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3. Military Intelligence

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J.M.: The purpose of the journals was essentially to answer the questions that Jefferson posed to Lewis in his instructions. But then, at Fort Mandan, you get Clark listing the number of officers and men needed, as he put it, "for to protect the Indian trade and keep the savages in peace with the U. S. and each other. " Now, that sounds sort of like military intelligence, doesn't it?

S.A.: Well, certainly it was military intelligence, and that was a constant part of the expedition, to find out who these Indians were, to try to make friends with them, to bring them in on the American side, to figure out where we could set up trading posts that would be manned by Americans and could engage in commerce with these Indians. That is a major part of all the journals.

Now the captains were under orders to keep a journal, which they did — it became one of the great poems of all American literature — but it was done primarily as a military service. In the 1950s, some parts of Clark's field notes were discovered in an attic in Minnesota. A Civil War general had been a collector and he had gotten ahold of these and put them up in the attic and forgotten about them apparently. But in any event, his granddaughter, I think it was, found William Clark's journals. Now a big dispute arose over who did they belong to. She said they were hers, she had found them, it was in her attic, it was her grandfather who had acquired them in the first place. The United States Government took her to court on the grounds that William Clark was a military officer. He was under orders to prepare this journal and these field notes. He was being paid by the United States Government for doing this, therefore they belonged to the United States of America. And that was the final disposition of the case.