Today, George Rogers Clark is celebrate as the conqueror of the Midwest, a man who defied the British and secured the heartlands.

But as a nation, our memory can be a bit... selective.

Commemoration is reall about an image of an individual.

And history is about many, many perspectives and many, many angles, He was presente as the conqueror of the Midwest and he did not conquer the Midwest.

Clark defied the British and calls for moderation.

He sparked new conflict with Native Americans who sought peace and die with his reputation in tatters, consumed by addiction and forgotten for 150 years until he became a convenient hero.

George Rogers Clark.

was asked to come to the Midwest, including to Indiana during the American Revolution, in order to secure, forts, really.

Not land, not territory but forts, for the rebel cause Clark spent his first several months in the Midwest conquering forts across present day Illinois and Kentucky To strengthen control of the land in the area, Clark sent out his clos friend, Father Pierre Gibault, to collect pledges of loyalty to the Patriot cause from the villages.

Suddenly, an unassuming trading post was thrust into the war for the heartlands.

That's what Vincennes was.

It was just this place an really in the middle of nowhere.

was very isolate and there wasn't much around it.

But this is wher the fur traders radiated from.

and where native peoples came.

Vincennes was far remove from the worst of the conflict without any significant fortifications but massive strategic benefit.

Thanks to the many tribes who came to trade there.

It was also deep within the lands of the Miami tribe and home to the Piankeshaw Chief, Young Tobacco.

Young Tobacco sought to ally himself with the American cause, and helped broker peace between Clark's men and the tribes of Indiana and Illinois.

The Miami did try and play mediators a lot.

we really didn't want to go to war with the British or the Americans.

And oftentimes we would try and play that middle ground.

It didn't work, obviously, but, you know, during their lifetimes it might've seemed like it did.

In the late 1700s, the British controlled the province of Quebec from Fort Lernoult in present day Detroit, From Fort Lernoult British Governor Henry Hamilton forged alliances with native tribes.

To thwart Patriot ambitions in the region, Hamilton was ordered to send out his allies to raid settlements.

He was a notorious figure among settlers as someone who hired and recruited native peoples to, to kill to, to gather scalps, basically.

Seeing Clark' push up the Wabash and alliance with the Piankeshaw as a threa to British control in the West, Henry Hamilton left Detroit and made for Vincennes, entering the town in the winter and immediately beginning to build up the aging For Sackville into a major base of British power.

With the dense woodlands of Indiana and Illinois blanketed in snow, Hamilton would have all winter to expand and reinforce Fort Sackville.

The fatal flaw in Hamilton's plan?

Assuming George Rogers Clark was willing to wait.

That's the epic moment where he marches during the winter with very minimal supplies.

Clark raced for the fort, enduring 16 days march through the snow, mud and icy water to reach Vincennes before Hamilton even knew to send for reinforcements.

With only a few me in the garrison, Lord Hamilton surrendered after a brief siege, turning himself over and spending the next few years in a Virginia prison.

Clark was celebrated as a hero for his defeat of the feared Lord Henry Hamilton.

Even though he captured the British commander, the next commander continued to sponsor raids into Ohio and into Kentucky.

Vincenne had significant symbolic value, but the military value was tied to Fort Lernoult in Detroit.

Without the manpower to spare or the funds for a campaign, and with the new British commander already carrying on Henry Hamilton's work.

Vincennes quickly lost its value as a military site.

As for George Rogers Clark his decades of military service were drawing to a humiliating close.

He misread things and he made some serious missteps that cost him his reputation.

He had an image of his younger man self.

And as he was approaching middle age, his younger man self was gone.

And that was very hard, I think, for him.

he, resorted to serious consumption of alcohol, and a lot of resentment that just lodged, deep within him.

But even as the Revolutionary War ended, the battle for land in the West only intensified.

It starts pretty much in 1783, when the British cede their claims that they got from the French who didn't get it from anyone.

We start having raids going back and forth.

which is what starts what you might call the Northwest Indian wars.

We would call the Mihi-maalhsa Wars.

That's what kind of sparks that, is their need for land to sell to pay off all their war debts.

To the settlers, the lands of the West were an untapped source of wealth to fill the treasury of a brand new nation.

One by one, the Native American tribes were forced to cede more and more land.

In 1795 of the Treaty of Greenville that cedes, mostly the southern half of Ohio.

and that's just from us.

Our principal chief signed a treaty in 1840, agreeing to removal because he thought he saw the writing on the wall that, if we stayed there, we were not going to survive as a people.

He was wrong, obviously, because we have citizens who live in Fort Wayne, Indiana still and their families never left, and they're still very much Miami.

To many Americans, the Indian Removal Ac was a moral stain on the nation.

Fierce debates waged on the place of Native Americans in society.

We've always had people who you know, viewed as human beings who deserve respect and should be treated fairly.

There's always been people like that.

But that's not necessarily who gets to make the decision on these things.

In 1846, the U.S.

Army rounded up the Miami at gunpoint in Peru, Indiana.

They were first sent to Kansas and placed on a reservation only a fraction the size of what they'd been promised.

After 20 years, they were again displaced.

Sent next to Ottawa County Oklahoma, where they are today.

We are being forcibly removed and forcibly placated in this way, and then we're being put right next to, you know, some of the only people we ever had generational warfare with.

in that very beginning, there would have been a lot of, pressure in the area.

That's not to mention the tribes that were from there that were being compressed within their own homelands, They had this vast area an they're just being smashed down.

The war over land in the West was over.

As for George Rogers Clark, in the late 1800s, his story was revived.

It capture the imaginations of the masses and made him a symbol of the bygone days of the wild frontie and the explorers who tamed it.

No matter what history said.

The commemoration process happens at sort of assigned moments like 100th anniversary and 150th anniversaries, etc., etc.

and those commemoration moments use historical figures to satisfy their own cultural moment and what their own cultural needs are.

And so they create images of people in the past.

Now we have much more of an appreciation of the complexit of what happens in the Midwest.

That process is so much muddier and messier, and has so many different moving parts to it.

So George Rogers Clark becomes one moving part now rather than the moving part the way he was And now I don't know what the next step will be in terms of how he's commemorated.

That's so much an important part of history.

The quest is to find the harder things to find and not the easier things to find.

Funding for this video was made in part by a community grant around the American Revolu a film by Ken Burns Sarah Botstein and David Schmidt You can stream the full fil starting November 16th on the PB We'd like to thank the following For more stories, visit WFYI.org/Across Indiana.