From Sea to Shining Sea

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  “And you, my dear,” he said to Lucy, “what about you?”

  “I,” she said, tilting her head toward Bill Croghan, “am waiting to see if this gentleman has any plans in that same line.” Croghan raised his eyebrows and stuck his tongue in his cheek.

  William had come down from topside during this, red-nosed and teary-eyed from the cold, and stood just inside the door looking around in the gloom. “By heaven,” Wilkinson exclaimed, turning to look at him over his shoulder, “enter the young scion, glowing with the cold. Master Clark, come sit by me. Would your parents object if I offered you a dram of bottled sunshine?”

  “Likely not,” William said. “They always dose me with it when I cough. HOUAGH! HOUAGH!”

  Wilkinson threw his head back and roared, then wiped his eyes and chuckled as he poured a potion in the little silver cap. All the Clarks were laughing with, or at, him. William drew up a stool and sat at the table with his cape still on and laid his pipe and a carrot of tobacco out on the table, and stuck his hunting knife in the tabletop. Then he passed the liquor under his nose. “My, my! I’d say that’s good enough to sip.” He took a small bit and let it trickle down over his tongue, and it spread a glow down his throat. He evidently had pegged this dandy as someone to be shown off to in a manly way; with men he deeply respected he was quiet. Wilkinson, of course, had no suspicion that he was being taken lightly. “My brother George taught me to tell by a whiff whether something deserves to be sipped or bolted,” William explained.

  “Ah! A connoisseur, is he?” Wilkinson said.

  “I don’t know about that,” William replied, taking another sip, “but he used to cough a lot.”

  “Oh, Billy, that’s not so!” exclaimed Fanny. Wilkinson seemed to be putting something down in his mental notebook for a moment, then he laughed again and he watched William trim some riffs of tobacco off the end of the twist with his razor-sharp knife and fill his pipe.

  “I’m only joking,” William said, pulling a candle to him and craning his head over to draw its flame into the pipe, puffing up a fragrant blue cloud.

  Wilkinson sniffed it and assumed an expression of bliss. “Mm-mmm! Now, that’s for connoisseurs!” he exclaimed.

  “He grew and cured it himself,” John Clark said.

  “Really! Is your curing method a family secret, Master Clark?”

  “It’s like this, sir. I hang it up in a barn.”

  William’s mother quickly put her hand over her mouth to hide a smile. Oh, my, she thought, this lickspittle dandy’s sure to make me laugh out unladylike yet, I swear!

  WHEN GREATHOUSE’S BOATS STOPPED AT WHEELING, WILliam pointed up at the fort and told General Wilkinson, “My brother George built that fort.” They all went up for a look at it, and, predictably, Wilkinson raved about the structure. Here at Wheeling, other boats joined Greathouse’s, and soon a dozen vessels were floating or rowing along within sight of each other down the widening breast of the Ohio between the ominous, wintry cliffs and bluffs. The numbers were reassuring. Since the war the flow of British goods and weapons into the tribes had diminished some, and tribes living north of the Ohio, angered by the constant flood of white men into the valley, felt justified in taking what they needed from the whites whenever they could catch lone vessels or weak and unguarded parties. Greathouse kept his flotilla out of musket range in midriver, and sentries constantly alert.

  Bill Croghan and Lucy Clark spent most of their time wrapped up in each other’s company, probably talking marriage, though no one could overhear them because they murmured like doves. William spent most of his time topside with Manifee, sketching and writing in a notebook, inquiring the name of every tributary, learning the navigational hazards. “A good riverman’s a prize,” Manifee said, obviously including himself. He told William funny stories about George’s favorite pilot, the one-eyed Davy Pagan, whose nautical language was so salty he went by the nickname of “the forepoop swabman.” “Y’ll meet ’im ere long,” Manifee said. “’E runs a ferry now ’twixt Louisville and Clarksville. Ha, heee! What an old sea-cock that’n is!” Now he pointed. “Yonder to larboard’s Grave Crick.”

  “Hey,” William exclaimed, and called down. “Ma! Pa! Here’s where George made his first farm, before the war!”

  It was corn stubble and clearings now, the Indian mounds clearly visible.

  And later that day Edmund pointed to the place where George had first encountered Chief Logan. “There’s where they sat and smoked,” he said. They all gazed at it and remembered the story, remembered George’s telling of it long ago.

  This scene was repeated over and over as they floated down the wintry river: Pipe Creek, where George had first fought Shawnees, with Cresap. Yellow Creek, where Chief Logan’s relatives had been massacred; Greathouse was grim and silent as they passed it. The mouth of the Kanawha, where Chief Logan had shown George the French plaque, and where General Andrew Lewis had fought the major battle of Dunmore’s War. Days later, Limestone Creek, near where Joe Rogers had been captured on Christmas Day of ’76. One morning when they had been on the Ohio for three hundred miles, Manifee pointed to the mouth of the Licking, where George had formed up his armies in ’80 and ’82 to march against the Shawnee towns. By now the whole family was aware that this wilderness was dominated by George’s spirit. Ann Rogers Clark lay that night on the shelf of straw that was her bed in the keelboat’s cabin and looked at the little candle-lamp glowing on the table in the middle of the compartment while the water of the Ohio gurgled under the hull, and the sense of all those events was boiling in her mind and soul.

  Look at all that’s grown out of the head and heart of that boy of ours, she thought. Look at all these boats going down to Kentuck, and he made Kentuck. And now here’s John and me goin’ out like pilgrims a-followin’ him on and on west, we who’ve been Virginia planters for so long, just giving up home and following, ’cause where he goes it seems like everybody rushes in after him.

  And when she thought of George, this wonder of a man everybody talked about here on this side of the mountains, she thought of him in the way that only a mother can think of a great man, and she remembered that stormy November day in ’52 when he was born, and she remembered the thunder and the lightning and the storm and the chicken-stealing Indians, all those omens, and then his emergence into the world. Thirty-two years ago, she thought, and a world turned upside down since, and yet I can remember it just plain as yesterday.

  The womb never forgets, she thought. She thought of all this, and shifted in her blanket, the stale blanket with all the old riverboat smells in it, shifted her weight to snuggle closer to the warmth of good old John, strong, wise, devout, able old John Clark, as good a man as any Woman could ever want, who for onto thirty-five years now had lain beside her like this, radiating heat like a stove and making all the nights snug and safe, first out in the wilds of Albemarle, and then in the big house at Caroline, and now in wagons and huts and caves and forts and boats as they migrated west, and soon he’d be warming her in a big mulberry-log house in some wondrous place called Louisville, where they’d likely finish up their days together.

  I kind of hope we die together, she thought. I don’t think it’d be a fit world for either of us t’ live in if the other was gone.

  Old John Clark said “Hm” in his sleep and put his arm across her waist, and she went to sleep in his warmth, floating down the river through the wilderness.

  FEBRUARY TURNED INTO MARCH AND THERE WAS NO SIGN of spring yet on the silver-gray river bluffs, but great V-shaped flocks of Canada geese, ducks, and brants were flying forever across the valley, honking and barking. The barge was so wide and long that, with its corral of horses and its overlapping communities of slaves, crewmen, and passengers, it was, as Elizabeth expressed it, “like a place that moves.” At the end of this trip, Greathouse said, it would be dismantled and sold as lumber and plank to make houses in Louisville. There were people there already, he said, who looked down their noses at log houses.r />
  “Son Jonathan wanted to plank over our mulberry house,” John Clark said, “but I told him, ‘Skip such expense as that. A log house was good enough for you t’be born in.’ That’s what I told ’im. Jonathan’s come to be one who wants things fancy. The newest fancy thing he hears of. I think it’s Sarah’s makin’ him thataway, don’t you, Annie?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Mought’s well blame a woman.”

  “George means to build a sawmill north of the river,” Bill Croghan said. “That’ll be where to get plank. He’s designed the machinery so it’ll run a gristmill, too. And thinks it would be good business to build a still.”

  “Ah, whiskey,” said Greathouse. “A good way t’ store corn till the damnblasted Spaniards open th’ Mississippi to trade.”

  “Aye, so? From what I’ve heard o’ folks at Louisville, ye couldn’t store that form o’ corn very long,” said John Clark.

  In such future talk the days and evenings passed, flowing day into day as the keelboat floated on. There was some time for music in the evenings, with Manifee on his fiddle, though the cabin was too crowded for dancing. So the family just listened and sang. They would sing “Barbara Allen” and “The Hog’s Heart” and “The Lawyer Outwitted.” Manifee sang several pungent variations of “Yankee Doodle,” and Captain Helm’s old swigging song with its “glup, spit, patoo!” He could also make up songs, and one catchy, nonsensical piece of singing and whistling soon became their favorite:

  Whicky picka chicky

  Whicky picky chick a ram

  Listen to me whistle

  (Wheet a wheet a wheetee!)

  A whiskey-pickled chickadee

  That’s what I am!

  Most often, though, he would play “Katy Cruel,” and when he sang O diddle lully day, O de little lie-o day, sometimes his grotesque ruin of a face would be tracked with tears.

  They would reminisce about the war, particularly about the clever tricks George had done here in the West. General Wilkinson would listen tirelessly to these wondrous tales, saying wistfully that it had been impossible to effect such brilliant strokes in the East because of Washington’s “deliberateness.” At this, Edmund reminded him of Paulus Hook.

  And always there was talk of Indians. Now that Virginia had ceded her Northwest Territory lands to Congress, Indian policy likely would become hopelessly muddled. “If you think the Virginia Government didn’t know anything about Indians,” said Greathouse, “wait till you see how much Congress don’t know!”

  “Well, I’ll say this for Congress,” Edmund offered. “They had enough sense to make George an Indian commissioner. George says he’s comin’ to see matters more the Indian way than ours. Well, ye know what he’d always say, about chief Logan and all. But, especially since Gnadenhutten, he says sometimes he’s ashamed to be a member o’ the white race.”

  A painful, gloomy silence followed. No white man liked to be reminded of the Gnadenhutten Massacre.

  In ’82, a company of soldiers from Fort Pitt had tied up a hundred peaceful Christian Indians, Delaware men, women, and children converted by the Moravian missionaries, and systematically crushed all their skulls with cooper’s mallets. Even among men who loved to boast about the Indians they had killed, there was seldom a man who would admit to having been at Gnadenhutten.

  Eventually this guilt-shadowed recollection led to the mention of the massacre of Chief Logan’s family a decade ago by a man named Greathouse.

  Suddenly there was an embarrassed silence. The boatmaster had been staring into the lampflame, chewing on a homemade toothpick and saying little, and now he was aware of the silence. Without raising his head, he lifted his eyebrows and glanced all around at everyone and answered the unvoiced question: “That was Jake Greathouse done that.”

  But he did not say whether he was related to Jake Greathouse. And as if to keep anybody from asking, he got up and went out on deck.

  “THERE SHE LAYS,” SAID JONAS MANIFEE THE NEXT AFTERnoon. “The Kentucky River.” He had put the helm over to swing the keelboat toward a gap in the forested south shore of the Ohio. William could see a few cleared acres, some chimneys, a half-collapsed wharf on the near side of the mouth, and on the far side, in a stump-dotted clearing, stood a one-story log house, windowless, very severe and solid, its roof shakes still the yellowish-white of new wood. “’Twas right here,” Manifee was saying, “that we put ashore in ’78. Hit was rainin’ like a tall cow pissin’ on a flat rock that day, I ’member.”

  “Hey, bo’!” someone yelled from one of the other boats. “Redskins yonder!” He was pointing toward the Ohio’s north shore a mile away. Now William could hear boots thumping on the plank decks below, and urgent voices.

  “There, I see ’em,” said Manifee. And now William saw them, too: a long, low canoe, a mere sliver on the water, where the Ohio began a gradual bend toward the northwest. The canoe was going downstream along that shore.

  “Big canoe,” Manifee mused. “What y’see, Master Clark? Fifteen, twenty people in ’er? My eyes ain’t what they used t’ was.”

  “About that,” William said, squinting. He could feel his pulse beating in his neck and temples. Greathouse was clambering up the ladder onto the roof now, with Edmund Clark and Bill Croghan following. Below, Wilkinson was looking at the distant vessel with a brass army telescope. Men were everywhere on deck now with their rifles, scanning both banks of the river and looking into the bare, snow-floored forest as far as their eyes could penetrate. The mouth of the Kentucky was yawning wider as they drifted toward it.

  “What sayee, Mister Greathouse?” said Manifee. “Do I put in, or no?”

  Greathouse was now looking warily at the river mouth, and he said, as if wondering aloud, “Might there be some up th’ Kentuck? Wait, Manifee.”

  “Better say it quick, Mister Greathouse, or I’ll overshoot th’ point. I cain’t back this thang up, y’know.”

  “Now, just—”

  “Put in, Mister Greathouse,” General Wilkinson’s voice ordered from below. “I’m damned if a pack o’ heathens a mile off makes me miss my landing. Have your man put in.”

  Greathouse’s bad teeth showed in a clench-jawed sneer, but he did nod to Manifee, saying, “Aye, then. Bear in. Any other savages in view? Eh? Keep y’r eyes clear, lads! If there’s any lurkin’ up the Kentuck there, stand ready to pole us off into th’ current. All look t’ your powder now, we’re headin’ in.”

  William watched the long rectangle of the boat swing ponderously inshore, and he had got the feel of it well enough now that he was sure it was going to swing a few yards too wide, because of Greathouse’s hesitation, and be nudged back out by the current of the Kentucky. But Manifee yelled down to a man who stood among the horses on the foredeck with a rifle resting across a mare’s withers:

  “Jaybo! Git on th’ bow an’ be set to flang a noose on that pilin’! Go, man! Git them ’fraidy bones out from ’hind that horse! Ain’t no redskins out there! Ha! He, hee!” The man moved out among the horses, leaned his rifle against a rail, vaulted the rail onto the prow and picked up the end of a coiled rope. It had a slipknot, which he pulled open and held at his side. By now the stern of the keelboat had swung downstream, and the prow was pivoting slowly past the end of the old wharf, a good fifteen feet from it and slipping past. “Rope it, Jaybo!” The man swept his arm out in a curve and the loop settled around the piling. “Yip!” Manifee shouted, and the man smiled, and looped his end of the rope around a cleat-post. The rope straightened, wood creaked, and they were fast. William looked up the Kentucky, between its formidable bluffs, and saw no one. And on the other side of the Ohio, the big Indian canoe was now out of sight beyond the bend. It was interesting to him how much alarm one canoe could cause.

  “Here’s where we must say adieu,” Wilkinson told the Clarks when his baggage had been handed down into a rowboat. “This would have been a dreary voyage for me indeed, but for your company. Pray come and visit me whenever you’re in Lexington.” He sho
ok hands with John and Edmund Clark and kissed the hands of Mrs. Clark, Lucy, Elizabeth, and Fanny. “I’ve left gifts for you all in your cabin,” he said. Then he turned to William. “Young sir, I feel we’ll meet often, as this country grows. Maybe we’ll serve together sometime, in some way. I certainly hope so.”

  “Aye, sir. And, ahm, here’s something for you.” William fished in his pouch for the twist of his home-grown tobacco, brushed some lint and pone crumbs off of it, and handed it to Wilkinson. The dandy took it, as if delighted, and let himself down into the rowboat. “Godspeed,” he called as the four oarsmen dug into the water and the rowboat started up the Kentucky. Most of the other vessels followed; they were en route to Lexington, Harrod’s Town, Danville, and Boonesboro, with goods for those Kentucky river towns; the keelboat was the only big vessel going directly on down to Louisville.

  The gifts Wilkinson had left were small but elegant. For each of the Clark ladies there was a lace-trimmed handkerchief; for the men he had left a gallon of brandy.

  “Well, he is some dilly,” said Ann Rogers Clark, touching the fine cloth to her cheek. “Just a bit of everything, isn’t he?”

  “I reckon,” said her husband, “we’ll hear more o’ him. A man like that surely won’t just fade into the countryside.”

  THE LOG HOUSE ON THE OTHER BANK OF THE KENTUCKY’S mouth was, Greathouse said, the dwelling of Captain Bob Elliot and his wife and daughter. “It’s Elliot,” Greathouse said, “who’s clearing land here.”

  “I should like to go see him,” John Clark said. “I promised him I would do.” This Captain Elliot had used to shelter at the Clark house in Caroline when he was passing through to Richmond during the war. “Row me over,” John Clark said. “It’s not so long till night, and he’s said we’re welcome to his house.”

  A skiff was untied from the keelboat’s side, and the man called Jaybo rowed John Clark across the mouth of the Kentucky. Mr. Clark wore a find woolen cape and tricorn, and his powdered wig, which he had got out of a box because this was a matter of calling. He looked as fine and dignified as a governor, and no one would have guessed he was still crawling with lice acquired from Red Stone Fort, and some more recent ones from the bunk straw of Greathouse’s barge.