Dear Brother: Letters of William Clark to Jonathan Clark.

Dear Brother: Letters of William Clark to Jonathan Clark. Edited and with an introduction by James J. Holmberg. Foreword by James P. Ronda. (New Haven, Conn., and London: Published by Yale University Press in association with the Filson Historical Society, c. 2002. Pp. xxx, 322. Paper, $18.00, ISBN 0-300-10106-6; cloth, $40.00, ISBN 0-300-09010-2.)

In 1988 an old trunk of family papers was discovered in the attic of a house belonging to the widow of Jonathan Clark's great-grandson. Among the papers were fifty-one previously unknown letters from the famous explorer William Clark to his brother Jonathan. Clark wrote the letters between 1792 and 1811; five of them were written during the Lewis and Clark expedition. James Holmberg, curator of special collections at the Filson Historical Society, has combined these with four Clark letters already in the Filson collection to produce a valuable edition of Clark's personal correspondence during a crucial period of his career.

Previously William Clark's voice was known through his contribution to the expedition journals, his official correspondence, and a scattering of letters to friends and relatives. This important set of letters represents his side of a continuous nineteen-year correspondence with his elder brother, whom Clark considered something of a second father. He often asked his brother's advice and therefore discussed his situation in detail and with a frankness rarely encountered in his other writing. The collection is valuable on several levels. It is rich with insights into Clark's personal story, character, career, and relations with family, slaves, and associates.

Because of Clark's important historical role in this period, the letters offer material of broader significance to American history as well, such as new information on the Lewis and Clark expedition, the Burr conspiracy, and the death of Meriwether Lewis. Just over half of the letters were written in St. Louis and include a fine portrait of daily life in the city. They are replete with such details as the influence and fees commanded by a popular midwife and gossip about the drinking problem of a prominent merchant's wife. The letters also inevitably contain much family information and sketch a portrait of the world of a prominent westering Virginia and Kentucky family at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Holmberg is a masterful editor. He has taken great care to render the letters as accurately as possible in print, precisely reproducing Clark's famously idiosyncratic spelling and grammar. His introduction explains the history of the letters and provides useful biographical sketches of William and Jonathan Clark and the relationship between them. He has divided the letters into chronological chapters representing subsequent phases of William Clark's life and career and provides helpful chapter introductions that set the context for each group of letters. In careful and extensive footnotes he identifies people, places, and other reference points as fully as possible, and he goes far to clear up the many obscurities that pepper Clark's prose. In short, Holmberg has done all that could be done to preserve the original character and content of the letters, while making the collection as useful as possible to the reader.

MARY ELLEN ROWE 

Central Missouri University