The Last Empty Places

by Peter Stark

  These beliefs eventually got John Bartram kicked out of the Darby Friends Meeting. While deliberating his case for fifteen months, the Meeting Overseers visited Bartram—who comes across as gentle and friendly in manner but firm in belief—at his house. They then reported back to the Meeting.

  “[He] still persists therein to say the longer he lives the stronger he is in the disbelief of the divinity of Jesus Christ.”

  At the time of his disownment by the Meeting, Bartram, in addition to his botanical reading on fruit trees, mosses, and herbs, was taking extensive notes on26 The Morals of Confucius—a favorite philosopher of the Deists. He was also a fan of the British poet Alexander Pope, a dwarfish and sharp-tongued gardening devotee who celebrated nature in his verse and whose spiritual views—though he was a Catholic in name—leaned toward Deism. Above the entrance to his greenhouse, Bartram inscribed a couplet from Pope’s “Essay on Man”:

  Slave to no sect,27 who takes no private road

  But looks through nature, up to nature’s God!

  John Bartram’s own vision of spirituality, one that would prove pivotal in how we view nature today, developed from many influences—a kind of amalgam of science, Deism, and his precise plant observations, all of it perhaps leavened with a little medieval cosmology and Chinese qi: God is manifest in all nature. All nature is animated by a divine spirit.

  In particular, Bartram cited an “intelligence” in plants as evidence of divinity in nature—the same divinity that is present in all humans. Plants, he observed in letters to friends, respond to heat and cold, light and dark, and the petals of many flower species close up in rainy weather or as evening approaches. He especially mentioned the Tipitiwitchet of the Carolinas and the mimosa tree, a native of Asia, whose leaves fold up on cool evenings.

  “[I]f we won’t allow them real feeling, or what we call sense, it must be some action next degree inferior to it, for which we want a proper epithet, or the immediate finger of God.…I have queried whether there is not a portion of universal intellect diffused in all life & self motion adequate to its particular organization.”

  “It is through the telescope,”28 he wrote on another occasion that would echo through the centuries, “that I see God in his glory.”

  Such was the unorthodox religious atmosphere and intensely botanical household in which young Billy Bartram, born in 1739, grew up. He seems to have been a moony, introspective youth, passionate about drawing and poetry. In 1752, at the age of thirteen, Billy entered the Philadelphia Academy—a progressive liberal arts school founded by Ben Franklin in an era when most schools focused on ministerial training. At this innovative school, Billy and his teenaged friends fell under the influence of the brilliant and fiery provost, William Smith, who had recently studied at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen.

  Smith brought the latest European literary trends to little Philadelphia. These adolescent sons of the city’s leading merchants and scientists now became smitten by British pseudo-classical verse. With Provost Smith as their adviser, they founded a publication, The American Magazine, which showcased their poetry written in strict rhymed couplets and studded with references to ancient gods and bucolic landscapes.

  Billy’s friend and classmate, sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Evans, published a poem wondering if the “sylvan muse” that inspired the great ancient Greek and Roman poets would ever appear in the New World or along Schuylkill’s banks—presumably among one of the circle of friends.

  Shall fam’d arcadia own the tuneful choir

  And fair Sicilia boast the matchless lyre?

  …

  O Pennsylvania, shall no son of thine

  Glow with the raptures of the sacred nine?

  Billy didn’t publish in The American Magazine but he clearly absorbed the lush, yearning spirit of its verse. His greatest passion was drawing pictures of birds, plants, and flowers, a talent he honed at age fourteen on plant-collecting expeditions with his father such as to the Catskill Mountains, the Hudson Valley, and to visit the New York botanist Cadwallader Colden. But that fall of 1755 their plans for more expeditions—especially to Carolina to observe its rich subtropical vegetation—were disrupted by the outbreak of full-on warfare in North America for possession of the Ohio Valley.

  The “treacherous” Indians, wrote Billy’s father, John Bartram, to a correspondent in Carolina, where his own father years earlier had apparently been killed by natives while traveling there, “have destroyed all our back inhabitants. No traveling now, to Dr. Colden’s nor to the back parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, nor Virginia.”

  AFTER EXPLORING THE WOODED RIDGETOP above the old Le Roy place where the Indians had hidden their hostages, I said goodbye to Kim Mattern that sunny Sunday morning. I then traced the route of the young captives of the Le Roy and Leininger families, heading exactly into those “back parts” of Pennsylvania mentioned by John Bartram that the events of autumn 1755 had put off-limits. While the long, fertile valleys had been cultivated two centuries ago into rolling greenswards, the great northeastern-trending mountain ridges of these northern Alleghenies still rise up as thickly forested and nearly unsettled as in Bartram’s day.

  Taking Mattern’s directions on back roads out of the charming Buffalo Valley, I soon connected with a four-lane highway that hugged the placid, languorous Susquehanna River and drove a few miles north, past the old river town of Sunbury, at the confluence of the river’s North and West branches. Here—although there was no evidence remaining—is where the ancient Indian village of Shamokin had stood. From Shamokin I took to smaller roads again, trying to pick up the route on which their Indian captors led Marie Le Roy and Barbara Leininger westward, into what was then a massive blank spot for the European settlers of North America.

  Mattern had told me that the retreating raiding party probably avoided the Great Shamokin Trail, a kind of ancient, foot-trodden superhighway connecting Shamokin on the Susquehanna, which flows to the Atlantic Ocean, to the Indian towns to the west. These villages sat on the Allegheny River and other Ohio Valley tributaries, which flow to the Mississippi and then to the Gulf of Mexico. In the millennia before European settlement this route served for long-distance, cross-country travel much as today’s Interstate 80 does, and connected the great watershed of the Atlantic Coast to that of the Mississippi Valley. In fact, today’s I-80 follows the Great Shamokin Trail through a good deal of Pennsylvania.

  By avoiding the Shamokin Trail, the captors stayed off the obvious route white searchers would follow when looking for the girls. The Indian captors probably took the smaller Karondinhah, or Penn’s Creek Trail. I followed this more obscure route, the captors’ route, by driving along Pennsylvania Highway 45. The highway rolled atop a gentle ridge in beautiful green farming country dotted with enormous Amish barns that resembled stoutly built country inns with shuttered windows, the wooded ridges rising as backdrops. Corn grew in thick, even rows, and herds of black-and-white-spotted Holstein cows grazed. On this Sunday afternoon Amish buggies trotted up the road with their bonneted women and vest-jacketed men in bushy beards, going Sunday visiting to their neighbors’ farms. Small boys in their vests played on shady lawns while parents chatted on porches. I wanted to stop at the prosperous farmsteads offering eggs, cheese, raw milk for sale, but the hand-lettered signs all said, “No Sunday Sales.”

  I felt that thrill of discovery that comes from unexpectedly stumbling upon someplace very different from one’s own culture. I was swept up by the beautiful landscape, the elaborate barns that showed so much craftsmanship, this place so rooted in the fertile earth and in the work of one’s hands compared to modern strip-mall America. I was reminded of a larger-scale version of the rolling Wisconsin dairy-farming country of my childhood. It was clear why, as the events unfolded on October 16, 1755, the day of the attack on the Le Roy and Leininger farmsteads, the white settlers coveted these rich, productive valleys and graceful, wooded hills—and why the Indians were not ready to forsake them.

  Immediat
ely after their capture, the Indians had led the girls to the top of a nearby high hill29—no doubt the one beside the Le Roy homestead where Kim Mattern had led me poking for artifacts with his golf-club shaft. The rest of the Indian raiding party arrived toward dusk, the girls reported later, and tossed six fresh, bloody scalps on the ground at the girls’ feet, saying they’d had a good hunt that day.

  The Indians conducted more raids on settlers the next day, returning with nine scalps and five more prisoners. On the third day they divided up the spoils, reported the girls, which totaled ten captives, fourteen horses, and abundant food taken from the farmsteads. The two girls—Marie Le Roy and Barbara Leininger—went to an Indian named Galasko, along with two horses. As they later described it:

  We traveled with our new master for two days. He was tolerably kind, and allowed us to ride all the way, while he and the rest of the Indians walked. Of this circumstance Barbara Leininger took advantage, and tried to escape. But she was almost immediately recaptured, and condemned to be burned alive. The savages gave her a French Bible, which they had taken from le Roy’s house, in order that she might prepare for death; and, when she told them that she could not understand it, they gave her a German Bible. Thereupon they made a large pile of wood and set it on fire, intending to put her into the midst of it. But a young Indian begged so earnestly for her life that she was pardoned, after having promised not to attempt to escape again, and to stop her crying.

  As I drove west on Highway 45 dark clouds swept in. Somewhere along here, west of modern-day Lewisburg, the Indian raiding band had split into two groups, apparently to avoid detection by white searchers, with the girls’ group heading toward a Delaware Indian town called Jenkiklamuhs (now Clearfield), which sat on the West Branch of the Susquehanna. The farming valley along Highway 45 looked peaceful and prosperous. A shimmery curtain of rain briefly veiled the wooded ridges. The sun returned and the narrow, sinuous strip of asphalt glistened, my tires zipping over it. The road wound upward, over a mountain ridge, through remnant groves of big white pine trees—the species that once cloaked much of this mountain landscape before it was logged. Here ran one of the long fingers of the northern Allegheny Mountains like a great curved claw. I guessed Galasko had led Marie and Barbara on his stolen horses through this same mountain pass. I descended again into farm country. Villages eventually yielded to subdivisions. Highway 45 fed into a four-lane. The four-lane roared into the town of State College, home of Pennsylvania State University. Here, in the collections of Pennsylvania Archives, I hoped to find what I needed to retrace Marie and Barbara’s captivity. Maps. Old, old maps.

  At the same time that Galasko led Marie and Barbara westward through the Pennsylvania wilds, in October 1755, back in Philadelphia, John Bartram started thinking that his son Billy should get a job. A real job. Enough dallying in the arts. By then, Billy had attended the Philadelphia Academy for about three years, with its poetry and classics, its playwriting and liberal arts (the school would eventually become the University of Pennsylvania). He’d become very proficient at drawing, but his father wanted him to have a means to make a hard-earned, decent living beyond what he considered these leisured—and unprofitable—aristocratic pursuits. He didn’t want Billy to be “what is commonly called a gentleman,”30 he wrote in a letter to his London botanical friend Peter Collinson. In turn, Collinson, who had much admired Billy’s botanical drawings, now advised Billy “to leave off his Darling Delights to qualify himself to live in the world.”

  When he turned sixteen, John presented Billy with various career options. Billy shunned each one, struggling to find his place.

  Medicine, thought John. He purchased medical texts for Billy to study, but then he complained that Billy didn’t turn a single page.

  Surveying, thought John, as it would allow Billy the chance to study and draw plants. Then he reconsidered, remarking, “We have five times more surveyors already than can get half employ.”

  John consulted with his friend, the ever-practical Ben Franklin. Like the confused Dustin Hoffman character in The Graduate who is told by his father’s friend to go into the fast-growing field of plastics, the at-loose-ends young Billy heard only one word of advice from Ben Franklin—“Printing.”

  John nixed it, knowing that “as [Ben] well knew, he was the only printer that did ever make a good livelihood by it, in this place.”

  Ben thought it over a bit, then suggested engraving. That didn’t work out either. What Billy really liked was botany and drawing—pursuits that John worried “won’t get him his living.”

  Finally, the practical-minded father took the initiative for the moony son and apprenticed him to a prosperous Philadelphia merchant, Captain Child, to learn how to trade in cargoes of goods. Billy spent four years with Captain Child—who felt toward him like a father to a son—and then set off to Cape Fear, in Carolina, where his uncle lived, to go into business as an independent merchant himself.

  Billy’s entrepreneurial foray soon failed. He endured the ocean voyage to Cape Fear badly seasick, then floods ruined much of the Carolina countryside, he reported in a letter home upon his arrival, undermining the chances of selling much merchandise. He did manage to sell one shipment of thirty-five barrels of turpentine, but no evidence exists of any merchant trades beyond that. In fact, there is little evidence of Billy of any kind during most of this period. What survives is an absence of Billy—a kind of blank spot of Billy. His father and Peter Collinson wrote him repeatedly, their surviving letters displaying a growing annoyance that Billy doesn’t respond to them, nor to their requests to send back a few plants or seeds from Carolina’s warm coastal climes.

  “[T]hee need not hinder half an hour’s time31 to gather them,” father admonished son for his laziness, “or turn 20 yards out of thy way to pluck them.”

  John began to lose faith in Billy, especially compared to his two other industrious sons, John Jr. and Moses.

  “I doubt Will,” he wrote to Collinson. “He will be ruined in Carolina. Everything goes wrong with him there.”

  “Billy, so ingenious a lad,” wrote Collinson to John, “is as it were lost in indolence and obscurity.”

  Billy may have started drinking heavily. His father’s letters to him of this period are filled with references to “temperance.” Or he may have fallen secretly in love with his first cousin, Mary Bartram, on whose family’s estate he lived at Cape Fear, perched high on a river bluff that offered stunning views of forest and cane meadows spreading below. Letters written years later point to that possibility, as does family tradition. Whatever the case, Billy certainly seems to have been intoxicated by the sheer, flowering lushness of Carolina compared to spare Pennsylvania.

  And so Billy idled at Cape Fear, with cousin Mary, in the climate’s “eternal spring.” He got along well with his uncle. He drew. He studied plants. He worked lackadaisically at trading. His business affairs deteriorated, and he fell deeper into debt to creditors back in Philadelphia.

  Meanwhile his father, thanks to diligent letter-writing by his friend Collinson to the duke of Northumberland, was appointed as the King’s Botanist for America. The appointment came to John with a stipend of fifty pounds a year. Collinson proposed to the king that John Bartram travel through the wilderness of the Florida interior to send back to Britain exotic and wonderful plant specimens.

  Thus appointed, John Bartram wrote to Billy proposing that he join him as assistant on the Florida expedition. He should sell off his remaining trade goods, John advised, and put his financial affairs into the hands of an attorney. Happily bailing out on the merchant’s life, Billy accompanied John through eastern Florida on a journey that was supposed to last one month but extended to more than five, so engrossed were the Bartrams with the flowering plants, the swamps and pine barrens, the gushing springs and bellowing alligators.

  Not wishing to leave the tropical exotica to return to the dull merchant’s life, Billy fixated on the notion that he’d like to set up as a rice planter o
n a remote, swampy stretch of Florida’s St. John’s River. Although his father considered this another “frolic” of Billy’s, John staked him to the necessities, which were dispatched from Charleston to Florida as John headed back north, for Billy to start a plantation in the wilderness. These necessities included four slaves to clear the land, an iron pot, axes, seeds, barrels of corn and pork, and a pot of sugar.

  Six months later, a Charleston acquaintance of the senior Bartram’s, Henry Laurens, visited Billy at his so-called plantation and reported to John back in Philadelphia that Billy was living in a leaky hovel beside a stinking malarial swamp. He was sick and feverish, out of food, and the labor of clearing a plantation was clearly beyond his “tender and delicate frame of body and intellect.”

  “[N]o colouring,”32 he wrote, “can do justice to the forlorn state of poor Billy Bartram.”

  Billy returned to Philadelphia by year’s end, working as a day laborer despite his expensive education in the classics and poetry. He then suddenly bolted and disappeared from Philadelphia after his creditors apparently threatened him with physical harm if he didn’t make good on his debts. After several months, he eventually showed up at Cape Fear again, reestablished communication with his family, and John paid off the creditors with “one hundred pounds ready cash.”