The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (10 page)

Henry Lewis, Fort Snelling, 1858. Malcolm Clarke spent his formative boyhood years at the fort, where his father was stationed with the Fifth U.S. Infantry from 1819 to 1828. Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society.

At Fort Snelling, Malcolm also developed the code of personal honor that governed his behavior and his relationships with others. He may have come by such a disposition naturally, for his sister remembered that from the time Malcolm was small, “he was very quick to resent anything that looked like an imposition, or an infringement of his rights, it mattered not who was the aggressor.” And yet a boyhood spent in a rigid military environment, which placed a premium on fortitude and masculinity, could only nourish such a worldview. Henry Snelling, son of the commandant and one of Malcolm’s closest companions, had the bruises to show for it. He recalled, “We were very good friends, but he was very passionate and would get angry with me on the slightest provocation … and, as I never would take a blow without returning it, black eyes and bloody noses [were the frequent result].”
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This tendency to answer all affronts with a closed fist shaped Malcolm Clarke’s entire life.

The most important development from Malcolm’s time in Minnesota, however, was his exposure to native peoples, whom he saw frequently because of Fort Snelling’s location in the middle of a contested borderland between the Dakota Sioux and the Ojibwas.
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In fact, one of the post’s key reasons for being was to mediate the escalating conflict between these two groups, which stretched back decades but had accelerated in the early nineteenth century as migrating Americans pushed the Ojibwas and their allies westward from Michigan and Wisconsin into Minnesota, where they competed for space and game with the Dakotas, who inhabited the watershed of the Upper Mississippi. Both peoples came often to trade at the American Fur Company post directly across the river from the garrison; that kept tensions in the region high.

Although his mother was terrified of the natives, Malcolm evinced sincere interest in them from an early age, captured nicely in a story recounted by his sister. One morning during the winter of 1825–26, the two children attempted to track a wounded wolf that had preyed for some time on their family’s livestock and pets but that had escaped the steel trap the siblings had set near the barn. After following the wolf’s bloody trail for more than a mile, they were about to give up the chase when they came across an Ojibwa boy, whom Malcolm, speaking in the Indian tongue, promised to reward if he could catch the animal and bring it to them at the fort. The children were delighted when the Indian arrived at the garrison a few hours later with the haggard wolf, and they treated their guest to “a royal breakfast.”
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Not all encounters with natives yielded such fond memories, however. Indeed, Malcolm, Charlotte, and other children of the post witnessed an infamous episode in the spring of 1827 that haunted the Clarke siblings ever after. In late May a band of Ojibwas pitched their lodges near Fort Snelling, having come to trade maple syrup and other goods with the soldiers. A few days later they were joined in camp by a party of Sioux, the apparent comity a result of the Treaty of Prairie du Chien, a pact signed in 1825 that established discrete hunting grounds for the tribes. The mixed group spent the evening sharing food and passing the pipe, trading stories about hunting and warfare. When the festivities ended around nine o’clock on 28 May, the Sioux bid their hosts goodbye, walked a few paces, but then turned and fired into the teepees, killing two Ojibwas and wounding six others. Charlotte was particularly affected by one of the injured, a young girl just a year or two her senior who lingered in agony for a few days before expiring.
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Mortified that such a slaughter should take place in the shadows of his post and with friendly Indians as the victims, Colonel Snelling ordered the capture of the perpetrators, and the next morning two of the guilty were hauled before him. The pair were then tied together and forced to run the gantlet on the prairie near the fort, an exercise in which freedom was assured to those among the condemned who managed to outrun the bullets of a nearby firing squad. Both men were immediately cut down by the Ojibwas, and their bodies dismembered. A few days later, the Sioux delivered the principal offenders, insisting that—in the unlikely event that the Ojibwas declined—they would kill the two men themselves because of the dishonor they had brought upon the Dakotas. The murderers were sentenced to the same fate, but took the news differently: one of them, known as Split Upper Lip, wept and pled for mercy; but the other, a tall and handsome warrior called Little Six, rebuked his companion and calmly gave away his worldly possessions in preparation for death.

As in the first execution, the convicted men were forced to run the gantlet, but this time the children at the fort were heartbroken when they recognized Little Six as one of the accused, for he had become a favorite visitor to the post, often distributing gifts to the youngsters. Six decades later, Charlotte still trembled at the memory of that day, when she watched with horror as the shackled men struck out across the field, headed for a line of trees representing freedom and from which their tribesmen shouted encouragement. She and her peers briefly experienced hope, when, in a stroke of luck, the bullet that struck down Split Upper Lip severed the cord binding him to Little Six, who lurched forward toward safety. “But the [Ojibwas] were cool in their vengeance,” and after calmly reloading their rifles they shot him down just before he reached the copse, reducing the children to tears.
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As it turned out, the execution itself was merely a prelude to greater horrors. Charlotte vividly recalled that the corpses were dragged to the top of a nearby hill and scalped, with the gory prizes presented as a souvenir to an Ojibwa headman. Indian women and children then descended upon the fallen Sioux, tearing open their bodies and drinking handfuls of blood before leaving the carcasses to rot in the afternoon sun. That night, as the corpses were hurled into the Mississippi, Malcolm and Charlotte lay awake in bed, “awe-struck and quiet,” lamenting the fate of their cherished Little Six and trying to imagine what the people of New Orleans would make of the desecrated bodies if they managed to float that far downriver.
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Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve, 1899. Clarke’s younger sister, Charlotte, pictured here at the age of eighty, witnessed with her brother the killing of two Sioux Indians forced to run the gantlet at Fort Snelling in 1827. Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society.

Notwithstanding such occasional brutality, the eight years the Clarkes spent at Fort Snelling were essentially happy ones. Their stay there ended swiftly, however, in the summer of 1827 when Nathan, by then a captain, and several companies were sent downriver to Wisconsin to quell an insurrection by the Winnebagos. It was the last time the family would ever be together at Fort Snelling. Years later, after many intervening moves, Charlotte relocated to St. Paul and spent much of her adult life there. In her autobiography, she recalled that whenever she passed the spot near the fort (which was eventually engulfed by the Twin Cities) where her family had bidden farewell to their friends in 1827, “a tender, reverential awe steals over me, as when standing by the grave of a friend long buried.”
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O
N AN
A
PRIL DAY
in 1834, Malcolm and Charlotte Clarke embarked with their father on a trip to the East Coast, a voyage that epitomized the transportation revolution that remade America in the early years of the nineteenth century. The first leg of their journey began at Fort Winnebago and involved an open boat crowded with soldiers and civilians and buffeted by wind and rain as it traveled down the Fox River to Fort Howard, located at the southern end of Green Bay. There the Clarkes boarded a schooner that ferried them across Lake Michigan, through the Straits of Mackinac, down Lake Huron, and up Lake Erie to Buffalo, where they marveled at the sight of Niagara Falls. No less impressive to Charlotte than the “hoary, magnificent” cataract were the modern conveyances they used to complete the last segment of the trip: the new Erie Canal, the Albany and Schenectady Railroad, one of the nation’s first lines, and finally a steamboat, which carried them down the Hudson River to West Point.
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Though thrilling to the children, the trip was long, requiring more than a month’s time. And yet the journey from the Old Northwest to the U.S. Military Academy was simpler for Nathan Clarke than getting his son admitted to the school in the first place. Having received no extended education of his own, Captain Clarke had ascended through the military ranks at a slow and frustrating pace, and he resolved early on that his only boy would not suffer the same disadvantages. Thus he initiated a campaign—which started long before his son had reached sixteen, the minimum age for entry at the USMA—to secure a berth for Malcolm at West Point. Despite Captain Clarke’s distinguished record of service in the U.S. Army, he nevertheless faced a daunting task, given the intense competition for the few seats in each class.

Clarke sensed an opportunity to advance his son’s candidacy in the summer of 1831 when President Andrew Jackson appointed Lewis Cass as his secretary of war. Clarke knew both men well: he and Cass had been stationed together at Fort Detroit fifteen years earlier, and then in 1828–29 Clarke had served as a recruiting officer in Nashville, Tennessee, where he met Jackson and his adored wife, Rachel, in the heady days between Old Hickory’s election and his departure for Washington, D.C. The couple left quite an impression on the Clarke children. Young Charlotte provided one of the most famous and oft-invoked descriptions of the homely Mrs. Jackson, whom she recalled as “a coarse-looking, stout little old woman, whom you might easily mistake for his washerwoman.”. Doubtless she paled by comparison with her husband, remembered by Charlotte for his “keen, searching eyes, iron-gray hair … [and] a face somewhat furrowed by care and time.”
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In any event, heartened by Cass’s appointment, Clarke wrote his old friend in December of 1831 to register Malcolm as an applicant for the class of 1837, but nothing materialized. Clarke tried again in the summer of 1833, to no avail. Driven to desperation, he then took a three-month leave of absence in the spring of 1834 and journeyed from his post in Wisconsin to New York in order to lodge a personal appeal. In the end, it took the direct intervention of General Winfield Scott, whom Captain Clarke had met years earlier at Fort Snelling and who was a veteran of the War of 1812 and the Black Hawk War, to place his son in the class of 1838.
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Malcolm enrolled just a few days shy of his seventeenth birthday. Among his fellow plebes was a handsome French Louisianan named P. G. T. Beauregard, who later graduated third in the class and became notorious when he accepted the surrender of Fort Sumter at the start of the Civil War and led Confederate troops to victory in the First Battle of Bull Run.

U.S. Military Academy. After his father pulled every conceivable string to have him admitted, Malcolm Clarke had a brief and tumultuous career at West Point, marked by fighting and indifferent academic performance and ending in expulsion. Courtesy of the U.S. Military Academy Archives, Stockbridge Collection.

Malcolm, of course, enjoyed a much shorter stay at the USMA. Perhaps his only comfort was that his father did not have to endure the debacle of his expulsion. Exhausted by two decades of military service and constant relocations throughout the Old Northwest, Nathan in the autumn of 1835 suffered an undisclosed illness and died the next February at Fort Winnebago, leaving his family “crushed and desolate.” Charlotte was at his side, along with her fiancé, Horatio Van Cleve, a lieutenant in the Fifth U.S. Infantry and a West Point graduate, class of 1831. On his deathbed, Nathan Clarke must have found solace in the belief that his two eldest children had secured the sort of exalted positions in military society that had eluded him in his own career. And so it was at least with Charlotte, whose husband won renown as a general in the Union Army during the Civil War and later served as the adjutant general of Minnesota. Malcolm would follow another path.
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