The Story Behind America’s First War on ‘Terror’

A cautionary tale from 1814

Landon Jones
10:30 AM

This summer marks 202 years since a force of American soldiers and volunteers embarked on the nation’s first war on terror. It did not turn out well. Today it reads like a cautionary tale.

On May 1, 1814, an ad hoc flotilla of five armed keelboats and 200 soldiers headed up the Mississippi River from St. Louis. Their “terrorist” targets—the word was already in use then—were Native Americans. The man leading this audacious American enterprise to crush them was none other than William Clark, the recent hero and co-leader of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The War of 1812, then raging along the Eastern seaboard, was about to open a Western frontier.
Clark, who had been appointed governor of the Louisiana Territory, had been outraged by a series of deadly attacks against American settlers. In his view, they were calculated and coordinated attacks, conducted with the support of a foreign power—British Canada. The mastermind was thought to be the Hudson Bay Company fur trader Robert Dickson, whom Clark blamed for inciting the northern Indian tribes along the American frontier.

Atrocity stories fanned the flames of revenge. In April, two men were shot and mutilated at Boonslick, Mo., and a Captain Cooper was killed at his hearth by an Indian who poked a hole through a log wall and fired a shot into the house. “Those savage bands between Lake Michigan & the Mississippi, we must Consider as our Enemies,” Clark concluded.

But what Clark and his countrymen rarely mentioned was that settlers usually came under attack only after moving into Indian lands they did not own. Only a decade earlier, William Henry Harrison had signed a treaty that had appropriated millions of acres of Sauk land. When 400 American families settled north of the Missouri on land claimed by the Sauks and Iowas, Clark found an imaginative solution. He proposed not removing the trespassers but rather redrawing the proposed boundaries of St. Charles County “to include this rich and flourishing settlement, and some of the best lands in the Territory.”

http://time.com/4401432/first-war-on-terror/