for decades. And then you have to look at the many contingencies of history and how
- complicated history was for George Rogers Clark in grappling with all the things that he grappled with
- at the time and what all the other people grappled with, why Fort Pitt did what it did and the Continental
- Army did what it did when George Rogers Clark was serving the Virginia militia and he was serving at
- the beginning of his career Virginia land companies.
- or interested in exploiting other places. And you have to understand, George Rogers Clark gives you
- a window into this whole process and all its contingencies and complexities. Without it, you don't understand
- that past. More important point of what I want to do today, I'm giving you very much about George Rogers
- Clark. I've skipped over a lot of it, and I've skipped over a lot of how history is made, but how history
- is made really, really, really matters. And this is where you come in.
- and you're the value that you place on local history in Monroe County, and on history in general, because
- I'm sure you all read many, many different things about history. You have a love for history, and you're
- a part of supporting institutions that preserve history. You're a part of supporting just your YouTube
- channel, et cetera, et cetera, all the things, the value of history. And so to study George Rogers Clark,
- you can study George Rogers Clark. You study anyone. You study them from the inside.
- or from the outside, right? So I can take, have you written diaries every day for the last 10 years?
- And I would love to have your diaries, right? And so that'd be one way of understanding what it's like
- to live between 2016 and 2026 in the United States, your diary. But I have to look at it from the outside.
- I look at it from the inside, from the outside. In George Rogers Clark, I can look at the George Rogers
- Clark from the inside, and I can look at it from the outside and how different those perspectives are.
- And we do have some George Rogers Clark papers that enable us to do that, which is why I would like
- your diary to be donated to the Monroe County History Center. Again, so it's so valuable to have that
- inside and outside perspective. The inside perspective is not good enough. And the outside perspective
- is not good enough either. To understand history, you need both. And you need the multiplicity to say
- conquest is this beautiful thing. It's really terrible for the babies that were slaughtered over and
- over and over.
- for decades, it doesn't look so good from that vantage point. So you have to look at history from so
- many different perspectives, so many different vantage points, so many different people, so many different
- places. And that's why history, again, is so important. And George Rogers Clark led to that place because
- his people have plumbed through George Rogers Clark over and over and over and changed George Rogers
- Clark. And I don't know how many of you are heroes, but most people I understand from one here right there,
- So most people, and you're saying he's a hero, and he's not even saying he's a hero, right? Most people
- don't want to be heroes, right? To be a hero is really, really hard, and it's to be incomplete. It means
- this one thing. And human beings are much more complex than heroes. Any hero you can think of, including
- you, sorry, are a complex human being. And any figure that we elevate into a hero, whoever it is,
- Martin Luther King, complicated human being. Gandhi, complicated human being. Any hero is a complicated
- human being. They're not just a hero. There might be a heroic action. And it's really, really amazing
- that the person did something heroic. It's hard to do heroic things, whatever your definition of heroism
- is. But there's a human being which is much bigger than the hero that might be inside any human being.
- And heroic actions can be very, very small. It can be just a kindness that you do, can be
- a heroic action. You don't even know what effect it has on somebody else. I can do a kindness to someone
- not knowing that they had a really terrible day or a terrible week, and my kindness really just changes
- something for that person. It's a heroic action that I don't even understand that I did. I just did
- something small, and it mattered so much to someone else at all they'd never even know. So heroism is
- such an incomplete thing. You don't even always recognize it. And the wish to have heroes
- is a more complicated wish. And obviously, there are different moments, like in the 1920s and 1930s,
- when there was a wish to have heroes. And in the 1920s and 1930s, you had the commemoration of George
- Rogers Clark. And if you look, I'm not going to give you all the speeches that were made, but it was
- all about rugged individualism, et cetera, et cetera, at a time when there were very few rugged individuals.
- There was no more frontier. And there was big business was dominating the world in the 1920s and 1930s.
- I know all of you were figments of the imagination back then. So the rugged individual just seemed to
- be gone, and there was this attempt to recreate the rugged individual in a culture that didn't have
- rugged individuals anymore. And that's the heroes that they wanted desperately in the 1920s and 1930s,
- because they didn't exist anymore. And there are different moments where people wanted George Rogers
- Clark to be something that George Clark
- Rogers Clark wasn't, and they wanted that for their own purposes, nothing to do with George Rogers Clark,
- they had to do something about themselves. And so to have an honest history that plumbs through all
- of the archives, not just some of the archives, but all of the archives from all the different perspectives,
- does all the research, does all the hard work that Mr. Essaray talked about, how hard it is, it's slow
- and tedious to do that work.
- That's what historians do and that's what people appreciate history. It's just hard work learning about
- history. Just think of all the events that you've attended in the last few years and all the different
- angles you've learned about Monroe County history and all the amazing things that have happened in this
- place. It's not one person that can deliver all of that to you. You have to come a number of times to
- appreciate from this angle and next month you're gonna have murder and sex. And you've had trains and
- you've had all these other things and now there's gonna be murder and sex on a train apparently.
- That's how history accumulates. It's not one thing. It's so many different vantage points. It's so much
- work. And that's part of the beauty of it. It's this continuous process of delving into it
- and the willingness not to just have heroes, but to have human beings and to have honesty and not to
- have a false history, but to have an honest history.
- I guess I have, my first name has a Russian heritage in it, but I'm not in Russia or China right now,
- so. And this hard work of history comes from many, many, it comes from academic historians among the
- faculty. I'm researching a book now about globalizing of the United States in the early 19th century.
- And there are so many Americans who went all over the world in the early 19th century. I thought they
- all just went west, but they went all over the world. They were in Chile, they were in Russia, they
- were in Turkey, they were in Borneo,
- They were everywhere. And I'm finding this really exciting. It's just hard, hard work. There's so many
- just, I've been working on this for over a decade, and there's still more work to be done. There are
- public historians who've done amazing work at national historic sites. I once was walking my dog in,
- right by Jackson Creek Middle School, where my younger son goes, or went.
- And there's a park there, Alcott Park. And then there's the, where is it? It's the family, the family.
- What's my dog's name? What? Rogers, Rogers family park. Yeah, wonderful place to walk a dog. And I met
- a man there who's not walking a dog, actually. And he ended up talking to me. He didn't know who I was.
- And he said he wasn't from Bloomington. He wasn't from Indiana. He was touring. He was visiting somebody.
- But he had just done a tour of battlefields on the East Coast.
- And this was last summer. And he said he wanted to see all the battlefields on the East Coast before
- all the signs had changed and you couldn't learn about the battles anymore because they were all being
- changed. And he was a veteran. I mean, he could have come here to the American Legion. And he was saying
- he wanted to do this tour before he probably could still learn about these battles before he wasn't
- allowed to learn. But public historians have done that at all these different historic sites
- all the different places. I'm going to do some of that this summer with my sons just to see these places
- again before the desk. People have done such extraordinary work. Archivists have done extraordinary
- work. Librarians have done extraordinary work. My son's teacher just did a brilliant job. I had one
- son in APUSH this year, AP US History. Good teacher. My younger son's teacher was just a great teacher
- at Jackson Middle School, Jackson Creek Middle School. And those teachers are just doing extraordinary
- work trying to
- convey history, real history, to young people. And now we're doing all of this in the context of terrible
- censorship and, for me, desecration of these historic sites around the country. I'm sure you've read
- about this in the newspaper. And we're doing this semi-quincentennial is right now on the 250th. We
- have the Lily L'Arbre. It has a dip of independence in it. And we're just going to have all of these
- things that have nothing to do with history.
- that desecrate the 250th anniversary. And so now it's so important, this work is so, so, so important.
- And this is where you come in, because you do, you're part of doing this important work. You're part
- of just having, sustaining a love of history in a community and what it means, and you're part of supporting
- it in all the different angles, all the different talks that you come with the history club.
- all the different activities that you do, also about history, all the conversations that you have with
- other people about history matter intensely. And you are the people who will hopefully demand that those,
- all the historic sites go back to having real history in them. You'll say, I don't want this Russian
- propaganda in there, I want real history. And you are the people who are gonna make the, on what constitutes
- history, what constitutes the value of
- understanding and grappling with the past as a way of understanding and grappling with the present.
- But history is not dead, of course. History is, I always tell my students, it's living history. It's
- so alive in so many different ways. It's right here, it's not there, it's right right here. And so what
- you do, what all the archivists do, all the librarians, all the teachers, all the public historians,
- all the different historic matters intensely, but you matter so intensely as you make demands on that
- to have an honest
- and real history. And without that, all of that can just go. All of that just can go. And so that's
- why I'm so grateful to be in your presence and to have been invited by Michael to do this, because again,
- what you do with your club and with all your videos online that I've learned so much from personally
- about this place, but what you do matters so intensely to preserve and protect and sustain and
- have history matter in this world and have it be alive in this world. So I cannot say that enough. And
- so it's not just about what the history says, but it's about the kind of history that you preserve and
- protect. And that's why I wanted to emphasize today not just the history of George Rogers Clark and
- all its complexity, and I could have gone much further into that, but I want you to appreciate how history
- itself changes. And again, the investment that people make at every single level
- all the research, all the analysis, all the preservation, all the library work, archival work, et cetera,
- et cetera, but all of your work as well. It cannot stay alive without your work as well. It can't simply
- happen in books and in classrooms. It has to happen in communities and in the public, which is why,
- again, I'm so grateful for the work that you do to keep history alive in our culture so we don't drift
- into propaganda.
- And with that, I want to say thank you for all your attention and your commitment to history.
- I think you can see, I mean, the instinct of being skeptical or knowing that you're told part of a story,
- and sometimes you can be more skeptical, right? This is what I teach my sons when they look at things
- online. Everything, you have to find out what the basis of everything is. What archives did they go
- into, if at all? There's so many things online which are just empty, right? And the first thing you
- have to do is say, what gives this substance and foundation? What is the work that someone has done?
- about anything. So it's a skepticism about areas, a critical eye to everything that we look at because
- we're bombarded with nonsense. And then you want to say that here is a work, you look at the footnotes,
- you look at what is the work that that person did. And you can see in the 19th century, they were working
- really hard to find the doc, just to find the documents. They knew the documents were disappearing already.
- In the 1830s, the documents were disappearing. So you have to find the things and that's, yeah. So it's
- not just about heroism.
- It's about human beings, but it's also about the foundation, the basis for which anything is said. And
- that has to do with all the things that are online. It has to do with everything in a book. What is
- the basis for what's said there? And that's the challenge of our modern moment, right? It's a challenge.
- We're just bombarded with so many more nonsense. Yes, sorry.
- What do we know about the involvement of Ohio? The what? Oh, well, that's just an important transport
- port, right, in terms of moving things up and down the Ohio. So the falls of the Ohio are very important.
- And Ohio is important in the 1770s, because that's where the British were trying to cultivate indigenous allies to
- try to stop settlement from expanding into that part of the world. No steamboats for later. 1830s would
- be full of steamboats. It's not steamboats yet. Yeah, no. 1830s and 1840s have lots of steam. And if
- you look at pictures of St. Louis in the 1840s, there's already the harbor of St. Louis. There's just
- hundreds of steam ships already. It's pretty amazing.
- So it happens very quickly, but it doesn't happen until the 1820s and 1830s. I think you had a, one
- of the talks I saw online was about barges going to Lafayette. I wish it was barges to Lafayette. It
- was pretty amazing. It was all about the things that were being produced in this part of the world,
- being shipped to other parts of the world, and it was all about the barges that could get up to Lafayette.
- It was very, very interesting.
- So thank you again, everyone. I guess, thank you again.