From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “To my mind,” Ann Rogers Clark said, “it’s Fanny who determines whether we stay or go. Whether she’s got the pneumonia.”

  By the end of a week the rivers had thawed, but Fanny was not well enough to go on.

  Greathouse came down the Monongahela two days after the thaw. His boats were leaking badly from the pressures of the ice and had to be unloaded and hauled up for caulking. The Clarks had their belongings near at hand again now, in a rat-infested warehouse by the boatyard. The sky cleared and the temperatures fell, and again the Ohio was frozen hard. Fanny was improving, but still too weak from the bleedings, Dr. O’Fallon said, to travel. “So,” said John Clark, “let’s make the best of it. We seem to be here for the winter. Edmund, next trip down to the warehouse, fetch that nice backgammon board Colonel Mason gave us. I’ll wager, if we practice all winter, we’ll be able to play the breeches off George when we get to Kentuck.”

  But they had less time for backgammon than they might have expected. Pittsburgh did not give them much idle time. The town, raw though it looked, had its little society, and the society knew that the Clarks of Virginia were present, with their illustrious name, with their comely daughters. Pittsburgh society was a mixture of the crude and the genteel. It was a funnel for news, gossip, and rumor pertaining to everything and everyone passing to and from the west. And so it happened that the Clark family spent its Christmas of 1784 in the society not of Louisville, but of Pittsburgh. Their host was a Pennsylvanian, Colonel Neville, who had helped George obtain provisions three years before, during one of his futile efforts to raise an expedition against Detroit. A large and merry entertainment was held in the Colonel’s home, and by now Fanny had recovered enough to attend. Dr. O’Fallon was present, and he watched her as closely as if she were still mortally ill. Whenever she was approached by any young buck of the town, or danced with one, the doctor would break away from any conversation he was in to come and see how she was feeling, or to admonish her against exhausting herself.

  Late in the evening, Elizabeth and Fanny were filling their cups at the punchbowl. Fanny leaned over the bowl, sniffing, her face rapt. “Come,” Elizabeth said.

  “Wait,” said Fanny. Her eyes were shut and she was breathing deeply. Elizabeth looked at her curiously; she looked as if she were in a trance, swaying, inhaling. Elizabeth got a little alarmed and touched her arm. “Are ye faint? Drunk?” Fanny kept breathing the steam from the bowl, her cheeks flushed.

  “Nothing. I’m well!” And when she came away she said, “That dear doctor! He got me so stunk up with garlic, nobody can come near me! Here, Betty, Hon, do I smell better now, like clove and ginger?” She had been trying to perfume herself with the fumes from the punchbowl.

  “O Lord, Fanny, ye silly! What you smell like now is an ol’ toddy-sot!”

  DR. O’FALLON KEPT COMING TO SEE FANNY EVERY DAY though she was quite recovered now. He spent New Year’s Eve going around with the Clark family to the different homes to which they had been invited, and at Colonel Neville’s, when the clock began bonging midnight and the cups were being raised all around, Dr. O’Fallon and Fanny Clark turned their faces to each other, and Dr. O’Fallon planted a kiss upon her ivory forehead. Her deep blue, long-lashed eyes widened so far that the whites showed all the way around the irises, then closed, and her face glowed pink, and she was aware of the New Year’s greetings only as a chorus of happy murmurings whirling around outside her head.

  “Oh,” she gasped to Lucy a few minutes later, after dragging her into the privacy of a vestibule, “oh, Sister, I’m going to marry that James O’Fallon, that’s my first thought of the Year of our Lord 1785!” Lucy had to admit to herself that Elizabeth had been right.

  “Well, little sister, you might as well make it your resolution,” she said. “I’ve been resolving every year now that I’m going to marry Bill Croghan, and he’s only just now coming to believe it himself, I think!”

  Dr. O’Fallon had come to be a good friend of the Clark menfolk, too, helping them keep the backgammon board busy in the evenings, riding out in the countryside with them to hunt when the winter confinement gave them cabin fever. One mild January day, which had melted most of the snow in the forest, they came upon a level piece of woodland flanked by ridges. The earth had a strange, bumpy look to it; grass seemed to have grown over a thousand little hummocks. A shoe of William’s horse clinked upon something in the grass. William dismounted and picked something up. “Look’ee, Pa, it’s from a singletree.” He passed the object, a rust-eroded iron ring attached to an iron band, to his father.

  “Aye, that’s what it looks like.” A few feet farther on William’s sharp eye found another rusty bit of metal; he pulled at it and an old bayonet ripped out of the roots of grass. A few minutes of turning up old brass spurs and buckles and gorgets and iron barrel hoops and ramrods, and then a broken human skull, and old John Clark suddenly understood. It was an old battlefield, and the irregularities in the ground were all overgrown bits of junk from the battle. Everywhere there were wagon wheels, hubs and bolts, bones, tomahawk heads, bucket handles, shoe buckles. “Look at the trees,” William said, pointing. The bark of many of the trees was puckered, the scars of old bullet holes.

  “May th’ Eternal have mercy,” John Clark said, taking off his hat and holding it on his breast. “This’d be Braddock’s battleground.” He took a deep breath and his eyes went deep as he remembered. He told them again of the day when the news of the slaughter had swept through Albemarle County. “Near thirty years ago, it was, and I’d never in my life felt so low and black in my soul!”

  The young men looked around as if the place were haunted. John Clark went on: “Many a patriot o’ the war just past got baptized in blood here. Gen’l Washington. Gen’l Morgan. Dan’l Boone. Gen’l Andrew Lewis. Those were some that lived, thank the Lord. Boys, take your hats off, because this ground has been watered with the blood of a thousand brave Englishmen.” He paused. “And lest we’ve forgot,” John Clark added sadly, “we were Englishmen then.”

  Now they took off their hats.

  THE RIVER ICE GRUMBLED AND BROKE UP EARLY IN FEBRUary, and though the sky was leaden and rainy, Mister Greathouse felt it in his bones that the river was through freezing, and came up to the fort and told John Clark he was ready to set out next day, and asked him if he and his family wished to throw in with him again and risk a little discomfort to get to their new home by early March. The family discussed it with Bill Croghan, and then John Clark said, “Aye, Mr. Greathouse. Put our furniture aboard. We’ll bring some Negroes down to help.”

  And so they packed their small things that night, and sent notes of thanks to their hosts and friends of Pittsburgh, and were aboard the next morning by daylight. Some of the Pittsburgh people were on the wharf at that early hour to wave them off.

  There was another small crowd, too, seeing off another traveler. This was a dapper, handsome young man of about twenty-seven with a hearty personality, mellifluous voice, and courtly grace. “That’s General Wilkinson,” Greathouse said in a low voice to Edmund’s ear. “Y’ll recollect we spoke of ’im last fall? He’s paid fare as far as the mouth of the Kentucky. Ye’ll get a chance to know ’im. But I say, look out.” The girls could scarcely keep their eyes off him, not even Fanny, who had been in a profound slump since the departure of Dr. O’Fallon a few days before. “D’you suppose he’s a married gent?” Elizabeth murmured to Lucy. On the wharf, the young dandy and his friends were drinking from a silver flask, using its cap as a glass. He was making cheerful toasts whose cleverness seemed to be keeping his friends in a high state of amusement. At last he embraced them all, men and women alike, sprang lightly upon the gangplank with an elegant swirl of his cape, and leaped lightly to the deck. He bowed to the Clark women with sparkling eyes. “Good day, my fellow sojourners!” he burbled. “A word with you, Mister Greathouse, about some arrangements, and then I must meet these distinguished-looking passengers. Excuse us, my dears.”

  “That,”
queried Ann Rogers Clark with a pursed smile and raised eyebrows, “is a general?”

  John Clark smiled and winked, then squinted into the sleet to watch the boatmen cast off. William climbed topside, greeted his old friend Mister Manifee, and at once was hard at work as if earning his berth. He stood on the cabin roof with his feet wide apart, face flushed, gazing in awe at the long, broad, northwesterly curve of the great Ohio, whose flint-gray surface was dimpled and ruffled with sleet, dotted with great hunks of floating ice. As the boat moved past the point of land, he watched the Allegheny pouring in on the right, watched the little people on the wharf stop waving and begin filing up the road toward the town. He watched the gloomy fort grow smaller and smaller astern.

  “Well, Master Clark,” said the helmsman, “we’re under way again, goin’ to a new world, eh? And I wonder what it is you’re a-thinkin’.”

  William turned to look at the strange noseless face, which had come to be no more ugly than many another face, and answered, “Thinkin’ a lot. About where this river goes. And tryin’ to count up how many times my brother George started down this river from here.”

  “How many I don’t know,” Manifee said. “But I do remember the one time, that May o’ ’78, on th’ way to Kaskasky. That I’ll never forget, m’ boy, ’cause I was with ’im.”

  William’s mouth dropped open. He stared at Manifee’s deep-socketed eyes, which were squinting into the sleet. Those eyes glanced over and saw William’s surprise, and crinkled with a smile.

  “Y’ never told me that before,” William said.

  “A man don’t tell all ’e knows right off.”

  “Were you one of ’em as marched to Vincennes?”

  “That I was, boy, and it was weather just like t’day. Y’see how cold that water looks? Wal, it feels three times colder.”

  “I know about cold water,” William said, remembering the Monongahela.

  “Well, boy, there’s a lots of us ’long this ol’ river who set out with ’im on that day, and I’ll tell y’ this: no man ever drug me through so much hell and misery as he did. But I’ll tell y’ another thang. Does Gen’l Clark ever need me again, I’m set t’ go.” He swallowed a scraggy Adam’s apple and gazed at the high, gray, wooded bluffs along the river. Then he said: “Your family. It’s a bad country we’re a-goin’ to. But I’ll tell ye. There’s nothin’ll happen to ’em that I can help. My word on’t.”

  They were not ten miles down the river, all sitting over tea in the stuffy little cabin of the riverboat, before General James Wilkinson had offered his friendship to the Clarks and told them everything about himself that he thought would impress them. It was really a bit hard to look at the elegant young fellow with his unlined face and believe it was all possible. But likely it was approximately true, as no one, surely, would have the audacity to make up such a history. He had grown up on a Maryland plantation and had studied medicine as a youth; and had been commissioned a brevet brigadier general in the Continental Army and appointed secretary to the Board of War. He said he had been with Benedict Arnold on his march to Quebec and, without actually saying it, managed to give the impression that he was somehow the guiding spirit in the events that later uncovered Arnold’s treason. Wilkinson also claimed it was he who had delivered to Congress the news of Burgoyne’s surrender at Saratoga in 1777—“That was when I was aide to General Gates,” he added casually—and he just happened to have a document on his person that proved the truth of it. “I was invited to address Congress with particulars of that great victory,” he said, “and in consequence, that great body generously appointed me a brigadier general.” He tilted his head and a modest smile curved his shapely lips. This last account nudged a corner of John Clark’s memory, and he raised a finger over the table, and said:

  “Yes, yes! I read o’ that. Some said Gen’l Dan Morgan of Virginia should have got that promotion, for what he did at Saratoga.” He sat back and looked at Wilkinson. The young officer raised his eyebrows at this, which seemed to be a note of contention from his heretofore complacent listener, then quickly adapted himself.

  “I myself felt that,” he said, “as Daniel Morgan certainly was an able and brave man, aye, one of our true best. But of course I could only accept.”

  “Of course, of course,” said John Clark with a slightly mocking smile. Whatever else Wilkinson might have intended to tell about his illustrious career, he now dropped, perhaps being aware that he was talking to a man of some knowledge, rather than a gullible old gent.

  Wilkinson now went on to more current achievements, telling how he had married a daughter of the eminent Philadelphia Biddles after the war—the Clark girls looked at each other and shrugged—how he had been elected to the Pennsylvania Assembly, and now was building a fine home in Lexington, Kentucky, where he was stationed as a partner in an important Philadelphia trading firm. He intended, he said, to use his political capabilities for the advancement of Kentucky’s interests. “I become convinced that Kentucky has needs that none of the leaders in Virginia seems to grasp,” he said. “As you might know, there’s strong sentiment among the Kentuckians to be made a separate state from Virginia.”

  “Are you, General, of those sentiments?” Bill Croghan asked.

  “Why, Sir, I am trying thus far to evaluate the matter. But forgive me!” he exclaimed suddenly, stirring on his bench and smiling around at the semicircle of Clarks. “How can I forget manners so reprehensibly as to engage in political talk in such charming company? I shall never forgive myself if I bore the ladies! So. So, so. You are all the Clarks, and you’re going to Kentucky, eh? What part, pray? I should hope Lexington, that we might perhaps see each other …?”

  “To Louisville, sir,” said John Clark proudly. “We’re moving there lock, stock, and barrel, from Virginia. Our sons have made us a new home there, on a fine site.”

  “Splendid! How admirably devoted of them. What line are they in, if I may pursue my curiosity?”

  “Soldiers,” Ann Rogers Clark interjected in a quick, strong voice. “Surely the general has heard of Colonel Jonathan Clark, hero of the Battle of Paulus Hook, and General George Rogers Clark, conqueror of the Northwest.”

  “And father of Kentucky,” Edmund added just as proudly.

  At the names, the young officer’s face momentarily froze, then he was instantly more effusive than ever. “By Heaven, you don’t say so! Of General Clark himself! Why, why, sir, Madame, may I kiss your hands! Why, ha! ha! Here I have been, going on and on about myself, never suspecting that I spoke to the—well, what? Shall I say, ha, ha, the grandfather and grandmother of Kentucky?”

  “That, sir, is not particularly gracious,” said Mrs. Clark.

  “I jest, forgive me, Madame. Ha, ha! One could not mistake you for a grandmother.” Wilkinson now was reaching into the duffel bag that leaned against his bench.

  “It would be no mistake,” she retorted. “I am one.”

  It was obvious that the young dandy’s charms were being wasted on this grand and handsome lady. He quickly flashed his silver flask over the table, unscrewing its cap. “Cognac,” he said, “from LaFayette’s own stock. Do have some, against the chill, and of course I should like to drink in honor of your illustrious sons!”

  “You’re generous with a precious stuff,” said John Clark, taking the cap and passing it under his nose.

  “An investment well made,” Wilkinson replied jovially, “as it’s my belief that the way to a man’s heart is down his throat. Drink up, Mister Clark. To your great sons and lovely daughters.”

  GENERAL WILKINSON HAD THE UNUSUAL ABILITY TO BE fawning and overbearing at the same time. And the Clarks, despite their immediate distrust of him, could not but enjoy his company as the keelboat drifted silently down the gray Ohio. His wit and joviality warmed the dank cabin in which they sat with blankets over their laps. He seemed to be able to drink a bit every hour of the day without becoming really intoxicated; his faculties were such that he could win at backgammon even while ca
rrying on a learned and entertaining discourse on the most complex subject, be it medicine, politics, or the foibles of Eastern society. He was a cartographer of masterful skill, as he proved by showing the Clarks a portfolio of battle maps he had made during the recent war; the maps were superior in detail and draftsmanship to any they had ever seen, including Peter Jefferson’s. He knew a great deal about Indian affairs, it seemed, about treaties, and he carried on a learned discussion with Bill Croghan about the history of British Indian affairs under Sir William Johnson. He was impressed that Bill Croghan was related to famous Tories but had become a patriot.

  Wilkinson could leap from serious discourse to affable banter and back without losing a step. “You, my dear Miss Fanny,” he would say with an avuncular smile, “as the youngest member of such an illustrious and handsome family, what do you expect you’ll be as the years go by? Will you be a famous beauty of the stage? A governor’s wife? If there were a clean, white china cup here to read tea leaves in, I’d tell your fortune. But, ha, ha! to read in these stained and rusty vessels of Captain Greathouse would be like probing the bottom of an old cistern, would it not? And it’s plain your future will not be dark like that, nay. What, come now, do you expect for yourself?”

  Fanny was by no means backward. “Sir,” she replied after a swift glance at her mother, “I expect to marry a doctor, I do, and I sh’ll be to him as my mother is to my father: his helpmeet and partner in every way, so that he’ll need me and depend upon me.”

  He clapped his hands together and squeezed them. “Well said, and such a fine tribute to your mother!”

  “Fine and true,” said John Clark, reaching over and laying his hand on his wife’s wrist.