The second son of John and Ann Rogers Clark, George Rogers Clark (1752-1818) was born near Charlottesville, Virginia, and spent much of his youth on a plantation in Caroline County. After showing little aptitude for formal education, he was trained as a surveyor, and in 1772 and 1773 he made his first journeys west by the Ohio River to explore, hunt, and survey in adjacent areas of Ohio and Kentucky. As an officer in the Virginia militia he participated in Dunmore's War, then returned to Kentucky, where he soon achieved recognition as a leader in both civil and military affairs. Clark's masterful plan for the conquest of the Illinois country, his skilled execution of the campaigns against Kaskaskia and Cahokia in 1778 and Vincennes in 1779, and his later defensive expeditions against British and Indians, 1780-1782, gave military control of Kentucky and the Old Northwest to the Americans. Although never specifically acknowledged in diplomatic records, Clark's conquest and control of the region constituted a major factor in determining its cession to the United States by Great Britain in the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
Many of Clark's post-Revolutionary projects were less successful. His retaliatory expedition of 1786 against Indian raiders in the Ohio Valley failed due to insubordination of some of his Kentucky troops. Out of favor politically by 1788, during the next several years Clark engaged in a number of speculative colonial and military negotiations with the Spanish and French but none of these ventures ever materialized. For many years, however, he served as member, and often chairman, of the Virginia commissioners supervising the allotment of lands in the Illinois grant, a tract north of the Ohio set aside for division among Clark's soldiers in payment for their Revolutionary War services. In connection with the development of this grant, he founded the village of Clarksville, Indiana. Clark also wrote (1791) a significant memoir of his Revolutionary service. In declining health and never fully paid by Virginia for his own Revolutionary expenditures, Clark spent the last years of his life (1809-1818) at Locust Grove, the home of his sister Lucy (Mrs. William Croghan) near Louisville.
A full biography of Clark was uppermost in Lyman Draper's plans for nearly half a century. As he wrote in 1851, his proposed “Life and Times of George Rogers Clark” would be far-reaching in scope, “embracing the early explorations of the West—the final settlement and progress of Kentucky—Clark's conquest of the Illinois country, ... Clark's Indian campaigns into the Miami country, and also up the Wabash.” And with a view to future sales, Draper added that “hundreds of brief notices of other Pioneers who figured under him will make a large demand from their descendants and relatives alone.” Five years earlier, Clark's nephew, Dr. John Croghan of Locust Grove, had given Draper not only the bulk of Clark's papers but also manuscripts of Leonard Bliss Jr., and Charles Ripley, two of the other historians and writers who had intended to write Clark biographies. Draper envisioned that his Clark biography would be his most glorious literary achievement, and he was still collecting data for it in the days just preceding his death in 1891. Although he drafted a few chapters, he always allowed his characteristic procrastination and other projects to interrupt the writing and prevent its completion. In the variety of its resources and content, however, Series J reflects the breadth and depth of Draper's conception of his book.
