_One_: JOHN LEDYARD
_One_: JOHN LEDYARD
I
Here was a man who was born with two great gifts, one the most precious
in the world, the other the most perilous. The first was an abounding
physical vitality which made the casual business of being alive a
divine adventure, the second, an imagination of the sort which refuses
discipline and runs away with the whole mind.
The adventure begins in the spring of the year 1772 with the farmers
of the Connecticut Valley halting their ploughs in the furrow, and
straightening up to stare at a certain extraordinary vehicle going north
on the river road. This vehicle was nothing less than a two-wheeled
sulky, then a rig almost unheard of outside the towns, and one never
known to be used by travellers. A sulky with bundle baggage lashed
behind, surely the driver must be an odd kind of rogue! Stopping at
nightfall at a farm, the stranger met with close scrutiny by rural
candle light. He was a fair-haired youth an inch or so under six feet
tall, and of that “rangy” and powerful build which is as characteristic
of American soil as Indian corn. His eyes, which were well spaced in a
wide forehead, were grey-blue in color, he had a good chin to face the
world with, and something of a lean and eagle-ish nose. His name, he
said, was John Ledyard, and he was on his way to become a missionary to
the Indians.
This youth, John Ledyard, third of his name, had seen the light of day in
the village of Groton, Connecticut; his father, a sea captain, had died
young; legal mischance or a descent of harpy relatives had deprived the
young mother of her property, and John had been brought up in the house
of his grandfather at Hartford. Then had come years at grammar school,
the death of his grandfather, his virtual adoption by an uncle and
aunt, and the attempt of these good folk to make a lawyer of him, which
experiment had not been a success.
At twenty-one years of age, John presented something of a problem to his
kinsmen. What was to be done with this great fair-haired youth who had
neither money nor influential friends? Suddenly Destiny came down the
Connecticut Valley with a letter.
[Illustration: JOHN LEDYARD
_Courtesy Judge John A. Aiken._]
The Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, founder of Dartmouth, wrote to John
inviting him to the college. The passion of this good man’s life was the
evangelization of the dispossessed and incorrigible redskins; he visited
them in their forlorn and dwindling encampments; he took their young
men to be his pupils, and he had founded his college largely for the
sake of training the sons of colonists to be Indian missionaries. Good
Doctor Wheelock had been a friend of grandfather Ledyard’s, and something
or other had recalled to his mind the fair-haired boy who he had seen
playing about the old man’s house at Hartford. He would make a missionary
of the lad, and send him forth to comfort the copper-skinned of the
elect. A letter arrived offering John the status of a free pupil destined
to the Indian field. Sulky and ancient nag were presently produced from
somewhere, perhaps from John’s own pocket, for he had just inherited a
tiny legacy; the uncle and aunt waved farewell, a whip cracked in the
air, and John and his sulky vanished over the hills and far away.
At Dartmouth College, he liked to act in plays, and clad in robes
of Yankee calico, strutted about as the Numidian Prince, Syphax, in
Mr. Addison’s “Tragedy of Cato.” A savour of old-fashioned rhetoric
and magniloquence made its way from these plays into John’s mind,
and coloured his letters and his language all his life. He liked the
out-of-doors, and on one occasion induced a group of comrades to climb
with him to the top of a neighboring height, and spend the night on
evergreen boughs strewn on the floor of deep holes dug in the snow.
Doctor Wheelock nodded an enthusiastic consent; he saw in John’s
adventure fine training in hardship for his future missionaries! Letters
of classmates paint Ledyard as restless, impatient of the dry bones
of discipline, authoritative on occasion, and more a man with devoted
cronies than one largely and carelessly popular. All other Dartmouth
memories have faded in the epic glow of the adventurer’s flight from his
Alma Mater.
He came to college in a sulky, he left it an even more adventurous way.
In the spring of 1773, the sound of the axe rings in the Dartmouth woods.
Presently comes a shout, a great, crackling crash, and the sound and
tremor of a heavy blow upon the earth. John Ledyard and his cronies have
just felled a giant pine standing close by the bank of the Connecticut
River. From this log, the homespun undergraduates fashion a dug-out
canoe, fifty feet long and three feet wide, a veritable barge of a canoe,
and once the digging and hacking is done with, John himself weaves at the
stern of the craft a kind of shelter-bower of willow wands. Word passes
among the lads to be at the river early in the morning.
The spring in northern New England is no gracious and gradual awakening,
it is shy, even timid, of approach, and there are times when the new
leaves and petals have quite the air of children who have run out of
the house on a winter’s day. Then comes a sudden night of warmth and
southwest wind, smells of wet earth and the sound of flooded streams fill
all the dark, a rushing spirit of fertility shakes the land, and the
rising sun reveals a world hurrying on to June. A dangerous spring in a
Puritan land, for flesh and spirit are taken unawares, and swept off to
the shrines of gods who have never made a covenant with man.
Such a spring it was, as the forest undergraduates gathered at the huge
dug-out under the slanting light of early day, and watched their friend
carry supplies to his canoe. John first put aboard a provender of dried
venison and cornmeal, then a huge bearskin for a coverlet, and last of
all two strangely assorted books, a Greek New Testament and the poems of
Ovid. The truant Yankee sophomore steps into his canoe. A long halloo,
a push all together, and the craft has slid off into the river, which,
clear of ice and swollen by a thousand mountain streams, is rushing past
their little college and on into the world. The current seizes the canoe;
the wet paddle blade flashes in the cool sun; John masters the swirl
with his strength and woodsman skill, and the future vagabond disappears
on the way to his fantastic destiny. Little does the truant know that
in January and February, 1787, a forlorn, penniless but indomitable
traveller will accomplish one of the most amazing feats ever performed by
mortal man, a fifteen hundred mile trudge through an unknown country deep
in arctic snow and cold, and that the vagabond will be John Ledyard.
The mystery of his truancy remains to puzzle the world. For after all,
why had he run away? In abandoning Dartmouth, he had locked behind him
the one door to an education which had opened to him in his obscurity.
John Ledyard’s contemporaries said simply that the spring was racing
in his blood, and that the born vagabond had been unable to control a
vagabond urge. There is a world of truth in the reply, but not quite
all the truth. The present day, with greater historical perspective,
will have it that this fair-haired lad was not really a scion of the
seaboard generations of transplanted Englishmen, but a son of the new,
native-born, and native-minded culture which was springing up in the
hearts of Americans during the last half of the eighteenth century. This
lad is no spiritual kinsman of harsh and merciless Endecott; his place
is with Daniel Boone and the lords of the frontier. But at Dartmouth,
the seventeenth century sat in the seat of power, for, intellectually,
Wheelock was a contemporary of Cotton Mather; the two dominies would have
talked the same Canaanitish jargon, and shared an identical attitude to
life. But young John was of different stuff, and, moreover, he was in
certain ways, curiously modern. His flight from Dartmouth thus becomes
a bit of vagabondage hiding an instinctive recoil, for had he accepted
a missionary career, the seventeenth century would have claimed him
forever for its own.
Down the Connecticut River floats the log canoe, carrying a young New
Englander from theology under Oliver Cromwell to adventure under George
the Third.