The Last Empty Places

by Peter Stark

  Small, smooth objects fell in the realm of the beautiful, while wild, craggy mountain landscapes gave rise to these feelings of the sublime—that sense of being overwhelmed by vastness, by power, by infinity. Beyond raw terror, the sublime, according to Burke, provokes a certain delight. But it isn’t found simply anywhere in the presence of power or terror or danger. The tremendous power of a draft horse, for example, doesn’t inspire the sublime.

  “[I]t comes upon us in the gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness, in the form of the lion, the tiger, the panther, or rhinoceros.”

  It was all of a piece—a crystallized moment when the Western outlook on Wild Nature started a dramatic transformation. For so long the concept of “Wilderness” and “the Wilds” had, in Western eyes, been viewed through the lens of the Old Testament. It was either a Paradise or a Hell. But Burke, Rousseau, and their contemporaries finally saw in Wild Nature a world that had its own spiritual value and transformative power. Burke succeeded in putting a name and definition to it—the “sublime.” In a way, it acknowledged the presence of God in the power and infinity of those towering mountains, those turbulent seas, those depthless heavens.

  When you read Burke’s essay, and you read Rousseau, and then you read Bartram’s Travels, you realize that Billy Bartram saw his four years in the American wilderness as a kind of grand quest for the sublime. He knew botany. He’d read British poets like Mark Akenside, whose The Pleasures of the Imagination celebrated Nature as a touchstone of the imagination. Surely he’d read Burke on the sublime, and probably Rousseau on the natural man. Now Billy Bartram—or William, this “son of Pennsylvania”—would “glow with the raptures of the sacred nine,” as his yearning classmate had once written. Billy would write his own epic poetic account of his travels in the American wilderness in search of those wild animals, those strange plants, those exotic tribes whose inherent goodness should be the envy of civilized man, those grand emotions.

  [We] enjoyed a most enchanting view;51 a vast expanse of green meadows and strawberry fields; a meandering river gliding through, saluting in its various turnings the swelling, green, turfy knolls, embellished with parterres of flowers and fruitful strawberry beds, flocks of turkies strolling about them; herds of deer prancing in the meads or bounding over the hills; companies of young, innocent Cherokee virgins, some busy gathering the rich, fragrant fruit, others having already filled their baskets, lay reclined under the shade of the floriferous and fragrant native bowers…disclosing their beauties to the fluttering breeze, and bathing their limbs in the cool fleeting streams; whilst other parties, more gay and libertine, were yet collecting strawberries, or wantonly chasing their companions, tantalising them, staining their lips and cheeks with rich fruit.

  Just as Bartram had embarked on a grand quest for the sublime and the inherent goodness of “natural man,” the deeper I hiked into the pathless ravine of Fish Dam Run that rainy late afternoon and the denser the ravine grew with fallen logs, mossy rocks, rhododendron bushes, undergrowth, the more I considered my travels to this “blank spot.” I jumped back and forth across the little stream, seeking the easiest way. The whole concept of “blank spots” implied a romance in these wild places. It implied that in the spaces left undescribed by the map I would discover something extraordinary, something powerful, something that would transport me, as the wild places had transported Rousseau and other eighteenth-century European urban sophisticates who climbed in the Alps. For much of my life, I realized, I had been searching, in one way or another, for those blank spots on the map, for those places Billy Bartram discovered for himself, while Cherokee maidens frolicked in the strawberry fields.

  MARIE LE ROY AND BARBARA LEININGER had been taken to a “blank spot,” too, but they gave no indication of seeking the Sublime in Nature or valuing the inherent goodness in “natural man.” For them, this blank spot meant captivity rather than emotional freedom. At the same time that Burke was laboring on his essay distinguishing the Beautiful and the Sublime, and Rousseau was retreating from the artificiality of Paris to the Alps to write, the girls were laboring as slaves in the Indian village on Beaver Creek, clearing fields, tanning hides, and planting corn.

  In late winter of 1759—three and a half years after their capture at Penn’s Creek, and once Indian alliances had shifted—Marie and Barbara plotted their escape. As the British advanced in the Ohio Valley52 by chopping another road through the forest toward the Forks, the Delaware leaders, in late autumn of 1758, decided to accept British peace offers, which included promises that the Ohio lands would remain in Indian hands. The Delaware Indians abandoned their alliance with the French. They moved their families—and their captives, including Marie and Barbara, now in their mid-teens—out of harm’s way, heading about 150 miles westward to a village called Moschkingo, located in present-day Ohio.

  The French, left at Fort Duquesne and knowing they couldn’t hold it against the British advance without the help of the Indian warriors, planted sixty barrels of gunpowder in its walls and ignited the fuse. The fort exploded into bits with a roar heard ten miles away by the British front guard. The French then retreated, sending their cannons by boat down the Ohio and Mississippi to Louisiana. The British marched in to the Forks of the Ohio the next day, renamed the strategic outpost Pittsburgh, and erected their own fort among the shattered French ruins.

  A little more than two months later, in February, the Delaware Indian men left their new camp at Moschkingo to travel back east to the new British post at Pittsburgh to trade furs. The Indian women and the captive girls remained at Moschkingo to gather roots. Among the other captives at Moschkingo were two boys, apparently in their late teens, David Breckenridge and Owen Gibson. It was with David and Owen that the girls planned their escape.

  Barbara feigned sickness—probably claiming she had her period—and was allowed to build a separate hut. Another captive woman, a German named Mary, had been secretly hoarding provisions for just such an escape attempt but then injured her leg and couldn’t go. She gave her hoard to the girls—two pounds of dried meat, a quart of corn, and four pounds of sugar. On the night of March 16, 1759, Marie, Barbara, David, and Owen rendezvoused at Barbara’s hut. They slipped out of the Indian town as it slept, creeping past more than a dozen dogs without alarming them.

  Once beyond the village, the four adolescents grasped the direness of the situation. They had to avoid the skilled Indian hunters who would surely come searching for them. Without compass or maps, and with only the sketchiest knowledge of the trails, they had to find their way through nearly two hundred miles of wilderness—a blank spot to them—to the nearest British outpost, which was Pittsburgh, while avoiding the main trails on which they might encounter Indians.

  Just beyond the village that night, they reached the bank of the Muskingum River and desperately looked for a means to cross it before they were discovered missing. Barbara improvised on an old hymn and softly sang it on the Muskingum shore. It was not a hymn that passionately embraced the new concept just gaining currency in Europe of the Sublimity of Wild Nature and the Inherent Goodness of Primitive Man.

  O bring us safely across the river!53

  In fear I cry, yea my soul doth quiver…

  Alas, what great hardships are yet in store.

  In the wilderness wide, beyond that shore!

  It has neither water, nor meat, nor bread,

  But each new morning something new to dread.

  Yet little sorrow would hunger me cost

  If but I could flee from the savage host,

  Which murders and fights and burns far and wide,

  While Satan himself is array’d on its side.

  Searching about in the darkness, the four youths discovered a raft that the Indians used to ford the river. Clambering aboard, they pushed out. The current swept them downstream nearly a mile before they landed on the far shore. Jumping off the raft, they ran through the woods all that night. They kept on running through most of the next day. Finally
, on the second night, they stopped to rest. They didn’t dare light a fire for fear of attracting notice.

  Rising the next dawn, Owen Gibson spotted a bear. He and David each carried guns—apparently they had been trusted by their Indian captors as reliable hunters—and Owen fired on it. The bear fell, wounded. As Owen approached with a tomahawk to dispatch it, the bear jumped to its feet, charged at Owen, and bit him in the foot, leaving puncture wounds. It then fled into some rocky grottos. Hungry for meat, the foursome attempted to track the bear but soon lost its trail amid the rocks.

  All that day they walked onward through the forest, despite Owen’s punctured foot, worried about their dwindling food cache. On the following day—their third in flight from the Indian village—Owen managed to shoot a deer. Cutting off its hindquarters, they carried the meat with them that day and roasted it over a fire that night, ravenously consuming all of it. On the fourth day they reached the Ohio River, having made a circuitous loop of over one hundred miles in four days in order to avoid the most well-traveled trails. But Pittsburgh, the haven occupied by the British that they now sought, still remained far away.

  The two boys worked most of the night to build a raft to cross the Ohio. Poling and paddling across to the far bank, they saw symbols left by the Indians indicating that the Forks lay to the east, still about 150 miles away. They determined to walk straight east—into the rising sun—until they reached it. For seven days they walked eastward, sometimes on a path and sometimes through the woods. On the seventh day they came to a watercourse that they recognized—Little Beaver Creek, where they had formerly resided as captives. They now knew they were about fifty miles from the Forks and safety with the British.

  And now, that we imagined ourselves so near the end of all our troubles and misery, a whole host of mishaps came upon us. Our provisions were at an end; Barbara Leininger fell into the water and was nearly drowned; and worst misfortune of all! Owen Gibson lost his flint and steel. Hence we had to spend four nights without fire, amidst rain and snow.

  On March 31, 1759—fifteen days after slipping out of the Indian village on the Muskingum River—the group reached the Allegheny River near the Forks. They were now three miles from Pittsburgh. Again, the foursome built a raft, and ferried themselves across the Allegheny, although Marie, as Barbara had before, fell in the river and almost drowned before the other three managed to pull her out. Landing on the Allegheny’s far shore, they walked a short way to the banks of the Monongahela. The British post lay just on the other side. Shouting across the river, they heard an answering call. The commander, Colonel Mercer, sent over a boat to carry them across. Clad as the captives were in native dress, however, the boatmen mistook them for Indians and the youths had to convince the boatmen they were in fact captives before they were let aboard.

  Colonel Mercer took in the foursome at the fort, where he fed them well, had clothes made for them—the girls each received new petticoats—and presented them with new knives. After two weeks of Colonel Mercer’s hospitality, they joined a contingent of soldiers headed east, into territory firmly held by the British. Marie Le Roy and Barbara Leininger reached Philadelphia on May 6, 1759, about two months after their escape and three and a half years after their capture at Penn’s Creek. It was then, on their arrival in Philadelphia, that they told their story to government and religious authorities, who wrote it down. The Narrative of Marie Le Roy and Barbara Leininger was quickly published in pamphlet form and avidly read, in part because it contained a list of several dozen British prisoners whom the girls had met over their captivity. The list was published at the end of the pamphlet to let the families know they were still alive. Barbara’s younger sister, Regina, however, who had been captured with Barbara and Marie at Penn’s Creek, had married an Indian man during captivity and adopted their ways. She didn’t emerge from the forest for another five years, after the French had finally given up all their claims in North America to the British, and peace prevailed between the British on the one side, and the French and Indians. Regina then reunited with her family.

  MARIE LE ROY AND BARBARA LEININGER’S account has endured these last two and a half centuries mainly as a curiosity and a vivid and dramatic historical document of an era. Bartram’s Travels, on the other hand, unconsciously reverberates with us every day.

  By the time Billy Bartram returned to Philadelphia, in winter 1777, from his four years of wilderness travel, his father was elderly and frail, and John died the following September as British troops advanced on Philadelphia to attack the American rebels during the War of Independence. (It was said that he worried himself to death that the British troops would trample his precious gardens.) John willed his botanical estate to his more businesslike and less peripatetic son, John Jr. Billy took up residence on the family estate, helping to manage its nurseries, which sold plants commercially.

  He spent about a decade at the farm quietly writing his account of his years wandering the American wilderness. Visitors to the Bartram botanical estate, who included Thomas Jefferson and other luminaries, sometimes found him in the garden, barefoot with hoe in hand. Bartram’s Travels was published in Philadelphia in 1791, and, in its American edition, was greeted with mixed reviews and modest success.

  The previous year, however, another epic account of travel in wild and exotic places had captured the rapt attention of a British audience—James “Abyssinian” Bruce’s Travels to Discover the Sources of the Nile. After its American debut, Bartram’s Travels was quickly published in England, where it found a large and enthusiastic audience. In rapid succession came an Irish edition, another one in English, then German, Dutch, and French. Clearly, Bartram’s Travels, celebrating the “sublime” in the American wilderness, had struck some kind of nerve in Europe. It had appeared at a key moment, as Europe’s intellectual climate shifted beyond the smooth cusp of Enlightenment rationalism toward the grand, jagged emotions that would soon become the Romantic movement—epic quests undertaken by heroic loners…scenes of wild nature that provoked the sublime…powerful passions deep within the soul, exposing the boldest truths.

  The young British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge was deeply smitten by Bartram’s54 Travels and copied passages of Bartram’s prose into his notebooks. He appears to have been fascinated not only by Bartram’s exotic, poetic descriptions of the American wilds but also by Bartram’s passionate belief in a kind of soulful “life force” that animates all things. Coleridge, who read widely in other visionary and philosophical works, including Eastern religions, now embraced this Bartramian notion. As a poet, he further believed that in humans this “life force” expressed itself in creative genius.

  One night in the summer of 1798, Coleridge, unhappily married, father of small children, sat in an armchair in a lonely farmhouse in Somerset, having ingested—for an illness, he claimed—an opium extract. Among the images fleeting through his opium dreams were both fragments of Bruce’s Sources of the Nile and the natural wonders William Bartram had described in his Travels. Coleridge envisioned especially vividly a powerful, geyserlike spring Bartram had discovered in central Florida that churned up great boils of white sand and bits of shell. The spring, intimately described by Bartram, then settled into a beautiful, clear pool, out of which meandered a stream that ran five miles through grassy meadows, finally emptying into Florida’s Lake George.

  Coleridge awoke from his opium visions three hours later, still in his armchair, having composed in the course of his visions what he estimated were between two hundred and three hundred lines of poetry. He immediately took up pen and paper and scrawled down all he could recall. This “fragment,” as he called it, became his visionary “Kubla Khan.” Now one of the most famous poems in the English language, this work helped touch off what became the Romantic movement. It is a profound rhythmic incantation of the power of that creative genius as it manifests itself in humans and nature.

  And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,

  As if the earth in
fast quick pants were breathing,

  A mighty fountain momently was forced:

  Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst

  Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,

  Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail;

  And ’mid these dancing rocks at once and ever

  It flung up momently the sacred river.

  Five miles meandering with a mazy motion

  Through wood and vale the sacred river ran

  Then reached the caverns measureless to man,

  And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean…

  Coleridge then turned his friend William Wordsworth, also an aspiring poet, on to Bartram’s Travels. Suffering from a broken love affair in France and seeking his path in the world both poetically and personally, Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy, lived in a cottage not far from Coleridge. During long walks through the beautiful hills of the West Country, the threesome theorized about poetry and nature. Mindful of John and William Bartram’s observations that a kind of intelligence or spirit animates plants, Wordsworth began to understand nature as infused with a conscious and moral purpose. He substituted, in the words of one Wordsworth critic and biographer, “the idea of Nature for the idea of God.”55

  A motion and a spirit, that impels

  All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,

  And rolls through all things.

  Wordsworth wrote of the need to look to Nature for instruction in that wisdom and moral purpose that he believed lies within all living things—partly due to the Bartrams’ descriptions of the intelligence of plants and the sublimity of wild landscapes. Wordsworth urged his readers, as in his “The Tables Turned,” to abandon the strict study of books and strike out into the natural world and learn from it. “Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books…Let Nature be your teacher.”