Chaneysville Incident

by David Bradley

  The Greyhound bus station that serves Philadelphia sits in the center of town, a prematurely deteriorating, fortunately subterranean structure which cannot escape its surroundings—the skin flicks down the street, the bowling alley on one side, the Burger King on the other. I emerged from the subway a block and a half from the station, ran the gauntlet of improbable offers from gypsy cab drivers, winos, and whores, entered the station, and stood in line to buy a ticket to a town that existed as only a dot—if that—on most maps, a town noted for its wealth of motel rooms.

  Originally it was the crossing of two major Indian trails, one running north and south, the other east and west; the Indians, it appears, had not lived in the area, but like later whites, had used it for overnight rest—a sort of redman’s Ramada. One group of these transient Indians, probably Cherokees, who made some kind of permanent residence in the area around the English colony at Jamestown, evidently had rather a malicious sense of humor; they whispered rumors of the lodes of silver to be found near the crossing of the great Indian trails. These whisperings reached the ears of an explorer, one Captain Thomas Powell, who accordingly, and no doubt to the great amusement of the Indians, fitted out an expedition.

  And so, sometime in the year of our Lord 1625, Captain Thomas Powell of Virginia became the first white man to set foot in what would later become the County. Navigating by the North Star, he made his way north, discovering a stream of exceptionally sweet water, which is now called Little Sweet Root Creek, and a convergence of three streams, which formed what is now called Town Creek. He found no silver, however, and so turned back before reaching the site of the present Town, and made a report so indifferent as to discourage exploration for some time. However, over a century later, in 1728, his grandson, Joseph, entered the region Captain Thomas had explored, leading a party of twelve men. They settled along the streams Captain Thomas had discovered, and evidently prospered—one man, Joseph Johnson, died in 1731, but the second of the party to die, Richard Iiames, lasted until January 26, 1758, a full thirty years after the first settlement. Powell, later joined by his brother George, did not fancy the farming life, and so, in 1737, became the first of several white men to build a trading post to do business with the Indians. Unfortunately, because Captain Thomas had never really reached the crossing point of the great Indian trails, the Powell trading post was built on Little Sweet Root Creek, which then, as now, was something of a backwater. Had this not been the case, the Town might have been named, originally, Powell. But it was not. The honor fell to a man named Robert Ray, who is believed to have built a post about 1751. The town that grew there originally carried the name Raystown.

  There is some doubt about the accuracy of the claim that it was Ray’s trading post that formed the nucleus of the Town. Other local features which bear his name (Ray’s Cove, Ray’s Hill) are located many miles away, and the spelling of the name in some documents is odd (Reas’). One historian reports that the actual nuclear establishment was a tavern, and another claims it was operated by John, not Robert, Ray. Such is history.

  In any event, the name was legitimized by 1757, when Governor Denny of Pennsylvania ordered Lieutenant Colonel John Armstrong to encamp three hundred men near “Ray’s Town” and from thence to do battle with the Indians. The matter dropped for lack of funding and, it appears, for lack of Indians. However, in the next year the English General John Forbes, who had been charged with retaking Fort Duquesne (later Fort Pitt) from the French and Indians, used Raystown as a rendezvous point for 5,850 mixed troops and 1,000 wagoneers. The advance elements of this party, which included at least a hundred British troops, eighty “southern Indians”—basically Cherokees—who were allies of the British, and one hundred “Provincial” soldiers (the number a conservative estimate, as one hundred were reported “down with the flux”), built a fort at Raystown, which was completed by August 16, some six weeks after its start. The fort continued as a mustering point of the campaign.

  The Town grew in importance through peacetime as well. In 1771 there was sufficient political power to have the entire area split off as a separate county, with Raystown as its seat. The name of the County was chosen in acknowledgment of political realities in England. The Town changed its name to match. Some sixteen years later, the political power of the Town and the County was such as to cause the construction of a road into the western reaches of the state. The surveys for the “Great Western Road” established that the Town was located “19 miles and 290 perches north of Mason and Dixon’s Line.”

  The importance of the Town and the County to the early development of America was acknowledged by no less a historian than Frederick Jackson Turner, author of the controversial “Frontier Hypothesis,” who pronounced it a watermark of westward expansion. However, both Town and County were of relatively minor importance during the War of Independence. Some three hundred men were mustered locally, but the local gunsmith was charged with providing only twenty-five muskets, and the commissioner’s clerk reported that he was running behind schedule. In light of this and the fact that the fort had fallen into ruin, it is probably fortunate that the locale saw little rebellious activity.

  However, during the Whiskey Rebellion (c. 1791-94), such activity was much the norm. For although the locals were not as involved with whiskey production as were farmers further west (who were farther from market and therefore more cognizant of the fact that a horse can carry only four bushels of grain but twenty-four bushels’ worth of distilled grain products, and who were as a result far more sensitive to the limitation of commercial freedom implied by a federal tax on spirits), the County register of 1792 listed forty-two still-owners operating fifty-five stills; while they were perhaps not involved with the tarring and feathering of government revenue collectors, they were certainly sympathetic to the rebels and antipathetic to the federal troops, commanded by General Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee (father of Robert E.) who came to put down the rebellion. It is possibly for this reason that President Washington chose to come into the field and take personal command of the troops, making his headquarters in the Town, thereby guarding the rear of the army with his personal prestige. Evidently the stratagem worked—the locals did not harry the flanks of the army, and a hotel, which later became a bakery, was named after Washington. He did not, however, sleep there, but made his headquarters at the home of Colonel Espy, a prominent local, a few doors away. In later years, the Espy House housed the local draft board.

  In other national conflicts, the County and the Town did their part, sending several companies to the War of 1812, and a full company of eighty volunteers, along with many regular recruits, to the Mexican War in 1846. The volunteer company, the “Independent Greys,” was mustered in the regiment that stormed Chapultepec, but the implied gallantry is somewhat misleading, as thirty of the eighty were “detailed, temporarily, on some other duty.” Since “nearly half” of the thirty died (two of them from “diarrhea”), the fifty are to be congratulated on their discretion.

  The County’s participation in the Civil War is somewhat ambiguous. Without a doubt, many men served gallantly on the Union side. Equally undoubtedly, a large number, many from the southern part of the County, where the descendants of Powell and his party of Virginia settlers peopled a section now known as Southampton Township, served the Confederacy with equal gallantry.

  Through the early and middle nineteenth century, the County knew some prominence due to a group of mineral springs which formed the basis for a resort industry attracting some of the richest and most powerful men in America. In the later portion of the century, however, both Town and County fell from grace. The decline of roads as principal means of transport injured the economy greatly. The Pennsylvania Railroad built its line thirty-nine miles to the north, through Altoona. The Baltimore & Ohio built its line thirty-five miles to the south, through Cumberland, Maryland. The South Penn Railroad, brainchild of William H. Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie, would have passed through the Town, but due to politica
l and economical maneuverings, and the intervention of J. P. Morgan, work on the South Penn Railroad—otherwise known as “Vanderbilt’s Folly”—ended on September 12, 1885. Even though some revival was occasioned by the use of the South Penn route for the building of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, which began half a century later, this was offset by the connection of a southern highway, Interstate Route 70, with the Turnpike at a point sixteen miles east of the Town.

  Now the county seat and watermark of westward expansion is a town served by only two local buses a day. If you’re in too much of a hurry to wait for one, you can buy a ticket and take your chances on begging or bribing the driver of an express bus to make a brief unscheduled stop on the ’pike, and walk four miles from there. I was in a hurry. I took my chances. The ticket cost eighteen bucks and change.

  Three and a half hours later my bus was boring up a moonlit slab of highway, the snarl of the exhaust bouncing off the walls of rock that towered on either side of the road. Except for the bus, the Turnpike was empty; four barren lanes, the concrete white like adhesive tape applied to the wounds the machines had slashed into the mountains. The bus moved swiftly, slamming on the downgrades, swaying on the turns. The driver was good and he knew the road; we were ahead of schedule, and long ago we had reached the point where the hills were familiar to me, even with just the moonlight to see by. Not that I needed to see them; I, too, knew the road, could pinpoint my location by the sways and the bumps. I knew that in a minute the driver would downshift and we would crawl up a long hill, and the road would be straight as an arrow from bottom to top, then twist away suddenly to the right. I knew that at the crest, just before the twist, there would be a massive gray boulder with names and dates scrawled on it, a cheap monument to the local consciousness: DAVID LOVES ANNIE; CLASS OF ’61; MARGO AND DANNY; BEAT THE BISONS; DEEP IN YOUR HEART YOU KNOW HE’S RIGHT; SCALP THE WARRIORS; NIXON THIS TIME. After that the road would twist and turn and rise and fall like a wounded snake for eighteen miles, and then I would be there, or as close as this bus would take me.

  And so I settled myself in my seat and took another pull on my flask and looked out the window at the mountainsides black with pine, and thought about how strange home is: a place to which you belong and which belongs to you even if you do not particularly like it or want it, a place you cannot escape, no matter how far you go or how furiously you run; about how strange it feels to be going back to that place and, even if you do not like it, even if you hate it, to get a tiny flush of excitement when you reach the point where you can look out the window and know, without thinking, where you are; when the bends in the road have meaning, and every hill a name.

  A truck swung around the turn ahead of us, its running lights dancing briefly in the darkness, the sound of its diesel penetrating the bus, audible over the rumble of the bus engine, and I thought of the nights when I would lie in bed, listening to the trucks on the ’pike grinding on the grades, bellowing like disgruntled beasts, and promise myself that someday I would go where they were going: away. Bill had done that too, had lain and listened to the trucks. He had told me—but not until years later—how he had lain there, night after night, chanting softly the names of far-off cities to the eerie accompaniment of the whine of truck tires. I had done the same, in my own way: I would start with the next town to the east or the west along the ’pike and move on, saying the names of the exits one by one, as if I were moving by them. Once I even reached New Jersey before I fell asleep. And I remembered thinking, when Bill told me of his game and I told him of mine, that his was so much better; that he had visited and revisited Paris, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Peking, while I was struggling to get out of the state. Later, I had wondered if it would be that way all our lives, he flying from place to place while I crawled, making local stops. I had watched with some curiosity to see if it would work out that way, and to some extent it had; he flew to Vietnam and never came back, and while I had taken a few leaps, I had ended up in Philadelphia. And now I was coming back, passing little towns, knowing their improbable names—Bloserville, Heberlig, Dry Run, Burnt Cabins, Wells Tannery, Defiance, Claylick, Plum Run, Buffalo Mills, Dott. The bus was an express, nonstop between Philly and Pittsburgh, but I was making local stops.

  The truck vanished behind us, leaving an afterimage on my eyes, and the bus rolled down into a valley and across a bridge. The stream below it was called Brush Creek, and this time of year it would be low. The logs would stick out from the banks and gouge gurgling hollows in the sluggish water. Half a mile upstream, near the hulk of a dead hickory, was the place where, surprising no one so much as myself, I had caught my first catfish. Old Jack had helped me bait the hook, had shown me how to get the fish off it. And then he had taken his knife and shown me how to scale the fish and gut it, and we had built a fire and fried the fish in bacon grease in a black iron skillet he had packed along. It was a lot of trouble to go to and it could not have been much of a meal for him—it wasn’t much of a fish—but he said there was something special about a boy’s first catfish, no matter how small it was.

  Then the bus was moving along the southern slope of a mountain—raw rock on one side, empty space on the other. I was almost there. I emptied the flask, capped it, put it in my pocket. I pulled my pack towards me, tightened the laces, checked the knots. Then I stood up and made my way towards the front. Five minutes later I stood by the side of the road, shivering in the sharp, clear mountain cold, and watched as the bus roared away into the darkness. And then I began to walk.

  In the pink and eerie light of false dawn I stood and looked up at it: an array of houses spread out along four streets called, starting at the lowermost, Railroad, Union, Lincoln, and Grant, connected at the eastern end by a slightly larger one grandly and ridiculously named Vondersmith Avenue. The streets were only vaguely parallel; the houses were not much better. They were oddly shaped, so tall and thin that it seemed their foundations were too small to support their height and, more often than not, leaning dangerously to confirm the impression. Most were of wood, and had often been patched, with corrugated metal and plywood and tar paper. Paths led from their back doors to yards where clotheslines sagged. Smoke rose from their rough brick chimneys and drifted down the slope, bringing to me the odor not of fuel oil but of kerosene and pine wood and coal and, mingled with it, the faint effluvium of outhouses. At the center of it all stood a small church made of whitewashed logs. That was it. The place locally termed Niggers Nob and Boogie Bend and Spade Hollow and, more officially, since the appellation came from a former town engineer, Jigtown: the Hill.

  I shrugged to resettle the pack on my shoulders and started up, thinking, as I did so, about the countless times I had made that climb, happy to be doing it, knowing it was the final effort before food, or drink, or bed, or just refuge from whatever it was that I needed to hide from. More than once I had reached the foot of the Hill on the dead run, pursued by white boys from the town, shouting names and curses; I would make the climb imagining that all the house windows were eyes staring at me; that they knew, somehow, that that day someone had called me a name or threatened me, and I had done nothing besides close my eyes and ears, trying to pretend it was not happening.

  But now I was a man, and the windows were only windows; the only effect they had was to make me wonder what was happening behind them. At one time I would have known with virtual certainty. Behind the windows of that house, the one with the siding of red shingle molded to look like brick, Joseph “Uncle Bunk” Clay would have been shaving, the muscles of his arms looking strong and youthful, his dark brown skin smooth and tight against the pure white of his athletic shirt. The steam would have been rising from the enamel basin before him as he wiped vestiges of white lather from his face with a creamy towel, and he would move with surprising agility for his fifty-odd years as he began to put on his bellboy’s uniform. Aunt Emma Hawley would have been making sour milk biscuits. She had been making them exactly the same way every morning for forty years; Mr. Hawley insisted on h
aving his breakfast biscuits. That was the weather-beaten house at the far end of Railroad Street, the one with the low shed next to it, in which three generations of Hawleys had tended store, one of the few places in the world where you could still buy a bottle of Moxie. A little way up the slope would have been the meticulously tended home of Aunt Lydia Pettigrew. Behind its shining clean windows Aunt Lydia would have been tenderly feeding the most bloodthirsty pack of mongrels north of Meridian, Mississippi. Aunt Lydia had kept the dogs since the state had taken her last two foster children, Daniel and Francis, away from her, and she was the only person who could come near those dogs without being torn to bits, for good reason—she had spoiled them by feeding them nothing but ground round steak, with Almond Joy candy bars for dessert. At the very bottom of the Hill, and way off to the left, two little girls would have been playing in front of a ramshackle house. The girls, Cara and Mara, and the house belonged to Miss Linda Jamison. It sat where it sat to spare visitors the necessity of climbing the Hill, of venturing any farther onto it than necessary. Inside it, Miss Linda would have been sleeping, exhausted from her night of entertaining a few “good friends” from the town. At the top of the Hill was the house Moses Washington had built. Behind its windows no one would have been stirring; Moses Washington had left his wife and children “comfortable,” which meant that his wife could support the family on the money she made as a lawyer’s secretary, and did not have to get up before seven. And on the far side of the Hill, where, quite literally, the sun didn’t shine, and where the houses—only one now—had no windows, Old Jack Crawley would have been “doing his mornings” in the old battered outhouse down the slope from the spring where he drew his water.