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