Liquor and the Ethnic Cleansing of North America

Chapter 10 continues the focus on Native American temperance by highlighting the tension between US government goodwill and fair trade with native tribes on the one hand, and predatory capitalists—including John Jacob Astor’s American Fur Company—who used liquor to subjugate the tribes on the other. William Clark (of Lewis and Clark fame) became an important mediator in this conflict between native pleas for prohibition and white profits. The role of distancing from predatory white liquor traders gives new perspectives on the Trail of Tears in the South, while the role of disputes over illegal white liquor peddling initiated the Black Hawk War to the North. As native tribes both north and south were relocated to the unsettled lands west of the Missouri and Arkansas territories, they found unscrupulous liquor dealers—including American Fur—waiting to take their tribal annuities in exchange for addictive liquor.

The Expedition

Weeks before Thomas Jefferson learned he had successfully purchased Louisiana, his secretary wrote William Clark to invite him to cocaptain an exploration of the territory. The preparations for the adventure, the selection of Louisville-area young men accustomed to hard living, and the gathering of supplies consumed Clark and the area until the two captains shoved away from the Falls in a driving October rain. The Lewis and Clark Expedition is a seminal moment in the development of the United States of America, and it was Clark’s brothers and brothers-in-law who received steady, if erratic, news of the uncharted continent between 1803 and 1806. The explorers, along with their Native entourage, arrived at the homes of Jonathan Clark and William Croghan before beginning their separate treks to Washington City, where they reported their stunning findings to Thomas Jefferson.