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  • William Clark's World: Describing America in an Age of Unknowns
  • Lina Del Castillo
William Clark's World: Describing America in an Age of Unknowns. By Peter J. Kastor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011. Pp. 360. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $45.00 cloth.

William Clark is primarily remembered as Meriwether Lewis's sidekick on the first transcontinental expedition commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson from 1804 to 1806. In Kastor's hands, Clark's life is transformed into a useful vehicle for understanding the West from the perspective of those who were immersed in the intercultural contact of the regions they explored and described. Their descriptions demonstrated the natural dangers and Indian threats that only men like Clark were positioned to control as Indian agents. In doing so, Kastor works against the blinding effects of generations of popular opinion and scholarship that have painted a uniform picture of the West as the place where an exceptional U.S. history of conquest occurred. His illuminating study draws a key spatial distinction and emphasizes a necessary temporal change in order to explain why some descriptions of the West produced from the 1780s through the 1820s questioned the benefits of unchecked expansionism, while those that emerged from the 1830s and 1840s reverberated with deeply held American values and beliefs that ultimately set the stage for Manifest Destiny.

Kastor's first main contribution is the spatial distinction he draws between the Near West and the Far West. The first part of the book demonstrates that Clark's early struggles with description and territorial control in the Near West of the trans-Appalachian backcountry, where he grew up, were familiar to men like Jefferson, John Filson, and Jedidiah Morse, whose late eighteenth-century geographic representations helped shape Clark's own descriptive strategies and professional goals. The book's second section traces Clark's career on the other side of Mississippi River, as one of the most important federal officials governing the territory acquired through the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Clark's descriptions of the Far West—especially his Map of Part of the Continent of North America . . . (1810), whose manuscript creation, publication, display, and historical significance is beautifully discussed in the book's prologue—in part gave Clark the notoriety necessary to succeed in a political culture that depended not on democracy but on Washington patronage. Clark's keen negotiating skills with Indian tribes in the Missouri Territory, paired with increasing population growth, eventually allowed parts of the Far West to become the Near West, a place deemed safe and attractive for white settlement. The third section of Kastor's book chronicles Clark's personal and professional losses after the Missouri territory entered the Union as a slave state in 1820 and the ousting of Clark from political office at the same time that he became a widower.

Kastor's second important contribution is identifying a transformation in the ways that geographic texts about the West related to public opinion from the time of the early republic to the antebellum period. Looking at this transformation helps us to better understand how the maps, multipage atlases, school geographies, travel narratives, scientific reports, newspapers, magazines, and books produced from 1780s through the 1840s should be read. These texts tapped into deeply held American beliefs about the [End Page 625] importance of land ownership for individual freedom and national liberty, the dark side of which required the expropriation and conquest of Indian populations. But the people who controlled the production of geographic descriptions from 1780s through the 1820s were men who, like Clark, informed and were informed by the treaties, laws,and federal policies intended to lay the groundwork for further expansion. This was a difficult and tentative process that identified the Far West as "a place of considerable opportunities, but also a landscape of tremendous danger" (p. 162), warning Americans against their expansionist ambitions and contrasting significantly with the boosterism that dominated contemporaneous depictions of the Near West. The mass-produced illustrations, dramatic fictional tales set on the frontier, and landscape portraiture of the 1830s and 1840s helped push the boundary between Near West and Far West, signaling the transition from the early American Republic to the...

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