Abraham FIELD

                   Source: Genealogies of Kentucky Families from Filson Club Historical Quarterly,
Genealogical Publishing Co. 1981 p. 482-509
Joseph and Reubin Field, sons of Abraham Field left Pond Creek somewhere in the Knobs region, about 8 miles south of Louisville, Kentucky to join the Lewis and Clark expedition in the fall of 1803 and to this same area they returned in 1806.  Abraham lived here, court records indicate, until 1814.  It must be judged the most important site relating to Abraham, Joseph and Reubin Field.  It is known that Abraham Field had 3 children by 1775, but we do not know the size of his family when he came to Kentucky.
It is interesting to note that John Clark had brought his family, including 14 year old William, to Louisville from Virginia in the same year 1784, only a few months before Abraham Field arrived there.  His son, George Rogers Clark, had been there, however since the founding of the settlement at the Falls of the Ohio.
The story of Joseph Field begins after he returned to Kentucky from his great expedition of exploration, includes a record indicating that Joseph Field's signature was used as a witness to John Myrtle's Will on 27 July 1801, before the exploration.  When the will was probated on 13 December 1813, Alexander Smoot and Reubin Field had to prove Joseph's signature, Joseph being dead at that time.
Joseph Field's life after the return of the expedition belongs to the short and simple annals of the poor---and the forgotten.  In addition to the nearly nothing that is known about him after his discharge from the expedition, there is the mystery that hangs over the manner of his death.  He had less than a year to live after he and his brother Reubin were discharged along with the rest of the men at St. Louis on 10 October 1806.
It is not known when Joseph and Reubin returned to the Falls of Ohio and their fathers home.  Probably it was in September or October of 1806.   Lewis and Clark, and a party traveling with them, arrived at Louisville on 5 November 1806, but there is no mention of the Field brothers being present.  The people of Louisville gave a ball in honor of the Lewis and Clark party at the time.  The Field brothers may have been present of that occasion, but there is no known reference to it.  It is hard to believe that these two outstanding members of the expedition were so little honored and remembered  in their home country that they literally disappeared from it history.  Yet it is so.
At some date after 3 March 1807, but not long thereafter, Joseph was one of 8 signators, including his brother Reubin, who petitioned the Congress to allow them to locate within the territories of either Louisiana or Indiana the 320 acres of land Congress had awarded each enlisted member  of the expedition.  The petition stated that many of them had settled in those areas and that it would be a great injustice to compel them to journey to distant land offices to claim land far from their intended residences.   Under the terms of the Congressional award the land was to be selected from surveyed public land west of the Mississippi River.  This petition was not granted.  Joseph Field's land warrant for 320 acres was eventually accepted in payment for the land by the receiver of Public Monies at Franklin, Missouri on 7 March 1822. (Franklin is the county just west of St. Louis and bordering the Missouri River)  He either sold the land warrant before his death or, more likely, it passed to Reubin after Joseph's death and was sold by him along with his own.
In recent years an interesting document came to light that casts a mystery over the manner of Joseph Field's death.  In the 1950's it became known that a collector of western Americana, had a William Clark cash book and Journal covering the years 1825-1828.  On the cover was a list of names of many members of the expedition in Clark's handwriting, made presumably between 1825 and 1828.  In this list he recorded the status and location of the persons as he knew them or thought them to be at the time.  Among those listed was Joseph Field.  The entry on Joseph reads, J. Fields do, which would mean that Joseph Field had been killed, and had not died a natural death.
                  

                   John left 7 children
                  

                   Cain left 10 children
                  

                   Source: Genealogies of Kentucky Families from Filson Club Historical Quarterly,
Genealogical Publishing Co. 1981 p. 482-509
Reubin Field does not have an better record after his return than did Joseph Field.  Reubin lived longer than Joseph, but in equal obscurity. For a year or two following the return of the expedition, it seemed that he might have a chance to return to the army and a military career.  In a letter of 26 November 1807 to Secretary of War Henry Dearborn, William Clark recommended Reubin for a lieutenancy if the army should be 'augmented  Nothing came of this recommendation.
In 1808 Reubin Field married Mary Myrtle.  The marriage took place in Indiana Territory, and was performed by a man named Smith.  Marry apparently was the daughter of John and Phebe Myrtle, the former being the man whose will Joseph Field had signed as a witness in 1801.  At the time he prepared his own will, Reubin field thought the marriage performed in 1808 might not have been legal.  In his Will he left all his estate to his wife, but added language saying that if the marriage, performed by a man named Smith who they thought was a minister of the Gospel but may not have been, as they learned later, then he bequeathed to her as Mary Myrtle the estate forever.
Abraham Field's daughter Cynthia, married William Lewis on 19 March 1807.  William Lewis was to play a large part in Abraham and Betty Field's lives from September 1814 on, because it was to his farm that they moved and where the lived until Abraham's death in 1822, July or August.
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Copied from Encarta 98 Encyclopedia reference William and Clark Expedition
Clark, William (1770-1838), American explorer, Native American agent, and frontier politician, who served as co-leader, with Meriwether Lewis, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-1806), the first overland exploration of the American West and Pacific Northwest. Clark was born in Caroline County, Virginia. In 1784 the Clark family moved to the Kentucky frontier, establishing a plantation called Mulberry Hill near present-day Louisville.
Clark followed the powerful examples of his brothers Jonathan and George Rogers Clark, both of whom made military life the path to success. In 1789 William joined a militia company and soon became an infantry officer in the army of General Anthony Wayne. During service in the Indian wars in the Ohio Valley, Clark gained a reputation for leadership and courage. He met Meriwether Lewis at this time when Lewis served briefly in Clark's rifle company. Under General Wayne, Clark took part in the Battle of Fallen Timbers (near what is now Toledo, Ohio) in August 1794, which destroyed the power of the Native Americans in Ohio. Clark also grew to be an experienced frontier diplomat, earning Wayne's praise for a dangerous scouting mission in 1796. When debts incurred by George threatened Clark family lands in Kentucky and Indiana, William resigned his commission and spent the next eight years defending family interests.
In June 1803 Lewis asked Clark to join him as co-leader on a government-sponsored expedition through the Louisiana Territory to the Pacific Ocean. Clark was promised a captain's commission to match Lewis's rank, but bureaucratic confusion made him a lieutenant. Despite this, both Lewis and U.S. President Thomas Jefferson, who commissioned the expedition, always considered Clark an equal partner in command.
As commanding officers on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Lewis and Clark informally divided leadership responsibilities. Clark was the expedition's map maker. Years of frontier experience had taught him to understand and record intricate terrain-land, rivers, and mountains. Clark's army experience also prepared him to be the expedition's most able negotiator and diplomat, a role he played in many meetings with Native Americans.
The expedition to the Pacific made Clark both famous and influential. For the rest of his life he played a key role as a federal Native American agent and territorial politician. In 1807 Clark was appointed agent for the tribes west of the Mississippi River. During the War of 1812 (1812-1815) Clark worked to organize western defenses against British and Native American attacks. At the end of the war Clark and other federal officials negotiated a series of Native American treaties that reestablished American power in the West. As a Native American agent and governor of the Missouri Territory (1813-1821), Clark earned the respect of many native people who knew him as the red-head chief.
After Lewis's death in 1809, Clark assumed responsibility for completing the report of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Clark employed American financier and diplomat Nicholas Biddle to prepare the two-volume collection, finally published in 1814. The large map of the West that Clark drafted for the report is a landmark in the geographic understanding of the American West.
When Missouri became a state in 1821, Clark was defeated in his bid to become governor. Although his power in Native American affairs was much diminished, Clark continued to act on behalf of the federal government. At the time of his death, Clark had a national reputation as an authority on the West.
Contributed By:
James P. Ronda