We shrank from these scenes of infamy with the speechless, stupefied disgust of soldiers too long in the field who had witnessed every conceivable insult of the flesh, and who had become finally interested only in their own preservation.
We traveled at night, following the stars, into cooler, more rugged country; for it was getting to be late in the month of October—the precise date we had left far behind us, along with all the other accoutrements of civilized men. Sans rifles, pistols, knives, blankets, shoes, that is to say, the rudiments of survival, we somehow managed to survive.
Uncle rebounded amazingly from his bashing and scalping—though the scar was quite awful—and brought to bear upon our situation all the hard-won skill of a lifetime spent rambling the wilds. Snares he built of vine and springy wood to capture hares and ’coons. Not a root, nor stem, nor shoot, nor fruit that could furnish nourishment escaped his hungry eye. And from an hundred signs, as the stars or mossy trunks of trees, to the nuance of a winging insect’s flight, or the direction of the clouds, he unerringly charted our homeward course true. We lived, in short, like migrating animals, wending northward toward home. And it was a brilliant autumn morning when I chanced to see, at last, the object of our quest, or thought I did.
Dawn had filled the yellowing woods with somber light as we searched for a secure place of shelter after our night’s long and arduous journey. It was a limestone ledge some ten feet up a south-facing cliff. It was our practice to sleep in the sun whenever possible, for our clothing amounted to mere rags. We had just breakfasted on a few handfuls of hickory nuts. I remember musing that it might be my birthday—which is October the 19th—meaning that I had attained to the age of twenty and thus true numerical manhood. The idea pleased me so much that I stayed awake to dote upon it whilst Uncle lay his head upon his limestone pillow. It was then that my eye caught the blur of movement amid the sunny dappling of the forest below. Suddenly, and with surprising delicacy of locomotion for a creature its size, there stepped into view what I took at first to be a bear of an unusually striking russet color, being quite as handsomely reddish as Papa’s long-gone hunting setter, Dorcas.
My reaction—strange!—was that the beast reminded me of something very familiar. But it was a lapse of several moments more ’til I realized that the thing familiar was none other than my repeated sketches of megatherium—indeed by now a portrait graven on my brain. And it was upon this instant of recognition that the huge animal strode out from behind a clump of magnolia (M. acuminata) and stood revealed in all its improbable glory.
I would estimate my distance from the beast as less than an hundred feet. By later ascertaining the height of trees in the neighborhood through which it passed, I would guess its size as eight feet at the shoulder and about fifteen in length from rump to snout. Its gait was bearlike, yet more rolling, due, I think, to the cumbrous forefeet with their claws like scimitars, which the beast held inward. Thus, its forefeet met the ground only on their outer soles, so that it swayed like a clubfooted man. Its rusty fur was very long and shaggy, hanging almost to the ground like a robe. Most unbearlike of all was the creature’s muzzle: its nose and lips curled down to form a quivering, hairless, mottled, pink and gray prehensile snout.
This entire observation I made in a span of time not exceeding five seconds. It paused before a Judas tree (Cercis canadensis), lifted its massive forebody, reached up with scimitar claws, and prepared to browse. I turned and gently shook Uncle’s leg. He woke with a start, sending a little shower of loose rock off our ledge. By the time Uncle lifted his head, the beast had lumbered away.
“Did you see it?”
“Did I see what?”
My heart sank. I clambered down from our ledge and crept quickly to the place where it had appeared. The springy forest floor had not taken a single footprint, for it was the driest season, but one could see where the great claws had left a peculiar raking sort of trail across the dead leaves. I stole deeper into the glade, coming shortly upon a heap of dung twice, no, four times the size of the average cowflop. It was still steaming.
“Uncle!” I called out heedlessly, breaking one of our cardinal rules. Half a minute later, he arrived on the spot.
“Well…?” he asked.
“Look!” I pointed to the magnificent specimen.
He glanced down.
“’Tis a pile of shit, Sammy.”
“’Tis indeed, sir. Do you know what made it?”
“An elk?”
“Not at all.”
“A woods bison?”
“Megatherium. A giant russet sloth.”
“Really?”
“I saw it myself. Just moments ago. With my own eyes.”
Uncle looked at me askance, then back down at the huge droppings, then off into the dappled woods, and finally back at me.
“Art terribly fatigued, nephew? Come, rest, my boy—”
“I saw it, I tell you. Just like the sketch it was! As big as a coach! With a long, flesh snout—where are you going?”
“Back to sleep.”
“But it was he. Quick, help me catch it!”
But Uncle was already trudging back to our ledge.
“I implore you, sir!”
He turned, placed his forefinger across his lips, and said, “Ssshhh.”
I trotted to him. “’Tis the reason we are here, and you propose to let him get away?”
“Yes,” he stated unequivocally.
“But—”
“Tell me, nephew, did he look content?”
“Content…?”
“Yes. Did he seem happy about his business?”
“As any brute, I suppose.”
“Then ’tis sufficient. Let him ramble on where he will. Leave him in his simple brute’s contentment.
Thus transpired our encounter with the sole object of our mission. I never did determine whether Uncle believed that I had seen the beast or imagined it in some rapture of exhaustion, cold, or starvation. In truth, I was never quite sure myself. What remained was simply that heap of dung, as impressive and formidable a heap as anyone might hope to find. I thought for a while about somehow preserving it, of wrapping up the heap in a bag of skins and bringing it back for the world to marvel at. But the idea seemed, at least, impractical, and, at worst, odious. So, I left it where it lay and returned to join Uncle in a furtive slumber.
Another week we trudged and trekked without notable event, passing through moonstruck bottoms, gloomy hills, misty vales, dangerous defiles, suspicious meadows, and always, as ever, wilderness, daunting, terrible, clothed with infinite dark woods resounding with the hollow air of perpetual sadness.
One dawning day, our breath white huffs in the chill air, we were undertaking to cross a branch of the Oconee when, to our dismay, appeared on the far side a caravan of mounted Indians. Yet they were Indians of a very handsome and noble mien, dressed in flowing shirts of woven cloth, their heads wrapped in colorful cloth turbans, their earlobes hung with hoops of silver, faces free of devilish paint, and good rifles lodged in the crooks of their arms. They looked, in short, more like a band of Thessalonian freedom fighters than a tribe of American aborigines—whilst Uncle and I, in our stinking rags, with bearded, filthy faces, and sharpened sticks our only weapons, must have appeared to them as backward as a pair of apes.
The fearless chieftain of this company seemed to grasp at once our plight; while we likewise discerned at once his beneficent character. He dismounted from his horse, a tall, handsome, clean-featured man of about forty years, and bid us step out of the freezing brook. We did. He clapped his fist upon his breast, repeating the word “Wuh-kul-tee-pah,” which we understood to be his name. Uncle, employing some sort of Indian lingua franca, successfully conveyed our identities and our predicament. These Cherokees were well acquainted with white society, and on fair terms with the traders who plied the paths of their mountain stronghold. Without further ado, we were hoisted aboard their healthy chestnut mounts and conducted after an hour’s eas
y march to their town, Ekowee.
It comprised an hundred-odd dwellings, well-made log houses, with chinks plastered inside and out with clay, and round roofs of chestnut bark. And here were Uncle and I fed, bathed, rested, and restored to vigor by these cheerful, well-intentioned people in our autumn of travail.
It was our honor to become acquainted with Wuh-kul-tee-pah, or the Scholar, who, influenced by his contact with us whites, and convinced of the salutary effects of education, endeavored to devise an alphabet in his people’s language. He had a son two years my junior, a most melancholy youth, who rebelled from his father’s high-minded philosophy and wandered the craggy hilltops composing poems about the slaughter of the whites. Though he was a far more unhappy soul than the Scholar, I admired this sullen prince’s intelligence and realism, and the Blackbird, as he was called, turned out to be as resolute a warmaker in his mature years as his father had been a virtuous pedagogue in his.
We sojourned among these laudable people only so long as necessary to recoup our strength, for we were anxious to continue on our journey home. According to the Scholar, the Savannah River lay ninety miles due east, and there upon it, the city of Augusta, where he had visited thrice, a place of limitless marvels, to hear him speak of it; and from Augusta by this same Savannah River, a route direct to the coastal city of that river’s name, at whose spacious harbor were ships as big as his town’s meeting house, a’bristling with masts and sails like clouds; ships that plied the Great Salt Sea to the yet more wondrous cities of the whites (said he), whence all the boons of mankind came.
Thus, on a bright November morning Uncle and I bid farewell to the upright citizens of Ekowee, dressed in fine cloth Cherokee tunics and trousers, goodly moccasins, our bellies filled and brains revived to happy thoughts of home.
A guide was furnished us, youngest brother of the Scholar, who conducted us on a two-days’ march out of the Cherokee hills down to the piedmont, where the virgin forests were falling to the settler’s axe and the great plantations of the cotton empire were being carved out of a wilderness.
The whitewashed plantation house glowed in the autumn sunshine like a lantern against the darker fields. It stood about a mile in the distance from the hillside where we emerged from the forest. White smoke issued from a log outbuilding, and the air carried the sweet-acrid scent of hickory. My heart filled with yearning for the familiar and beloved things of home. Uncle too gazed upon the dwelling of this Georgia planter like one who has returned to earth after a lengthy exile upon a strange planet.
“What a lovely sight!” he declared with a catch in his voice, and we started down to the fields. The year’s crop had been picked, and only rows of corn stubble remained.
“What is the first thing you shall want to do when you reach Owl’s Crossing?” I asked.
“I should like to inspect my garden.”
“But it will be so late in the year.”
“Seed time, my boy, seed time.”
“O, yes, of course.”
“And thee, Sammy?”
“I want to go to a ball and see the beautiful girls of New York City all in a row.”
“Pish—”
“And I want to read a newspaper—an hundred newspapers! No, not read, devour them! And I want to sit before a warm fire with a bowl of chocolate filberts this high! And O, Uncle, I want Christmas, the family round the parlor, sister Caroline at the spinet, and the hearth blazing, and roasted apples, and snow! Beautiful, clean, white, fluffy snow—!” I remembered poor little Tansy and my heart shrank. “Yes, I shall like Christmas,” I concluded somberly. “Do you think we might get home in time?”
“With a fair wind and the right ship and a good captain and a little luck,” Uncle said and patted my shoulder, sensing my emotion.
In the distance arose the squeals of pigs. A strong and decidedly foul odor mingled with the scent of hickory smoke.
“’Tis hog-slaughtering time,” Uncle declared. “They’re blanching off the bristles. O, I shall like a chop or two!” he glanced merrily my way and smacked his lips. “And look! What ho! They come to greet us!”
Coming toward us at several hundred yards were two white men accompanied by a quartet of Negroes. We had just raised our hands to signal halloo when shots rang out. Uncle groaned and clutched me before slumping to the ground. I gazed down at him in horror. Blood spilled over the folds of his Cherokee tunic.
“Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” I screamed and began racing toward them. They didn’t seem to understand. Another shot resounded. The ball whistled past my ear. “What are you? Madmen? Idiots? Hold your fire, damn you!”
The two white men traded a worried glance.
“Villains!” I cried. “Murderers!”
The pair and their Negroes began a brisk trot toward us. I returned to Uncle. He lay supine amid the stubble, his face ashen, blood everywhere. I fell to my knees and cradled his head in my lap.
“I am slain, Sammy.”
“Please be still,” I said, rocking him back and forth, the tears streaming down my face.
“Owl’s Crossing. The garden. My darlings. Thee must look after—”
“I will. Depend upon it.”
“I shall miss them so—”
“Dear Uncle, I beg you, don’t die.”
The men and their slaves now arrived upon the scene and formed a circle around us.
“We thought that you was Indians,” one of the whites said, a porridge-faced youth some years my junior.
“Better you had never thought at all, nor drawn a breath,” I reviled him. “Look upon your work, you caitiff!”
“Sammy….” Uncle remonstrated me with a gasp and weakly wagged his finger in my face.
“Oh look what they have done to you!” I blubbered and drew him to my breast.
“I am not afraid. But the light, nephew, it is dazzling! O, O, O, Jehovah, I come….”
Uncle swooned in my arms.
The slaves took off their hats.
It was never established if the shot that brought down Uncle was fired by Orrin or Reuben Grinder, sons of Aaron Grinder, patriarch of Longwood Plantation. It is probably true, however, that they innocently mistook us for a pair of rogue Indians who had been stealing livestock and terrorizing the neighborhood for some months previous, for we were undeniably dressed in the Cherokee style when the assault took place.
Happily, Uncle was not slain after all. The ball passed cleanly through the superior lobe of his right lung and out of his back below the scapula, causing much less damage to the staunch gentleman than the flood of gore initially suggested. We were, however, constrained to make our Christmas among the planters of Glascock County, Georgia, and did not arrive in Philadelphia aboard the bark Adamantine until the following Easter. But Uncle lived another twenty-three years after taking his wound, and the famous portrait of him by Rembrandt Peale was painted in his eighty-fifth year, at Owl’s Crossing, beneath the white oak tree (Quercus alba) that grew beside the brook in the garden that he loved so well.
The fate of other personages who played a part in this account is no doubt of interest to the reader.
Louis Bourbon, as he came to call himself, parlayed a $50 loan from his father-in-law into the largest cotton brokerage in New Orleans. A lover of knowledge, he eventually mastered seventeen languages—including Choctaw, Urdu, and Aramaic—and helped found Tulane University in his adopted city. All his years, it was whispered up and down the Vieux Carré that he was Louis XVII, the rightful king of France, an insinuation he always denied with a laugh, as though the idea amused him.
Bessie Bilbo Bourbon gave birth to fifteen children and became doyenne of the city’s commercial aristocracy. Her charity work among the poor prostitutes of Toulouse Street is legendary and worthy of a book in itself.
Melancton Bilbo, after being briefly jailed on suspicion of fraud, made a small fortune from the sale of his Universal Physic and a larger fortune in politics. In 1816 he was elected Lieutenant Governor of the state o
f Louisiana; impeached, 1817; returned to office by the voters, 1820. In his later years he was proprietor of a theater on Dauphine Street, where he often appeared in the role of King Lear.
Neddy, surname unknown, left his comfortable surroundings in New Orleans in the spring of 1807 and vanished into the West.
Judge Felix Ravenel was slain by robbers in Carroll County, Kentucky, on his return to Babylon in 1803.
William Clark, along with his co-commander, Meriwether Lewis, successfully explored the western territories and reached the Pacific Ocean in 1805. In later years he was appointed Governor of the Missouri Territory, winning further renown as a diplomat among the Indians.
Meriwether Lewis died on the Natchez Trace in 1809 at the age of thirty-five of gunshot and knife wounds. It is not known whether he was a victim of suicide or murder. But he was considered deranged at the time of his death by many who knew him, including Thomas Jefferson.
The Wejun tribesmen as a group were never seen again, but reports of blond-haired savages speaking a quaint and queer variant of the English language persisted well into the nineteenth century around the region of Mobile Bay.
An Embarrassment of Riches Page 34