From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “Ye can’t tell ’em with their leaves, either. It’s ’cause you don’t pay any attention to anything ’cept what’s eatable.”

  York could only grin, because that was true.

  “Grin, y’ old pork barrel!” William would say, trying not to laugh. “But someday, y’ll find youself out someplace where there’s nothin’ eatable ’less you know what it is. Or else with your appetite y’ll pick up somethin’ poison. And then y’ll lay there on the ground a-huggin’ that big belly and screaming, and then by heaven you’ll wish you’d paid attention to me.”

  York would stick out his lower lip in a pout. “I don’t wanta go places where they’s nothin’ to eat!”

  “Well, hey, now, if you want t’ be my man, y’ll be goin’ places y’ never even heard of. Y’do wanta be my man, don’t ye?”

  “Sure do, Mast’ Billy.”

  “Well, I want you to be, too. So now,” he’d say, pointing again to the shrub or tree in question, “try t’ think, and name me that.”

  “I just can’t tell ’em without they leaves on, Mast’ Billy.”

  And at that, William would yowl with mock fury and jump on York like a panther, and a great, whooping, bone-creaking, snow-flinging wrestling match would ensue, with the quick, sinewy redhead pinning the stronger York deep down in the trampled snow.

  A WARMER WIND CAME OUT OF THE SOUTHWEST AND THE snow vanished in hours, allowing the party to leave their cabin in the mountain pass and move on.

  The frozen road thawed almost as fast, and the ruts were soon filled with melt water. Again the wagons were hub-deep in mud and brown water, and the men were wading in the icy muck again, hauling at spokes.

  At midafternoon, Edmund’s feet slid back out from under him as he strained with his shoulder at a wheel, and he fell full-length into a runny stew of muddy water, clods, and soggy leaves. Rising, he had mud over his entire face and body; gobs dribbled from his fists, which were clenched at his sides. He spat muddy water away from his lips and blinked it out of his eyes and lamented loudly:

  “This is damn low living for a former captain of the by God Continental Army!”

  William gasped with laughter and continued to strain at the back of the wagon. “Hell’s fire, Cap’n,” he snorted. “This is easy goin’ today. All downhill.”

  After two days of such effort, they reached Fort Cumberland, a shabby and overcrowded little outpost guarding the mountain passes. It was garrisoned by a small force of militiamen and three officers. It was but a token fort now, with no war going on, and stood only as a refuge from Indian raids for settlers in the vicinity. But it seemed more like a warren of drifters and adventurers, of frontiersmen and fur trappers traveling east and land-seekers and speculators going west. The Clark girls were bewildered and even frightened by the near-savage appearance of some of the backwoods dwellers. There were men dressed more like Indians than white men. There were brutish, scarred men missing an eye or an ear, and one whose nose had been bitten off by something or someone; there were louts who reeked of whiskey from morning to night; there were steely-eyed long hunters with greasy hair and skin, wearing clothes so stiff with blood and filth and so smoke-blackened that they looked like iron. There was a huge, crazy-eyed woman, survivor of some Indian raid, whose face from the cheekbones down was flecked with embedded black gunpowder; there were two brassy wenches smelling like dead fish and constantly scratching, who seemed to belong to nobody or anybody in the fort.

  Living conditions in the fort were scarcely better than in the little cabin, but the Clarks were treated to every kindness the garrison could afford. Among the raffish sojourners here, it happened that there were several who had served under George, and these tended to grow teary-eyed with nostalgia when they sat and told about the high point of their lives, which had been the wonderful victory over General Hamilton in ’79. It was almost impossible to believe that men of such appearance could have been heroes, but anyone who had been a part of that campaign was acknowledged to be one.

  Edmund drifted close to a heated discussion near the fort’s stables. There were three lean men in buckskins, and a stocky man in a dark green velvet jackcoat standing unheeding of the ankle-deep mud in the compound, all waxing derisive about “the dang Spaniards,” and their blockade of commercial traffic on the lower Mississippi. Edmund had heard it much discussed while he had been in Louisville working on his parents’ new home. It was said to be strangling Kentucky.

  The stout man, Edmund soon learned, was a shipper of lumber, tobacco, flour, and other produce from the burgeoning Kentucky settlements. The other three were trappers.

  “I can’t eat furs,” said one of these. “I can eat what was inside of ’em. But pelts stackin’ up with no place to go, why, that’s not goin’ to buy me no gear. And I tell ye, this is the last time I take the trouble to haul anythin’ up th’ God-damned Ohio River. I want to go down the Mississippi. I wonder, do them bright gents in th’ government yonder know rivers run easier downstream?”

  “They might know,” growled the shipper. “But as for carin’, why, they don’t seem to at all. I went to ever’body I ever heard of, an’ talked till my feet sweat, but most I got was a ‘Hum, now, that is a pity indeed.’ What I ain’t sure they know is whether there be a Mis’ipp’ out there, nemmine whether she runs uphill or down.”

  “Y’know my feelin’s,” grumbled another of the fur traders. “A guv’ment that don’t know y’ exist ain’t your guv’ment atall. I say Kentuck ought t’ break off an’ be its own country, and go down and deal with Spaniards our own way.” He raised his clenched fist. “You, sir,” he said to Edmund. “Y’seem to have an interest. Pray, what’s your stance on it?”

  “No stance,” replied Edmund, “as I’m from Virginia, not Kentuck. I listen to learn, by y’r leave.”

  “Hm,” the man said, nodding. “Then learn this: my stance as I say is make our own country. Then send General Clark down with an army o’ Kentuckians to pluck the tailfeathers out o’ that Spaniard governor.”

  Edmund drew a corner of his mouth back and sucked an eyetooth. “Clark, y’ say?”

  “The very man. I went with ’im agin the Shawnees, both in ’80 and ’82, and he’s a man could open New Orleans up real wide. Y’know of ’im, bein’ a Virginian, I’d reckon.”

  “I’ll admit,” Edmund answered after a moment, “I have heard considerable about the man lately.”

  WHEN THE CLARKS SET OUT FROM FORT CUMBERLAND FOR the Red Stone Fort on the Monongahela River the next morning, they had an uninvited escort. Five mounted men, with two packhorses, were waiting at the gate. Their leader apparently was the trader in the green coat. He sat his horse, the early sunlight of a fair, cold day harshly illuminating the stubble and oiliness of his fat jowls and the boils above his collar. The four men with him held long rifles across their pommels. One of them was the man with the bitten-off nose. “Oh Lordy me,” Lucy moaned to her mother. “I’d hoped never to have my eyes fall on that pigsnout again. It gives me shivers.”

  “Rather picked him up than what I did pick up,” Mrs. Clark said, discreetly scratching at a part of her lower body.

  “You too, Ma?” whispered Elizabeth, whose own fingernails were chasing a newly acquired louse through her armpit.

  The trader rode close to Edmund and extended his hand. “Forgive me not knowin’ ye yesterday, Cap’n Clark. My name’s Greathouse. Ye might like some company down to Red Stone?”

  Greathouse, Edmund thought, and he wondered whether this was one of the Greathouses George had spoken of, who had murdered the family of the Mingo chief Logan a decade ago, thus setting off Dunmore’s War. “You’re welcome to go along with us,” he said reluctantly, “though I fear our wagons’ll slow ye down some.”

  It was customary for groups to enforce each other as they entered the Indian country. Still, Edmund whispered to his father and William to keep their eyes open for any sign of treachery.

  So they started southwestward down the long valleys toward t
he Monongahela under a clear November sky. It was their easiest going yet. Greathouse’s men tended to ride as a group in the advance, while the trader himself stayed close by.

  As for the women, they were glad that the pig-snout man was far ahead and facing the other way.

  “Y’re going to the Falls of Ohio, then, I presume,” said Greathouse, riding alongside the wagon Edmund was driving.

  “Ye presume right.”

  “I might be of service then. I have boats for hire at Red Stone. Roomy and sound. Ask anyone. And not costly, as ye’d be ridin’ down with paid freight.”

  They discussed fares and the Clarks found them reasonable; an agreement was made.

  “I’ve a cousin served with y’r brother,” Greathouse said after a while.

  “Do ye, now.”

  “Aye. At the battle of Vincennes. He never stops talkin’ of it.”

  “M-hm.” Edmund was beginning to envy those who had been on that campaign, despite their sufferings. It must have been a tidier and more satisfying war than the one he’d been in. He remembered mainly the endless and aimless marching of huge bodies of blue-coated Continentals from place to place, and the helpless burrowing from bombshells at Charleston, and the sadness of defeat.

  “Have y’ever heard of a General Wilkinson, sir?” Greathouse asked.

  Edmund had; he searched his memory. “Clothier-General, wasn’t he?” Edmund vaguely remembered some scandal. Dismissal for neglect of duty or something.

  “Aye. Him,” said Greathouse. “Well, he came through here not long ago. Downriver someplace now, maybe at Louisville.”

  “Well, that’s interesting,” Edmund said after a while, “but how does that concern me, may I ask?”

  “In that he’s reputed for venality and uncommon ambition, where he goes, folks want to watch out. Especially folks of position.”

  Edmund studied the trader from the corner of his eye and wondered what ax he had to grind.

  “I only hope General Clark will be wary, sir,” Greathouse said finally.

  Edmund felt a sudden surge of appreciation. He smiled at Greathouse. “Brother George is the wariest o’ men,” he said. “And I thankee for y’r good counsel.”

  With the road so fine and the sky so fair, they made a third of the distance down to the Monongahela before dark. Greathouse’s riders had selected a campsite in a cliff cave and built a fire by the time the wagons arrived. The cave was the size of a ballroom. Its smoky walls showed it had been long used as a shelter.

  The Clarks and the Greathouse party contributed to the dinner table—though there was no table—and a fine dinner of pone, venison, bean soup, and apple jam was served. The Clark women tried not to look at the noseless man during the meal, as he was a particularly unappetizing sight with his face lit from below by a bonfire. For a man who evidently was some extraordinary brawler, however, he had a shy and soft-spoken demeanor. And when Greathouse coaxed him to go get his fiddle and start playing reels, he quickly became as pleasant a companion as any man. Greathouse’s men stomped and capered through a pair of jigs, whooping and flapping their elbows with more vigor than grace. When the fiddler changed to reels, the young Clark ladies began getting up to dance, paired first with their brothers, then with the strangers. A dark jug had appeared sometime, from somewhere, and the fiddler played “Betsy Kiss My Lips” as it was passed from one man to the next. The Negroes looked on in delight. York eventually leaped up and began capering near the fire, his huge body bending and straightening in motions totally unlike what the others were dancing, but he was so animated that eventually everyone else stopped for a while to watch him.

  The high point of the evening came when William, flushed with good spirits—his own and those he had drunk—at last persuaded his mother to get up and take a few turns around the cave with him. She grumbled and protested a great deal at first, saying: “I don’t know how t’ dance; I been busy havin’ you ten babies since I was fifteen!” But she soon was whirling so prettily that old John Clark was stirred into action, and got up and danced her around and around the fire, the two of them looking at each other, eyes alight with long memories.

  And Lucy thought she heard her mother say, in the dark after midnight when the cave was full of snores:

  “Remember, John. We agreed. Ten’s enough.”

  WHEN THEY SAW THE OLD RED STONE FORT TWO MORNINGS later, it stood glowing, almost brick color in weak morning sunlight against a backdrop of frost-white, leafless trees. The frozen road sparkled with frost. The morning was stinging cold. A horizontal curtain of woodsmoke from the fort and nearby houses hung a few feet over the low bluff on which the fort was built, next to the mouth of Red Stone Creek. Above the settlement rose a massive silver-blue mountain; below the bluff curved the slate-gray Monongahela, which was to be the start of their long water road down to their new Kentucky home. Along the river there were mooring posts, and two wharfs of plank and pilings, and a windowless row of Ohio Company log warehouses. There seemed to be more boats along the riverbank than houses in the town: blunt-ended flatboats with shanties built on them, featureless barges lying low in the water, scows and skiffs, and one row-galley with a mast and boom. There were windlasses and winches. Bark and wood-chips littered the ground of a boat-building yard.

  But there were no vessels coming or going out on the river. Greathouse frowned as he rode, wrapped to the nose in a muffler, and studied the river. It was a still, gray sheet of ice.

  “Damnation,” Greathouse mumbled. “May have to lay here till a thaw, Mister Clark, sorry t’ say.”

  The Clark convoy started up toward the town to inquire about lodging while Greathouse went down to look his boats over for ice damage and to talk with rivermen about the freeze.

  “Hey, Pa,” Edmund called. “What say’ee nobody mentions Brother George here? I’m ’bout honored out. All in favor say ’aye’!”

  Several voices from within the wagons called “Aye.” But Mrs. Clark added:

  “’Less we need somethin’.”

  The early freeze-up of the river had bottled up westward traffic, and the town was full of transients and rivermen. It appeared that no lodgings would be found, and that the Clarks would have to live in their wagons for as many days as they might be here. “Or maybe Mr. Greathouse will let us live aboard a flatboat,” John Clark said.

  “Nonsense,” said Mrs. Clark. She threw off the blanket in which she had been wrapped, climbed down from the wagon seat, and went into the public house. There she told the publican that she was the mother of George Rogers Clark.

  In less than an hour all the Clark party was quartered in the inn and in private homes around the town.

  “I WAS HERE IN ’78,” SAID THE INNKEEPER, POINTING HIS pipestem at John Clark across the table, “when that boy o’ your’n was here tryin’ to recruit his army. And never in my days have I seed Fate so stubborn against a man. Every single day I expected to see that lad just give up and go home.” The innkeeper had a greasy-looking head of graying auburn hair and a narrow, stubbly, undershot chin that canted to the right as if it had been knocked off center. He set the stem back between his teeth with a click, puffed, and went on: “But he had a way with people, and he could get the unlikeliest scoundrels all het up about doin’ great sarvice. I’ll say this, things were mighty quiet around here for a while after he’d left, as ’e’d signed on and took with ’im most every tavern-wreckin’, eye-gougin’, horse-stealin’, bear-rapin’ outlaw and general ring-tailed roarer from the whole countryside. I remember tellin’ ’im, ‘Colonel Clark, sir, y’ve got y’rself as felonious an army there as ever walked, and they’ll fair chew up y’r enemies and spit out their bones, if they don’t do th’ same to you first.’”

  HAVING BEEN ICE-LOCKED FOR A WEEK IN RED STONE SETtlement with their boats and cargoes, some of the rivermen were restless and unpleasant. At night they could be heard going roaring drunk up and down the street of the little town, breaking emptied jugs, kicking dogs, cursing each other with jovi
al familiarity or acid belligerence, and sometimes kicking each other if there were no dogs within reach. As a breed, these rivermen seemed to fight more with their feet than with their hands.

  “Wonder why that is,” John Clark mused to Edmund one afternoon as they sat drinking rum near the door of the-public house. Outside, two big riverboatmen were trying diligently to crush each other’s private parts with spectacular, grunting kicks.

  “I reckon,” Edmund observed, “it’s ’cause they won’t lay down their jugs long enough to free up their hands.”

  That evening, though, in the dining room, a pair of burly flatboat pilots did show that their feet were not their only weapons. John Clark and his sons were sitting with Greathouse over a supper of venison stew, when the door leading down the guestroom corridor burst inward, torn off its hinges and splintered, and with it came the two pilots, locked together in a stamping, scuffling, careening embrace and emitting a double-voiced snarl that made them look and sound like some two-headed, four-footed beast trying simultaneously to tear off its own limbs and dance itself to death.

  This apparition reeled across the room until it struck the end of the Clarks’ table and fell upon it, smashing crockery and sloshing venison stew in every direction.

  And then the diners, sitting aghast and dripping stew, watched one pilot bite off the other’s underlip with bloody, seesawing teeth, while his victim broke all the fingers of the biter’s left hand.

  “Of such,” said the innkeeper after the brawlers had been clubbed unconscious and repaired with splints and bandages, “was a considerable part of your son’s army made, Mister Clark. Less wonder ’e caught th’ British, eh?”

  John Clark wiped stew off his weskit, gazed at the wrecked, blood-spattered table, and shook his head.

  “Or else more wonder,” he replied.

  ANN ROGERS CLARK WAS AWAKENED IN DARKNESS BY DISTANT shouting and running feet. Fanny was snuggling close to her in fright, and Mrs. Clark for a moment could not remember where she was. The bed was musty and the corn shucks of the mattress rustled under her. It had been ages since she had slept on corn shucks, and it seemed as if years had fallen away and she was a young woman back in Albemarle County. Then she remembered: Red Stone.