WEBVTT 00:00:00.130 --> 00:00:07.796 - So welcome to another program of the Mill County History Club. My name is Michael Carter and welcome 00:00:07.796 --> 00:00:15.614 - to my wife Paulette, my cousins and my brother over there to support me. Also should welcome our class 00:00:15.614 --> 00:00:23.281 - of 64 people that support this. The guys over here and the gals over here. We're all over 39, just a 00:00:23.281 --> 00:00:28.670 - little bit. I left some sheets of paper on all the tables as you know, 00:00:29.634 --> 00:00:37.301 - you share amongst yourselves, take a picture of it, of our coming programs. We're scheduled through 00:00:37.301 --> 00:00:45.581 - January next year, so barring cancellations, we're scheduled pretty far ahead. I want to thank the American 00:00:45.581 --> 00:00:53.248 - Legion for allowing us to have these programs for so many years. We've been coming here a long time 00:00:53.248 --> 00:00:54.398 - now, 13 years. 00:00:59.074 --> 00:01:08.019 - And thanks so much to the white staff, to the girls serving us. Be generous with them. And I'd also 00:01:08.019 --> 00:01:16.964 - like to thank CATS TV, our partners over there, for recording these programs for over 10 years. And 00:01:16.964 --> 00:01:26.267 - Dave back there has been here for a lot of them. All this stuff allows us to preserve our local history 00:01:26.267 --> 00:01:28.414 - for future generations. 00:01:28.610 --> 00:01:35.817 - and thanks to our loyal history enthusiasts who attend these programs. And we're really grateful to 00:01:35.817 --> 00:01:43.457 - them. A lot of diversity, a lot of great programs, a lot of different types of programs. Any new visitors 00:01:43.457 --> 00:01:50.665 - today? Anybody new? OK, there's a couple. If you want to get on our regular email list, if you wish 00:01:50.665 --> 00:01:55.998 - to, our regular email, just let me know. I can put your address on there. 00:01:56.514 --> 00:02:06.000 - And Steve Brewer will send out the invitations like he does every month. Now, right now, we have a public 00:02:06.000 --> 00:02:10.206 - service announcement from Jonathan back there. 00:02:26.306 --> 00:02:34.447 - Well, good afternoon. Thank you for the invitation. I'm Jonathan Michelson, and I have the pleasure 00:02:34.447 --> 00:02:42.750 - of directing a play called Another Revolution. And this is a play that deals in history, true events. 00:02:42.882 --> 00:02:50.136 - And so that's why I got the invitation to come and talk to you. You know, I'm sure you're familiar with 00:02:50.136 --> 00:02:57.250 - the Mark Twain quote, history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes, right? And this play is set 00:02:57.250 --> 00:03:04.574 - in 1968 on the campus of Columbia University. And for those of you that may remember that time, like me, 00:03:04.738 --> 00:03:12.816 - There were major protests that took place on Columbia during that spring and into the summer. And so 00:03:12.816 --> 00:03:20.975 - this play deals with that. And of course, the rhyming part comes in. This was a time that the country 00:03:20.975 --> 00:03:25.854 - was deeply divided, right, 1968. The Vietnam War was raging. 00:03:26.082 --> 00:03:34.384 - Certainly this play deals in that, that sort of bifurcation of the population in terms of people for 00:03:34.384 --> 00:03:42.768 - the war and against the war. And then this sense of a college campus, and it hasn't, where the police 00:03:42.768 --> 00:03:51.235 - are ultimately called in. The protests at Columbia then turned violent in certain ways when the police 00:03:51.235 --> 00:03:55.838 - interacted with people. And we start to, rhyming again, 00:03:55.938 --> 00:04:03.662 - on some of our college campuses recently, including Columbia, but including our own IU campus where 00:04:03.662 --> 00:04:11.540 - there was some difficulty in terms of peaceful protests. So the play really is important in that way. 00:04:11.540 --> 00:04:19.419 - And in coming to see it, one, you get a wonderful sense of this time. And remembering back, it's been 00:04:19.419 --> 00:04:23.358 - quite a journey for me to think through that time. 00:04:23.554 --> 00:04:31.889 - And then also this sense that is something that makes a difference to us now. Then on top of that, 00:04:31.889 --> 00:04:40.393 - you know, I'm a stage director, so I get to work with a wonderful group of people. We collaborate. I 00:04:40.393 --> 00:04:45.950 - have a great group of designers that have put this show together. 00:04:46.402 --> 00:04:54.990 - And then I have a wonderful cast that I get to work with. One cast member just graduated from our graduate 00:04:54.990 --> 00:05:03.338 - program at IU with an MFA. And the other is an actor that we hired in from New York to come and be part 00:05:03.338 --> 00:05:09.438 - of this community. So it's a wonderful piece. It deals in college students. 00:05:09.634 --> 00:05:17.409 - going through the same rhyming, again, the same thing that our graduate students go through in terms 00:05:17.409 --> 00:05:25.570 - of funding, in terms of making it through school, but then also this sense of time and how certain events 00:05:25.570 --> 00:05:33.268 - that we think back, oh, well, that happened in the 60s, well, here we are again in certain ways. So 00:05:33.268 --> 00:05:37.502 - I hope you'll join us. We open June 5th, no, June 4th. 00:05:38.050 --> 00:05:46.600 - June 4th, I'm looking back at somebody that dates better than I do. June 4th, and it runs three weekends 00:05:46.600 --> 00:05:55.068 - here in Bloomington. So I hope you'll come and join us. I think if you like history, it'll be something 00:05:55.068 --> 00:06:03.618 - that you truly enjoy and have fun with. Okay, thank you very much. And now Daniel Slegel from the Monroe 00:06:03.618 --> 00:06:07.934 - County History Center would like to say a few words. 00:06:11.714 --> 00:06:17.789 - Thank you, Michael. Hi, everyone. We're really excited to be here again. There's a lot going on at the 00:06:17.789 --> 00:06:23.804 - History Center if you haven't been here yet. I'll touch on a couple things before I get to the really 00:06:23.804 --> 00:06:30.233 - big one. But Dr. Roger Rott, there he is, brought some more editions of his book about the Hoosier hysteria. 00:06:30.233 --> 00:06:33.182 - So if you missed buying it on the first printing, 00:06:33.282 --> 00:06:40.286 - Roger has a second printing, and we have some for sale. And then we're also very lucky, because I know 00:06:40.286 --> 00:06:47.290 - many of you look for books that you don't have yet or that have not been out very long. And we're very 00:06:47.290 --> 00:06:54.294 - lucky that Penny Matheson, one of our researchers, is also an amazing writer. And she did a whole book 00:06:54.294 --> 00:07:01.434 - about the Worley Mansion from Ellitsville that was torn down in the 70s, I believe. 1940. I was a little 00:07:01.434 --> 00:07:02.590 - off its history. 00:07:03.554 --> 00:07:09.784 - But it took me longer than it normally does to read this book, just because with her descriptions and 00:07:09.784 --> 00:07:16.502 - what Penny found, I would flip back to the maps or the pictures she's included to figure out where everything 00:07:16.502 --> 00:07:22.854 - was or where rooms were as you looked at the building. I've not read a book and had so much fun reading 00:07:22.854 --> 00:07:29.206 - it in a long time. So if you want a new book, Penny published this. She brought them in for us to sell. 00:07:29.206 --> 00:07:33.054 - She's been very generous. So if you want a great book to read, 00:07:33.506 --> 00:07:39.962 - Please feel free to stop by at the table. I think I brought about all 20 copies we have left. So Ann 00:07:39.962 --> 00:07:46.673 - 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 00:07:46.673 --> 00:07:53.449 - member or yourself. I know someone that does that. Please make sure to stop by. We have a lot of exhibits 00:07:53.449 --> 00:07:59.968 - that have opened recently. We have one on Sarx Tarzian. We did a refresh to our cook exhibit. We have 00:07:59.968 --> 00:08:01.822 - one about all the Civil War. 00:08:02.050 --> 00:08:07.867 - American Revolution veterans that moved west, and so they settled and died here in Monroe County. So 00:08:07.867 --> 00:08:13.799 - we have an exhibit about that. We have a lot of different things on display. About a month ago, a lady 00:08:13.799 --> 00:08:19.673 - came in and said, oh, I just brought my friends in. I've already seen upstairs. I don't need to go up 00:08:19.673 --> 00:08:25.663 - there. And we kind of laughed and said, ma'am, just head up there. If you find everything up there that 00:08:25.663 --> 00:08:29.982 - you've already seen before, then you can come back down, no admission fee. 00:08:30.402 --> 00:08:36.591 - And she came back down and gave us $20 and said, I hadn't seen half of that stuff. I'm coming back when 00:08:36.591 --> 00:08:42.660 - they're not here. So just to emphasize, we really do try to change things up in there, and things are 00:08:42.660 --> 00:08:48.670 - always looking different. So please make sure to come by. And the other very big thing we have going 00:08:48.670 --> 00:08:54.859 - on, it's through this week, are donations going to our garage sale. So if you're doing spring cleaning, 00:08:54.859 --> 00:08:59.262 - not that anybody here would procrastinate, but should that have happened, 00:08:59.682 --> 00:09:06.375 - Please know we are still accepting donations out at the garage sale. And then I have more flyers for 00:09:06.375 --> 00:09:13.002 - the garage sale that it's here next month. It's going to be here really, really soon with June 10th 00:09:13.002 --> 00:09:19.894 - being member day. If you're a Monroe County History Center member or cook or Simtra employees. And then 00:09:19.894 --> 00:09:23.870 - Friday, June 12th, Saturday, the 13th and Monday, the 15th. 00:09:24.482 --> 00:09:30.828 - 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 00:09:30.828 --> 00:09:37.111 - sheets. If anyone else needs a little reminder, I'm very much that way. So I'm not ashamed to say it. 00:09:37.111 --> 00:09:43.703 - So feel free to stop by and see me and come get some of these. What are the hours for accepting donations? 00:09:43.703 --> 00:09:49.864 - Excellent. Thank you, Pam. The hours are from 10 AM until 2 PM. So there's about a four hour window 00:09:49.864 --> 00:09:51.774 - to stop by and make donations. 00:09:52.610 --> 00:10:01.214 - But again, if you have any questions, if you want to know more about the exhibits, or you'd love to 00:10:01.214 --> 00:10:09.818 - read a new book, I'm happy to make a recommendation. But stop over and see me. Thank you, everyone. 00:10:09.818 --> 00:10:18.680 - Thanks, Daniel. Real quick, I want to mention next month's program. It's by our own Clay Stuckey here. 00:10:18.680 --> 00:10:21.950 - It's called The Male Murders of 1946. 00:10:22.722 --> 00:10:29.899 - It's about race, sex, and murder. And that's all I'm going to tell you about it. But if that doesn't 00:10:29.899 --> 00:10:37.004 - draw people here, I don't know what else will. So anyway, that's next month, June 30. Today we have 00:10:37.004 --> 00:10:44.465 - a fellow associate professor of history at IU, Constantine Dirk. And although I'm on a first name basis, 00:10:44.465 --> 00:10:50.718 - I can call him Con. I've been told. So hello, Con. So he's going to talk about a person 00:10:50.850 --> 00:11:02.132 - We all grew up knowing this name, George Rogers Clark. We've probably all been to Vincennes and seen 00:11:02.132 --> 00:11:13.638 - the memorial down there. But I'll let Constantine go ahead and start with his program. Everyone, thank 00:11:13.638 --> 00:11:16.766 - you so much for being here. 00:11:16.962 --> 00:11:22.642 - I'm really, really excited to see such a large, large crowd of people devoted to history. I have been 00:11:22.642 --> 00:11:28.379 - watching a bunch of videos. Am I close enough to the mic? Sorry. Am I doing OK to the mic? OK. I'm not 00:11:28.379 --> 00:11:34.170 - used to talking with a microphone. And I'm a hand talker, so I'm going to try to talk only with my left 00:11:34.170 --> 00:11:39.906 - hand and not with my right hand. And I'm also a wanderer, because I often have a dog when I teach. And 00:11:39.906 --> 00:11:43.582 - my little dog accompanies me and follows me around the classroom. 00:11:44.642 --> 00:11:50.566 - Anyway, I'm really pleased. I watched a bunch of videos, actually, that are on the YouTube site for 00:11:50.566 --> 00:11:56.609 - the History Club, which is really, really interesting. I've learned an amazing amount of this part of 00:11:56.609 --> 00:12:02.769 - the world and all the things about it. I noticed that a lot of speakers who come focus on Monroe County 00:12:02.769 --> 00:12:08.812 - and the area. I'm not going to be able to do that today. I also noticed that people have some amazing 00:12:08.812 --> 00:12:11.774 - old photographs from earlier in the 20th century. 00:12:11.970 --> 00:12:18.399 - of trains and all kinds of things, which are really, really beautiful. I am talking about the late 18th 00:12:18.399 --> 00:12:24.642 - century. There are going to be no photographs at all. But I'm going to try to sort of valorize, talk 00:12:24.642 --> 00:12:31.132 - about George Rogers Clark as a figure as it relates to the American Revolution, the War of Independence, 00:12:31.132 --> 00:12:36.510 - and the American Revolution as it relates to Indiana and it relates to a larger world. 00:12:36.706 --> 00:12:42.534 - And what I'd really like to concentrate on doing today is something unusual, which is really concentrate 00:12:42.534 --> 00:12:48.139 - on how history is made. Because I think there are a lot of misconceptions about how history is made, 00:12:48.139 --> 00:12:54.134 - how it changes over time, et cetera, et cetera. And I want to look at how Georgia Rogers Clark was invented 00:12:54.134 --> 00:12:59.739 - effectively, not as a person, but as an image and as a reputation, and how that image and reputation 00:12:59.739 --> 00:13:03.902 - have changed over time through the 19th century and into the 20th century. 00:13:04.034 --> 00:13:11.509 - and what the meaning assigned to George Rogers Clark, how that meaning has changed rather dramatically. 00:13:11.509 --> 00:13:18.768 - 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 00:13:18.768 --> 00:13:26.099 - important that is for what you do. Oh, okay, sorry. Thought that was for me. The kind of appreciation 00:13:26.099 --> 00:13:33.214 - of history that you cultivate here and protect and preserve and how important that is for history. 00:13:33.442 --> 00:13:42.290 - So I'm going to circle back to that. My screen is gone already. There it is. All right, this is the 00:13:42.290 --> 00:13:51.226 - only surviving painting of George Rogers Clark from his lifetime. This is in 1810 when he's 58 years 00:13:51.226 --> 00:14:00.958 - old. You can see he has a rather ornate cane there at the bottom. He is not the happiest person in the world. 00:14:01.858 --> 00:14:07.381 - maybe just inclined to smile. If you know anything about photographs, early photographs from later in 00:14:07.381 --> 00:14:12.796 - the 19th century, they're mostly unsmiling people, because to sit for a photograph in 1850, you had 00:14:12.796 --> 00:14:18.212 - to sit for many, many minutes, and to hold a smile for that long was rather difficult. So there are 00:14:18.212 --> 00:14:24.006 - a lot of unsmiling photographs for a long time before it became normal for people to smile. In a portrait, 00:14:24.006 --> 00:14:29.692 - he could have made his choices, but this is the choice that he made when his life had become very, very, 00:14:29.692 --> 00:14:30.558 - very difficult. 00:14:32.034 --> 00:14:41.644 - This is the memorial that many of you know and have been to. It's a rather remarkable place. Imagined 00:14:41.644 --> 00:14:51.255 - to be very, very important as a contribution to the history of Indiana in the 1930s. Actually started 00:14:51.255 --> 00:14:57.662 - in the 1920s. I'm not sure why that is happening. Please come back. 00:14:58.754 --> 00:15:04.798 - OK, this is the inscription on it. And this is where I'd like to begin. This is on the rotunda. This 00:15:04.798 --> 00:15:10.903 - is the text that's on there. And this is part of the reasoning behind the image that's created in the 00:15:10.903 --> 00:15:17.127 - 1930s. And if you know anything about historical films, historical films often are about not the moment 00:15:17.127 --> 00:15:23.291 - that they show in the past, but they're about the moment in which they are made. And that's certainly, 00:15:23.291 --> 00:15:28.318 - this tells us a lot about the 1930s and what they wanted George Rogers Clark to be. 00:15:28.866 --> 00:15:35.163 - And it's that desire that I'd like to focus on today, why people wanted George Rogers Clark to be a 00:15:35.163 --> 00:15:41.586 - certain kind of person. This is another memorial to George Rogers Clark. I'll show the inscription in 00:15:41.586 --> 00:15:48.009 - a minute. This is at the University of Virginia, which is the origins of his life in that part of the 00:15:48.009 --> 00:15:54.558 - world, Alpenmoral County in Virginia. This is sort of a classic kind of statue. This was built in 1921. 00:15:55.106 --> 00:16:03.855 - in the same era in which there's a lot of memorialization of George Rogers Clark. This is sort of a 00:16:03.855 --> 00:16:12.778 - very standard kind of statue in this time period where you have the main figure in the center and you 00:16:12.778 --> 00:16:23.102 - have very prone people. You have armed frontiersmen, I'll call them, there and you have very prone indigenous people. 00:16:23.522 --> 00:16:30.926 - who are part of the statue. And this kind of iconography appears in statue after statue after statue 00:16:30.926 --> 00:16:38.330 - this time period. I'm not sure why that's happening. There it's back. But this kind of the prone and 00:16:38.330 --> 00:16:46.247 - unarmed indigenous people and the standing and armed frontiers people are, again, it's very, very standard. 00:16:46.247 --> 00:16:52.478 - This is the inscription, Conqueror of the Northwest on the Charlottesville Memorial. 00:16:52.674 --> 00:17:01.367 - And a lot of these statues and inscriptions become complicated. And I'll talk about that in a moment. 00:17:01.367 --> 00:17:10.401 - A lot of this has been to memorialize how George Rogers Clark intersects with Indiana history, of course. 00:17:10.401 --> 00:17:19.095 - And that is, of course, in Vincennes and the seizure of two small towns in Illinois and then crossing 00:17:19.095 --> 00:17:21.822 - Illinois in a very harsh winter 00:17:22.178 --> 00:17:29.300 - and coming to Vincennes and taking a British outpost, what became a British outpost at Vincennes in 00:17:29.300 --> 00:17:36.422 - the late summer of 1778 into the early winter of 1779. And that's the real claim to fame and that's 00:17:36.422 --> 00:17:43.829 - what a lot of the commemoration is about. This is the route that he took from the very beginning coming 00:17:43.829 --> 00:17:51.806 - from Western Pennsylvania below Fort Pitt and crossing, crossing, crossing by boat and then ultimately by land. 00:17:52.674 --> 00:18:01.189 - to go to Kaskia and Cahokia here, where two places were French outposts for a long time, but belonged 00:18:01.189 --> 00:18:09.787 - at this point to the British, and were given over very, very handily. And then there's the walk across 00:18:09.787 --> 00:18:18.719 - Illinois to get to Vincennes and Fort Sackville, or take Fort Sackville, which surrendered rather quickly. 00:18:18.719 --> 00:18:22.142 - This is the claim to fame at the moment. 00:18:22.882 --> 00:18:29.711 - And this is why I looked at there's a really wonderful historical marker database where I discovered 00:18:29.711 --> 00:18:36.675 - there are 255 historical markers, many in this part of the world, that commemorate George Rogers Clark 00:18:36.675 --> 00:18:43.031 - and the conquest of the Northwest and his heroism. There are also counties in several states. 00:18:43.031 --> 00:18:49.927 - There's a town, of course, in his honor that was granted to him for his service. And there's a bridge 00:18:49.927 --> 00:18:51.550 - which I've crossed over 00:18:51.650 --> 00:18:59.537 - actually between Jeffersonville and Louisville. And again, it's disappearing, sorry. Seems to be coming 00:18:59.537 --> 00:19:07.803 - back. So this statue and this kind of commemoration became rather complicated at the University of Virginia. 00:19:07.803 --> 00:19:15.766 - This statue was built in 1921. And in 2021, this is what happened to this statue. Yeah, it'll come back. 00:19:15.766 --> 00:19:21.150 - But it was removed because it was rather, again, this kind of portrait 00:19:21.282 --> 00:19:27.472 - iconography is over and over and over and there are a lot of people who felt very very uncomfortable 00:19:27.472 --> 00:19:33.968 - with this kind of iconography in 2021 and so this statue was removed and this is the part of the changing 00:19:33.968 --> 00:19:40.158 - image and reputation of George Rogers Clark and I'd like to really track through that changing image 00:19:40.158 --> 00:19:46.409 - and reputation and think about how history is made because George Rogers Clark is a historical figure 00:19:46.409 --> 00:19:49.534 - but there are many many just George Rogers Clark's 00:19:49.922 --> 00:19:56.093 - over the course of history. His image changes rather dramatically, what people know about him and what 00:19:56.093 --> 00:20:02.145 - he is made to represent in terms of how he represents Virginia or Kentucky or Indiana or Illinois or 00:20:02.145 --> 00:20:08.197 - the Northwest, et cetera, et cetera. What does George Rogers Clark mean? And what does Indiana mean? 00:20:08.197 --> 00:20:14.308 - What does Kentucky mean? What does Virginia mean? What does Northwest mean? And this happens over and 00:20:14.308 --> 00:20:18.622 - over and over. And so here you have what is really, really important to 00:20:18.722 --> 00:20:24.426 - two elements. One is a detective work of history, and that's simply going through all the old records, 00:20:24.426 --> 00:20:30.075 - some of which are stored in the Monroe County History Center, local records, for instance, are so, so 00:20:30.075 --> 00:20:35.779 - very important. I'll talk about that some more. Part of it is that kind of detective work, finding the 00:20:35.779 --> 00:20:41.483 - records that enables us to understand the past, and part of it is the analytical work of understanding 00:20:41.483 --> 00:20:47.353 - the past. I'd like to emphasize both today as George Rogers Clark changes. But I know you all know George 00:20:47.353 --> 00:20:48.350 - Rogers Clark from 00:20:48.802 --> 00:20:55.611 - from high school, et cetera, et cetera, hopefully. But I'll do a little bit of background of his life. 00:20:55.611 --> 00:21:02.684 - He's born in Virginia in 1752. As a very young man, he does some surveying in Western Virginia and Eastern 00:21:02.684 --> 00:21:09.492 - Kentucky. Then he becomes a militia officer and works his way up the ranks. Then you get to the famous 00:21:09.492 --> 00:21:16.830 - moment where he's quite, you can see he's quite a young man when he does what he does in Illinois and Indiana. 00:21:19.074 --> 00:21:25.305 - After that, he leads another military expedition against the Shawnees in 1780. He becomes a brigadier 00:21:25.305 --> 00:21:31.658 - general in command of two fascinating places that Virginia names all of Kentucky, Kentucky County, that 00:21:31.658 --> 00:21:38.011 - belongs to Virginia at this time period, and they name all of Illinois, Illinois County, and claim both 00:21:38.011 --> 00:21:41.310 - of those places that become future states, of course. 00:21:41.506 --> 00:21:49.970 - But in this moment of time, until 1784, when Virginia cedes all this territory, these are large counties 00:21:49.970 --> 00:21:57.869 - of Virginia for a while. In 1782, Clark leads two military expeditions against the Shawnee again. 00:21:57.869 --> 00:22:06.172 - And after, given the difficulty of those, he's relieved of his military command. He becomes a surveyor 00:22:06.172 --> 00:22:10.686 - of military bounty lands. He leads one more expedition. 00:22:10.818 --> 00:22:19.198 - In 1786, that is not sanctioned by any government, and it proves to be quite a disaster. And then he 00:22:19.198 --> 00:22:27.495 - falls into greater obscurity. There's a moment in 1793, which we now know much more about, where he 00:22:27.495 --> 00:22:36.455 - offers his services to the French. And Edmund, if you remember, it's about Genet, who's the French diplomat 00:22:36.455 --> 00:22:37.534 - who tries to 00:22:37.794 --> 00:22:46.276 - recruit Americans to fight the Spanish Empire, and George Rogers Clark falls prey to that and is willing 00:22:46.276 --> 00:22:54.516 - to expatriate himself in response. He settles in Clarksville in 1803. He has enslaved people and land 00:22:54.516 --> 00:23:03.078 - earlier, but he's in serious financial struggles, so he signs over all his land and slaves to his younger 00:23:03.078 --> 00:23:07.198 - brother, who was very, very famous, William Clark, 00:23:07.298 --> 00:23:16.170 - of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Because Indiana is a free state at that point, Ben McGee is emancipated 00:23:16.170 --> 00:23:24.711 - before William Clark comes to live with his brother for a little while. And Ben McGee is an indentured 00:23:24.711 --> 00:23:33.003 - servant who's supposed to serve for 30 more years. In 1809, he suffers a terrible axe stroke and an 00:23:33.003 --> 00:23:34.910 - accident, loses a leg. 00:23:35.170 --> 00:23:41.159 - And it gets closer to the painting that I started with, where he's struggling. He moves in with his 00:23:41.159 --> 00:23:47.269 - sister in Locust Grove, Kentucky. I don't know if you've ever been there, but I'll show you a picture 00:23:47.269 --> 00:23:53.378 - in a moment, where again, he's tended in Kentucky. Slavery is legal, so he has a slave who takes care 00:23:53.378 --> 00:23:59.966 - of him. And then he dies. This is a reconstruction, or this was a reconstruction of his cabin in Clarksville. 00:23:59.966 --> 00:24:02.302 - This is where he ended up for a while. 00:24:02.786 --> 00:24:10.302 - It was actually destroyed in 1854 by accident and then reconstructed and then destroyed again, unfortunately, 00:24:10.302 --> 00:24:17.612 - I think in 2021. And then Locust Grove, where his sister lived with her spouse, who was once a subordinate 00:24:17.612 --> 00:24:24.444 - of George Rogers Clark, but who became very successful and one of the interesting books that's been 00:24:24.444 --> 00:24:31.550 - read rather recently is to look at the trajectory of George Rogers Clark, which sort of goes like this. 00:24:32.066 --> 00:24:39.877 - and his brother-in-law, William Krogan, and his brother-in-law has a nice place in Locust Grove, Kentucky. 00:24:39.877 --> 00:24:47.761 - And this is where he ends up in his life as a ward of his sister and brother-in-law. In order to understand 00:24:47.761 --> 00:24:55.280 - George Rogers Clark, one of the most important documents that survives is his own memoir that he wrote 00:24:55.280 --> 00:24:59.806 - in manuscript. But it disappeared for long stretches of time. 00:25:00.546 --> 00:25:07.337 - And it was in different kinds of hands. It was used by different people. One of the first is Mann Butler, 00:25:07.337 --> 00:25:13.871 - who wanted to write a history of the Commonwealth of Kentucky. There was a person who wanted to write 00:25:13.871 --> 00:25:20.598 - the first biography of George Rogers Clark, who was anti-slavery and then was killed in a duel for being 00:25:20.598 --> 00:25:27.132 - an anti-slavery activist as an editor of a newspaper. That memoir was again used, and it was again in 00:25:27.132 --> 00:25:28.926 - odd hands for a good while. 00:25:29.378 --> 00:25:36.370 - by one of the first historians of this part of the world, John P. Dillon. And then it's really uncertain 00:25:36.370 --> 00:25:43.096 - where those papers are, but they end up in the hands of Lyman Draper, who makes excellent efforts to 00:25:43.096 --> 00:25:49.756 - preserve historical records across the 19th century. Upon his death in 1891, he donates his massive 00:25:49.756 --> 00:25:57.214 - collection of documents to the Wisconsin Historical Society, and that's where George Rogers Clark papers end up 00:25:57.826 --> 00:26:05.031 - in 1891 and become accessible to other scholars, not through informal means of appealing to the family, 00:26:05.031 --> 00:26:12.582 - but as a place where any researcher can go. And that's when you have much more serious use of the documents. 00:26:12.582 --> 00:26:19.579 - There's a person who tries to write one of the first histories of the Northwest and to emphasize how 00:26:19.579 --> 00:26:22.974 - important the Northwest was to American history. 00:26:23.202 --> 00:26:29.847 - That's his main point and he uses George Rogers Clark. Then the papers are fully, all of his papers 00:26:29.847 --> 00:26:36.758 - including the memoir are published in 1912 in the first collection of his papers and they are published 00:26:36.758 --> 00:26:43.403 - separately in full in 1920. So I just give you, I'm not sure how you can see on the wings, but this 00:26:43.403 --> 00:26:47.390 - is one of the, it's just a marvelous, marvelous collection. 00:26:47.490 --> 00:26:54.644 - of George Rogers Clark's papers that were assembled in 1912 in the second volume in 1926. And this is 00:26:54.644 --> 00:27:01.657 - one of the first books that really, really tried to put George Rogers Clark into the public eye and 00:27:01.657 --> 00:27:09.021 - to make a case for his importance to the history of Kentucky when this historian was trying to emphasize 00:27:09.021 --> 00:27:15.614 - the importance of Kentucky. And this is where you come in in a lot of ways, and this is where 00:27:15.714 --> 00:27:20.974 - the image and reputation of George Rogers Clarkman, but there's such an effort in this time period to 00:27:20.974 --> 00:27:26.182 - preserve papers. And there's a sense that the papers that are really, really important to understand 00:27:26.182 --> 00:27:31.390 - history are disappearing. And Mann Butler was one of the people who tried to collect the papers. How 00:27:31.390 --> 00:27:36.856 - do you write the history of George Rogers Clark? How do you write the history of Kentucky when the papers 00:27:36.856 --> 00:27:39.486 - are all scattered and the papers are disappearing? 00:27:39.906 --> 00:27:45.658 - And how do you actually write history? How do you preserve history? And this is what you do, right? 00:27:45.658 --> 00:27:51.583 - This is what your organization does. It preserves the value of history to our culture. And this is the 00:27:51.583 --> 00:27:57.393 - moment of Man Butler. Sorry, these things are disappearing. And so one of the things that Man Butler 00:27:57.393 --> 00:28:03.318 - does is try to find the documents. He's one of the first to write an account of the Illinois campaign. 00:28:03.318 --> 00:28:07.230 - And he uses those papers in order to do that, in order to emphasize 00:28:07.746 --> 00:28:14.602 - settlers coming from Kentucky and having a relationship with Illinois and Indiana because Illinois and 00:28:14.602 --> 00:28:21.459 - Indiana have British presence and British presence is coming down with indigenous allies into Kentucky 00:28:21.459 --> 00:28:28.115 - and there's a lot of conflict over settlement. He thinks to write the history of Kentucky, you also 00:28:28.115 --> 00:28:35.038 - have to write the history of Illinois and Indiana and Michigan because these things are bound together. 00:28:36.706 --> 00:28:42.711 - And so he's really the first to do this. And as you can see, Butler laments the conduct of Clark and 00:28:42.711 --> 00:28:48.776 - does not seek to justify his hero. So there's a lionizing of what George Rogers Clark accomplishes in 00:28:48.776 --> 00:28:54.841 - 1778 and 1779, and that's the focus of what he's able to do. And then there's an acknowledgement that 00:28:54.841 --> 00:29:01.024 - George Rogers Clark made mistakes at the same time. And this is part of the complexity of history right 00:29:01.024 --> 00:29:05.246 - away, and this is part of the grappling of who is George Rogers Clark? 00:29:06.274 --> 00:29:12.663 - What is he? And again, in the 1920s and 1930s, when all those memorials went up, there's a great deal 00:29:12.663 --> 00:29:19.176 - of emphasis to try to lionize him and romanticize him and turn him into a hero. And already in the 19th 00:29:19.176 --> 00:29:25.753 - century, I just want to emphasize for a long time, there's a real grappling with who George Rogers Clark 00:29:25.753 --> 00:29:32.141 - was and what did he do. And this is important for Man Butler because Man Butler wants to say not just 00:29:32.141 --> 00:29:35.774 - who George Rogers Clark is, but who is, what is Kentucky? 00:29:37.314 --> 00:29:43.315 - What is Kentucky and who are Kentucky and what kind of people are they. What kind of people are Westerners. 00:29:43.315 --> 00:29:49.038 - Who are they. And he's using George Rogers Clark is one avenue into trying to grab with that question. 00:29:49.038 --> 00:29:54.206 - And you can see here I'll just read this a force and impetus there is enough in the Western. 00:29:55.490 --> 00:30:01.761 - character, all that is lacking is direction, a deep reverence for truth, a profound respect for law, 00:30:01.761 --> 00:30:08.342 - a ready submission to write, a loyal allegiance to duty. These will make the Western character as perfect 00:30:08.342 --> 00:30:14.738 - as humanity could ever hope to become." And so he's trying to hold up examples. How do you make people 00:30:14.738 --> 00:30:21.071 - in Kentucky and in the Old Northwest, how do you make them better? And this is part of the purpose of 00:30:21.071 --> 00:30:24.734 - history. You show history as an inspiration or as a lesson 00:30:24.834 --> 00:30:30.488 - to making people better. That was the purpose of writing history. That's why history, they felt, was 00:30:30.488 --> 00:30:36.309 - really important. And this is why he felt George Rogers Clark was important. How do you create an image 00:30:36.309 --> 00:30:42.074 - of someone, a real image of someone, in order to make a whole region, a whole state and a whole region 00:30:42.074 --> 00:30:47.728 - better? And again, this is the interesting thing that happens right away. It happens well before the 00:30:47.728 --> 00:30:52.094 - memorials and what the memorials are supposed to mean in the 1920s and 1930s. 00:30:52.450 --> 00:30:58.250 - this already happens here is what does a person mean? What does a place mean? What does a state mean? 00:30:58.250 --> 00:31:04.106 - What does a region mean? And how does it fit into the United States? I know we're in Monroe County and 00:31:04.106 --> 00:31:09.962 - most of what you do here is how does Monroe County fit into larger stories of the railroad, et cetera, 00:31:09.962 --> 00:31:15.648 - et cetera? And this is the same dilemma. How do you fit something and assign it meaning so that the 00:31:15.648 --> 00:31:19.742 - meaning strikes a chord with people in whatever way it strikes a chord? 00:31:21.538 --> 00:31:28.049 - And how do you do that? How do you make history come alive for people so that it matters to them? And 00:31:28.049 --> 00:31:34.624 - this is the purpose of what history was supposed to do. It was supposed to measure character. And this 00:31:34.624 --> 00:31:41.008 - happens over and over and over and over in the 19th century. And I'm only going to do some greatest 00:31:41.008 --> 00:31:47.902 - hits of this process. But I want to show you again how the image of George Rogers Clark mattered so much to 00:31:48.130 --> 00:31:54.478 - and why they wrestled with it and why they tried to collect documents about it and why they tried to 00:31:54.478 --> 00:32:01.330 - look at it from preserve that history and put it forward. And here this is sort of the lamentation tradition 00:32:01.330 --> 00:32:07.992 - that George Rogers Clark was not given the credit that it was due and this is why he became such a bitter 00:32:07.992 --> 00:32:14.718 - person. That he had sacrificed so much as a young man and then he was discarded and he ended up, you know, 00:32:15.266 --> 00:32:21.692 - deep financial struggles, and terrible, terrible health alone, award of other people. And so everything 00:32:21.692 --> 00:32:28.426 - seemed to go horribly wrong for George Rogers Clark, and he should be given his due for what he accomplished 00:32:28.426 --> 00:32:34.728 - as a young man. And that's what this article, I'm just doing articles, there's so many articles about 00:32:34.728 --> 00:32:41.092 - him across the 19th century. And part of that tradition is how do we give him his due? The hero of the 00:32:41.092 --> 00:32:43.934 - heroic age of the West deserves a biographer. 00:32:44.578 --> 00:32:51.055 - And so the origins of the Northwest were the heroic moment. And how do you write a biography of the 00:32:51.055 --> 00:32:57.792 - hero? And this is one version of George Rogers Clark. There's another version in here that disappeared. 00:32:57.792 --> 00:33:04.399 - And this is about, this is a piece, this is another notes on the early settlement of the Northwestern 00:33:04.399 --> 00:33:11.006 - territory. Again, what does this part of the world mean? And this historian said, went and looked in, 00:33:11.298 --> 00:33:17.691 - You can see nine lawyers who were at the bar when Mr. Burnett came to the territory. Eight died confirmed 00:33:17.691 --> 00:33:23.783 - Sots and a large proportion of the officers under St. Clair, Wayne and Wilkinson were hard drinkers. 00:33:23.783 --> 00:33:29.815 - The greatest man of the early West, George Rogers Clark died a drunkard. And so the lesson here was 00:33:29.815 --> 00:33:35.967 - the first generation struggled and struggled and struggled and the second generation was able to lift 00:33:35.967 --> 00:33:41.214 - the Northwest up. The first generation just struggled and lapsed into hardship because 00:33:41.730 --> 00:33:47.050 - just didn't know what they were doing and they were in the in the rough initial conditions and it was 00:33:47.050 --> 00:33:52.318 - a second generation that was able to go up in the third generation and that was the argument of this 00:33:52.318 --> 00:33:57.846 - book. The first generation does what it did and the second generation builds on what the first generation 00:33:57.846 --> 00:34:03.166 - did and again it's meant to inspire how do you you don't want to end up like the first generation you 00:34:03.166 --> 00:34:08.382 - want to be the model here is the second generation the second generation is the one the people that 00:34:09.058 --> 00:34:15.339 - things that the first generation was unable to imagine and unable to do. And this is how you're supposed 00:34:15.339 --> 00:34:21.440 - to inspire the next generation. Then there's the heroic tradition, which is not a lamentation for him 00:34:21.440 --> 00:34:27.602 - or Jeremiah. And this tradition lasts a long, long, long time. And that is that among the many things, 00:34:27.602 --> 00:34:33.882 - Clark was in the West where George Washington was in the East, the unrivaled champion of the Revolution, 00:34:33.882 --> 00:34:37.950 - and he may be held with great propriety the Washington of the West. 00:34:38.466 --> 00:34:44.966 - And this is the trope that appears over and over and over. You've waged the great battle of Western 00:34:44.966 --> 00:34:51.466 - civilization against the savages of North America. And there are so many biographies, and I've read 00:34:51.466 --> 00:34:58.486 - more than a dozen biographies, and most of them have this trope that you have civilization versus savagery, 00:34:58.486 --> 00:35:03.166 - and he's on the side of civilization, and this is what he's able to do. 00:35:03.554 --> 00:35:09.460 - And this is the heroic tradition that appears over and over and over. And this is what appears in the 00:35:09.460 --> 00:35:15.425 - speeches in 1921 in Charlottesville at the University of Virginia. When that statue goes up, it's what 00:35:15.425 --> 00:35:21.331 - hearts in the speeches that are given by the President of the United States in 1936 when Vincennes is 00:35:21.331 --> 00:35:27.701 - opened up. And it's the heroic tradition that George Rogers Clark was a hero. But this is really complicated. 00:35:27.701 --> 00:35:30.654 - It's already, as you can see, in the 19th century, 00:35:30.850 --> 00:35:38.045 - some appreciation of the complexities of George Rogers Clark. That he was not just what he did in 1778 00:35:38.045 --> 00:35:45.100 - and 1779 and whatever heroic actions, however you want to describe those actions, he was a much more 00:35:45.100 --> 00:35:52.504 - complicated figure and this becomes what becomes more and more obvious as more and more of the historical 00:35:52.504 --> 00:35:59.838 - records are found and preserved and collected and looked at and are analyzed. And so George Rogers Clark 00:36:00.514 --> 00:36:06.149 - It gets more and more complicated. Here's someone writing in 1875 the truth concerning the expedition 00:36:06.149 --> 00:36:11.673 - of George Rogers Clark. Sorry, it's going to keep disappearing. But it's the truth about it, right? 00:36:11.673 --> 00:36:17.253 - It's not the myth of it. It's not the heroic myth. It's what really happened. And this is what every 00:36:17.253 --> 00:36:22.832 - time more documents are discovered, people can make this claim that you think you know George Rogers 00:36:22.832 --> 00:36:28.467 - Clark, but you don't know George Rogers Clark. This is the real George Rogers Clark. And this is what 00:36:28.467 --> 00:36:29.406 - really happened. 00:36:30.434 --> 00:36:36.613 - And this is, again, the process of history. And so Henry, William Henry, he was complaining about who 00:36:36.613 --> 00:36:43.278 - was the greatest historian of the 19th century in the United States, George Bancroft, who wrote a magisterial 00:36:43.278 --> 00:36:49.396 - multi-volume set, History of the United States, from the beginning. And so many editions of this, so 00:36:49.396 --> 00:36:55.697 - many multi-volume editions that people were able to pay for a 10-volume set and a 12-volume set because 00:36:55.697 --> 00:36:58.302 - they just appeared over and over and over. 00:36:58.530 --> 00:37:04.610 - And William Henry says, no, he got the expedition all wrong. And the problem is, George Pankow spent 00:37:04.610 --> 00:37:11.111 - a lot of time trying to write, putting the history of the United States and world history, and he neglected 00:37:11.111 --> 00:37:17.492 - the American archives. And if you look at the American archives and the new documents about George Rogers 00:37:17.492 --> 00:37:23.571 - Clark, then you understand that George Rogers Clark was important. He was not nearly as important as 00:37:23.571 --> 00:37:24.414 - the soldiers. 00:37:27.490 --> 00:37:33.768 - we emphasize officers too much, we don't emphasize the rank and file too much. And that was the truth 00:37:33.768 --> 00:37:40.045 - about the George Rogers Clark. The George Clark is, yes, he's important, but he's not as important as 00:37:40.045 --> 00:37:46.262 - you think he is. Then there's another, then Samuel Evans writes, and you can't see, but he writes in 00:37:46.262 --> 00:37:52.724 - quotes the truth concerning George Rogers Clark, because he thinks William Henry is wrong. William Henry 00:37:52.724 --> 00:37:54.878 - is correcting George Bancroft and, 00:37:56.130 --> 00:38:01.323 - Samuel Evans says, well, you're emphasizing Virginia way, way too much. It's really Pennsylvania, the 00:38:01.323 --> 00:38:06.617 - important stuff. And if you look at the records that you haven't looked at, because you're looking only 00:38:06.617 --> 00:38:11.708 - at the Virginia records, but you look at the Pennsylvania records, it's really what mattered to the 00:38:11.708 --> 00:38:16.951 - whole thing was what Pennsylvania did. And so these kinds of battles happen again and again and again. 00:38:16.951 --> 00:38:22.093 - Again, what does George Rogers Clark mean? Who was George Rogers Clark? How important is Virginia or 00:38:22.093 --> 00:38:25.758 - Kentucky or Indiana or Illinois, et cetera, et cetera, to this history? 00:38:26.338 --> 00:38:32.333 - What is the old Northwest? And who are these people? It's always about the character of the people. 00:38:32.333 --> 00:38:38.448 - What are they capable of? What did they actually do? How important are they? And this measure happens 00:38:38.448 --> 00:38:44.683 - over and over and over. And so again, I'm only going to give you a little taste. I'll give you a little 00:38:44.683 --> 00:38:50.857 - more taste of this because I want to lead to some more magnificent debates and then to what our modern 00:38:50.857 --> 00:38:54.814 - understanding of George Rogers Clark is and why that's important. 00:38:55.554 --> 00:39:02.263 - And then that's going to lead to why you are so important. This is Theodore Roosevelt. Anyone heard 00:39:02.263 --> 00:39:09.443 - of Teddy Roosevelt? So he was a president who it's hard to imagine that a president could speak a coherent 00:39:09.443 --> 00:39:16.353 - sentence or write a coherent sentence. But Teddy Roosevelt wrote a four volume set, The Winning of the 00:39:16.353 --> 00:39:23.264 - West. It's a rather beautifully written book, actually. Teddy Roosevelt was himself a very complicated 00:39:23.264 --> 00:39:24.606 - person with lots of 00:39:25.570 --> 00:39:31.917 - complicated things about him. But this is his contribution to putting the West, which at this time was 00:39:31.917 --> 00:39:38.079 - the Northwest and the West, into American history to say that even though he was an East Coast kid, 00:39:38.079 --> 00:39:44.242 - et cetera, et cetera, he wanted to say that the whole country was valuable to the United States and 00:39:44.242 --> 00:39:50.466 - to American history, not just the East Coast. And he made a strong, strong argument in the book that 00:39:50.466 --> 00:39:51.390 - you can't see. 00:39:52.514 --> 00:39:58.007 - for this, and this is volume two, as you can see, from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi, and he's 00:39:58.007 --> 00:40:03.500 - gonna keep going, there's four young, he's gonna keep on tracking that history. People, Teddy Rose, 00:40:03.500 --> 00:40:09.378 - Frederick Jackson Turner, does that name mean anything to people? So not a President of the United States, 00:40:09.378 --> 00:40:14.926 - but an incredibly important historian. In 1892, wrote an amazing essay about the significance of the 00:40:14.926 --> 00:40:20.254 - frontier in American history. Made the argument, of course, that the frontier would be stopping. 00:40:20.354 --> 00:40:26.525 - in 1892, there's no longer any more frontier, and this was gonna be problematic for the United States, 00:40:26.525 --> 00:40:32.515 - that the United States and the character of the United States, what it was capable of, was premised 00:40:32.515 --> 00:40:38.686 - on having a frontier, having the next step. And he was fascinated, of course, he's now, he's a younger 00:40:38.686 --> 00:40:44.796 - historian, Teddy Roosevelt's still a youngish enough man, before becoming president, before the Navy, 00:40:44.796 --> 00:40:48.990 - et cetera, et cetera. And Frederick Jackson Turner reviewed his book, 00:40:50.306 --> 00:40:55.468 - And he said, this is a pretty amazing book because what Teddy Roosevelt does is he takes all of his 00:40:55.468 --> 00:41:00.889 - local history that people have written about Virginia and about Kentucky and about Illinois and Indiana, 00:41:00.889 --> 00:41:06.206 - and he's looking at the big picture. And this is what we need more of. We need more of the big picture 00:41:06.206 --> 00:41:11.678 - to understand George Rogers Clark, to understand Indiana, to understand Kentucky, to understand Virginia. 00:41:11.678 --> 00:41:17.201 - You need the big picture. And this is what Teddy Roosevelt manages to do in this book. It's a magisterial, 00:41:17.201 --> 00:41:18.750 - again, it's four-volume sets, 00:41:18.914 --> 00:41:24.866 - It's a magisterial book. He's also able to appreciate the American Revolution, that there were two American 00:41:24.866 --> 00:41:30.487 - Revolutions. And now we're in the semi-quincentennial of 1776, right? We're having debates. What does 00:41:30.487 --> 00:41:36.329 - the American Revolution mean? What does 1776 mean? I hope you're all going to the Lilly Library on campus 00:41:36.329 --> 00:41:42.060 - or the university and looking at one of the 26 copies of the Declaration of Independence, which is just 00:41:42.060 --> 00:41:45.918 - an incredibly beautiful document that you can look at and appreciate. 00:41:46.018 --> 00:41:51.993 - But we're having debates about what does 1776 mean? What does the Declaration mean? And this is what 00:41:51.993 --> 00:41:58.382 - Frederick Jackson Turner appreciated about Teddy Roosevelt to say that there were two American revolutions. 00:41:58.382 --> 00:42:04.476 - There was one on the East Coast, which faced the British, and there was one in the West, what was then 00:42:04.476 --> 00:42:10.628 - the West, which faced Native peoples and the British Empire, which was still in Canada, and the Spanish 00:42:10.628 --> 00:42:13.054 - Empire, which was as close as St. Louis. 00:42:13.922 --> 00:42:19.433 - It was all in New Orleans, and it was in St. Louis, and it was all around. So this was another American 00:42:19.433 --> 00:42:25.210 - Revolution that faced in a very, very different direction. And this has become what more and more historians 00:42:25.210 --> 00:42:30.562 - have been writing about recently, which is the American Revolution in the West. It happened all over 00:42:30.562 --> 00:42:35.862 - the place. It was not just a revolution that faced a British. And if you look to Ken Burns' series, 00:42:35.862 --> 00:42:41.267 - Ken Burns also has multiple American Revolutions over the wars. The wars faced different theaters and 00:42:41.267 --> 00:42:42.910 - faced in different directions. 00:42:43.234 --> 00:42:49.947 - But this was not fully appreciated, and this is why historians in this part of the world wanted to say, 00:42:49.947 --> 00:42:56.467 - actually, the Northwest mattered even to the War of Independence, right? It didn't just happen here, 00:42:56.467 --> 00:43:03.180 - there, and everywhere on the East Coast in New Jersey and in South Carolina. It also happened out here. 00:43:03.180 --> 00:43:08.990 - And then there's Frederick Jackson Turner saying, Teddy Roosevelt gave too much credit to 00:43:09.570 --> 00:43:16.185 - George Rogers Clark. He tried to overestimate it, what George Rogers Clark accomplished. And he imagined 00:43:16.185 --> 00:43:22.485 - that it mattered. And if you look at the diplomatic records of what happened at the peace treaty of 00:43:22.485 --> 00:43:28.847 - 1783, the Treaty of Paris between the British and the new United States, George Rogers Clark did not 00:43:28.847 --> 00:43:35.462 - figure in any of that. What he did in Vincennes did not figure in any of that. All of those negotiations 00:43:35.462 --> 00:43:37.982 - happened in a very, very different way. 00:43:38.146 --> 00:43:45.367 - so you cannot you can say George Rogers Clark did what he did in Illinois and in Vincennes but it did 00:43:45.367 --> 00:43:52.516 - not matter to the American Revolution so you can be grateful for this much but you can't be grateful 00:43:52.516 --> 00:43:59.737 - for that much or this sorry this is what Frederick Jackson Turner wants to argue needless to say this 00:43:59.737 --> 00:44:01.790 - does not make everyone happy 00:44:03.074 --> 00:44:09.105 - And so the question just always becomes, I wanted to walk you through the 19th century rather than the 00:44:09.105 --> 00:44:15.136 - 20th century. But in the 20th century, there's still all this discussion about who George Rogers Clark 00:44:15.136 --> 00:44:21.226 - is. And I'm going to show you very quickly the changing image of George Rogers Clark again and how that 00:44:21.226 --> 00:44:27.198 - process happened. And then I want to circle back to you. But how do you tell the history of a person? 00:44:28.226 --> 00:44:33.539 - do you tell it through their memoirs? And for a long time, the emphasis was, let's look at what George 00:44:33.539 --> 00:44:38.697 - Rogers Clark, what he said about what he did. And how do we get that? And how do we put that before 00:44:38.697 --> 00:44:43.855 - public? And again, that wasn't very few historians had access to that, but they had to find William 00:44:43.855 --> 00:44:49.168 - Clark and ask permission. For a long time, Lyman Draper had it and didn't give anyone permission until 00:44:49.168 --> 00:44:54.533 - it got into the Wisconsin Historical Society. People couldn't give you what George Rogers Clark thought 00:44:54.533 --> 00:44:55.358 - of what he did. 00:44:56.514 --> 00:45:02.789 - and that was one of the great imperatives. And then just gathering the documents, where are the documents 00:45:02.789 --> 00:45:09.006 - and which documents do you emphasize? Kentucky historians emphasize all the Kentucky documents. Virginia 00:45:09.006 --> 00:45:15.340 - historians emphasize the Virginia documents. Illinois historians emphasize the Illinois documents. Indiana 00:45:15.340 --> 00:45:21.616 - historians emphasize the Indiana documents. How do you tell that history? And how do you give it context? 00:45:21.616 --> 00:45:22.622 - And so what has, 00:45:22.914 --> 00:45:32.320 - expanded is a lot of the early work focused on 1778 and 1779 and what George Rogers Clark did. And slogging 00:45:32.320 --> 00:45:41.203 - through the prairie in winter in terrible conditions across Illinois is not an easy task. So that was 00:45:41.203 --> 00:45:50.173 - one reason why he was lionized. He was able to inspire his troops to do this and to do this action and 00:45:50.173 --> 00:45:52.350 - go and make a difference 00:45:52.450 --> 00:45:57.586 - and get rid of Henry Hamilton, who was the British commander there, who had a terrible reputation for 00:45:57.586 --> 00:46:02.823 - cruelty, et cetera, et cetera. And he was able to do that. And that was the emphasis. And then you look 00:46:02.823 --> 00:46:08.010 - a little further at his life, and you see before what happened before and what happened afterward. And 00:46:08.010 --> 00:46:13.045 - then you look at the rest of his life. And so to look at George Rogers Clark is not just to look at 00:46:13.045 --> 00:46:18.232 - this one moment, but it's to look at the entire life and the course of his entire life. And his entire 00:46:18.232 --> 00:46:19.390 - life is quite complex. 00:46:19.970 --> 00:46:25.002 - The one moment is an important moment, but it's not the only moment. So that's chronologically. Then 00:46:25.002 --> 00:46:30.133 - it's geographically. To look at this history of George Rogers Clark, you have to go to Virginia, where 00:46:30.133 --> 00:46:35.115 - he started. You have to go to Kentucky, where he spent some time. You have to go to Illinois, where 00:46:35.115 --> 00:46:40.197 - he was briefly. You have to go to Indiana, where he was briefly. You have to go to Ohio, where he was 00:46:40.197 --> 00:46:45.328 - briefly. You have to go to Michigan, where the British were. And then you have to keep going. You have 00:46:45.328 --> 00:46:49.214 - to go to Missouri, because in St. Louis was the Spanish Empire and supposedly 00:46:49.826 --> 00:46:55.976 - George Rogers Clark fell in love in St. Louis, unrequited falling in love. It didn't happen. But there 00:46:55.976 --> 00:47:01.946 - was an important Spanish commander there. He's going to come back. You have to talk about Louisiana 00:47:01.946 --> 00:47:08.036 - because the French in this part of the world, they were very oriented toward Louisiana rather than to 00:47:08.036 --> 00:47:14.185 - the British in Detroit, needless to say. And there were a lot of French in this part of the world, not 00:47:14.185 --> 00:47:19.678 - even Vincennes, et cetera. There are a lot of these little trading posts that were the most 00:47:20.578 --> 00:47:27.005 - non-indigenous populations in this part of the world. And they were already very oriented to Louisiana. 00:47:27.005 --> 00:47:33.309 - You have to talk about Tennessee. Why Tennessee? George Rogers Clark never went to Tennessee. There's 00:47:33.309 --> 00:47:39.489 - no Clark County in Tennessee. But while George Rogers Clark was going to Illinois and into Ohio and 00:47:39.489 --> 00:47:45.668 - into Indiana, George Washington was sending other people down into Tennessee from Fort Pitt. And so 00:47:45.668 --> 00:47:47.646 - George Rogers Clark didn't know 00:47:47.842 --> 00:47:54.426 - as other campaigns were going on, but they were very, very important for how the Continental Army organized 00:47:54.426 --> 00:48:00.583 - resources, supplies. George Rogers Clark complained about limited recruits and limited supplies, and 00:48:00.583 --> 00:48:06.801 - there was multiple things going on that were beyond his knowledge that we have to know about, because 00:48:06.801 --> 00:48:13.141 - they affected George Rogers Clark. New York, you have to know about New York. George Rogers Clark never 00:48:13.141 --> 00:48:14.238 - went to New York. 00:48:15.106 --> 00:48:21.629 - But at the time, again, there was a massive campaign that George Washington was orchestrating into upstate 00:48:21.629 --> 00:48:28.031 - New York to deal with the Iroquois in his version of it. It was a rather brutal scorched earth campaign, 00:48:28.031 --> 00:48:34.432 - a very, very notorious Solomon campaign. But this was really important, again, for attracting resources, 00:48:34.432 --> 00:48:40.590 - for affecting Fort Pett, for affecting what the instructions to the Continental Army in the West who 00:48:40.590 --> 00:48:44.126 - were stationed in Fort Pett were told not to do anything. 00:48:44.770 --> 00:48:49.745 - George Rogers Clark wanted to go up to Detroit and forfeit was said, no, no, no, no, we're not doing 00:48:49.745 --> 00:48:54.819 - that because all of our resources are being concentrated in New York. George Rogers Clark did not know 00:48:54.819 --> 00:48:59.745 - this. Again, he was not aware of what else was going on. But to understand him and the pressures on 00:48:59.745 --> 00:49:04.966 - him, et cetera, et cetera, you have to go to these other places. You'll have to look at multiple empires. 00:49:04.966 --> 00:49:09.990 - You have to look at the French, what was left of the French Empire, the French was no longer present. 00:49:09.990 --> 00:49:12.798 - The British were obviously in the French Empire in 1763. 00:49:12.898 --> 00:49:18.146 - You have to know about the French, and you definitely have to know about the British Empire and all 00:49:18.146 --> 00:49:23.551 - the things they were doing, not just in Michigan and Detroit, but elsewhere. And you had to know about 00:49:23.551 --> 00:49:28.904 - the Spanish Empire, because they were in St. Louis, they were in New Orleans. So much of Illinois was 00:49:28.904 --> 00:49:34.204 - oriented toward that part of the world, that that's where the trading was. And these were the people 00:49:34.204 --> 00:49:39.661 - actually who helped George Rogers Clark. And you have to know about multiple native nations. And native 00:49:39.661 --> 00:49:41.918 - nations were struggling with encroachment, 00:49:42.242 --> 00:49:47.806 - from settlers into their part of the world. They had very different responses to it. There were divisions 00:49:47.806 --> 00:49:53.055 - within communities like the Cherokee, for instance, were very divided about how do you respond when 00:49:53.055 --> 00:49:58.462 - people are coming to take over your land? What do you do? And if you can imagine I'm going to come and 00:49:58.462 --> 00:50:03.711 - I'm going to take over, I'm going to find out where each of you live, and this weekend I'm going to 00:50:03.711 --> 00:50:09.065 - come with an army and take over your land, you would have to figure out what to do. Some of you would 00:50:09.065 --> 00:50:10.430 - defend your homes, maybe? 00:50:10.530 --> 00:50:15.402 - Some of you would get the heck out, because I have a gazillion guns, and you have very few. 00:50:15.402 --> 00:50:20.909 - What do you do? So this is what the problem with the Native nations was at the time. How do you respond 00:50:20.909 --> 00:50:26.574 - to this encroachment? What do you do? Do you fight? Do you flee? Do you negotiate? And there are divisions 00:50:26.574 --> 00:50:32.240 - among those between different Native groups and within different Native groups. And you have to understand 00:50:32.240 --> 00:50:34.782 - all of that. And that becomes very complicated. 00:50:37.922 --> 00:50:42.789 - You have to look at so many different places in order to tell the history of George Rogers Clark, not 00:50:42.789 --> 00:50:47.656 - just where George Rogers Clark went, but all the kinds of places that he didn't go that affected him, 00:50:47.656 --> 00:50:52.857 - like New York, et cetera, et cetera. So you have to do dig and dig and dig, not just in one local historical 00:50:52.857 --> 00:50:57.819 - society in one state, but you have to keep going and follow George Rogers Clark, and you have to follow 00:50:57.819 --> 00:51:02.781 - all these other things that are happening that did not involve George Rogers Clark, but affected George 00:51:02.781 --> 00:51:05.310 - Rogers Clark. And you have so many different people. 00:51:05.986 --> 00:51:12.111 - And among the fascinating things, you have the French. It was a French person who helped George Rogers 00:51:12.111 --> 00:51:18.177 - Clark. George Rogers Clark did not go to Vincennes the first time around. He sent, there was a French 00:51:18.177 --> 00:51:24.361 - person who went to Vincennes who paved the way, for instance. There was a Spanish, an Italian, actually 00:51:24.361 --> 00:51:30.486 - an Italian officer who was trading there. There was an Italian person there. There are British people, 00:51:30.486 --> 00:51:35.422 - there are people, Spanish people in St. Louis. He went to St. Louis to try to get, 00:51:35.618 --> 00:51:41.800 - Spanish support against British. And so you have to look at all of these different figures that, again, 00:51:41.800 --> 00:51:47.922 - had to be discovered. You have to find them, and they're mentioned, somebody's mentioned, and then you 00:51:47.922 --> 00:51:54.163 - have to figure out who the heck is this person that's mentioned in this document. And all your detective 00:51:54.163 --> 00:52:00.167 - work has to go and go and go to figure out who is Francis Vigo. Anyone heard of Francis Vigo? Still? 00:52:00.167 --> 00:52:02.782 - A little bit? Yeah? Okay. Right. It worked. 00:52:03.458 --> 00:52:10.052 - do this kind of work over and over and over to figure out who everyone is. And there's a lot of, I'm 00:52:10.052 --> 00:52:16.580 - just giving you a few of these people, but there's a lot of people to put into the history. And the 00:52:16.580 --> 00:52:23.108 - dilemma continues. This is one of the first, one of the great institutions, I think, is the Indiana 00:52:23.108 --> 00:52:30.093 - Magazine of History, which all of you read. It's had many, many editors. This is one of the first editors, 00:52:30.093 --> 00:52:30.942 - Mr. Essaray. 00:52:31.458 --> 00:52:38.918 - very early on in the 1910s when the magazine was first started in this part of the world to try to preserve 00:52:38.918 --> 00:52:46.033 - Indiana history. And he tried to write a history of Indiana, as you can see from Exploration 1850. And 00:52:46.033 --> 00:52:53.218 - I'll just give you, this is what you can't see. It'll come back, sorry. But I'll just read the preface, 00:52:53.218 --> 00:52:57.086 - because the preface is rather remarkable. This is 1914. 00:52:57.890 --> 00:53:02.893 - In the preparation of this book, several unexpected obstacles have been met. In the first place, many 00:53:02.893 --> 00:53:07.946 - traditional stories popularly regarded as substantial history have been found to be without historical 00:53:07.946 --> 00:53:12.851 - foundation. In the second place, there is no considerable collection of historical material to draw 00:53:12.851 --> 00:53:18.050 - upon. Other states have published their documentary materials and thus made them available to historians, 00:53:18.050 --> 00:53:23.005 - but that work remains to be done in Indiana. In the third place, many of the state publications have 00:53:23.005 --> 00:53:25.310 - been found after close study to be unreliable. 00:53:25.826 --> 00:53:32.850 - Others are bound without indexes, table of contents, or even continuous pagination. In many cases, it 00:53:32.850 --> 00:53:39.806 - is necessary to turn through a record page by page to find any desired information. These conditions 00:53:39.806 --> 00:53:46.693 - have made it necessary to found every material statement on a primary source. Such work is slow and 00:53:46.693 --> 00:53:53.648 - very tedious. And so this is 1914, and this again is why it's so important to have the Monroe County 00:53:53.648 --> 00:53:54.750 - History Center. 00:53:55.234 --> 00:54:00.842 - why it's so important to have the Indiana Historical Society and when it became a stable institution 00:54:00.842 --> 00:54:06.561 - and not just a sort of private gentleman's club. And when it opened up its archives, which is now it's 00:54:06.561 --> 00:54:12.057 - just an amazing place, it's why historical societies are so important in so many different places, 00:54:12.057 --> 00:54:17.665 - local ones, town ones, county ones, state ones, national ones, like the magnificence of the National 00:54:17.665 --> 00:54:20.830 - Archives and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. 00:54:21.730 --> 00:54:27.871 - and preserving all of those documents. And this task remains. How do you save these? I can just give 00:54:27.871 --> 00:54:34.256 - an example from my first book. I wrote a book about letter writing as my first book in the 18th century. 00:54:34.256 --> 00:54:40.580 - Who wrote letters in the 18th century? Who was able to do so? And the argument was that very few people 00:54:40.580 --> 00:54:46.660 - were able to do so, but more and more people. And I remember going to one historical society, and I 00:54:46.660 --> 00:54:47.390 - was saying, 00:54:47.906 --> 00:54:53.796 - I'm interested in letters. I know these exist, which are post office records, and post office records 00:54:53.796 --> 00:55:00.033 - have all kinds of random people. So I'm interested in letters written not by famous people, but by ordinary 00:55:00.033 --> 00:55:06.038 - people. And the person, the archivist there said, oh, we don't buy those. We only buy letters by people 00:55:06.038 --> 00:55:12.044 - that we become famous, who are state legislators or something like that. We don't buy letters. We don't 00:55:12.044 --> 00:55:16.606 - have the money to buy letters by ordinary people. They don't matter as much as 00:55:17.250 --> 00:55:23.755 - state legislators matter. How many of you are state legislators here? So you are all the people who 00:55:23.755 --> 00:55:30.391 - don't matter, right? You are the people who don't matter and aren't part of history. And this was the 00:55:30.391 --> 00:55:36.896 - argument that was made earlier about officers are important and soldiers are not important. And the 00:55:36.896 --> 00:55:43.531 - person tried to make an argument, actually soldiers are important, not just officers. And so ordinary 00:55:43.531 --> 00:55:46.654 - people matter. And how do you tell the story of 00:55:47.298 --> 00:55:53.073 - everybody in history, all the people who are involved in history. And what gets preserved? What gets 00:55:53.073 --> 00:55:58.905 - put in an archive? And what is usable in an archive? And I know I've come where I've been given boxes 00:55:58.905 --> 00:56:04.795 - of just miscellaneous stuff that's going to have to go through the whole box and it just takes all day 00:56:04.795 --> 00:56:10.570 - long and you don't find anything. You don't find something you need because the box is unmarked. And 00:56:10.570 --> 00:56:16.574 - part of the project of archives is to make things usable so that people can find the things that they're 00:56:16.834 --> 00:56:23.201 - can explore, even to know what you can explore is so important. And this dilemma is in the 19th century, 00:56:23.201 --> 00:56:29.688 - and it's a part of the project of these amateur historians in the 19th century, and it remains the project 00:56:29.688 --> 00:56:36.237 - into the present day. How do you tell the history of a state? That's why papers like this are so important, 00:56:36.237 --> 00:56:42.603 - but they're selective. These are the papers about George Rogers Clark that were to or from George Rogers 00:56:42.603 --> 00:56:45.150 - Clark. But there are so many other papers 00:56:45.250 --> 00:56:50.714 - don't have not to or from George Rogers Clark that relate to George Rogers Clark. And so this is where 00:56:50.714 --> 00:56:56.177 - you can start your research. This is the first month of your research. But once you're done with this, 00:56:56.177 --> 00:57:01.800 - then you have to go on and do so much other work to figure out all the other names, all the other places, 00:57:01.800 --> 00:57:07.423 - et cetera, et cetera. This is the hard, hard work of telling the story of George Rogers Clark, or telling 00:57:07.423 --> 00:57:12.833 - the story of Indiana, or telling the story of the Old Northwest, or telling the story of the American 00:57:12.833 --> 00:57:13.470 - Revolution. 00:57:14.018 --> 00:57:20.967 - or telling the story of the early American Republic, or telling the story of American history. You need 00:57:20.967 --> 00:57:27.782 - all of these different perspectives to understand any one, even one person, even George Rogers Clark, 00:57:27.782 --> 00:57:34.597 - you need to do so much work to learn about George Rogers Clark. It's not there, but it'll be there in 00:57:34.597 --> 00:57:41.278 - a moment. So there's history with an imperative. People have said, Indiana needs to have a history. 00:57:41.730 --> 00:57:46.631 - If you're a people without a history, you're a people who don't matter, right? That's what Mr. Essaray 00:57:46.631 --> 00:57:51.485 - was doing. He wanted to write the history of Indiana. It hadn't been written for a long time in a way 00:57:51.485 --> 00:57:56.339 - that had garnered respect. And he wanted to do it. And he found how hard it was to do that. Same with 00:57:56.339 --> 00:58:01.097 - people in Kentucky. Same with people who were invested in the Northwest, the old Northwest, or what 00:58:01.097 --> 00:58:05.904 - became eventually from what was called the West for a long time in the 19th century. It's not called 00:58:05.904 --> 00:58:10.662 - the Midwest until much later. And then it becomes the Midwest, which is where we all live. Why does 00:58:10.662 --> 00:58:11.614 - the Midwest matter? 00:58:14.018 --> 00:58:20.173 - and if it doesn't have a history, how does it fit into the story of the United States? And this is what 00:58:20.173 --> 00:58:26.328 - you can see people try to do. James Woodburn, Indiana History and its Celebration, 1913. Bodley, sorry, 00:58:26.328 --> 00:58:32.542 - who was a kin, George Rogers Clark was his ancestor. He wrote the national significance of George Rogers 00:58:32.542 --> 00:58:38.697 - Clark. He wanted George Rogers Clark to have a meaning and importance. The recognition, Louise Kellogg, 00:58:38.697 --> 00:58:43.550 - the recognition of George Rogers Clark. The argument was that George Rogers Clark 00:58:43.842 --> 00:58:49.633 - what he accomplished was not given enough recognition. And that became the imperative of history. An 00:58:49.633 --> 00:58:55.538 - appraisal of the contributions of George Rogers Clark to the history of the West by James Alton James, 00:58:55.538 --> 00:59:01.443 - 1930. And this was a project, I'll just give you four examples. This was the project of so many people 00:59:01.443 --> 00:59:07.521 - that say, Indiana matters. And you're part of the project for saying Monroe County matters. What happened 00:59:07.521 --> 00:59:12.222 - in this place needs preservation because it matters to the history of this state. 00:59:12.674 --> 00:59:20.102 - It mattered then and it matters now. This place matters. Indiana matters. The Northwest matters. The 00:59:20.102 --> 00:59:27.971 - West matters. And that's what these people tried to do. And that's what drove their history. Then there's, 00:59:27.971 --> 00:59:35.693 - I'm not, I wrote a title, The Invention and Reinterpretation of George Rogers Clark. George Rogers Clark 00:59:35.693 --> 00:59:38.046 - has been reinterpreted already. 00:59:38.562 --> 00:59:45.107 - And people have added, two people have really written terrific things. James Fisher wrote a piece, and 00:59:45.107 --> 00:59:51.780 - it was all about, here's this heroic tradition of George Rogers Clark, and here's the real George Rogers 00:59:51.780 --> 00:59:58.388 - Clark. And the real George Rogers Clark did some very, very terrible things, and the real George Rogers 00:59:58.388 --> 01:00:05.251 - Clark ended really, really unhappily. He had his heroic moment in his mid-20s, and everything went downhill 01:00:05.251 --> 01:00:06.014 - from there. 01:00:06.978 --> 01:00:13.467 - And so George Rogers Clark again became a complicated figure. James Madison is right there. A wonderful 01:00:13.467 --> 01:00:19.769 - colleague of mine who's now retired. I'm assuming he's been here, actually. He gives talks, and he's 01:00:19.769 --> 01:00:26.195 - an amazing speaker. He's done amazing work at the Indiana Magazine of History. He's written an amazing 01:00:26.195 --> 01:00:33.246 - history of the state of Indiana, which I hope you've all read. And he again wanted to look at the history of how 01:00:34.338 --> 01:00:39.840 - Indiana Magazine of History has changed in how it's presented the history of Indiana. And for a long 01:00:39.840 --> 01:00:45.342 - time it was about heroes, and this was the way to create value for Indiana. If you have heroes, then 01:00:45.342 --> 01:00:50.954 - you're a valuable place. And we need to find heroes, and then other people will appreciate this place. 01:00:50.954 --> 01:00:56.565 - And then over the course of Indiana Magazine history, it became something different. It's not just the 01:00:56.565 --> 01:01:02.230 - heroes that valorize Indiana. It's all its complex history that valorizes Indiana and fits Indiana into 01:01:02.230 --> 01:01:03.102 - a larger story. 01:01:03.234 --> 01:01:08.984 - And so that piece includes George Rogers Clark, but includes many, many other things. And then there's 01:01:08.984 --> 01:01:14.567 - all kinds of wonderful books now that I would encourage all of you to read. One of the first people 01:01:14.567 --> 01:01:20.317 - to write about the indigenous perspective on the American Revolution was Colin Calloway. And now there 01:01:20.317 --> 01:01:25.899 - are many such books, but he wrote one of the first one in 1995. I highly recommend it. It's still a 01:01:25.899 --> 01:01:31.649 - brilliant, brilliant book. It pried open possibilities. One thing people looked at George Rogers Clark 01:01:31.649 --> 01:01:32.766 - and did not look at 01:01:33.122 --> 01:01:38.308 - what it was like to be on the receiving end of George Rogers Clark. And that maybe things look rather 01:01:38.308 --> 01:01:43.748 - differently from that vantage point and that perspective. And Colin Callaway was instrumental for starting 01:01:43.748 --> 01:01:49.035 - that process. Andrew Caton, a wonderful historian who ended his career at Ohio State. He wrote a number 01:01:49.035 --> 01:01:54.475 - of books about the Midwest, including a really, really terrific earlier book in his career called Frontier 01:01:54.475 --> 01:01:59.610 - Indiana, which I highly, highly recommend. And again, it gives you appreciation of the complexity of 01:01:59.610 --> 01:02:00.830 - this part of the world. 01:02:01.026 --> 01:02:07.964 - Patrick Griffin, who teaches at Notre Dame, has written American Leviathan, Empire Nation and Revolutionary 01:02:07.964 --> 01:02:14.645 - Frontier. Bethel Saylor, who teaches at Haverford, I believe, that settles empire colonialism and state 01:02:14.645 --> 01:02:21.390 - formation in America's old Northwest. Rob Harper has run Unsettling the West, Violence in State Building 01:02:21.390 --> 01:02:25.694 - in the Northwest. And these are the books now that I think I would 01:02:25.794 --> 01:02:32.792 - encourage all of you to read, because these are the books that really help us to appreciate the complexity 01:02:32.792 --> 01:02:39.921 - of this part of the world. So we don't need heroes to valorize this part of the world. We need to understand 01:02:39.921 --> 01:02:47.051 - this part of the world and how it fits into the story. So George Rogers Clark did not conquer the Northwest. 01:02:47.051 --> 01:02:53.918 - He did not even come close to conquering the Northwest. He made so many mistakes, even in 1778 and 1779, 01:02:54.018 --> 01:02:59.801 - And now, when historians have plumbed through this, starting in the 19th century into the present day, 01:02:59.801 --> 01:03:05.416 - he had just a limited grasp of pretty much everything. He was a human being. He was not a hero. And 01:03:05.416 --> 01:03:11.142 - he didn't understand Native nations the way he thought he did. There were American traders already in 01:03:11.142 --> 01:03:17.038 - Cascascia that helped him. He didn't know anything about them. He didn't know about the French settlers. 01:03:17.038 --> 01:03:23.326 - He did not like the French settlers. He didn't know about the British. He didn't understand the Spanish empire. 01:03:23.522 --> 01:03:28.917 - He didn't understand what else was happening in the war. He didn't understand what the Continental Army 01:03:28.917 --> 01:03:34.105 - was doing. He didn't get along with people. He alienated, he was supposed to be defending Kentucky. 01:03:34.105 --> 01:03:39.552 - He did that really badly because he wanted to be so obsessed with attacking Detroit that he was actually 01:03:39.552 --> 01:03:44.844 - neglecting the people in Kentucky. The people in Kentucky were really angry with him and disappointed 01:03:44.844 --> 01:03:49.150 - with him. So he just made mistake after mistake, which is why in 1782 he was gone. 01:03:51.394 --> 01:03:58.067 - They did not conquer the Northwest because the conflict in the Northwest continued into the 19th century, 01:03:58.067 --> 01:04:04.551 - and you know Matt Anthony Wayne does really problematic, it's a nice way of putting it, things in Ohio 01:04:04.551 --> 01:04:11.160 - and in Fort Wayne is named after him, obviously in this part of the world to have to do that work again. 01:04:11.160 --> 01:04:17.455 - That work continues with the Battle of Tippecanoe and William Henry Harrison, et cetera, et cetera. 01:04:17.455 --> 01:04:20.414 - That process of dispossessing people continues 01:04:20.674 --> 01:04:27.953 - And so George Rogers Clark did not conquer anything. And he was very good at crossing Illinois in terrible 01:04:27.953 --> 01:04:34.824 - conditions, but he had a very, very limited understanding of logistics and finances. He was terrible 01:04:34.824 --> 01:04:41.763 - at finances, terrible at administration. He was not a good diplomat. He was not a good strategist. He 01:04:41.763 --> 01:04:48.770 - did not know how to sustain these things. What he did accomplish relied on the help of others over and 01:04:48.770 --> 01:04:49.790 - over and over. 01:04:50.018 --> 01:04:57.978 - If you look at his taking of Kaskaskia and Cahokia, there was no resistance there, but the French settlers 01:04:57.978 --> 01:05:05.417 - did not like the British, and they were very happy to have something gone from there. When you look 01:05:05.417 --> 01:05:13.228 - at what he did in Vincennes, of course, he publicly executed indigenous people at the gates there, which 01:05:13.228 --> 01:05:19.774 - became a very notorious episode and became a harbinger of what he did later on in Ohio. 01:05:20.674 --> 01:05:28.278 - where he participated in scorched earth tactics. And when I say that, it's like what happened in New 01:05:28.278 --> 01:05:35.958 - York and what happened elsewhere, scorched earth tactics come with a lot of atrocities. And they kill 01:05:35.958 --> 01:05:43.486 - babies, among many other things, things that aren't so appreciated. Maybe were ignored at the time, 01:05:43.486 --> 01:05:48.606 - but not appreciated in the present. He was dismissed because he had 01:05:48.834 --> 01:05:56.426 - reputation for neglect for alcohol abuse already in 1782 and then again 1786. 1786 was a disaster when 01:05:56.426 --> 01:06:03.871 - he did something without any sanction but he was already known as an alcoholic then and which is why 01:06:03.871 --> 01:06:11.242 - he was relieved of command. 1786 proved a disaster and in 1793 he was so financially desperate that 01:06:11.242 --> 01:06:17.950 - he wanted to, he was willing to sell his soul to the French and effectively commit treason 01:06:19.554 --> 01:06:27.842 - And so, and this was not known in the early histories, but this has become known, these documents have 01:06:27.842 --> 01:06:35.968 - come out as part of his history, which is why a lot of, like you can see, I'll go back to this book, 01:06:35.968 --> 01:06:43.934 - but you can see the papers are 1771 to 1781, the papers I collected do not go past 1784, and other 01:06:44.226 --> 01:06:52.010 - to do the work of collecting the other material that was proving to be quite embarrassing to George 01:06:52.010 --> 01:06:59.872 - Rogers Clark. So why study a hero that is not a hero? Why study George Rogers Clark? Why does George 01:06:59.872 --> 01:07:07.968 - Rogers Clark matter? George Rogers Clark is a complicated figure, has always been a complicated figure, 01:07:07.968 --> 01:07:09.758 - but he's a window into 01:07:10.466 --> 01:07:15.838 - because he's been looked at and he intersects with so many different things in so many different places. 01:07:15.838 --> 01:07:21.261 - He's a window into the complexity, especially of the Western theater of the War of American Independence. 01:07:21.261 --> 01:07:26.377 - And that's really important to appreciate all of the War of American Independence, not just some of 01:07:26.377 --> 01:07:31.595 - it, not just what happens on the East Coast, but what happened in all the places and involved all the 01:07:31.595 --> 01:07:36.813 - different kinds of empires and all the different kinds of indigenous peoples. And George Rogers Clark 01:07:36.813 --> 01:07:39.678 - gives us access to that, but he was part of that story. 01:07:43.266 --> 01:07:48.862 - So the American Revolution becomes or the War of American Independence becomes something different. 01:07:48.862 --> 01:07:54.682 - The Northwest becomes something different because you can appreciate what it meant for land speculation 01:07:54.682 --> 01:08:00.502 - companies to hire surveyors like George Rogers Clark to try to survey something. And settlers just come 01:08:00.502 --> 01:08:06.099 - in there and they go without surveys and without titles, et cetera, et cetera. And they do terrible 01:08:06.099 --> 01:08:11.695 - things to indigenous peoples in a time period. And you have to watch this process and how clean and 01:08:11.695 --> 01:08:13.150 - unclean this process was. 01:08:14.498 --> 01:08:21.150 - And you have to understand how this part of the world develops. And George Rogers Clark is a window 01:08:21.150 --> 01:08:27.803 - into that. He's a window into conflict that continues and takes many, many years of conflict before 01:08:27.803 --> 01:08:34.722 - dispossession becomes conquest. And conquest is a really, really ugly term. You think of if you conquer 01:08:34.722 --> 01:08:41.507 - something, to be on the receiving end of conquest is never a very good thing. And if you only look at 01:08:41.507 --> 01:08:43.902 - the conqueror part of the equation, 01:08:44.226 --> 01:08:49.529 - You're not looking at all of that history. But you have to look at the conflict and the dispossession 01:08:49.529 --> 01:08:54.833 - that carries over for decades. And then you have to look at the many contingencies of history and how 01:08:54.833 --> 01:09:00.188 - complicated history was for George Rogers Clark in grappling with all the things that he grappled with 01:09:00.188 --> 01:09:05.751 - at the time and what all the other people grappled with, why Fort Pitt did what it did and the Continental 01:09:05.751 --> 01:09:11.002 - Army did what it did when George Rogers Clark was serving the Virginia militia and he was serving at 01:09:11.002 --> 01:09:13.758 - the beginning of his career Virginia land companies. 01:09:14.274 --> 01:09:20.237 - or interested in exploiting other places. And you have to understand, George Rogers Clark gives you 01:09:20.237 --> 01:09:26.797 - a window into this whole process and all its contingencies and complexities. Without it, you don't understand 01:09:26.797 --> 01:09:33.059 - that past. More important point of what I want to do today, I'm giving you very much about George Rogers 01:09:33.059 --> 01:09:39.380 - Clark. I've skipped over a lot of it, and I've skipped over a lot of how history is made, but how history 01:09:39.380 --> 01:09:43.614 - is made really, really, really matters. And this is where you come in. 01:09:43.874 --> 01:09:50.086 - and you're the value that you place on local history in Monroe County, and on history in general, because 01:09:50.086 --> 01:09:56.240 - I'm sure you all read many, many different things about history. You have a love for history, and you're 01:09:56.240 --> 01:10:02.276 - a part of supporting institutions that preserve history. You're a part of supporting just your YouTube 01:10:02.276 --> 01:10:08.488 - channel, et cetera, et cetera, all the things, the value of history. And so to study George Rogers Clark, 01:10:08.488 --> 01:10:13.470 - you can study George Rogers Clark. You study anyone. You study them from the inside. 01:10:13.602 --> 01:10:19.067 - or from the outside, right? So I can take, have you written diaries every day for the last 10 years? 01:10:19.067 --> 01:10:24.640 - And I would love to have your diaries, right? And so that'd be one way of understanding what it's like 01:10:24.640 --> 01:10:30.430 - to live between 2016 and 2026 in the United States, your diary. But I have to look at it from the outside. 01:10:30.430 --> 01:10:36.057 - I look at it from the inside, from the outside. In George Rogers Clark, I can look at the George Rogers 01:10:36.057 --> 01:10:41.630 - Clark from the inside, and I can look at it from the outside and how different those perspectives are. 01:10:42.146 --> 01:10:47.835 - And we do have some George Rogers Clark papers that enable us to do that, which is why I would like 01:10:47.835 --> 01:10:53.639 - your diary to be donated to the Monroe County History Center. Again, so it's so valuable to have that 01:10:53.639 --> 01:10:59.499 - inside and outside perspective. The inside perspective is not good enough. And the outside perspective 01:10:59.499 --> 01:11:05.302 - is not good enough either. To understand history, you need both. And you need the multiplicity to say 01:11:05.302 --> 01:11:11.049 - conquest is this beautiful thing. It's really terrible for the babies that were slaughtered over and 01:11:11.049 --> 01:11:11.902 - over and over. 01:11:12.482 --> 01:11:17.919 - for decades, it doesn't look so good from that vantage point. So you have to look at history from so 01:11:17.919 --> 01:11:23.680 - many different perspectives, so many different vantage points, so many different people, so many different 01:11:23.680 --> 01:11:29.386 - places. And that's why history, again, is so important. And George Rogers Clark led to that place because 01:11:29.386 --> 01:11:34.824 - his people have plumbed through George Rogers Clark over and over and over and changed George Rogers 01:11:34.824 --> 01:11:40.638 - Clark. And I don't know how many of you are heroes, but most people I understand from one here right there, 01:11:41.378 --> 01:11:48.017 - So most people, and you're saying he's a hero, and he's not even saying he's a hero, right? Most people 01:11:48.017 --> 01:11:54.720 - don't want to be heroes, right? To be a hero is really, really hard, and it's to be incomplete. It means 01:11:54.720 --> 01:12:01.422 - this one thing. And human beings are much more complex than heroes. Any hero you can think of, including 01:12:01.422 --> 01:12:07.678 - you, sorry, are a complex human being. And any figure that we elevate into a hero, whoever it is, 01:12:07.874 --> 01:12:13.882 - Martin Luther King, complicated human being. Gandhi, complicated human being. Any hero is a complicated 01:12:13.882 --> 01:12:19.775 - human being. They're not just a hero. There might be a heroic action. And it's really, really amazing 01:12:19.775 --> 01:12:25.840 - that the person did something heroic. It's hard to do heroic things, whatever your definition of heroism 01:12:25.840 --> 01:12:31.791 - is. But there's a human being which is much bigger than the hero that might be inside any human being. 01:12:31.791 --> 01:12:36.990 - And heroic actions can be very, very small. It can be just a kindness that you do, can be 01:12:37.986 --> 01:12:43.961 - a heroic action. You don't even know what effect it has on somebody else. I can do a kindness to someone 01:12:43.961 --> 01:12:49.879 - not knowing that they had a really terrible day or a terrible week, and my kindness really just changes 01:12:49.879 --> 01:12:55.569 - something for that person. It's a heroic action that I don't even understand that I did. I just did 01:12:55.569 --> 01:13:01.373 - something small, and it mattered so much to someone else at all they'd never even know. So heroism is 01:13:01.373 --> 01:13:06.494 - such an incomplete thing. You don't even always recognize it. And the wish to have heroes 01:13:07.394 --> 01:13:13.207 - is a more complicated wish. And obviously, there are different moments, like in the 1920s and 1930s, 01:13:13.207 --> 01:13:19.078 - when there was a wish to have heroes. And in the 1920s and 1930s, you had the commemoration of George 01:13:19.078 --> 01:13:24.891 - Rogers Clark. And if you look, I'm not going to give you all the speeches that were made, but it was 01:13:24.891 --> 01:13:31.164 - all about rugged individualism, et cetera, et cetera, at a time when there were very few rugged individuals. 01:13:31.164 --> 01:13:37.150 - There was no more frontier. And there was big business was dominating the world in the 1920s and 1930s. 01:13:38.050 --> 01:13:44.760 - I know all of you were figments of the imagination back then. So the rugged individual just seemed to 01:13:44.760 --> 01:13:51.339 - be gone, and there was this attempt to recreate the rugged individual in a culture that didn't have 01:13:51.339 --> 01:13:58.114 - rugged individuals anymore. And that's the heroes that they wanted desperately in the 1920s and 1930s, 01:13:58.114 --> 01:14:04.759 - because they didn't exist anymore. And there are different moments where people wanted George Rogers 01:14:04.759 --> 01:14:07.390 - Clark to be something that George Clark 01:14:07.778 --> 01:14:14.045 - Rogers Clark wasn't, and they wanted that for their own purposes, nothing to do with George Rogers Clark, 01:14:14.045 --> 01:14:19.957 - they had to do something about themselves. And so to have an honest history that plumbs through all 01:14:19.957 --> 01:14:26.402 - of the archives, not just some of the archives, but all of the archives from all the different perspectives, 01:14:26.402 --> 01:14:32.491 - does all the research, does all the hard work that Mr. Essaray talked about, how hard it is, it's slow 01:14:32.491 --> 01:14:34.206 - and tedious to do that work. 01:14:35.650 --> 01:14:40.592 - That's what historians do and that's what people appreciate history. It's just hard work learning about 01:14:40.592 --> 01:14:45.487 - history. Just think of all the events that you've attended in the last few years and all the different 01:14:45.487 --> 01:14:50.430 - angles you've learned about Monroe County history and all the amazing things that have happened in this 01:14:50.430 --> 01:14:55.277 - place. It's not one person that can deliver all of that to you. You have to come a number of times to 01:14:55.277 --> 01:15:00.124 - appreciate from this angle and next month you're gonna have murder and sex. And you've had trains and 01:15:00.124 --> 01:15:04.734 - you've had all these other things and now there's gonna be murder and sex on a train apparently. 01:15:05.058 --> 01:15:13.096 - That's how history accumulates. It's not one thing. It's so many different vantage points. It's so much 01:15:13.096 --> 01:15:20.128 - work. And that's part of the beauty of it. It's this continuous process of delving into it 01:15:20.128 --> 01:15:27.934 - and the willingness not to just have heroes, but to have human beings and to have honesty and not to 01:15:27.934 --> 01:15:32.030 - have a false history, but to have an honest history. 01:15:35.330 --> 01:15:40.807 - I guess I have, my first name has a Russian heritage in it, but I'm not in Russia or China right now, 01:15:40.807 --> 01:15:46.231 - so. And this hard work of history comes from many, many, it comes from academic historians among the 01:15:46.231 --> 01:15:51.708 - faculty. I'm researching a book now about globalizing of the United States in the early 19th century. 01:15:51.708 --> 01:15:57.185 - And there are so many Americans who went all over the world in the early 19th century. I thought they 01:15:57.185 --> 01:16:02.555 - all just went west, but they went all over the world. They were in Chile, they were in Russia, they 01:16:02.555 --> 01:16:04.542 - were in Turkey, they were in Borneo, 01:16:04.674 --> 01:16:12.717 - They were everywhere. And I'm finding this really exciting. It's just hard, hard work. There's so many 01:16:12.717 --> 01:16:20.604 - just, I've been working on this for over a decade, and there's still more work to be done. There are 01:16:20.604 --> 01:16:28.491 - public historians who've done amazing work at national historic sites. I once was walking my dog in, 01:16:28.491 --> 01:16:34.270 - right by Jackson Creek Middle School, where my younger son goes, or went. 01:16:35.170 --> 01:16:41.431 - And there's a park there, Alcott Park. And then there's the, where is it? It's the family, the family. 01:16:41.431 --> 01:16:47.692 - What's my dog's name? What? Rogers, Rogers family park. Yeah, wonderful place to walk a dog. And I met 01:16:47.692 --> 01:16:54.013 - a man there who's not walking a dog, actually. And he ended up talking to me. He didn't know who I was. 01:16:54.013 --> 01:17:00.457 - And he said he wasn't from Bloomington. He wasn't from Indiana. He was touring. He was visiting somebody. 01:17:00.457 --> 01:17:04.286 - But he had just done a tour of battlefields on the East Coast. 01:17:04.962 --> 01:17:10.614 - And this was last summer. And he said he wanted to see all the battlefields on the East Coast before 01:17:10.614 --> 01:17:16.378 - all the signs had changed and you couldn't learn about the battles anymore because they were all being 01:17:16.378 --> 01:17:22.254 - changed. And he was a veteran. I mean, he could have come here to the American Legion. And he was saying 01:17:22.254 --> 01:17:27.850 - he wanted to do this tour before he probably could still learn about these battles before he wasn't 01:17:27.850 --> 01:17:33.054 - allowed to learn. But public historians have done that at all these different historic sites 01:17:33.186 --> 01:17:39.139 - all the different places. I'm going to do some of that this summer with my sons just to see these places 01:17:39.139 --> 01:17:44.808 - again before the desk. People have done such extraordinary work. Archivists have done extraordinary 01:17:44.808 --> 01:17:50.477 - work. Librarians have done extraordinary work. My son's teacher just did a brilliant job. I had one 01:17:50.477 --> 01:17:56.316 - son in APUSH this year, AP US History. Good teacher. My younger son's teacher was just a great teacher 01:17:56.316 --> 01:18:02.156 - at Jackson Middle School, Jackson Creek Middle School. And those teachers are just doing extraordinary 01:18:02.156 --> 01:18:03.006 - work trying to 01:18:03.682 --> 01:18:10.203 - convey history, real history, to young people. And now we're doing all of this in the context of terrible 01:18:10.203 --> 01:18:16.416 - censorship and, for me, desecration of these historic sites around the country. I'm sure you've read 01:18:16.416 --> 01:18:22.568 - about this in the newspaper. And we're doing this semi-quincentennial is right now on the 250th. We 01:18:22.568 --> 01:18:28.782 - have the Lily L'Arbre. It has a dip of independence in it. And we're just going to have all of these 01:18:28.782 --> 01:18:31.550 - things that have nothing to do with history. 01:18:32.226 --> 01:18:38.849 - that desecrate the 250th anniversary. And so now it's so important, this work is so, so, so important. 01:18:38.849 --> 01:18:45.344 - And this is where you come in, because you do, you're part of doing this important work. You're part 01:18:45.344 --> 01:18:52.354 - of just having, sustaining a love of history in a community and what it means, and you're part of supporting 01:18:52.354 --> 01:18:58.334 - it in all the different angles, all the different talks that you come with the history club. 01:18:58.466 --> 01:19:04.654 - all the different activities that you do, also about history, all the conversations that you have with 01:19:04.654 --> 01:19:11.022 - other people about history matter intensely. And you are the people who will hopefully demand that those, 01:19:11.022 --> 01:19:17.090 - all the historic sites go back to having real history in them. You'll say, I don't want this Russian 01:19:17.090 --> 01:19:23.639 - propaganda in there, I want real history. And you are the people who are gonna make the, on what constitutes 01:19:23.639 --> 01:19:25.982 - history, what constitutes the value of 01:19:26.690 --> 01:19:32.268 - understanding and grappling with the past as a way of understanding and grappling with the present. 01:19:32.268 --> 01:19:37.902 - But history is not dead, of course. History is, I always tell my students, it's living history. It's 01:19:37.902 --> 01:19:43.703 - so alive in so many different ways. It's right here, it's not there, it's right right here. And so what 01:19:43.703 --> 01:19:49.336 - you do, what all the archivists do, all the librarians, all the teachers, all the public historians, 01:19:49.336 --> 01:19:55.026 - all the different historic matters intensely, but you matter so intensely as you make demands on that 01:19:55.026 --> 01:19:56.030 - to have an honest 01:19:56.194 --> 01:20:03.158 - and real history. And without that, all of that can just go. All of that just can go. And so that's 01:20:03.158 --> 01:20:10.540 - why I'm so grateful to be in your presence and to have been invited by Michael to do this, because again, 01:20:10.540 --> 01:20:17.574 - what you do with your club and with all your videos online that I've learned so much from personally 01:20:17.574 --> 01:20:24.190 - about this place, but what you do matters so intensely to preserve and protect and sustain and 01:20:24.930 --> 01:20:31.054 - have history matter in this world and have it be alive in this world. So I cannot say that enough. And 01:20:31.054 --> 01:20:37.178 - so it's not just about what the history says, but it's about the kind of history that you preserve and 01:20:37.178 --> 01:20:43.124 - protect. And that's why I wanted to emphasize today not just the history of George Rogers Clark and 01:20:43.124 --> 01:20:49.486 - all its complexity, and I could have gone much further into that, but I want you to appreciate how history 01:20:49.486 --> 01:20:54.302 - itself changes. And again, the investment that people make at every single level 01:20:54.626 --> 01:21:01.897 - all the research, all the analysis, all the preservation, all the library work, archival work, et cetera, 01:21:01.897 --> 01:21:09.099 - et cetera, but all of your work as well. It cannot stay alive without your work as well. It can't simply 01:21:09.099 --> 01:21:15.959 - happen in books and in classrooms. It has to happen in communities and in the public, which is why, 01:21:15.959 --> 01:21:23.024 - again, I'm so grateful for the work that you do to keep history alive in our culture so we don't drift 01:21:23.024 --> 01:21:24.190 - into propaganda. 01:21:25.410 --> 01:21:51.870 - And with that, I want to say thank you for all your attention and your commitment to history. 01:21:55.010 --> 01:22:00.920 - I think you can see, I mean, the instinct of being skeptical or knowing that you're told part of a story, 01:22:00.920 --> 01:22:06.607 - and sometimes you can be more skeptical, right? This is what I teach my sons when they look at things 01:22:06.607 --> 01:22:12.183 - online. Everything, you have to find out what the basis of everything is. What archives did they go 01:22:12.183 --> 01:22:17.759 - into, if at all? There's so many things online which are just empty, right? And the first thing you 01:22:17.759 --> 01:22:23.390 - have to do is say, what gives this substance and foundation? What is the work that someone has done? 01:22:23.554 --> 01:22:29.035 - about anything. So it's a skepticism about areas, a critical eye to everything that we look at because 01:22:29.035 --> 01:22:34.568 - we're bombarded with nonsense. And then you want to say that here is a work, you look at the footnotes, 01:22:34.568 --> 01:22:40.209 - you look at what is the work that that person did. And you can see in the 19th century, they were working 01:22:40.209 --> 01:22:45.955 - really hard to find the doc, just to find the documents. They knew the documents were disappearing already. 01:22:45.955 --> 01:22:51.489 - In the 1830s, the documents were disappearing. So you have to find the things and that's, yeah. So it's 01:22:51.489 --> 01:22:52.766 - not just about heroism. 01:22:53.186 --> 01:23:00.268 - It's about human beings, but it's also about the foundation, the basis for which anything is said. And 01:23:00.268 --> 01:23:07.144 - that has to do with all the things that are online. It has to do with everything in a book. What is 01:23:07.144 --> 01:23:14.364 - the basis for what's said there? And that's the challenge of our modern moment, right? It's a challenge. 01:23:14.364 --> 01:23:18.558 - We're just bombarded with so many more nonsense. Yes, sorry. 01:23:26.466 --> 01:23:34.701 - What do we know about the involvement of Ohio? The what? Oh, well, that's just an important transport 01:23:34.701 --> 01:23:43.258 - port, right, in terms of moving things up and down the Ohio. So the falls of the Ohio are very important. 01:23:43.258 --> 01:23:52.542 - And Ohio is important in the 1770s, because that's where the British were trying to cultivate indigenous allies to 01:23:53.250 --> 01:24:01.629 - try to stop settlement from expanding into that part of the world. No steamboats for later. 1830s would 01:24:01.629 --> 01:24:09.766 - be full of steamboats. It's not steamboats yet. Yeah, no. 1830s and 1840s have lots of steam. And if 01:24:09.766 --> 01:24:17.983 - you look at pictures of St. Louis in the 1840s, there's already the harbor of St. Louis. There's just 01:24:17.983 --> 01:24:22.334 - hundreds of steam ships already. It's pretty amazing. 01:24:22.626 --> 01:24:28.690 - So it happens very quickly, but it doesn't happen until the 1820s and 1830s. I think you had a, one 01:24:28.690 --> 01:24:34.814 - of the talks I saw online was about barges going to Lafayette. I wish it was barges to Lafayette. It 01:24:34.814 --> 01:24:40.878 - was pretty amazing. It was all about the things that were being produced in this part of the world, 01:24:40.878 --> 01:24:47.366 - being shipped to other parts of the world, and it was all about the barges that could get up to Lafayette. 01:24:47.366 --> 01:24:49.246 - It was very, very interesting. 01:24:52.226 --> 01:24:54.846 - So thank you again, everyone. I guess, thank you again.