Richly detailed histories follow Lewis and Clark's trail

On Aug. 20, 1794, Clark led a unit of riflemen at the Battle of Fallen Timbers. On Aug. 3, 1795, he was present when the Treaty of Greenville was signed.

Fallen Timbers, writes Landon Y. Jones, "forever extinguished the Indians' dream of confining" settlers east of the Ohio River. And Greenville not only ended a brutal 30-year frontier war, but "established. . . the endgame for all future relations" in which "white encroachment" on Indian lands would spark retaliation that would lead to military response.

And it was Clark who would be the architect of this endgame. Today, Jones writes, the process would be called ethnic cleansing. Jones, a former writer and editor for Life, Time, and People, is on the board of the National Council of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial. His richly detailed biography of Clark, while never losing its focus on that endgame, presents a fully-rounded portrait of a complex and intriguing figure.

Clark was a younger brother of George Rogers Clark, a "galvanizing" leader on the frontier during the American Revolution.

The elder Clark was a friend of Thomas Jefferson who, in 1783, asked if he would be interested in leading an expedition westward to California. The "almost offhand question," Jones writes, "introduced the pattern of military exploration that would prevail in the West for the next century" -- most notably with that of Lewis and Clark. .

Jones provides a good account of the Lewis and Clark expedition, but his main focus is on the endgame, the removal of the Indian tribes.

In 1808, while leading one such military expedition, Clark summoned Osage leaders to a council where he produced a treaty under which they gave up some 82,000 square miles of land, including "the empire of furs that was the economic base of their culture." Then, 17 years later, came a second treaty to acquire the western land onto which the Osage had moved -- before the resettled Indians began farming on it.

Jones writes that Clark, as superintendent of Indian Affairs, should be viewed as "a moderate," believing "that once the Indians were no longer a military threat and were no longer obstacles to American economic interest, then justice and humaneness could govern their treatment." Clark held the position of Indian Affairs from 1821 until his death in September 1838.