My Dearest Julia,
This land we traverse is beautiful and untouched. Paradise must have been like this before Adam and Eve ever tasted of the apple. Animals are plentiful, and the soil fertile. If we are being eaten alive by mosquitoes and gnats, it is only a proof of how all creatures thrive upon this wilderness!
Captain Lewis is growing worried that we’ve found no Natives since our encounter with four Kickapoos shortly after the onset of our journey.
I hesitate to tell this, for fear you might worry, yet I did promise you a faithful account of all that happened to me, and it is not fair to keep you in ignorance of something so significant.
Our Kickapoo visitors said there was some great magical force alive in the land, and it was gathering strength in an attempt to expel white colonists from this continent, although after the Sundering, where would we go? It seems this force, which thrives on the new magic present in America, must mean to kill us all. The native chief also told of tribes enslaved and even of the dead resurrected as servants to this dread power.
Neither Captain Lewis nor I are men to engage in magic, but we cannot turn our backs when such dire misdeeds are being committed. Even if we can’t combat this terrible force, we mean to investigate it, which is the charge of our expedition in the name of the wizard Franklin. What this means for our survival, I cannot say, but you know I will exert every endeavor to return to you alive and hale.
Yours faithfully,
William Clark
—Letter from William Clark to Julia Hancock,
June 28, 1804