by Peter Stark
Galen pointed out to me the stones of Mom Howard’s chimney barely poking above the backed-up waters of the Penobscot River, where, decades ago, it had been dammed into a small reservoir for power and paper mills. We then laid out a map of Mount Katahdin and Baxter State Park on the hood of his pickup. With his finger he traced the Thoreau party’s route up the Penobscot West Branch and Thoreau’s ascent of Katahdin. I said goodbye to Galen and drove an hour to the park that hot, sunny, Sunday afternoon. Starting in mid-afternoon, I hiked hard and fast, jogging its gentler lower reaches, on Thoreau’s route up the mountain, following what today is called the Abol Trail. I panted and sweated as the mountainside tilted ever steeper, scrambling over the massive boulders that looked like they had rained from the sky, from some “unseen quarry.” As I climbed higher, the sun dropped lower to the hazy, blue-green horizon. About two thirds of the way up Katahdin, I stopped—tired, out of water, not wishing to be caught in darkness near the top. Thoreau, too, had turned back, but in the blowing clouds, the cold wind, among the dark crags.
Here occurred some of his most profound realizations about Nature, that not all Nature offered humans her warm embrace, that places existed on this earth where humans didn’t belong. High on the barren, boulder-strewn face of Katahdin, this was one such place.
I sat on a big, rounded, whitish boulder catching my breath, draining the last drops of water from my plastic bottle, and gazing off over the great northern forest extending toward the horizon in all directions. To the west, toward the lowering sun, it glinted silver with sunlight reflecting on jeweled lakes and sinewy rivers—a view that hadn’t changed all that much since Thoreau climbed over this same boulder slide 150 years ago. I waited for my own profound realization about Nature. Nothing happened. Sweat dripped off my chin and splashed in rough, grit-flecked droplets on the broad face of the boulder, the only evidence of human life in view. I waited. Still no epiphany. The boulder felt warm from the day’s sun, its low, golden ball casting its rich, summer-evening light—an almost buttery warmth—on my cheeks. Rather than overcome with thoughts about the inhospitality of Nature in this spot, as Thoreau had been in the cold and clouds, I wanted to lie down and take a nap.
After twenty minutes or so, I started down Mount Katahdin, lowering myself through the steep clog of boulders. I realized that my most profound moments in the wilds of northern Maine had occurred not on the side of Katahdin but in the rapids of the St. John. There all my senses had been utterly attuned to nature in its minute and vivid detail—the curl of a wave, the undulating rush of the current, the boiling reflection of light, the swoop of a bird, the ripple of muscle on a child’s glistening arm. These were moments when I was most vulnerable to the unpredictability of nature, just as Thoreau’s greatest moments of vulnerability to nature’s unpredictability occurred not at Walden Pond or in the gentle woods and fields of his Concord, but alone in the cold wind and blowing clouds on rocky Katahdin, where he had some of his greatest insights. Likewise, the two young Charleses, Biencourt and La Tour. In the wilds of Acadia, traveling through the endless forest, living like the Micmac, they discovered for themselves this profound sense of Nature’s unpredictability. To live this way, they had to be utterly attuned to the natural world, far from the musty, worn, manorial life that awaited them should they return to Old France.
A blank spot was not simply an unpopulated area on the map, as I’d started out believing, nor was it only a reflection of our own ignorance, as I’d later come to see it. Rather, what is compelling about blank spots—these wild places—is their unpredictability, and the uncertainty that it engenders, so unlike the safe, well-trodden paths most of us travel in our daily lives. The unpredictability provokes our awareness of the natural world, otherwise we won’t survive. Our awareness, if we’re open to it, pushes us toward insights that don’t occur in our routine lives.
FROM KATAHDIN, I drove the next day northeastward to the middle reaches of the St. John Valley along the Maine–New Brunswick border, where small farming towns appear regularly on its broad banks. I crossed the border into Canada and stopped for a look at the thundering, misty Grand Falls of the St. John. The story that I had heard, from a Maine lobsterman down on the coast who had married a woman of Acadian descent, was that when the British finally expelled the Acadians a small group fled up the St. John River past the Grand Falls. They knew that British warships could never chase them above its drop.
Back on the Maine side, I drove a two-lane highway above the Grand Falls and through more small towns along the St. John for another forty miles or so, each with a large church out of proportion to the size of the town, like a cathedral in a French village. We hadn’t canoed this stretch of the St. John, as we’d taken out at Allagash, another sixty or seventy miles upriver. Driving along, I spotted a massive white cross, known as the Cross of St. David, planted in a pasture beside the pastoral riverbanks. I drove down a lane to reach it. Beneath it lay a row of stone markers commemorating families that had staged reunions here—Thibodeau, Ouellette, Chasse, and on and on.
The original wooden cross had been erected on this spot by Joseph Daigle in June 1785 after a party of Acadians, fleeing the British, landed here.
After Charles de La Tour’s death in 1663, Acadia went on bouncing back and forth between the two empires, French and British, for the next forty years, until it was captured for good by the British in 1710. The Acadian population had soared,59 meanwhile, as each family had six to eight children, and more immigrants arrived from France. The old Poutrincourt and La Tour dream of an Acadian fur empire headed by an aristocratic leader was supplanted by small but very fertile farms the Acadians established in the tidal marshlands of the Acadian Peninsula that could support the large families, along with hunting and fishing.
Through the first half of the 1700s, the British merely tolerated the Acadian presence in the peninsula they called Nova Scotia, forcing the Acadians to take loyalty oaths to the British. They viewed the Acadian farmers as strategically necessary to raise food to supply the British forts, while disparaging the Acadian way of life.
“They Lavish, Eat, Drink, and Play60 all away as long as the Goods hold out,” wrote one colonial official, “and when these are gone, they e’en sell their Embroidery, their Lace, and their Clothes.” Instead of settling down on the farm, complained another, the young men head off to unsettled regions along the coast where they “do nothing but hunt or negotiate with the natives.” Another tried in vain to enforce a decree forbidding “licentiousness [with native women] and ranging in the woods.” The British even complained that the Acadians were too lazy to go out and clear some real forest for farms, the way they did it down in New England, but relied instead on the diking and draining of the tidal marshes for their fields.
L’Ordre de Bon Temps—“The Order of Good Times”—had set the tone in Acadia from the start, as did their intermingling with the Micmac who lived in the forest, hunting, making war, living intensely in the moment. The party in Acadia ended, however, at 3:00 p.m. on the fifth of September in 1755. In the epic ongoing struggle between Britain and France for the North American continent, certain British generals, as tensions built and suspicions flared, unfairly decided that the Acadians could no longer be trusted to remain neutral. On that September day Colonel Winslow of the British summoned the Acadian men and boys of Grand Pré to meet at the church, and once inside had his soldiers bar the doors while an interpreter read aloud the eviction notice to the shock of those trapped within.
Six days later, on September 11, 1755,61 with bayonets fixed the British troops marched the Acadian men and boys out of the church, down the cart path a mile and a half to the harbor. Women and children lined the road, wailing and praying, singing religious dirges, never expecting to see their fathers and husbands, brothers and sons again. Soon the women and children were rounded up, too, and packed onto other cargo ships—two people to a cell four feet by four feet by six feet. Smoke rose from the hundreds of squared-log Acadian home
steads set afire by British troops—to destroy the incentive to return. By the end of October twenty-four ships had sailed away, dropping the fragmented Acadian families in ports up and down the East Coast—Massachusetts, New York, Virginia and the Carolinas, Bermuda.
Some six thousand Acadians were deported in all, and, by some accounts, half died of disease and hunger. Some were made into indentured servants to the British colonists. Some returned to France. Others ended up in the French West Indies. One group eventually moved to New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta country—French territory, with a lot of wilds still left in it. Those Acadians in Louisiana invited their scattered relatives to join them. Thousands finally showed up. The name “Acadians” in Louisiana became “Cadians” became “Cajuns.” In the Mississippi River bayous, they carried on their traditions of hunting and fishing and “ranging in the woods” and letting the Good Times roll.
Some—no one knows just how many—escaped Le Grand Dérangement62 (“The Great Disturbance”) and hid in the woods of Acadia or fled to nearby Quebec. Over the years, some trickled back. They settled in unclaimed pockets on the fertile lands of Acadia.
Thirty years after that first expulsion in 1755, a small party of Acadian families who had been living quietly in the lower St. John River Valley, once again, during a period of tense relations between empires, came under pressure by the British to leave. In 1785, they boarded small boats and headed up the St. John, past the Grand Falls. After ten days of traveling they pulled ashore at a broadening of the valley and a fertile flat that they named St. David, and where Joseph Daigle built a wooden cross that first evening. In some ways, it is an Acadian version of Plymouth Rock. Their settlement on the banks of the St. John—deep in what was then a wilderness—probably escaped detection by the fledgling United States63 for a number of years and was largely ignored by the British. The Acadians had found a perfect hiding spot.
This was the spot where I now stood. There was no one around. Green wooded hills and meadows rolled up and down the river valley. I could see prosperous farms in the distance. A warm summer breeze blew and the sun sparkled on the riffled water of the St. John. I would have chosen this spot, too.
I got back in the car and drove down the highway to the little town of Van Buren, Maine. It was still before noon, but I was hungry, and so I walked into Josie’s Diner. A roundish, friendly man with dark hair and a mustache, a gravelly voice and an apron, took my order. As I sat at the lunch counter, I realized he was speaking in a language unintelligible to me, and with a kind of guttural intonation, with the man sitting two stools down.
“Is that French?” I asked as he came by again, wiping the counter.
“That’s right,” he replied. “I speak French to the people who want to speak French and English to the people who want to speak English. French or English, as long as everybody is happy, I don’t care, right?”
It was the perfect Acadian response. He laughed, deeply and easily. We talked. His name was Gil Thibodeau—an old Acadian name, like the names of most people in Van Buren, Maine. Two hundred and fifty years ago, his family had been evicted from Acadia during Le Grand Dérangement. Some had ended up in Louisiana—today the town of Thibodeaux in bayou country west of New Orleans bears the family name. Another ancestor, Baptiste Thibodeau, had arrived here on the banks of the St. John with Joseph Daigle, who erected the Cross of St. David in the summer of 1785.
Sitting there at Josie’s Diner with my cheeseburger and cup of tomato soup, I had arrived where the Acadians disappeared.
PART II
THE WILD
LANDS OF
WESTERN
PENNSYLVANIA
Map of Pennsylvania and surrounding region, with Braddock’s Road (1755) to Fort Duquesne (later Pittsburgh) in what was then the Ohio Valley wilderness.
Detail map of Pennsylvania, showing Indian paths of mid-1700s, Le Roy homestead, and present-day Renovo (center) with Fish Dam Run and Burns Run nearby. Inset shows lights of region at night, with New York, Philadelphia, and Washington at right.
Early on October 16, 1755,1 Jacob Le Roy’s hired man had gone out to the pastures and woods of the family’s farmstead in the Buffalo Valley on the Pennsylvania frontier to herd the cows back for milking. Le Roy’s wife was away on some morning errand. It was right after autumn harvest and there was much work to be done. But Le Roy himself was home that morning. So were the children, Marie and John, and a girl visitor from a neighbor’s homestead, as a band of eight Allegheny and Delaware Indians moved silently down the ancient trail that followed nearby Penn’s Creek—Karondinhah, as the Indians knew it2—having traveled nearly two hundred miles from the deep wilds of the Ohio River Valley. With their torsos blackened and facial features emboldened in the geometric red and black designs of war paint, it happened that the Le Roy place, on the very farthest western edge of the frontier, was the first white homestead the Indians encountered as they moved east toward the white settlement burgeoning from the British colonies of the Eastern Seaboard onto tribal lands.
The band of Alleghenies and Delawares found Jacob Le Roy fetching water in a leafy glen beside his cabin where a bountiful artesian spring burbled up. They either shot or tomahawked him.3 It’s not quite clear which. They then dragged his body to the cabin, laid it half inside the doorway, buried two tomahawks in the skull, and set the cabin afire. After taking his two children, Marie and John, as well the visiting little girl, they disappeared.
Simultaneously, two Indians arrived at the cabin of the Leininger family, German immigrants who had settled in the Buffalo Valley a half mile from the Le Roy homestead. Mrs. Leininger had gone off that morning to the grist mill and left her three children at the cabin with her husband. At first they had no cause for alarm, as it was not unusual to have occasional Indian visitors at white cabins on the Pennsylvania frontier in the mid-1700s. The two Indians asked Leininger for rum, the strong drink available in colonial America brought from the West Indies. He said he had none. They asked for tobacco instead. Leininger gave them a plug. The two Indians filled a bowl, and finished smoking their pipe.
“We are Allegheny Indians, and your enemies!”4 they suddenly declared, according to an account the girls later gave. “You all must die!”
They shot the Leininger father, and tomahawked his twenty-year-old son. Once they’d dispatched the adult males, the Indians captured Barbara Leininger, aged twelve, along with Barbara’s little sister, Regina, aged nine, and fled into the forest that covered the rounded ridges.
“THIS IS THE OLD LE ROY PLACE,” said Kim Mattern, climbing out of his battered pickup and shaking my hand.
We were standing in front of a weathered red barn on a warm Sunday morning in July. A slender middle-aged man, Mattern wore shorts and a T-shirt and had long, grayish hair protruding from under his baseball cap. His casualness contrasted with the occupants of an Amish horse-drawn buggy that clip-clopped down the country road nearby—women and girls wearing bonnets, men and boys in white shirts and dark vests, going Sunday visiting. Green pastures and lush cornfields spilled up from the valley bottom to break gently against the rising wooded ridges. The old farmhouse stood beside the barn, looking both cheery and lonely out here, in the middle of the bucolic Buffalo Valley, with no other dwelling around.
He first checked for permission at the house’s front door.
“Follow me,” Mattern said.
I followed him across the grassy front yard. Mattern spent part of his childhood in the nearby hamlet of Penn’s Creek, and at the age of eight discovered his first Indian artifact. Now working by day doing building maintenance in nearby Lewisburg, he spends his off hours scanning the countryside for new Indian sites as an amateur archaeologist, reporting his findings to the state. His artifact collection currently numbers about fifteen thousand pieces.
A hundred yards from the farmhouse, we descended into a beautiful little glen filled with the sound of dripping water and shaded by overhanging trees. A spring burbled out of the ground int
o a pool formed by a miniature dam, and cascaded over the dam’s edge in a tiny waterfall that gathered into a stream, meandering through the grove toward Penn’s Creek.
Mattern squatted down beside the pool, and scooped up some water in his palm. He drank.
“The Indians came from the west,” he said, taking another scoop of water. “They were incited by the French to take back their lands from the settlers coming from the British colonies. Le Roy was the first settler here. My irony is that he was the first guy here and the first one killed.”
Here, at this spring where Mattern drank, the Indians had come upon Le Roy on that October morning in 1755. And so one thread of the story began.
THE BRITISH AND FRENCH EMPIRES of the mid-1700s acted like two giant rival corporations battling for market dominance in a globe whose vast entirety had just been revealed. The French and Indian War, as we know it—or the Seven Years’ War, as Europeans call it—was one major fight in this battle for global dominance. Far more than the Revolutionary War,5 which followed it by two decades, the French and Indian War shaped the cultural geography of North America. Had it gone the other way, and the French and Indians won instead of the British, the “blank spots” of which I write in North America—including those of Pennsylvania—might be larger and emptier today, given the difference in the two empires’ cultural interaction with the Indians and their differing settlement practices.
The mid-1700s were also a time of tremendous intellectual ferment. As the French and British empires struggled for global ascendancy, the thinkers and writers who were hunkered down within them, oppressed by the heavy discipline imposed from above by king and church, embarked on their own struggle for individual rights. They heard explorers’ accounts, now coming in from all over the globe, of how humans in their “natural” state—without the iron-fisted institutions of church and king—could live in dignity and freedom. For these and many other reasons, they began to cast aside their ancient bonds to biblical scripture and strict fealty to one’s sovereign. Their view of the world and of the state, coming unmoored from these linchpins, shifted dramatically.