The Red and the White: A Family Saga of the American West (9 page)

Established in 1802, the USMA had survived its sputtering origins and the occasional hostility of state and federal politicians to become the key supplier of the young republic’s engineers and military leaders. Indeed, around the time of Dickens’s visit, James Longstreet, class of 1842, had just graduated; Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, class of 1846, was settling in; and Ulysses S. Grant, class of 1843, was plodding his way through the curriculum to finish twenty-first in a class of thirty-nine. Because of its reputation and also its egalitarianism (in theory, West Point’s doors were open to any young man who obtained a congressional nomination and passed the entrance exam), competition was fierce for the four or five dozen places in each cohort.
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With help from his father, Malcolm Clarke had secured one of the coveted spots from Ohio in the class of 1838. But instead of graduating with his peers and winning glory on battlefields from Mexico to Virginia, Clarke became an unwitting member of a different club: nongraduate alumni of the USMA. To be sure, this group counted luminaries of its own, like Edgar Allan Poe, class of 1834, who lasted just a single semester at West Point before deserting in 1831. Apparently, Poe found his courses insuperably boring—not surprising, given that he would come to write some of the most phantasmagorical verse in American literary history—and was unable to drink as he pleased. He managed, nevertheless, to churn out a book of poems during his short stint at the academy, underwritten by subscriptions from his fellow cadets. For Malcolm Clarke, however, it was a keen sense of personal honor that caused trouble at West Point.
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Malcolm Clarke. By equal turns charming and hot-tempered, Clarke found great success and personal fulfillment in Montana before his life was cut short in August 1869, when he was just fifty-two. Courtesy of the Montana Historical Society.

Early one morning in March 1835, Lindsay Hagler, a North Carolinian who had matriculated with the class of 1837 but been held back because of poor academic performance, excoriated Clarke for disturbing his sleep while sweeping their dormitory. A scuffle ensued, but the combatants were soon separated. Others might have let the matter rest, but Clarke seethed, and so several days later he sent a note to Hagler that read in part, “I demand of you, that satisfaction, which no true gentleman will refuse another.” When Hagler ridiculed Clarke’s proposal to settle their disagreement with a duel, Malcolm opted for another course of action. During roll call on the morning of 11 March, he took a stick and crumpled the unsuspecting southerner with a blow to the head. Only the quick intervention of some bystanders prevented a tragic outcome, as the dazed but livid Hagler rose to defend himself brandishing a dirk.

While USMA brass frowned upon brawling and in some cases even dismissed cadets for the offense, dueling was another matter entirely. Even issuing a challenge was considered a grave breach of conduct. But such recourse seemed only natural to Malcolm Clarke, given his exposure to the practice while growing up. Still, understanding the gravity of the charges against him, he wrote a lengthy letter to the members of the court-martial hearing his case. Clarke did not grovel. Instead, he simply explained that, while he knew he risked expulsion, he had challenged Hagler because “there is another and a higher standard of conduct, which must regulate the actions of a man of honor.” The court rejected his defense and expelled him.
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But Malcolm Clarke was not finished at West Point, for he was granted a pardon by no less a figure than the commander in chief, President Andrew Jackson. This was not as unlikely as it might have seemed, because Jackson, who had grave misgivings about the elitism engendered by the USMA and was thus happy to meddle in its proceedings, had overturned a number of such expulsions. And yet there can be little doubt that Jackson took a special interest in the case of Malcolm Clarke, whom he knew personally through Clarke’s father, who had been stationed in Nashville in the late 1820s. Moreover, Old Hickory himself had fought at least a dozen duels in his own day, including one dispute in 1806 in which he had killed his opponent but taken a bullet to the chest, which remained lodged in his body for the rest of his days. Surely, Jackson must have thought, the U.S. Army needed more men with young Clarke’s bravado.
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Malcolm repaid his benefactor’s generosity by engaging in another fight while at West Point in November 1836, and this time he was the one wielding the dagger (in addition to a cowhide whip). On that occasion, however, there was no one to save him. Jackson, who was in the waning days of his second and final term, had renounced his policy of reinstating expelled cadets. In any event, Clarke could hardly lean upon his classroom record for support, given that he ranked forty-seventh out of fifty-one members in his class.
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He was convicted and expelled, but in absentia, because knowing the inevitable outcome of the court-martial, Clarke had already set out for perhaps the best place for a failed military man to make himself anew: the West.

Over the next three decades he flourished in the lands beyond the Mississippi, finding ample opportunity for personal fulfillment. After all, the mid-nineteenth-century West was a place where a strong jaw and a steady hand were revered. Thus in time Malcolm Clarke grew into something of a legend, known from the Southwest to the northern Plains as a cunning man of unmatched bravery. But the same penchant for violence that had undone him at West Point followed him like a ghost, and in the end, when it tracked him down years later on a warm summer day in Montana, it ensnared those whom he loved best.

A Martial Youth

Malcolm Clarke was born to the martial life, descended from two families with impressive records of military service. His maternal grandfather, Major Thomas Seymour, took a commission in the Continental army upon his graduation from Yale College in 1777 and commanded a light horse company during the American Revolution. After helping to defeat the British at Saratoga that autumn, the then captain Seymour accepted the pistols and riding equipment relinquished by General John Burgoyne. It bespeaks his prominent role in the battle—one of the most important in the war, for the rebel victory paved the way for a formal military alliance between the Americans and the French—that Seymour appears in John Trumbull’s famous painting of the surrender, mounted on one of the sleek black steeds for which his regiment was known and feared.
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Malcolm’s father, Lieutenant Nathan Clarke, served with distinction during the War of 1812.
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At the conflict’s end, the New England native was stationed as a recruiting officer in Hartford, Connecticut, where he met and courted Major Seymour’s daughter, Charlotte, who at twenty-one was six years Clarke’s junior.
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The couple wed hurriedly the next summer after Lieutenant Clarke received orders to join the Fifth U.S. Infantry at Detroit, though the circumstances of the ceremony were inauspicious. At the time, Charlotte was still recovering from “spotted fever” (probably some variant of a tick-borne disease) and could not stand without assistance. Still, she managed to take her vows in a firm voice and immediately afterward boarded a carriage with her husband for the long, uncomfortable trip to the interior. Such resolve served her well during the many years she spent in the Old Northwest.
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When Nathan Clarke and his new bride set out for the Great Lakes in July 1816, peace prevailed in the region for the first time in more than half a century. Beginning with the Seven Years’ War between France and England, the area had suffered endemic conflict as European imperial powers, their North American colonists, and the region’s many indigenous groups struggled for control of the Ohio Valley. It was only after the War of 1812 that relative tranquillity descended upon the Northwest, as the British, who since the end of the American Revolution had supported Indian resistance against U.S. expansion, finally recognized American sovereignty there. White Americans now moved in ever-greater numbers to the present-day states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, while the territory’s native peoples looked on with alarm.
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It was against this backdrop that units like Lieutenant Clarke’s Fifth U.S. Infantry deployed to the Northwest, invested with three key responsibilities: to keep a watchful eye on the British, to protect white settlers from Indian attacks, and to facilitate the business of the fur trade. Detroit was particularly important to federal officials in Washington, given its strategic location on the border with Canada and its excellent access to multiple waterways.
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As one of their daughters remembered, the Clarkes found much to like about the settlement there, which is somewhat surprising in view of its remote location on the western frontier of the United States as well as the war-weariness of its inhabitants following the recent conflict with England. More than anything else, it was Charlotte’s improving health and especially the company of prominent military families like those of John Whistler and Lewis Cass that cheered the young couple during their stay in Michigan.
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The Clarkes’ Michigan honeymoon lasted less than a year before Nathan was ordered in spring 1817 to make yet another foray deeper into the continental interior. This time the destination was Fort Wayne, Indiana, located some two hundred miles southwest of Detroit and named in honor of General “Mad Anthony” Wayne, a Revolutionary War hero who routed a confederacy of western Indians at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. Charlotte once again endured a miserable journey, made even more arduous by travel on horseback over pitted roads and by an advanced pregnancy. On 17 July 1817, within a few weeks of their arrival, she gave birth to her first child and only son, whom she christened Egbert Malcolm in honor of her youngest brother.

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XCEPT FOR OCCASIONAL VISITS
to the East with his family, young Malcolm passed the first decade of his life in the Northwest, most of it at Fort Snelling, where the Fifth U.S. Infantry was ordered in the summer of 1819 after the closure of Fort Wayne. Perched high on a bluff overlooking the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers in what is now downtown Minneapolis–St. Paul, the diamond-shaped fort was the westernmost outpost in U.S. territory at that time, and resembled “a medieval stone castle.”
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On an inspection tour in 1824, General Winfield Scott came away so impressed with the fort—which boasted thick stone walls, an impregnable round tower, and a lavish, Georgian house for the commandant—that he insisted it bear the name of its chief officer, Colonel Josiah Snelling.

Its beginnings were less grand. The troops arrived late that first summer and, as ordered, simply stopped at the mouth of the Minnesota River, which had not even a proper landing for their watercraft. While the soldiers hacked out a clearing on which to build makeshift cabins, their families used the boats they had taken up the Mississippi River as temporary shelter. The winter was bitterly cold, with heavy snows and lashing winds; adding to the misery was a severe outbreak of scurvy, which struck at the first signs of spring and carried off forty men. But inspired by Snelling’s spirited example, the troops got quickly to work building the fort as well as a sawmill upriver at St. Anthony’s Falls. For his part, Malcolm’s father served as the post’s assistant commissary of subsistence, charged with provisioning the three hundred men stationed there.
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The time Malcolm spent with his family at the isolated post in Minnesota had a lasting and indelible effect on the boy. For one thing, it was at Fort Snelling where he acquired the outdoor expertise that years later so awed the Blackfeet. His younger sister, Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve, recalled her brother at a very early age became “a ready pupil and prime favorite of Captain Martin Scott, widely known as the veritable Nimrod of those days.”
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The Vermonter’s hunting prowess was legendary, his aim so true that a stream in Wisconsin bore the name Bloody Run on account of all the game he slaughtered while stationed in its vicinity. Furthermore, Scott shaped his young protégé into an expert horseman and, critically, a willing duelist, for Scott had once faced off with a rival who had teased him for his humble origins.
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