Historic St. Louis: 250 Years Exploring New Frontiers

U.S. government gifts to Indians.
As Superintendent of Indian Affairs in
St. Louis, William Clark chose this cotton
fabric and other designs, as official gifts
to native delegations. The tomahawk is
marked “USID” (Indian Department)
and was given to tribes as a treaty gift.
Author’s photograph of his artifacts.
In 1808, Governor Lewis suddenly
suspended trade with the Osages, falsely
accusing them of killing white settlers. He
threatened a war of extermination using their
many Indian enemies unless they signed the
controversial Treaty of Fort Osage. Several
intimidated Osage chiefs ceded 52,480,000
acres of their traditional territory to the U.S.
government, receiving only a fraction of a
cent per acre. Having never warred with the
Americans, the Osages were shocked to be
the first western Indians dispossessed of their
homelands and the only ones forced to
abandon a still-profitable fur trade. In the
Second Treaty of St. Louis in June 1825,
Clark took the last 40,000 square miles of
Osage lands and soon forced them to leave
the state they had helped create.
St. Louis under the Americans remained
the center of Indian diplomacy in the West.
An eyewitness in the 1820s described how
Indians, “a hundred or more at a time” would
“promenade down our Main Street in Indian
file,” including bare-legged chiefs wearing
U.S. army officer coats and “military hats
with plumes,” while warriors, draped in
“Mackinaw blankets,” each carried “a flaming
scarlet umbrella…in one hand and…a palm
leaf fan in the other.” They headed for
William Clark’s Indian Council Chamber
and museum of Indian curiosities on North
Main Street. The museum was described as
“the most complete” collection of Native
American artifacts and portraits in white
hands “anywhere in the United States” that
early. In 1825, the Marquis de Lafayette was
very impressed by what he saw—especially
the grizzly claw necklace—as were other
European elites of the era who were
fascinated by Native American cultures.
Although the Indian items collected by “Red-
Headed Chief” Clark honored indigenous
cultures in one sense, his filing cabinets
were filled with treaties documenting the
419,000,000 acres he wrested from the
homelands of many western tribes.
Clark’s rapidly rising career symbolized
the new opportunities for U.S. army officers
in St. Louis. The town’s strategic site made it
an ideal launching point for new explorations.
In 1805, Lieutenant Zebulon M. Pike left
there in an unsuccessful attempt to seek the
source of the Mississippi River. With soldiers
from Fort Bellefontaine, a U.S. army base
north of St. Louis, Pike then led an 1806-07
expedition to the Arkansas and Red Rivers,
eventually reaching the Rio Grande. A dozen
years later, Major Stephen H. Long left
from St. Louis to map present-day Kansas
and Nebraska—establishing a precedent by
taking artists Samuel Seymour and Titian
Peale to paint exquisite scenery that helped
Americans to visualize the West.
During the War of 1812 army personnel
from Fort Bellefontaine protected the town
from British and Indian invasion. In 1813
Clark led a successful raid on the pro-British
Sauk and Fox stronghold at Prairie du Chien
(Wisconsin) with 60 soldiers and 140 St. Louis
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