The Last Empty Places

by Peter Stark

  THERE WERE NO BOX STORES in Renovo. I bought some dry flies at an old-fashioned sporting goods place, a few snacks at the small supermarket, and drove across the Susquehanna River on the Highway 144 bridge. The two-lane road snaked briefly along the river past some old railroad workers’ houses, then, springing out of the river bottomlands, suddenly curled up a steep draw. It entered a pretty forest, quite open underneath.

  After climbing a long way, the road finally reached the top of a miles-long rolling ridge that trended northeast like so many of the Allegheny ridges, and traced the crest. I was far above the surrounding countryside. The ridge’s northwestern edge was scalloped with steep gullies—as if a great cantaloupe scoop had sliced away giant balls from the ridge. The gullies dropped away on my right, deepening and lengthening, the forest within them thickening as it spilled down the ravines’ sides, until they fell into the Susquehanna some five miles away and nearly two thousand feet below.

  The clerk at the sporting goods store, who’d moved here from what Renovo residents call “the flatlands,” had described to me the first time she’d driven this ridgetop road in winter.

  “I said, ‘God, just get me off this mountain.’”

  I stopped at a scenic pullout along the highway that perched on the edge of one great ravine. I looked out over miles of hazy ridgeline cut by other deep ravines. The ridgetops were the ancient folds38 of mountains—the Appalachians and its Allegheny chain—forced up 250 million years ago when the rock plate now holding Africa shoved inexorably into the North American plate. These mountains were once joined to Morocco’s Atlas Mountains. Some of the hazy, rounded ridges I could see, now about 2,200 feet above sea level, once stood at least another ten thousand feet higher—and perhaps taller than Everest—worn down just as inexorably by water and wind and ice in those hundreds of millions of years since. What was once these Himalaya-like mountaintops has washed away as silt and rock to form the Eastern Seaboard of North America, where major cities sit.

  A sign explained that, due to the lack of city lights here at night, it was possible from this point to see six thousand objects in space—planets, stars, supernovae, distant galaxies. Here, I thought, was yet another measure of “blank spot”—a place on this heavily wired Earth where you could clearly see the clouds of brilliant stars. Ten thousand years ago—even a mere thousand years ago, before lamplighters walked the growing cities with their torches at dusk—that particular blank spot existed virtually everywhere on Earth. It dismayed me that it had vanished from so much of the planet. How psychologically healthy it would be for all of us to live in it—to be reminded, with a casual glance up at the clouds of stars, of our own insignificance.

  Turning off the pavement, I followed a gravelly road called Jews Run along an outlying ridge defined by a deep ravine on each side. To my left dropped away Burns Run and to my right Fish Dam Run. Both were marked “wild areas” on my Sproul State Forest map. I parked alongside a trail marker for the Chuck Keiper Trail, named after a well-known wildlife conservation officer. This inscribes a huge loop through the state forest, and drops into and then climbs out of both ravines. I couldn’t decide which ravine looked more promising—richer in its “blankness,” its “wildness,” in those elusive qualities I sought. It was late in the day—after 2 p.m. I decided to hike down into Burns Run today, and come back tomorrow, with an earlier start, and try Fish Dam Run.

  From an open, meadowy area on the ridgetop, the trail plunged quickly over the edge, switchbacking downward. The deeper I went, the tighter the forest canopy closed overhead. The forest felt damp and twilighty, the air moist and fragrant, the leaves broad and soft and still, the floor damp and spongy, so unlike the bone-dry, crackling, wind-sighing Montana forests I’d hiked for years. I recognized some tree species, like maples, from my Wisconsin upbringing but not all. Unlike dense Wisconsin, however, little undergrowth appeared here, except occasional leafy carpets over the floor. In places, the naked, columnlike tree boles and thick overarching canopy lent the forest a hushed, cathedral feeling.

  After perhaps a half-hour’s descent, I reached the ravine’s bottom, where a small stream trickled over mossy rocks in little rills. I followed the trail along the rills as the ravine deepened, swishing through ferny patches and mossy evergreen groves. Then, on the left wall of the ravine, I spotted something shimmering through the tree trunks. As I drew nearer, I realized it was a clump of giant rhododendron bushes, way taller than I could reach, with big pink and white blossoms the size of my hand that glistened in a single beam of sun penetrating the thick forest canopy. I noticed other clumps of big pink and white rhododendrons dotting the steep, woody hillside farther up. In dozens of years hiking forests, mostly northern ones, I’d never before walked a flowering woods.

  There was, as some of the earliest travelers to North America’s Middle Latitudes reported, an Edenesque quality to these woods. They were both wild and flowering at once, unfettered in their luxuriant growth yet somehow benign and welcoming in their carpets of moss and bright flower blooms. A sense of excitement sprung from the sheer fecundity of it, the richness and variety of life pushing up from the rich, black soil.

  I knew well the gloom of northern forests—the dark fir and spruce boughs crowding against one another, the scaly barks, the mats of decaying needles underfoot. Those northern forests harbored so few tree species that even at their thickest and richest, even on a sunny day, they spoke of spareness. They spoke of a need to gird yourself, to prepare yourself, to be deprived.

  John and William Bartram embraced the rich Middle Latitude forests like the one into which I descended in Burns Run. They’d traveled some of these same Pennsylvania forests. But for William, this was only an introduction. I could imagine William’s ecstasy, as an artistic and wandering and lovelorn young man, at first encountering the even more extreme blossoming fecundity of, say, a South Carolina wilds, or Florida’s.

  DESPITE QUESTIONS ABOUT BILLY’S CHARACTER, the wealthy Dr. Fothergill of London offered to fund his botanical explorations to the Southeast and Florida to the tune of fifty pounds a year. At thirty-four years old and having spent most of his adulthood at loose ends, Billy left Philadelphia in 1773 as if it were the husk of a former life. He sailed as far as Savannah, carrying letters of introduction to gain him entry to governors, prominent families, and planters, and promptly spent forty pounds to buy a good horse. On horseback, he set out south down the coastline, crossing the estuaries on small ferries and stopping by evenings at hospitable plantations, many of which grew rice in the coastal wetlands. Then he cut inland to meet the St. Mary’s River and trace it upstream to its source in the Okefenokee Swamp, which straddles today’s line between Georgia and Florida.

  On his first day traveling up the St. Mary’s toward the swamp, Billy had one of his life’s most revelatory experiences. As he left the white settlements and headed into the blankness that lay beyond, he spotted a Seminole Indian armed with a rifle, riding his way.

  …the first sight of him startled me,39 and I endeavoured to elude his sight, by stopping my pace, and keeping large trees between us; but he espied me, and turning short about, sat spurs to his horse, and came up on full gallop. I never before this was afraid at the sight of an Indian, but at this time, I must own that my spirits were very much agitated: I saw at once, that being unarmed, I was in his power, and having now but a few moments to prepare, I resigned myself entirely to the will of the Almighty, trusting to his mercies for my preservation; my mind then became tranquil, and I resolved to meet the dreaded foe with resolution and chearful confidence. The intrepid Siminole stopped suddenly, three or four yards before me, and silently viewed me, his countenance angry and fierce, shifting his rifle from shoulder to shoulder, and looking about instantly on all sides. I advanced towards him, and with an air of confidence offered him my hand, hailing him, brother; at this he hastily jerked back his arm, with a look of malice, rage and disdain, seeming every way disconcerted; when again looking at me more attentively,
he instantly spurred up to me, and, with dignity in his look and action, gave me his hand.

  Arriving at the trading post upstream by following the Seminole’s directions, Billy was warmly received and heard from the white traders that the Indian was “one of the greatest villains on earth.” The previous night the traders had broken his rifle and beaten him so severely that he left the post pledging to kill the first white man he saw.

  “My friend, consider yourself a fortunate man,” they told him.

  But Billy didn’t see the incident as an example of good luck. While his father, John, hated Indians, and called them “the most barbarous creatures in the universe,” Billy interpreted the encounter with the Seminole as an example of an inner goodness that inhabits all humans, whether “savage” or “civilized.”

  “Can it be denied, but that the moral principle, which directs the savages to virtuous and praiseworthy actions, is natural or innate?”

  Billy had grown up in an entirely different generation. He’d been exposed to the new ideas crossing the Atlantic from Europe about the arts, about human liberty, and about the natural goodness of man. During his time at the progressive-minded Philadelphia Academy, he’d been a protégé of the faculty member Charles Thomson. A professor of Latin and Greek, Thomson was also a student and a friend of the Delaware Indians during the turmoil of the French and Indian War. He spoke out boldly against unfair white treatment of the Delawares in land dealings and treaty-makings with the colonials. He condemned the way the whites had conspired to keep the Delaware chief Tedyuscung drunk during the entirety of a key treaty conference at Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1757 which Thomson personally attended as a Quaker observer. In that treaty conference, conducted at the height of the war, the Delawares had gained the promise from the colonials of a place in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley—land previously taken from them—where they could settle.

  The Delawares called Thomson “the man who tells the truth.”40

  Now Billy began to see firsthand what Thomson had spoken out against.

  Continuing up the St. Mary’s, he noted in scientific detail the flowers and shrubs along the riverbanks and in the nearby savannas. When he arrived at the great Okefenokee Swamp with its labyrinth of waterways and islands of high ground, he doesn’t appear to have ventured into the swamp itself, but he was fascinated by the stories told about it. In particular, he related a legend told by the Creek Indians, that a band of their stray hunters venturing into the swamp once encountered a race of beautiful and generous women who lived deep within this “terrestrial paradise.” But the women could not tarry with the Creeks, as their jealous men would miss them. The Creek hunters had returned many times into the maze of waterways looking for them, and seen footprints and traces of settlement, but after that first clandestine meeting never again had found the beautiful women.

  Billy also heard from the Creeks that these people might be the remnants of an ancient Indian tribe, the Yamases, that the Creeks had conquered long ago and who took refuge deep in the swamp.

  Heading back to the coast and the M’Intosh plantation, where he’d stayed earlier, Bartram took fifteen-year-old Jack M’Intosh on as a traveling companion—“a sensible and virtuous youth.” Together Billy and Jack then headed up the Savannah River, taking notes and gathering specimens for Dr. Fothergill, with their destination a congress—a large meeting—between white traders and Creek and Cherokee Indians.

  The white traders were demanding two million acres of Indian lands. Presumably, this was to settle debts in trade goods that the Indians had run up at trading posts. The young Creek warriors wanted to fight instead of cede their lands, but, after days of negotiation, the older chiefs finally convinced the young warriors not to fight, and the tribes gave over the lands to the whites. Bartram and Jack M’Intosh then joined a ninety-man surveying party to stake out the two-million-acre claim, which pushed Billy’s sympathies further toward the Indians. After walking through the most magnificent forest he ever saw, in a fertile vale that hosted black oaks ten and eleven feet in diameter at breast height, he witnessed how a white surveyor standing on a hilltop misread a compass in order to cheat the Indians41 out of more of these lands. Finally, a chief raised his arm, pointed toward the correct river confluence in the distance, and said that the “wicked little instrument was a liar.”

  And so Billy Bartram, as he ventured farther from Philadelphia and his father and deeper into the wild lands of the Southeast, grew emotionally closer to the Indians. He began to grasp their way of looking at the world and to reconcile it with his.

  MARIE LE ROY AND BARBARA LEININGER showed little evidence of embracing the Indian way of looking at the world—at least not the Indian warrior way. They showed even less of embracing the French way. After General Armstrong torched the Indian village of Kittaning and blew up Captain Jacobs in his house, the Indians brought the two captives to Fort Duquesne—the French stronghold at the Forks of the Ohio. Here the girls labored for several months as servants for the French, who paid wages to the girls’ Indian masters. Pleased to eat bread again (although they didn’t like the French bacon), they felt, in some respects, better off than in the Indian villages.

  [W]e could not, however, abide the French. They tried hard to induce us to forsake the Indians and stay with them, making us various favourable offers. But we believed it would be better for us to remain among the Indians, in as much as they would be more likely to make peace with the English than the French, and in as much as there would be more ways open for flight in the forest than in a fort.

  It’s easy to think that Marie and Barbara couldn’t “abide” the French because the French soldiers may have been interested in something more intimate than a simple housekeeping arrangement. Or perhaps, in fact, the girls made a coldly calculated strategic decision. Whatever the case, their Indian masters took the girls from the French at Fort Duquesne and brought them to the Indian town of Kaschkaschkung (or Kuskuski), on Beaver Creek, a river that flowed into the Ohio about twenty-five miles west of the Forks.

  The girls remained at the Beaver Creek village, clearing fields for the Indian nobility, planting corn, tanning hides, through the year of 1758. On August 18 of that year, a white visitor—a German Moravian minister and cabinetmaker by the name of Frederick Post—suddenly appeared at Kaschkaschkung and gave Marie and Barbara, then in their mid-teens after three years in captivity, hope. Emigrating from Prussia to America as the disciple of a religious visionary, Post had married an Eastern Delaware woman and learned the Indian languages. He then had worked to convert the Indians to Christianity. Given his rapport with the Delawares, he’d now been tapped by Governor Denny of Pennsylvania to try to convince the Ohio Valley Indians, who included the Western Delawares, to leave the French and make a separate peace with the British colonials.

  As soon as he had slipped into the Ohio Valley, word spread through Indian and French networks that Post was somewhere in the territory. The French sent out search parties to find him and, according to Marie and Barbara, threatened to roast Post alive for five days should they catch him. Well versed in native ways, however, Post enjoyed Indian protection during his mission and was personally guided into the Ohio Valley by Pisquetomen, the older brother of Chief Shingas.

  That August of 1758, both sides well understood, was an opportune moment for reconciliation between the British and the Indians of the Ohio Valley. The British, after their initial setbacks in the war, were now striking powerfully against the Indians’ French allies at Fort Ticonderoga (where, despite their attack with fifteen thousand men, they were forced to retreat), Louisbourg, and Fort Frontenac. Earlier that summer, the British started building another road through the wilderness and a string of supply forts to stage a major attack on Fort Duquesne42 at the Forks. But the British knew they would badly need the Ohio Valley Indians on their side in order to attack the French at Fort Duquesne. The Indians, meanwhile, sensed the momentum of the war shifting to the British.

  Frederick Post sp
ent two days at Kaschkaschkung, meeting with various Ohio Valley chieftains, before taking his offer to other villages along Beaver Creek and the Ohio River. Marie and Barbara described the excitement stirred by Post’s visit:

  We and all the other prisoners heartily wished him success and God’s blessing upon his undertaking. We were, however, not allowed to speak with him. The Indians gave us plainly to understand that any attempt to do this would be taken amiss. He himself, by the reserve with which he treated us, let us see that this was not the time to talk over our afflictions.

  Post found a receptive audience among the chieftains, who wished to end the fighting. Post reminded them of the promise made by the colonial authorities at the Easton conference the previous year, that the Delawares could have lands to settle in the Wyoming Valley. He said the British didn’t want to settle the Ohio Valley. The British only wanted to push the French out of the valley.

  Still, the Indians remained skeptical. It was difficult to argue with the chieftains’ logic:

  It is plain that you white people are the cause of this war;43 why do not you and the French fight in the old country, and on the sea? Why do you come to fight on our land? This makes every body believe, you want to take the land from us by force, and settle it.

  THE DAY AFTER MY HIKE down into Burns Run, I went looking for a link between that period in the mid-1700s when the wild Ohio Valley’s fate hung in the balance, and the Ohio Valley now. Specifically, I sought a local historian who could tell me about the earliest settlers around Renovo. While most of the area surrounding Renovo remained blank—wild and unpopulated and mountainous—a few hamlets lay scattered about.

  It was raining in the morning as I left my things in my room at the Sportsman’s Motel and drove north from Renovo along Highway 144. The road climbed through misty, wet, forested mountains until topping out on a grassy, shorn plateau.