An American hero’s gift arrives late

I suppose if one were searching for that unique Christmas present for the man who, having been dead for 162 years, is a major-league pain to buy for, the gift that President Clinton has presented to William Clark would adequately fill the bill.

At the behest of a number of members of Congress and the National Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council, Clinton recently signed a bill that posthumously promoted the explorer Clark – of Lewis and Clark expedition fame – from lieutenant in the Army to captain.

When a brief news story describing the pending legislation ran deep inside the newspaper a while back, I taped it to the side of my computer that serves as a bulletin boad for items that fall into a What-Is-Wrong-With-This-Picture? category.

The bill stipulated that Clark, “co-leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-06, shall be deemed for all purposes to have held the grade of captain, rather than lieutenant, in the Regular Army, effective as of March 26, 1804, and continuing until his separation from the Army on Feb. 27, 1807.” Clark died in St. Louis in 1838.

And I’m thinking, well, that’s nice for making the historical revisionists feel all warm and fuzzy, no doubt. But what earthly good can it possibly do Lt. Clark or his heirs to receive his captain’s bars at this late date, given that the bill prohibits anyone from receiving benefits that would normally accrue from such a promotion? If we now must call him Capt. Clark does it change anything whatsoever, or is a dead explorer by any other name still a dead explorer? What’s next – another stripe for World War I Medal of Honor hero Sgt. Alvin York, long since gone to his heavenly reward? The posthumous elevation of Col. Ollie North to general 200 years down the line when the Iran-Contra Scandal Bicentennial Council gears up?

I e-mailed the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Council, seeking the answer to such burning questions. This week, Michelle D. Bussard, the outfit’s executive director, ignored the doubting-Thomas tilt to my query, and was kind enough to reply. “The point is to simply make Clark what members of the expedition thought he was and the true equal in rank to Lewis, as Lewis treated him,” she wrote. “As co-captains, they made history that will never be repeated, and so it is well worth marking symbolically…”

Bussard’s reference to the magnanimous way that Lewis treated Clark on their three-year quest to discover a water route linking the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, a so-called Northwest Passage, jibed with an account of that remarkable relationship by gifted historian Stephen Ambrose in his best-selling book “Undaunted Cou-rage.” In that spellbinding story of the historic expedition published four years ago by Simon and Schuster, Ambrose provided the rationale for the promote-Clark boomlet that followed.

According to Ambrose, Lewis sought to have Clark, whom he admired from previous Army service, join him in the expedition – a proposition enthusiastically endorsed by President Thomas Jefferson.

“There followed the most extraordinary offer,” wrote Ambrose. Lewis wrote to Clark that “he [Jefferson] has authorized me to say that in the event of your accepting this proposition he will grant you a Captain’s commission, which, of course, will intitle you to the pay and emoluments attached to that office and will equally with myself intitle you to such portion of land as was granted to officers of similar rank for their Revolutionary services; your situation if joined with me in this mission will in all respects be precisely such as my own…”

Ten days after this remarkable offer of shared command, Lewis received from Secretary of War Henry Dearborn the advance pay for the party to be recruited. It authorized one lieutenant only, and Lewis made no known protest.

“Jefferson should have been alert enough to notice that Dearborn was thinking lieutenant while Lewis was offering captain,” Ambrose wrote, “and he should have corrected the situation by telling Dearborn that Lewis’s offer would prevail, and Clark, if he accepted, would be a captain. But the commander in chief did nothing. It was uncharacteristic of Lewis and Jefferson to miss a detail of any kind, much less one fraught with such potential danger for embarrassment, misunderstanding, and bad feeling, but they missed this one…”

And the rest, as they say, is history, albeit now a revised history with William Clinton’s symbolic stocking-stuffer Yuletide gift of captain’s bars to the long-ago shafted William Clark. All’s well that ends well, I suppose. So a posthumous Merry Christmas to the newly promoted Capt. Clark. Merry Christmas to you, too. And may your next promotion not take 200 years to kick in.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.