George Rogers Clark and His Little Brother

George Rogers Clark, William Clark's older brother, became famous after his violent campaigns against Indigenous residents of the Ohio River Valley.

James Barton Longacre, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian

In the early 1800s, not many people knew William Clark, but many knew his brother.

George Rogers Clark was seen in the United States as an American Revolutionary War hero. Many of the military successes he had were in the Ohio River Valley, where he waged violent campaigns against Indigenous communities and their British allies.

Rogers Clark and other Americans destroyed Shawnee villages in the Ohio River Valley and killed many Indigenous people during the war. Violence and dislocation continued after the American Revolution, especially as a flood of American settlers entered the valley. Most Shawnee moved away to start new settlements or relocated to Delaware, Creek, or Cherokee towns.

Congress passed a series of land ordinances (in 1784, 1785, and 1787) that outlined measures for surveying, selling, and settling Indigenous lands. A flood of people rushed into the Ohio River Valley.

This included the Clark family. They traveled to Kentucky in 1785, when William Clark was fourteen years old, on roads established by Delaware, Shawnee, Haudenosaunee, Cherokee, and many other people. When their father died in 1799, William, rather than George, inherited most of the family property, which included land, a distillery, a grist mill, and twenty-four enslaved people, one of whom was York.

When Clark met up with Meriwether Lewis, their mission was in part to meet leaders of Indigenous communities throughout the Louisiana Territory and onto the Pacific Ocean, tell them who their new colonial leaders were, and hand out medals as European colonizers had long done to Indigenous leaders in the Western hemisphere. He did so having grown up with an older brother who Americans looked up to for killing Indigenous people.

About this article: This article is part of a series called “Pivotal Places: Stories from the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail.”