Newly uncovered map suggests U.S. explorer William Clark stole Indigenous land

An archival discovery has revealed a rare map in Washington D.C. that shows American explorer William Clark was behind a massive land grab from Indigenous nations and broke the peace treaty with Great Britain to do it.

The map, which was painstakingly decoded, re-dated and examined by University of Cambridge historian Robert Lee in the U.K., exposes Clark’s role in a 19th-century land grab, which robbed Indigenous peoples of territory the size of Switzerland in what is now Missouri, and fuelled the expansion of slavery.

While doing research with some microfilm from the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C., Lee saw a map filed under the name “Captain Eli B. Clemson” that did not match the basic geography of the accepted version of events about the treaty of 1808 commonly known as the “Osage Treaty”.

The Treaty of Fort Clark was signed at Fort Osage in November of 1808 where the Osage Nation ceded all the land east of the fort in Missouri and north of the Arkansas River to the United States. The Osage signed seven treaties with the U.S. between 1808 and 1839.

In a new study published in the journal William and Mary Quarterly, Lee posits that the map was drawn by Clark in 1816, who was then governor of the Missouri Territory, and shows how he stole 10.5 million acres of Sauk, Meskwaki and Iowa Indigenous territory and added it onto the United States after the War of 1812 by reinterpreting the Osage Treaty.

This land seizure violated the Treaty of Ghent with Great Britain, led to slave-holding emigrants flocking to the territory, and reshaped Missouri’s political boundaries.

“This astonishing map shows how William Clark leveraged the U.S.–Indian treaty system to promote settler supremacy in the United States at a time when he’s been praised for trying to protect Indigenous land from squatters. Now we can see just how scheming and disingenuous he really was,” Lee said in a news release.

The unsigned, undated map is sketched in ink and pencil, and contains about 50 named features, roughly half of which are rivers. The rest include towns and settlements, mines, salt licks, springs, and boundary lines. There are also more than 150 unnamed features, most of which are unidentified settlements along nondescript streams.

Lee argues that the map is Clark’s 1816 map, which previous historian Clarence Edwin Carter declared missing in 1951.

The map’s style, spelling and symbols all point to Clark, especially a line between the Arkansas and Red rivers, which Clark described in the 1816 letter that accompanied the map before the two got separated, according to the release.

Lee was able to decode that Clark personally orchestrated the scheme to steal half of what is today the state of Missouri from its Indigenous owners.

“This stray line looks like the cartographic equivalent of a Freudian slip. It’s the closest thing we have to an admission in Clark’s own hand that he dispossessed the Sauks, Meskwakis, and Iowas of a huge tract of land to hasten settler supremacy in Missouri,” Lee said in the release. “Clark didn’t discuss this plan in his 1816 letter and it remains largely unknown today despite playing an integral part in Missouri’s colonization.”

In 1815, after failing to purchase land north of the Missouri River from the Sauks, Meskwakis and Iowas, Clark withdrew recognition of their possession and asserted by proclamation that the United States had already bought this region from the Osage by the treaty in 1808.

By redrawing a treaty line right after the War of 1812 — that unlabelled line on the map — Clark secured an invasive squatter settlement and added millions of acres to the U.S. public domain in violation of the Treaty of Ghent, and he deliberately ignored official orders to restore prewar Indigenous boundaries.

“A naïve interpretation might say he found a huge loophole in the Treaty of Ghent. A realistic one would say he broke it to seize a landmass triple the size of Connecticut,” Lee said.

The stolen land attracted many slaveholders and emigrants, which pushed out generations of Indigenous nations in the area. Over the course of his career, Clark is now thought to have links to the taking of 419 million acres of Indigenous land.