The Last Empty Places

by Peter Stark

  With it shifted their view of nature—or “Wild Nature,” as some of them called it, or wilderness, as we think of it, in contrast to, say, the genteel and cultivated countryside of Britain or France. The wider world had grown far more accessible by the mid-1700s via sailing ship and carriage. Confronted with the vast and wild landscapes of the Alps or North America—or even the Sahara Desert or the Amazon forest or the Arctic—these city-dwelling thinkers groped for a vocabulary to describe Wild Nature’s awesome power. A century or so earlier, Europeans, seeing some of them for the first time, portrayed these landscapes with the biblical imagery that flowed so easily from their pens. They cast the wild, unfamiliar spots of the earth in terms either black or white—either an Eden-like Paradise or a Satanic Hell.

  But now, starting in the mid-1700s, Europe’s intellectuals sought a more nuanced, insightful way to comprehend these powerful landscapes. Some of the thinkers had made youthful sojourns—even run away—to the Alps while others kept up with the wider world through the literature of exploration. We think of North America as very isolated from Europe then. It wasn’t at all. A kind of intellectual volley began back and forth across the Atlantic over how to understand Wild Nature, a kind of serve and return, enabled by the merchant ships constantly sailing to and fro bearing letters, journals, books, and pamphlets, and keeping the drawing rooms of London and salons of Paris in touch with the North American wilds.

  Philadelphia in the mid-1700s stood at the intellectual center of British North America, and near to the edge of its wilds. Only 150 miles west of this busy little city on the Eastern Seaboard and over the rounded wooded crest of the Allegheny Mountains began the great watershed of the Ohio Valley—so large it takes in present-day Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, western Pennsylvania, and parts of other states, including Kentucky, Tennessee, and Illinois. For the British on the East Coast in the mid-1700s, almost all the Ohio Valley was a blank spot.

  Parts of Pennsylvania—especially the northwest—remain remarkably blank today. This unexpected wildness in a state usually associated with the urban East is what drew me to it. Pennsylvania is compelling for the pivotal role it played, by way of the French and Indian War, in molding the cultural geography of North America. Even more, I was fascinated by the part that little Philadelphia, with its intellectual ferment of the mid-1700s, with its scientists, botanists, and poets, had played in changing the way Americans came to think about wilderness.

  I started in eastern Pennsylvania at the Le Roy homestead, where the children were captured by Indians. I wanted to trace their route as prisoners over the Alleghenies to Pennsylvania’s western sector and what was then the remote wilds of the Ohio Valley. Along the way my self-appointed mission was to seek out the blankest spots in Pennsylvania that I could find.

  IN THE AUTUMN OF 1753,6 two years before the Indians arrived at the Le Roy cabin, George Washington, then an obscure twenty-one-year-old Virginia planter, left the British colonies of the East Coast and crossed the Allegheny Mountains into the remote Ohio Valley carrying a letter from Virginia’s lieutenant governor, Robert Dinwiddie. A ham-handed and impetuous man, Dinwiddie, of course, represented British interests in colonial America as well as perhaps his own. He had selected the young Washington as his wilderness courier due to Washington’s smattering of backwoods experience from his surveying work as a teenager, and to his political and family connections in coastal Virginia. Washington, seeking respectability as the new proprietor of a plantation he had inherited from his half-brother, eagerly took on Dinwiddie’s mission.

  Stumbling through the snow, Washington and his backwoods guides reached Fort Le Boeuf, near Lake Erie, on December 11, 1753.7 The French had recently constructed the fort along one of their key fur-trading routes that linked the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley. The fort’s commandant, Captain Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, greeted Washington’s ragtag and travel-worn party with formal hospitality and invited Washington to dine with him that night. A formal dinner in the backwoods outpost might include candlelight and venison roasts and French clarets served before the roaring fire in rough-planked officers’ quarters. A professional French officer thirty years Washington’s senior, Saint-Pierre had decades of experience in the fur trade of the North American wilderness.

  Washington handed over the letter from Dinwiddie.

  “The lands upon the River Ohio,”8 Dinwiddie had boldly penned, “are notoriously known to be the property of the Crown of Great Britain.…I must desire you to acquaint me by whose authority and instructions you have lately marched from Canada with an armed force, and invaded the King of Great Britain’s territories.…it becomes my duty to require your peaceable departure…”

  The French Canadians, their Indian associates, and their canoe-paddling voyageurs had carried packets of pelts through these parts of North America for nearly two centuries. The Ohio River and its tributaries provided a wilderness highway between their fur posts on the Great Lakes and their fur posts on the Mississippi River.

  The problem was that both Britain and France exerted dim, sketchy claims to the Ohio Valley, rooted in the earliest days of European exploration in North America. Armor-plated explorers had planted their respective nation’s flags on East Coast headlands and seized in name of God and King and Queen vast stretches of territory extending hundreds or thousands of miles inland. These vague, competing claims hadn’t really mattered for nearly two hundred years. By the mid-1700s, however, the British colonial population of East Coast planters had swelled and new settlers jostled for farmland.

  Just over the Appalachian crest lay the rich Ohio Valley, beckoning to the British colonials as an untamed wilderness to be settled, fields to be cleared and towns built, a vast area to be civilized and made bountiful through agriculture. But for the French who passed through the Ohio Valley in canoes and the Indians who lived there, hunted its forests, fished its streams, and planted small plots of corn beside their villages, the Ohio Valley already was bountiful and beautiful. It needed no improvement.

  In the years before the capture of Marie Le Roy and Barbara Leininger, the Indian tribes living in Pennsylvania, the Ohio Valley, and elsewhere in the region had lost millions of acres to shady “treaties” concocted by British colonial authorities. William Penn, the Pennsylvania colony’s Quaker founder, was famous for his fairness to Indians and desire to harmoniously live side by side. But once Penn died, his sons grabbed all the land they could lay their hands on. What each Indian tribe really needed, looking at these deals from the distance of two and a half centuries, was a strong team of lawyers and appraisers.*

  To lay their dubious claim to Indian lands in the great blank spot of the Ohio Valley, the British colonials played tribes against each other and used clever geographical obfuscation. It worked like this: The British had managed to strike an allegiance with the Iroquois Confederacy, a powerful group of five or six tribes in what’s now upstate New York. The confederacy claimed to have conquered other tribes far distant from its power base and thus to control the lands of those tribes, which it then sold in pieces to the British. In 1744, the Iroquois Confederacy sold off—for a few hundred pounds—what the Iroquois believed was only the Shenandoah Valley9 in Virginia. The fine print in the contract, however, said that the Iroquois were giving up all the remaining Indian lands in Virginia. The Indians understood the western boundary of Virginia as being the “place of the setting of the sun”10—the crest of the Allegheny Mountains. However, Virginia’s founding charter put the colony’s western boundary all the way at the Pacific Ocean—a different “place of the setting of the sun.”

  By Virginia’s way of thinking, the Iroquois Confederacy had just signed over the entire Ohio Valley to the British colony. Virginia land speculators immediately jumped in. A group of wealthy planters from the Northern Neck area—including George Washington’s half-brother Lawrence—set themselves up as the Ohio Company and acquired from Virginia’s House of Burgesses almost a third of a million acres of these very sha
kily gotten lands along the Ohio River in order to sell to homesteaders. The Ohio Company then gave stock to Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie11 in the hopes it would prove politically expedient. They apparently were right. Dinwiddie penned his outrage at what he claimed were French incursions on Virginia land and dispatched his letter with young George Washington to Saint-Pierre at Fort Le Boeuf.

  After his formal dinner with Saint-Pierre that December night in 1753, and as Saint-Pierre wrote his reply to Dinwiddie, Washington and his little party hung around Fort Le Boeuf, surreptitiously checking it out. They counted several hundred canoes that the French were building and preparing to descend to the main Ohio River in the spring. The land jealousy flared between the two rival empires, and Washington’s own sense of indignity grew.

  Saint-Pierre presented his written reply to Washington, and four days after his arrival at Fort Le Boeuf, Washington and his few guides headed back to coastal Virginia bearing the letter. After almost drowning when he fell off a log raft into an icy river, Washington arrived a month later at Dinwiddie’s offices in Williamsburg. He handed over Saint-Pierre’s letter.

  The veteran French officer had replied coolly to Dinwiddie that the king of France held “incontestable” rights to the Ohio lands. Nevertheless, he would send Dinwiddie’s letter to his superiors so they could judge for themselves the king of Great Britain’s “pretensions.”

  “As to the summons you send me to retire,” Saint-Pierre wrote, “I do not think myself obliged to obey it.”

  “I SHOULD MENTION that the French were traders,” said Kim Mattern, as we hiked out of the shady glen and walked back to his pickup at the old Le Roy farmstead. “They were not interested in land. They were not interested in ‘civilizing’ the natives. But in the wars between the English and French, both French and English vied to have the natives on their side.”

  Mattern reached into the bed of his pickup for what looked like a stack of large picture frames. He held the first up for me to see in the bright Sunday sunlight. Mounted on white cottony material covered by glass lay dozens upon dozens of tiny arrowheads. Their makers had crafted them so precisely they looked sculpted from glass rather than chipped from chert, quartz, and rhyolite.

  “These are Late Woodland points,” Mattern said.

  He lifted up another tray in the warm morning sun.

  “I didn’t know what you wanted to see, so I just brought a selection of some,” he remarked. “These are from the Early Woodland period.”

  These points were finely worked, too, but heavier. Early Woodland meant archaeologists dated them from the era between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 1.

  Then he lifted up a tray from the Archaic Period, and then fifteen more trays. Each represented a step deeper into the countless generations of Indians who inhabited this region today known as Pennsylvania but that surely had hundreds of other place-names that will never be spoken again.

  “Do you know what bifurcated means?” Mattern asked me. “Like a tooth that has two roots,” he said, forking his fingers downward. He held up a tray of the bifurcated spear points. Considerably larger than the others, their cutting edges had been worked in a jagged fashion with tiny stone teeth like the edges of a serrated knife.

  “These are eight thousand years old,” he said, holding up another tray from the Archaic.

  Some had come from the Buffalo Valley. This spot where we stood had been hunted by humans for at least eighty centuries before the Le Roys arrived. It had been a blank spot—wilderness—only to European eyes. At thirty years per generation, that was roughly 270 generations who had lived here before the Le Roys built their farm.

  Seeing the incredible detail of those thousands of years’ worth of points that were part of Kim Mattern’s collection of fifteen thousand, I suddenly understood why it was so important to the French and to the British colonials, once the hostilities broke out between them during the French and Indian War, to each have the Indians on their side. They knew how to hunt here, they knew how to live here, and they knew how to fight here. The only participant who seemed not to care a whit for Indian help was Major General Edward Braddock, who would come across the Atlantic to command British forces in North America. His soon-to-be aide, the eager young George Washington, would learn by his poor example. Singlehandedly, Braddock did much to invent the stereotype of the arrogant British commander who was utterly ignorant—and willfully dismissive—of the local culture.

  WHEN WASHINGTON RETURNED from his wintry mail-delivery mission to Fort Le Boeuf, an indignant Dinwiddie presented to the Virginia legislature Saint-Pierre’s cheeky reply—“I do not think myself obliged to obey.” Though wary of Dinwiddie’s personal motives and Ohio Company connections, the legislators did cough up ten thousand pounds to build forts in the Ohio Valley to counter the French moving in there. Washington had hardly returned home when Dinwiddie again dispatched him, in early April of 1754, back over the Alleghenies, heading a disheveled army of 160 volunteers drawn forward by the promise of free settlement land at the Forks of the Ohio.

  Britain and France now raced each other through the wilderness for the same coveted strategic spot. This is where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet to form the main Ohio—the site of today’s Pittsburgh. In February, an advance party of forty Virginian volunteers had managed to reach the Forks and started erecting a fort. On April 17, however, they looked out from their crude ramparts to see a giant flotilla of canoes and pirogues paddle down the Allegheny River from the north, beaching at the Forks. From the boats, which were those Washington had seen being built back in December at Fort Le Boeuf, stepped five hundred professional French troops hauling eighteen cannons. They marched to the walls of the makeshift British fort with its undernourished complement of Virginia volunteers and demanded immediate surrender. Guaranteed by Captain Contrecoeur safe passage back to the Tidewater, Commander Ward readily gave in, and the French, in gentlemanly military tradition, laid on a feast that night for the hungry Virginians.

  Meanwhile, George Washington and his motley band of 160 was advancing hard through the wilderness to the Forks from the east. While an older and more confident commander might have considered his options12 at this point, the determined young Washington kept advancing on orders issued to him by the militarily inexperienced Dinwiddie—and without London’s approval.

  “You are to restrain all such Offenders [who attempt to interrupt British settlement], & in Case of resistance make Prisoners of or kill & destroy them.”

  These orders, observes one historian, “amounted to an invitation to start a war.”13

  Which is just what happened. Accounts generally agree on events leading up to the fateful moment. Learning of Washington’s approach toward the Forks, Captain Contrecoeur sent out a small party headed by a distinguished French officer, Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville, to converse with them and read a summons warning them to stay off French territory. When Washington got word of the French advance party, he assumed it was an attack. He roused his men, marched them through a rainy night for seven miles, and at dawn surprised the waking French party in a woody bottomland—since known as Jumonville Glen. The French jumped up in alarm; one of them apparently fired a shot. Washington ordered a volley in return. The French tried to retreat but their way was blocked by Washington’s Indian guides. There was a pause. Washington held fire to let the French leader, Jumonville, through a translator, read the letter he carried aloud.

  Then the accounts vary wildly from eyewitnesses on each side. Washington’s official account is apparently a whitewashed version of events, written by a young officer covering up his lack of control of the situation.14 It stated that Jumonville was killed in combat and so were nine others, and the Indians scalped them.

  But a careful reconstruction based on several other eyewitness accounts,15 English, French, and Indian, paints a far different drama. Jumonville was wounded and had fallen in the initial volleys. During the cease-fire, Washington took the letter Jumonville carried and walked o
ff to have his own translator read it. While Washington read over the letter, an Indian ally of the British from the Iroquois Confederacy approached the fallen Jumonville. Known as Tanaghrisson, or the “Half-King,” he had his own motives to start a conflict between French and British—he had been trying to rally his own following of Indians, without much success, to join him with the British, in order to keep himself in power.

  “Thou art not yet dead, my father,” said Tanaghrisson.

  With that, Tanaghrisson split open Jumonville’s skull with several blows from his hatchet. Then he plunged his hands into the cranium and squeezed Jumonville’s brains through his fingers.

  Tanaghrisson’s well-aimed hatchet blow was a shrewdly calculated political move on his part.16 If he could provoke the French to attack the British—his allies—and the British responded with war, it could help him, and the Iroquois Confederacy, to maintain some influence over the separate Indian tribes of the Ohio Valley. Tanaghrisson’s hatchet murder of Jumonville was just enough of an outrage, in this sodden, brushy creek bottom in the Ohio wilderness with an uncertain twenty-one-year-old George Washington in charge, to spark what has been called the first global war. Starting here at Jumonville Glen, near modern-day Farmington, Pennsylvania, it lasted for seven years, brought in many countries of Europe, and was fought in North America and Europe as well as India and the Caribbean, where Britain and France had colonial territories.

  Ultimately, the French had to give their claim to North America over to Great Britain. It was thus a war that defined America’s boundaries, and its lack of boundaries, its open spaces for westward expansion, its cities, its affiliations to which nations of Europe, as well as its sense of independence from them all. It gave Americans a sense of their own destiny. And it fostered the notion that there is always more land to settle—more open space, another blank spot—just over the next hill.