To the Far Lake Country and Home Again.
We had left what it pleases us to call civilization behind. Until our
return we were scarcely again to see the blackened fields of stumps
surrounding clearings, or potash kettles, or girdled trees, or chimneys.
Not that our course lay wholly through unbroken solitude; but the men we
for the most part encountered were of the strange sort who had pushed
westward farther and farther to be alone--to get away from their fellows.
The axe to them did not signify the pearlash of commerce, but firewood and
honey and coon-skins for their own personal wants. They traded a little,
in a careless, desultory fashion, with the proceeds of their traps and
rifles. But their desires were few--a pan and kettle, a case of needles
and cord, some rum or brandy from cider or wild grapes, tobacco, lead, and
powder--chiefly the last three. They fed themselves, adding to their own
fish and game only a little pounded maize which they got mostly from the
Indians, and cooked in mush or on a baking stone. In the infrequent cases
where there were women with them, we sometimes saw candles, either dips or
of the wax of myrtle-berries, but more often the pine-knot was used.
Occasionally they had log-houses, with even here and there a second story
above the puncheon-floor, reached by a ladder; but in the main their
habitations were half-faced camps, secured in front at night by fires.
They were rough, coarse, hardened, drunken men as a rule, generally
disagreeable and taciturn; insolent, lazy, and miserable from my point of
view, but I judge both industrious and contented from their own.
We should have had little favor or countenance from these fellows, I doubt
not, but for Enoch Wade. He seemed to know all the saturnine, shaggy,
lounging outcasts whom we met in unexpected places; if he did not, they
knew him at a glance for one of their own kidney, which came to the same
thing. It was on his account that we were tolerated, nay, even advised and
helped and entertained.
Enoch had been a prodigious traveller--or else was a still more prodigious
liar--I never quite decided which. He told them, when we chanced to sit
around their fires of an evening, most remarkable stories of field and
forest--of caribou and seals killed in the North; of vast herds of bison
on far Western prairies; of ice-bound winters spent in the Hudson Bay
Company's preserves beyond the Lakes; of houses built of oyster-shells and
cement on the Carolina coast. They listened gravely, smoking their
cob-and-reed pipes, and eying him attentively. They liked him, and they
did not seem to dislike Coppernol and our other white servants. But they
showed no friendliness toward my poor Tulp, and exhibited only scant,
frigid courtesy to Mr. Cross and me.
The fact that my companion was a power in the East India Company, and a
director in the new Northwestern Fur Company, did not interest them, at
least favorably. It was indeed not until after we had got beyond the
Sandusky that Enoch often volunteered this information, for the trappers
of the East had little love for companies, or organized commerce and
property of any sort.
I like better to recall the purely physical side of our journey. Now our
little flotilla would move for hours on broad, placid, still waters,
flanked on each side by expanses of sedge and flags--in which great broods
of water-fowl lived--and beyond by majestic avenues formed of pines,
towering mast-like sheer sixty feet before they burst into intertwining
branches. Again, we would pass through darkened, narrow channels, where
adverse waters sped swiftly, and where we battled not only with deep
currents, but had often to chop our way through barriers of green
tree-trunks, hickory, ash, and birch, which the soft soil on the banks had
been unable to longer hold erect. Now we flew merrily along under sail or
energetic oars; now we toiled laboriously against strong tides, by poles
or by difficult towing.
But it was all healthful, heartening work, and we enjoyed it to the full.
Toward sundown we would begin to look for a brook upon which to pitch our
camp. When one was found which did not run black, showing its origin in a
tamarack swamp, a landing was made with all the five boats. These
secured, axes were out with, and a shelter soon constructed, while others
heaped the fire, prepared the food and utensils, and cooked the welcome
meal. How good everything tasted! how big and bright the stars looked! how
sweet was the odor of the balsam in the air, later, as we lay on our
blankets, looking skyward, and talked! Or, if the night was wild and wet,
how cheerily the great fires roared in the draught, and how snugly we lay
in our shelter, blinking at the fierce blaze!
When in early July we drew near the country of the Outagamis, having left
the Detroit settlement behind us, not to speak of Oswego and Niagara,
which seemed as far off now as the moon, an element of personal danger was
added to our experiences. Both white hunters and Indians were warmly
affected toward the French interest, and often enough we found reason to
fear that we would be made to feel this, though luckily it never came to
anything serious. It was a novel experience to me to be disliked on
account of the English, whom I had myself never regarded with friendship.
I was able, fortunately, being thus between the two rival races, as it
were, to measure them each against the other.
I had no prejudice in favor of either, God knows. My earliest
recollections were of the savage cruelty with which the French had
devastated, butchered, and burned among the hapless settlements at the
head of the Mohawk Valley. My maturer feelings were all colored with the
strong repulsion we Dutch felt for the English rule, which so scornfully
misgoverned and plundered our province, granting away our lands to court
favorites and pimps, shipping to us the worst and most degraded of
Old-World criminals, quartering upon us soldiers whose rude vices made
them even more obnoxious than the convicts, and destroying our commerce by
selfish and senseless laws.
From the Straits west I saw the Frenchman for the first time, and read the
reasons for his failure to stand against the English. Even while we
suspected grounds for fearing his hostility, we found him a more courteous
and affable man than the Englishman or Yankee. To be pleasant with us
seemed a genuine concern, though it may really have been otherwise. The
Indians about him, too, were a far more satisfactory lot than I had known
in the Valley. Although many of our Mohawks could read, and some few
write, and although the pains and devotion of my friend Samuel Kirkland
had done much for the Oneidas, still these French-spoken, Jesuit-taught
Indians seemed a much better and soberer class than my neighbors of the
Iroquois. They drank little or no rum, save as English traders furtively
plied them with it, for the French laws were against its sale. They lived
most amicably with the French, too, neither hating nor fearing them; and
this was in agreeable contrast to the wearisome bickering eternally going
on in New York between the Indians striving to keep their land, and the
English and Dutch forever planning to trick them out of it. So much for
the good side.
The medal had a reverse. The Frenchman contrived to get on with the
Indian by deferring to him, cultivating his better and more generous side,
and treating him as an equal. This had the effect of improving and
softening the savage, but it inevitably tended to weaken and lower the
Frenchman--at least, judged by the standard of fitness to maintain himself
in a war of races. No doubt the French and Indians lived together much
more quietly and civilly than did the English and Indians. But when these
two systems came to be tested by results, it was shown that the
Frenchman's policy and kindliness had only enervated and emasculated him,
while the Englishman's rough domineering and rule of force had hardened
his muscles and fired his resolution. To be sure, measured by the received
laws of humanity, the Frenchman was right and the other wrong. But is it
so certain, after all, that the right invariably wins?
* * * * *
It was well along in September when, standing on the eminence to the east
of Fort Stanwix, I first looked again on my beloved Mohawk.
The trip had been a highly successful one. Enoch was bringing back four
bateaux well packed under thin oilskin covers with rare peltries,
including some choice black-beaver skins and sea-otter furs from the
remote West, which would fetch extravagant prices. On the best estimate of
his outward cargo of tea, spirits, powder, traps, calico, duffle, and
silver ear-bobs, breast-buckles, and crosses, he had multiplied its value
twenty-fold.
Of course, this was of secondary importance. The true object of the
journey had been to enable Mr. Jonathan Cross to see for himself the
prospects of the new Northwestern Company--to look over the territory
embraced in its grants, estimate its probable trade, mark points for the
establishment of its forts and posts, and secure the information necessary
to guard the company from the frauds or failings of agents. He professed
himself vastly gratified at the results, physical as well as financial, of
his experience, and that was the great thing.
Or no!--perhaps for the purposes of this story there was something more
important still. It is even now very pleasant to me to recall that he
liked me well enough, after this long, enforced intimacy, to proffer me
the responsible and exacting post of the company's agent at Albany.
To say that the offer made me proud and glad would be to feebly understate
my emotions. I could not be expected to decide all at once. Independent of
the necessity of submitting the proposition to Mr. Stewart, there was a
very deep distaste within me for fur-trading at Albany--of the meanness
and fraudulency of which I had heard from boyhood. A good many hard
stories are told of the Albanians, which, aside from all possible bias of
race, I take the liberty of doubting. I do not, for instance, believe all
the Yankee tales that the Albany Dutchmen bought from the Indians the
silver plate which the latter seized in New England on the occasions of
the French and Indian incursions--if for no other reason than the absence
of proof that they ever had any plate in New England. But that the
Indians used to be most shamefully drugged and cheated out of their
eye-teeth in Albany, I fear there can be no reasonable doubt. An evil
repute attached to the trade there, and I shrank from embarking in it,
even under such splendid auspices. All the same, the offer gratified
me greatly.
To be in the woods with a man, day in and day out, is to know him through
and through. If I had borne this closest of all conceivable forms of
scrutiny, in the factor's estimation, there must be something good in me.
So there was pride as well as joy in this first glance I cast upon the
soft-flowing, shadowed water, upon the spreading, stately willows, upon
the far-off furrow in the hazy lines of foliage--which spoke to me of
home. Here at last was my dear Valley, always to me the loveliest on
earth, but now transfigured in my eyes, and radiant beyond all dreams of
beauty--because in it was my home, and in that home was the sweet maid
I loved.
Yes--I was returned a man, with the pride and the self-reliance and the
heart of a man. As I thought upon myself, it was to recognize that the
swaddlings of youth had fallen from me. I had never been conscious of
their pressure; I had not rebelled against them, nor torn them asunder.
Yet somehow they were gone, and my breast swelled with a longer, deeper
breath for their absence. I had almost wept with excess of boyish feeling
when I left the Valley--my fond old mother and protector. I gazed upon it
now with an altogether variant emotion--as of one coming to take
possession. Ah, the calm elation of that one moment, there alone on the
knoll, with the sinking September sun behind me, and in front but the
trifle of sixty miles of river route--when I realized that I was a man!
Perhaps it was at this moment that I first knew I loved Daisy; perhaps it
had been the truly dominant thought in my mind for months, gathering vigor
and form from every tender, longing memory of the Cedars. I cannot decide,
nor is it needful that I should. At least now my head was full of the
triumphant thoughts that I returned successful and in high favor with my
companion, that I had a flattering career opened for me, that the people
at home would be pleased with me--and that I should marry Daisy.
These remaining twenty leagues grew really very tedious before they were
done with. We went down with the boats this time. I fear that Mr. Cross
found me but poor company these last three days, for I sat mute in the bow
most of the time, twisted around to look forward down the winding course,
as if this would bring the Cedars nearer. I had not the heart to talk.
"Now she is winding the yarn for my aunt," I would think; "now she is
scattering oats for the pigeons, or filling Mr. Stewart's pipe, or running
the candles into the moulds. Dear girl, does she wonder when I am coming?
If she could know that I was here--here on the river speeding to
her--what, would she think?"
And I pictured to myself the pretty glance of surprise, mantling into a
flush of joyous welcome, which would greet me on her face, as she ran
gladly to my arms. Good old Mr. Stewart, my more than father, would stare
at me, then smile with pleasure, and take both my hands in his, with warm,
honest words straight from his great heart. What an evening it would be
when, seated snugly around the huge blaze--Mr. Stewart in his arm-chair to
the right, Daisy nestling on the stool at his knee and looking up into my
face, and Dame Kronk knitting in the chimney-shadow to the left--I should
tell of my adventures! How goodly a recital I could make of them, though
they had been even tamer than they were, with such an audience! And how
happy, how gratified they would be when I came to the climax, artfully
postponed, of Mr. Cross's offer to me of the Albany agency!
And then how natural, how easy, while these dear people were still smiling
with pride and satisfaction at my good fortune, to say calmly--yes, calmly
in tone, though my heart should be beating its way through my breast:
"Even more, sir, I prize the hope that Daisy will share it with me--as my
wife!"
What with the delay at Caughnawaga, where Mr. Cross debarked, and Major
Fonda would have us eat and drink while he told us the news, and Tulp's
crazy rowing later, through excitement at nearing home, it was twilight
before the boat was run up into our little cove, and I set my foot on
land. The Cedars stood before us as yet lightless against the northern
sky. The gate was open. The sweet voice of a negro singing arose from the
cabins on the dusky hill-side. Tears came to my eyes as I turned to Tulp,
who was gathering up the things in the boat, and said:
"Do you see, boy? We're home--home at last!"