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(More customer reviews)I found By Honor and Right to be a most rewarding read. For me, the story presented by John C. Jackson was intriguing at three levels. First of all, the book provides background on an under-appreciated data point that would later re-enforce one of a series of tenuous U.S. territorial claims in our northern borderlands. In an exercise of connecting-the-dots, this involved a region that later filled in the northwest corner of the U.S. puzzle. The outcome, however, was not inevitable. In 1806 U.S. Army Captain John McClallen stepped out into the geo-strategic void that was left in the wake of the return of the Lewis & Clark Expedition to St. Louis. Circling wide to find a back door to Santa Fe in order to open up trade, McClallen found himself being the sole representative of the U.S. government in the northwest interior during the 1807-1808 period.McClallen had previously intercepted Lewis and Clark as they were heading downriver. They shared with their fellow officer the concern that the Montreal based Northwesters were becoming well entrenched on the upper Missouri. Furthermore, there was the imminent threat that this Canadian company represented beyond the continental divide. The following year, as the only U.S. authority present in the region, McClallen felt compelled to challenge David Thompson and his Canadians as they fanned out into the upper Columbia basin, to map and trap along the Kootenai, Pend Oreille, and Clark Fork tributaries. McClallen also had the good fortune to follow a band of Flatheads over the continental divide along a relatively easy crossing, instead of the almost fatal route that Lewis and Clark had taken with the Shoshone. Of comparative interest as well, much like Captain Bonneville a quarter of a century later, McClallen was on a leave of absence from the U.S. Army to conduct a private venture with strategic national implications. Coordinated through his commanding officer, General Wilkinson, this venture was to run in parallel with that of a better known official one under Lt. Zebulon Pike.
Secondly, amplifying on several of the points touched on above, at another level Jackson's book does a marvelous job of providing the reader with a sense of the ambiguity surrounding the conflicted national loyalties and interests rampant on the American frontier at this time. This is combined with what today would pass for incredible conflicts of interest, due to an overlapping of the public and private spheres. Thereby one acquires a new appreciation for the context in which the intrigues of Vice President Aaron Burr and General James Wilkinson occurred. Likewise, for Jackson's treatment of the ever shifting Indian alliances, and his highlighting of the magnitude of the role played by the French-Canadians of Missouri in the opening of the American West.
Then finally, among this latter group, there is one of the cast of characters that had accompanied Lewis & Clark only as far as the Mandan villages. As the Expedition was returning the following year, this individual opted to join up with Captain McClallen's venture to go back in. Like virtually all of McClallen's men in this American expedition, he spoke French, not English or Spanish. And of course he had never been to France. He was actually born in Quebec, Canada, his name being Francois Rivet. When Francois passed away 46 years later in 1852 in Oregon's French Prairie settlement in the Willamette Valley, he and his Indian wife Therese Tete Platte (Flathead) left behind a legacy of dozens of mixed-blood French and Salish speaking metis children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren. In the course of the 1850s, as a new order established itself in the low country, most of the Rivet descendants gradually headed back upriver to find refuge among their mother's people in the Flathead country of what is now western Montana. As one among a hundred or so similar metis settler families in the region south of the 49th parallel, the thousands of descendants of the Rivet clan alone constitute one of the largest and oldest families currently inhabiting the repopulated Pacific Northwest.
In conclusion, to any prospective reader of By Honor and Right, I would offer one warning. If you prefer to read conventional versions of history that `keep it real simple,' and don't challenge us a bit, then I would recommend against tackling this book.
Robert Foxcurran
Pacific Northwest Historians Guild President
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