While it would be easy (and materially correct) to say William (and his siblings) didn’t have the “formal” education of Jonathan or George Rogers, i.e. there was no Donald Robertson in an outpost like Louisville where teachers like him and learning materials — the philosophies, the classical histories, the scientific textbooks, the essays, as well good paper and pencils — were quite limited, the Clark household was still a place of learning, “formal” and “frontier.”
The reason the Clark’s eschewed “formal” education stems (at least a bit) on the economic reality of sending all their children away (as they did with Jonathan and George Rogers). With less children and in a less remote location, Lewis would obtain, like Jonathan and George Rogers, the more formal, broad Enlightenment, education through out a series of teachers, “impoverished divines,” in David Lavender’s words.
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About a hundred log cabins greeted the Clark’s as they made their way to the plot upon which they’d stake their claim to Kentucky soil.
The South Fork of Beargrass Creek would became the family home – first Ampthill, then Mulberry Hill. They built a wooden “I-style” house — two rooms on each floor divided a center hall, forty feet by twenty with glass windows — that would last over a hundred years. As a working labor camp, the enslaved — Old York, Rose, Cupid, &c. — built homes of stone and brick, a separate kitchen, spring house and grist mill.
The town of Louisville laid itself out beneath them. The house faced Fort Nelson, which replaced George Rogers’ 1778, Fort-on-shore. There was Corn Island in the distance, still an island when the Clark’s moved (before it slowly eroded away). And, of course, you could see the Falls of the Ohio, which surely hummed throughout daily life in early Louisville. George Rogers would declare themselves “by far the best settled of any persons in this part of the Cuntrey.”1
Part of being a “settled person” meant education. This was, after all, the era of the Enlightenment and having a grasp upon the the physical and metaphysical world was crucial, a reflection of the “rational” government being formed back east. In fact, Clark’s early biography, by Jerome Steffen, linked the Enlightenment as a key driver to William’s “public interest and personal interest,” as well as his “intellectual pursuits of an academic nature and business pursuits.”
It would be easy (and materially correct) to say William (and his siblings) didn’t have the “formal” education that Jonathan or George Rogers had. It’s true that here was no Donald Robertson in an outpost like Louisville, where teachers like him nor their learning materials, such as the philosophies, the classical histories, the scientific textbooks, the essays, as well as good paper and pencils, were had to come by. And while teachers and supplies were quite limited, the Clark household was still a place of learning: “formal” and “frontier.”
Landon Jones’ biography of Clark is illuminating on this “formal” education:
Jonathan's leather-bound "Cyphering Book" was passed from brother to sister and eventually to "Billy," as William was called. The book's topics included "Simple Interest" and "The Rule of Three Direct" and calculation questions reflecting the daily concerns of rural Virginians:
When the days are 9 hours long I can travail from here to Williamsburg in 9 days, how many days will I be going the same journey when the days are 14½ [hours] long.
If 10 horses in 14 days eat 14 bushels of oats, [how many] will serve 18 horses in 165 days?
How many feet of plank that is 13¼ inches broad will floor a room that is 24 foot long by 24½ broad?
In addition to reading and writing (insert William’s colorful spelling anecdote here), these abstract mathematics, these notebooks filled with (as William Foley described it) “detailed instructions for making calculations using decimals, compounding interest, figuring square and cube roots, and a host of other similar mathematical procedures”, became lab work as the children learned the arts of surveying (which William became proficient), farming (tobacco, rye, peas, pumpkins, sweet potatoes), and animal husbandry (horses, first and foremost).
Jones also notes the ribald humor left behind in these notebooks, such as the classic:
William Clark is a spark / And he loves to shoot a gun /He left a fart behind catch / And it sounded like a drum.
One aspect of this poem we can confirm, by fifteen, Clark was tall, broad, and good shot. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that most of William’s education was informal, “frontier,” if we must.
Like the mathematics, William’s love of natural history was fostered at a kitchen table but implemented in the field. It’s also undeniable he had a great teacher: “I don't suppose there is a person living that knows the Geography and Natural History of the back Cuntrey [sic] better if so well as I do myself… It has been my study for many years,” wrote his brother George Rogers Clark.
His “field work” studies, if you will, hinted at the wilderness skills that would be vital in his military service, his cartographic detail, and lead directly to his “Western Tour” with Lewis. (Later, after his sister Fanny married James O’Fallon, William would pick up some medical training: no doubt some useful and confirmed remedies he’d seen throughout his life, but also bizarre, like wearing flannel underwear to cure arthritis, which, hey, a lot less harmful than bloodletting.)
As we near his 20th birthday, we’ll begin to reckon with another major aspect of William’s life: his relations with Native peoples.
We noted the unease William may have felt years before, when he first floated the Ohio, seeing the Native peoples his brother had told him stories about. But another layer of unease deepened every day William (and his family) woke up with his brother, Richard, known as Dicky, not there.
Richard was part of George Rogers’ Illinois Regiment during the revolutionary years but mysteriously disappeared. His clothes and saddle were found by the side of a river but nothing else.
It was up to you if he drowned on the Wabash, or the White, or, if he was abducted, tortured and killed by Indians, as William concluded, as many many men of his generation, the kin of and/or future Indian fighters and Indian killers themselves, would. But Dicky didn’t happen in a bubble, at least not as the years went by: he begot the Elliott’s begot Moluntha begot Logan’s raids begot Hardin parading body parts on pikes begot the Chenoweth’s.
In July 1789, before William’s first foray with Hardin, which we’ll soon talk about, Peggy Chenoweth was attacked (likely by Shawnee) and had her scalp ripped off. She’d survive but wear a cap for the rest of her life. William returned from Hardin’s raid to bands being formed to hunt down those who assaulted Peggy.
This would come to nothing but it did allow William to take new skills he’d learned on campaign (even one with deeply suspect discipline) and extend them into a long hunting trip in the backwoods. However, it wouldn’t be until he was offered a captain’s commission in the militia and went off on a six-week reconnaissance mission in Kentucky that William’s formal and informal educations merged.
In Harrodsburg, he’d meet with Captain Abraham Chapline, also from George Roger’s Illinois regiment (whom George Rogers may have pushed William to visit, it’s unclear). No doubt he told William how he survived the running the gauntlet and was adopted into a Shawnee family on the Upper Miami River. (Perhaps William may have thought this could have been the fate of Dicky – a less grizzly, if still sad, fate.)
In addition, William read from “Aristotle, Cicero, Plutarch, and Pope, as well as astronomy and world history.” He would copy what he felt was important to know into a notebook, something he’d become world famous for. He’d read novels, like Tobias Smollett’s Roderick Random, “a picaresque novel about a shameless Scottish rogue with a penchant for farce, horseplay, and violence,” according to William Foley.
After a flirtation with a Nelly Slaughter, a daughter of another George Roger’s confidant, Colonel George Slaughter, William was back at Mulberry Hill in February 1790.
By 1790, Clark was on the verge of manhood with a temperament to match: he was honest, steady, and as William Foley notes,
neither snobbish nor arrogant, but his gentrified upbringing left an indelible imprint of class consciousness. Proper deportment and association with the right people were important to Clark.
While he failed to correct the deep contractions that lay at the heart of slavery, he “absorbed the spirit of Enlightenment thought and a commitment to the republican principles that Virginia's Revolutionary generation embraced so ardently.” It was true that he came from a high-achieving family in a world that demanded “proper social ethics and intellectual development and economic success.” He liked what he’d experienced so far in the makeshift militia units of the new Northwest Territory. Like the rest of his brothers, he followed their path into the military.
While Clark ranged out in the Ohio County, Lewis wrote his mother back in Georgia:
I live in Hopes of receiving a Letter from you by which as the only Means I may be informed of your Health and Welfair. I enjoy my Health at present which I hope is your situation. I am your ever loving Sone.
Missing your mom is one thing, but one wonders if he wasn’t missing the exuberance of being a kid. His Georgia education was over but, in those low moments, especially in Charles Everitt’s classes, did he long to just be outside, exploring and learning the ways of the world? Or did he wish to be in his mother’s company, reading from her library, which she must have taken to Broad River — valued at $30 at her death, several hundred dollars today?
As Meriwether settled into his teenaged years, his (and his guardians’) lives became sourcing out teachers and tutors (as well as rooms and board with the schoolmasters themselves or with his aunts and uncles) to prepare him for his life to come — as well as the responsibilities he bore that weren’t his choice at all.
The reason the Clark’s eschewed “formal” education stems (at least a bit) on the economic reality of sending all their children away (as they did with Jonathan and George Rogers). However, with less children and in a less remote location, Lewis would obtain, like Jonathan and George Rogers, the more formal, broad Enlightenment. An education from a series of teachers, or as David Lavender calls them, “impoverished divines.”
After arriving back in Virginia in 1787 under the guidance of his uncles Nicholas Lewis and William D. Meriwether, they (our Lewis as well as his cousin Robert) “applied,” if you will, to Reverend Matthew Murray’s Albemarle Classical School at his farm, Edgeworth. (Jefferson was taught by Murray’s father, James, no doubt recommending the son.) He’d have to wait until the spring, but he’d “set” with Murray, however reluctantly, as they’d request mathematical training that Murray, apparently, feared would “ interfere with his Latin business.”
There were perks, however: Murray was mild-mannered, a plus; his daughter, Milly, caught the eye of a young Meriwether (or didn’t. One of Lewis’s earliest biographers, Richard Dillon relates, if family lore is to be believed, which… ya know, how Milly wanted to see “once more the picture of the schoolboy who had become the dashing young officer, the President's secretary, the great explorer, and who had loved her once,”); but mainly it was cheap, paid out from Lewis’s inheritance built from bonded labor.
After two years, however, Lewis explains to his little brother, Reuben, that their uncle, William D. Meriwether, felt he was “well acquainted with the English Grammer” and he was now living with their cousin, Peachy [Gilmer], going “to school to a Master in the Neighbourhood in Order to get acquainted with Figurs.”
For half of 1789, Lewis attended the school of Dr. Charles Everett.
Lewis’s cousin, Peachy, who would describe Lewis in this era, said that Everitt acted like he was “Master in the Neighbourhood” — as a disciplinarian who tolerated little outside the sound of his own lecture — recalling “his method of teaching was as bad as anything could be… he was impatient of interruption We seldom applied for assistance, said our lessons badly, made no profciency, and acquired negligent and bad habits.”
This wouldn’t do.
However, years later, Peachy would relate the young Meriwether:
He was always remarkable for perseverance, which in the early period of his life seemed nothing more than obstinacy in pursuing the trifles that employ that age; of a martial temper and great steadiness of purpose, self-possession and undaunted courage. His person was stiff and without grace; bowlegged, awkward, formal and almost without flexibility. It bore to my vision a very strong resemblance to Buonaparte.
Richard Dillon jokes that future portraitist of Lewis, Saint-Mémin, didn’t agree. However, like our anecdotes from Lewis and Clark’s frontier boyhoods, it’s worth noting how much of our perceptions come after the fact, remembered in the guise of other figures, larger-than-life in some ways.
After leaving Everitt by the fall of 1789 (as Jefferson returned from France and Clark paled around Kentucky on “reconaissance”), Meriwether Lewis transferred to Rev. James Waddell (whom his uncle Nicholas had preferred after James Murray wasn’t taking new students back in 1787). He wrote his mother in August 1790, just as he was celebrating his 16th birthday:
Every civility is here paid to me and leaves me without any reason to regret the loss of a home of nearer connection. As soon as I complete my education, you shall certainly see me.
A year later, in October 1791, he’d write again:
I see you have made mention of your dependance on me for your return to Virginia. I will with a great deal of cheerfulness do it but it will be out of my power sooner than eighteen Months or two years.
But this was not to be. His formal schooling ended shortly after he’d put his hopes to paper, in the spring of 1792.
The death of his stepfather, John Marks, and his mother’s desire to return to Virginia, no doubt exacerbated his decision to drop of of school, though no doubt his uncle’s would’ve felt he was more than proficient to run Locust Hill.
Here, then, the ”formal” education gave way to the informal: at 18, he was in charge of his family’s generational slave labor camp. Due to the depleted soil (the reason John Marks moved the family to Georgia), Locust Hill switched from tobacco to wheat, which grew steadily, if less profitably.
Perhaps the rotation of crops, or, as Patricia Stroud notes in her newer biography of Lewis, his interest in “deep plowing to lessen erosion, fertilizing, and other methods for improving agriculture,” such as applying plaster and clover to improve the soil, or the prospects of tobacco’s return or the prospect of a side hustle in corn or rye or potatoes or flax, or looking to the skies to determine, as he wrote his mother, the “consequence of the Ivy weather,” or maybe the logistics of transport from mill to wagon to buyer, held his attention for long enough to convince him that he could be successful, that this—*gestures broadly*—was enough.
Of course, these passive daydreams are common to you, listening, but it must be remembered that only those who looked like Lewis got to follow their dreams without pushback. Stephen Ambrose writes his biography of Lewis, Undaunted Courage, that, like all enslavers, “he made no distinctions between them [Black people], made no study of them, had no thought that they could be of benefit to America in any capacity other than slave labor.”
And that includes labor of any kind, including that of the “skilled artisans” at Monticello, who Lewis commissioned to built a carriage to bring his mother back to Virginia. He planned to leave in May 1792, noting how the “season is now advancing” and that he was afraid traveling “will be very hot and distressing.”
The carefree ten-year old child that went to Georgia had grown into a manager of responsibilities.
Lewis never forgot the transformative power of his education. He’d be an advocate for his siblings throughout the rest of his life.
As a fifteen year old, Lewis told his twelve year-old brother that he’d
like very much to have some of your Sport fishing, and hunting, provided I could be doing Something, that will no Doubt be more to my advantag herafter.
Wintering along the Monongahela in 1794, he told his mother “I would wish Rubin to amuse himself with ucefull books” and hopes he’ll “pay attention” to tasks he had to take over at Locust Hill.
On the verge of leaving for his expedition, in July 1803, while dismissing the dangers of a transcontinental journey, he tells his mother, “remember me to Mary and Jack” — his half sister and brother —“and tell them I hope the progress they will make in their studies will be equal to my wishes and that of their other friends.”2
Even from Fort Mandan, high up the Missouri in today’s North Dakota, as the ice broke and the permeant party was about to head west, he closed his letter:
I must request of you before I conclude this letter, to send John Markes to the College of Willamsburgh, as soon as it shall be thought that his education has been sufficiently advanced.
He concluded with the thought that any hardships suffered for his “future prosperity” is preferred than to “suffer his education to be neglected or remain incomple[te].”3
Much of this article quotes the various biographies of Lewis and Clark over the years: Foley, William E.. Wilderness Journey: The Life of William Clark. University of Missouri Press, 2004; Steffen, Jerome O.. William Clark: Jeffersonian Man on the Frontier. University of Oklahoma Press, 1978; Jones, Landon Y.. William Clark and the Shaping of the West. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005; Dillon, Richard H.. Meriwether Lewis: A Biography. Western Tanager Press, 1988; Ambrose, Stephen E.. Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West. Simon & Schuster, 1997; Lavender, David. The Way to the Western Sea. University of Nebraska Press, 2001; Stroud, Patricia Tyson. Bitterroot: The Life and Death of Meriwether Lewis. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.
Lewis to Lucy Marks, July 2, 1803 (#58) in Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents: 1783-1854, 2nd ed., ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978).
Lewis to Lucy Marks, March 31, 1805 (#143) in Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition with Related Documents: 1783-1854, 2nd ed., ed. Donald Jackson (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978).
#27 - Formal and Informal Educations [MM4.6]