The Last Empty Places

by Peter Stark

  Attitudes had changed so quickly. In 1759, Barbara Leininger, standing on the bank of the Muskingum River with Marie Le Roy and David and Owen and searching for a way to cross before being discovered by the “savage host,” composed her own hymn about wild Nature, where she found “Each new morning something new to dread.” Two decades after Barbara’s hymn, William Bartram, on his travels, sings a kind of prose hymn to the rising of the sun in the wilds. “[T]he pulse of nature becomes more active, and the universal vibration of life insensibly and irresistibly moves the wonderous machine; how cheerful and gay all nature appears.” And, two decades after Billy Bartram’s sublime wilderness experience at dawn, William Wordsworth rhapsodized about Bartram’s “pulse of the machine” and the “impulse” of nature:

  One impulse from the vernal wood

  May teach you more of man

  Of moral evil and of good

  Than all the sages can.

  In those forty years—from Barbara and Marie’s 1759 escape through the Pennsylvania wilderness to Wordsworth’s 1798 poem “The Tables Turned”—the thinking radically transformed about Nature and the Wilds. It was a shift midwifed—channeled—by that “gentle, mild, young man,” Billy Bartram. The wilds became, instead of a place to fear, a place of reverence. Instead of a place of ignorance, they became a place of wisdom. Rejecting a sterile citadel of learning like Cambridge, Wordsworth wrote longingly of a wild place where one could think deeply, “a sanctuary for our country’s youth…a primeval grove…[that] should bear a stamp of awe…”

  But Wordsworth was just the beginning. Other thinkers in the decades ahead would refine this romantic notion of Wild Nature and further develop its spiritual benefits, eventually melding this with a deepening grasp of Wild Nature’s scientific complexity and integrity—as represented in ecosystems—until arriving at our understanding of it today.

  I DROVE A LONG LOOP—it took me two days—up through northwestern Pennsylvania in search of the Buffalo Swamp and the last sliver of Indian land left in Pennsylvania, known as “Cornplanter’s Kingdom.” I rolled along for hours on winding highways through small towns and cornfields, through mountain valleys, through the Allegheny National Forest. At Warren, almost to the New York border, I crossed the Upper Allegheny River.

  I was now close to Cornplanter’s lands. A Seneca chief, he and his followers in 1784 had been given “as an act of mercy” by the newly constituted United States of America a few hundred acres along the Upper Allegheny. The United States, soon after its founding as a nation, took all the remainder of the Indian lands in Pennsylvania for a mere five thousand dollars. The Americans argued that since the Indians had sided with the British during the Revolutionary War and attacked Americans, they had given up any right to their lands in the Ohio Valley. The Americans announced the Ohio Valley would now be open to white settlement. This was a mere twenty-five years after British assurances, delivered by Frederick Post to the village on Beaver Creek where Marie and Barbara were held captives, that the Indians could keep their Ohio Valley lands.

  And so—just like that, on the receiving end of yet another legalism—the Native Americans lost another large chunk of the North American continent. After following the history of these Pennsylvania and Ohio Valley transactions of Indian lands, it was abundantly obvious to me that the Indians, from the start, should have heeded Shakespeare’s character’s advice: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.”

  I drove north along the Upper Allegheny, to what should have been the borders of Cornplanter’s tiny reservation. Instead, I was greeted by signs for golf courses, suburban houses, and a huge blue lake—actually a reservoir—surrounded by green hills. Jet Skis zinged across it in the July sun, leaving sparkling white wakes. There was no sign of an Indian reservation.

  Up the road a short way, I crossed into New York State. Just over the border, I spotted a roadside stand. The sign adverted “Ohi:Yo Smokes.” I was now on the Seneca Reservation, but not Cornplanter’s.

  I pulled over on the gravelly shoulder. I struck up a conversation with two Seneca Indians who ran the stand, Les McComber and Dennis Lytel, under a shady awning outside, while Dennis carved a walking stick and we all sipped ginger ale.

  They told me that Ohi:Yo means “Beautiful River,” which refers to the Allegheny. The Seneca were a warrior tribe—the most feared, they said, of the Iroquois Confederacy—and a tribe in which women have a powerful role. (“The mothers have the last say,” as Les put it. “With the Mohawks, the fathers have the last say.”) With their lands on the western edge of the confederacy, the Senecas were known as “Keepers of the Western Door” while the Mohawks were “Keepers of the Eastern Door.”

  “They didn’t do a very good job,” cracked Dennis about the Mohawks. “They let the Pilgrims in.”

  “How far does the reservation extend to the south?” I asked, wondering if it went into Pennsylvania.

  “From sea to shining sea,” Les replied with a smile.

  “I’m interested in Cornplanter’s village,” I said.

  “It’s all underwater now,” he said. “The old people still remember it.”

  Then they told me the story of how in the 1960s the dam came in. The Indians in Cornplanter’s old village were forced out of their homes, and the homes then were burned by the Army Corps of Engineers. They said the tribal leader at the time sold out the Senecas for $795 per person. They spoke for a long time of internal tribal politics, and how the “businessmen” were in charge now.

  Indian lands were taken by deceit for the first 450 years of European arrival in America, and, at least until the 1960s, the pattern still prevailed. It was encouraging to hear Les and Dennis speak of Salamanca, New York, a larger town about ten miles to the north. All along, the Indians have owned the land that lies under Salamanca’s downtown, and have leased it—rather than sold it—to the whites since the days of George Washington.

  For the first two centuries, the Indians leased the land at nominal rates. “But in 1999 when it came time to renew the lease,” Les and Dennis told me, “the Senecas consulted a property assessor like the white man. We had it assessed at value. Then we started charging what it was worth.”

  Some of the white businesses renewed their leases at considerably greater expense. Some, they said, had to be escorted off the property by federal marshals.

  And so, I thought, the wheel finally turns.

  I DROVE THROUGH SALAMANCA on a four-lane highway lined with big new casinos, then circled back down into Pennsylvania. I now sought the “Buffalo Swamp.” My road atlas showed a big white roadless area that approximated the location of the Buffalo Swamp that I’d seen on maps dating to the eighteenth century. After spending the night at the small town of Kane, the next day I drove an arc around the swamp’s northern and eastern edges on State Highways 46 and 146.

  I passed few towns or development of any sort. There were a few abandoned hamlets, an old church, what looked like abandoned fields. I skirted marshy flats that sprouted islands of white pine. The whole area felt high in elevation—kind of a plateau—yet swampy. No major watercourses ran through it. The Indians, traveling by canoe along free-flowing streams, would have skirted it if they were trying to get anywhere fast, and yet the buffalo (or the elk) may have liked its rich grasses. Thus the ancient name Buffalo Swamp?

  In the little town of Clermont, I idled past the annual picnic of the Volunteer Fire Department, where I heard the clank of horseshoes ringing on metal stakes. The old Clermont School was abandoned. Old barns and pastures stood about. A cemetery displayed a prominent headstone facing the road: “Mangrate 1810–1850.” This, no doubt, was when Clermont thrived.

  East on Highway 46—empty of humans, and their houses. Only forest along it. It reminded me of a very empty New England. Then south on 146. Big wooded bluffs overlooked a long, narrow valley dotted with old farms.

  I turned due west at the town of Emporium—and now aimed straight into the heart of the old Buffalo Swamp. A na
rrow paved road followed the Driftwood Branch of Sinnemahoning Creek upstream. Wooded hills skirted a pretty valley of fields and farms. Several suburban-style houses with neat green lawns bordered the road—I speculated these were the “suburbs” of Emporium and imagined the town’s bankers living here. I passed a lumber mill, Lewis & Hockenberry, that makes furniture-grade hardwoods from the surrounding forests of the Allegheny Mountains. My “blank spot” was not feeling very blank.

  The road narrowed. The creek danced in late afternoon sun. The houses grew smaller—now bungalows and cabins. Signs posted over their entrances named them as “camps.” “Maple Camp.” “Love Wolf Camp.” “Little Round Top Camp.” “Camp Cozy Aire.” These, I realized, were family-owned deer hunting camps and summer cabins. I passed an older couple sitting on the front porch of a log cabin, overlooking a pond.

  Six miles up, I bumped off the pavement and crossed the Driftwood Branch on a small bridge. Climbing with the creek, the gravel road now ascended into the woods. The creek pooled and splashed through pretty emerald glens, overhung by leafy green bowers and sparkling in the sun. At the prettiest spot a sign read “Posted.” It made me angry, as if to say here is a bit of paradise and you can’t come in. The fine print said it was owned by a logging company that rented the lands out for hunting and fishing, which made it a bit more understandable why would-be wanderers were told to go away.

  A few miles farther, twisting higher into the woods, where hemlock and maple groves lined the creek, a sign announced I’d entered state forest. The road abruptly left the creek and twisted sharply upward, climbing a steep hillside on tight switchbacks. Sensing the terrain was about to top out, I kept going.

  The road suddenly leveled. I’d now driven about fifteen miles from Emporium into the old Buffalo Swamp. I’d reached a kind of ridgetop plateau. Maples and pines and tamaracks stood in open groves, sunny glades between them. A glistening carpet of tall ferns covered the entire forest floor.

  I stopped the car and got out. After the rumble and thunk of tires over the dirt road, it was quiet except for the slight sigh of wind in the boughs. The place exhilarated me. Here was the blankest of the blank spots I could find on the western Pennsylvania map. I’d chosen it mostly at random. Yet I couldn’t imagine stumbling onto a lovelier place. I waded hip-deep into the swishing ferny glades, marveling at the spot. That I had discovered it on my own, without someone pointing it out to me—unlike the wild ravines at Fish Dam Run, where I’d been directed by a forester—made it all the richer. That sense of discovery, I’d learned in childhood in the Wisconsin woods, could be intoxicating.

  I could have felt a sense of dread out here. That something sinister lurked in the remote landscape, in these wilds, so far from a town, that something bad could happen to me here, my sense of unease left unchecked blossoming into panic. But I had Pennsylvania’s own Billy Bartram to thank that I didn’t feel anything approaching dread. Instead I felt a sense of celebration and marvel. I had Bartram to thank, and Coleridge, and Wordsworth. And, of course, Emerson and Thoreau, and my own father, who had seen romance in living in a log cabin in the woods.

  Many other thinkers and writers, naturalists and philosophers, had helped generate the concept, but these were the direct ancestors that I could acknowledge for how I felt, standing there in the glistening ferns in the midst of the ancient Buffalo Swamp. It had taken them centuries, but they had finally managed to transcend the way of thinking about wilderness, about Wild Nature, rooted in the Old Testament. It didn’t have to be an Eden-like Paradise. Nor did it have to be a Satanic Hell. Rather, it had its own spiritual value.

  I wished Bartram was with me in that ferny glade. I imagine him crouching low to pull the fern fronds to his face, reflecting on the life forces running through them, then sitting down, as if nesting among them, and taking out his sketchbook and notepad. I’m quite sure Bartram wouldn’t have done what I did. I looked at my watch. I had a “schedule” to keep. I estimated whether I could make the next spot on my itinerary before dark. This was the elk-viewing area on Highway 555 along the Bennett Branch of the Sinnemahoning. Once native to these mountains, elk had been wiped out long ago, but recently were reintroduced and were now thriving. I hoped to see them—as well as stop at Kittanning on the Allegheny, where Marie and Barbara had been held—before I had to get to Pittsburgh to catch a plane home to Montana.

  I climbed back in the car and, within ten minutes of arriving in the ferny glades in the center of the blank spot of the ancient Buffalo Swamp, drove back down the way I’d come toward Emporium.

  I immediately regretted it. But it felt too late, and I was in too much of a hurry, to turn back.

  Brooding as I drove the long, thumping dirt road out, I realized that, paradoxically, blank spots exist in direct proportion to our modern sense of time and are just as relative as time. The longer it takes to reach a place—the larger of a valuable chunk from our schedule we have to spend in transit—the blanker that spot will most likely be. In relation to the rest of our crowded world, the more time it demands from us, the more precious that spot will become.

  * The British used remarkably innovative ways to cheat the Indians out of their lands. For instance, there was the bitter “Walking Purchase” of 1737. While accounts differ in exact details, a document, possibly forged, appeared in the 1730s purporting that years earlier the Indians had agreed with the Penn family to sell a tract of land that could be paced off in “a day and half’s walk.” Colonial authorities recruited the three fastest white “runners” they could find, cleared a path to speed their way through the forest, and set them off sprinting for a day and a half. Two of them collapsed from exhaustion; the other managed to cover fifty-five miles. And so the boundary was drawn, giving two thirds of a million acres of Indian lands to the Penns and displacing the Delaware tribe from eastern Pennsylvania.

  PART III

  THE LOST

  COUNTRY OF

  SOUTHEAST

  OREGON

  Map of Oregon with its high desert (center) and route of old Oregon Trail to Willamette Valley. Disastrous trail “Cut-Off” went from Fort Boise, past Malheur Lake, toward Diamond Peak.

  Steens Mountain area in southeast Oregon and Roaring Springs Ranch. Inset shows lights of region at night, with Vancouver/Seattle/Portland at left, Boise at right.

  The first one to stumble out was Martin Blanding.

  He was found in mid-October 1853,1 by a thirteen-year-old boy, Dave Mathews, who’d been out herding cattle near Disappointment Butte, in Oregon’s Willamette Valley, when he spotted a smoldering campfire. Dave Mathews discovered Martin Blanding lying on the ground beside the fire, so weak he could barely move to acknowledge Mathews. He’d clumsily jammed a stick in the earth suspended over the fire on which he’d skewered a hunk of “slunk colt.” He’d hacked it from the hindquarters of a foal that had just been born from the mare he’d been riding. Blanding, barely able to lift the gun, had killed the foal the evening before.

  Mathews told Blanding that there was a house nearby. Blanding “cried for joy” and, when they arrived at the dwelling, stuffed food into his mouth so fast that the hosts forced him to stop before he became ill.

  He managed to get out his story. A party of 250 wagons had taken a shortcut on the Oregon Trail. They’d left the main trail weeks earlier near Fort Boise. The “Cut-Off” led them across the huge, empty spaces of modern-day southeastern Oregon. They’d become disoriented amid the great untracked valleys, the mountain ranges, the deserts, the alkaline lakes. They couldn’t find water. They’d run out of food except some flour and the stringy flesh of near-dead cows. After weeks of wandering, they’d discarded bedsteads, buckets, starving cows, and even left their wagons behind. The party fragmented. Finally Blanding and another man struck westward to seek help.

  The rest of them are all still out there, the starving Blanding told his hosts. Out there in the wild empty spaces. The women, the children, the babies. A whole train of them, 250 wagons and more t
han a thousand people. Running out of food. Winter closing in. Lost.

  I HEADED TOWARD SOUTHEAST OREGON at the end of May. It was a good time of year to visit, I’d heard, when birds migrated through desert-ringed marshlands and the mountain grasses still kept their spring green. I bade goodbye to my family, climbed into my battered, twenty-year-old Isuzu Trooper at our home in Missoula, Montana—the rig had a rugged undercarriage and powerful four-wheel drive that I anticipated I might need—caught the entrance ramp to Interstate 90 four blocks from our house, and drove west into the Bitterroot Mountains.

  It was hot—very hot for late May—in the mid-nineties down in the valleys. Yet high on the peaks of the Bitterroots the deep, melting snows lingering from a long winter glistened temptingly against a cobalt sky. On days like this, I love to drive with all the windows down, hot breeze blasting through the unair-conditioned car, sun burning my bare forearm resting on the open window.

  Interstate 90 spilled me from the minty Bitterroots onto the dry, rolling, beige wheatlands of eastern Washington. Trying to make time on the four-lane roads while they lasted, I sheared south on Highway 395, crossing a sweeping bend of the Columbia River at Pasco and Kennewick. The river swirled with muddy snowmelt running off ten thousand mountains and now shoving against the massive pilings of the highway bridge. The little creek that gurgled past our front door in Missoula several hundred miles upstream, in the mountains, ended up here.