A Clearing in the Wild (21 page)

“Meeker says the land is good there, that it’s already been farmed in places,” Adam Schuele affirmed. “He’s introduced hops, so you know the soil is good. We can buy stock from those already there.” As the other fluent English speaker, he alone could verify Christian’s enthusiasm and assessment of Meeker’s words.

I imagined having to part with Opal and didn’t like that thought at all.

“Indeed,” said Christian. “If we can buy some of those established farms and lay claim to adjoining land, we can have all we need for the colony.”

“There are neighbors near?” I asked.

“Most of the travel is by walking or by boat,” Christian continued, as though I hadn’t spoken. “The woods are too tangled for wagons, but the
rivers are perfect for bringing in supplies and for sending sold products out. We’d farm beside the rivers.” A gleam formed in Christian’s eyes.

There’d be few families there if wagons couldn’t make it through the rough.

“Timber everywhere and a ready market for it in California in the gold fields. Indeed. I believe the Lord has led this Meeker into our midst as a beacon, the directional light we need.”

Travel by boat? Rivers? Timber without wide open spaces and not even the comfort of the mount my father picked for me? Where were the women? I felt my stomach lurch.

“Wilhelm wanted separation,” Adam Schuele reminded. “But there’s a fort at Nisqually and another at a place called Steilacoom, so should there be Indian trouble we’d have a secure place to go to.”

“Could we talk more about the need for separation?” I said. “Perhaps the way the colony is to grow isn’t through new recruiting from far away, but by living closer to people, where they can see the caring in our lives and want that for themselves. Maybe the Lord has led us here to this Vancouver to do things differently than before, and this Meeker is a … distraction.”

Only the steady thumping of the rain on the log roof filled the silence. Men moved their eyes to Christian, then to the floor. I might have fine ideas, but today I appeared to be invisible and my words as silent as a preacher’s sin.

Against my better judgment (not that anyone asked), we sold the stock. How I hated parting with Opal, who’d become more of a pet than a work animal, a confidante for my unspeakable woes. Her new owner, a
Portland farmer, took Fred, too, but I spent most of my time with the man singing Opal’s virtues, including her guardian tendencies. He smiled indulgently. At least he spoke German and so could communicate with the horses and mules.

Within two days, we took a scow north on the Columbia River to a landing at Monticello, where once Hudson’s Bay people had a fur storage place. There, we were met by tall, somber men and their long cedar canoes. “Cowlitz Indians,” Meeker said. “Friendly. They speak some English. Their name means ‘seekers,’ I’m told. As in a spiritual sense.”

“We have that in common,” Christian said, and he clicked his boots together and bent at his waist in recognition of their virtue.

They had that curious sloped forehead I’d seen at the Dalles Landing, and I wondered what could cause this but didn’t know how to ask. Besides, I didn’t want to be rude.

Meeker said we’d pay the Cowlitz in trade goods to take us all north, and I wondered what of our meager goods might appeal to these stately men or to the women who I noticed now sat in the bows of the crafts.

We moved by canoe up the Cowlitz River into the new Washington Territory.

Once again I watched the shoreline glide by, this time while seated with packs of our personal belongings like gray mushrooms at my feet. A Cowlitz woman and child were in our canoe, which held Christian and five other men besides the Cowlitz paddlers. A wooden cradle wrapped around one infant. A brace pressed against the infant’s head, answering my question about what made the sharp angle to the forehead. I wondered if it hurt and wished again that I could speak another language. The baby cooed and his mother smiled.

Every now and then a woman reached into rectangular, oval-bottomed coiled baskets to give their babies something to chew. The
honey-colored baskets were beautiful as well as practical. Whatever they held comforted the infants. It looked like thicknesses of fat.

The paddlers urged us past sand bars that speared the water, often poling and using ropes to pull us against the current. Occasionally, we got out so they could take their heavy canoes around fallen trees that blocked the waterway. Back in the canoe, I tried not to look at the water rushing by, grabbed the side of the canoe when a swift current caught the craft and might have sent it spinning but for the skill of our handlers. I noted how thin the sides of the boat were. I could find no seams, so the boat was formed of one continuous, long, red, fragrant cedar log.

I caught a glimpse of a huge bird with scarlet feathers that Ezra Meeker named a pileated woodpecker. “A shy bird,” he told me through Christian. “One that doesn’t like to be seen very often.”

“That wouldn’t be hard in those thickets,” I said.

“Still, you’ve seen one, so that is something to remember,” Christian said. “Meeker says that sightings are rare. A unique experience in this wilderness. You like unique things, if I remember.” He patted my hand, stopped my thumb and finger from rubbing themselves raw.

The men spoke constantly of the timber, its size and girth, how dense and how abundant. The river meandered through lush prairies while I forced myself to think not of the possible problems with the water but to watch for dots of color, to let myself be taken in and comforted by the presence of flowers whose names I didn’t know. We all marveled at the high, timbered ridges, much taller than the bluffs of Missouri; more foreboding, too. We swatted at mosquitoes, buzzing.

Wide prairies eased out from the water’s edge, and we watched deer and sometimes elk tear at grasses. Despite the promise of lush soil for kitchen gardens, I noticed few clearings in this wild.

When we reached Toledo, another small landing with a few log
homes and fenced gardens, we stepped out of the canoes and Meeker left us.

“His farm is near Puyallup, quite a bit farther northeast,” Christian said. “But he thinks we should go on up to the Sound and see if we can winter at one of the forts there. They’ll have doctors.”

“But I thought we took this route because Meeker had neighbors that he knew of who had land we could acquire.” I knew I sounded irritated, but when they included me in discussions, it was to eavesdrop more than participate. Issues weren’t decided within my earshot. Within my presence they merely affirmed decisions already made.

“He’s done what we asked of him,” Christian told me. It seemed to me he bristled. “His advice has been good. We’ve seen abundance. We’ll explore yet this fall and finalize our location, then send scouts back to Bethel. You have to agree, this is beautiful country.”

Beautiful
, ja,
but empty of all but tall trees
.

I assumed we’d walk the rest of the way to Puget Sound, to the promised “bustling” town of Olympia, but instead the Cowlitz paddlers had relatives who met us, and for another trade of red cloth bought just for this purpose back in Vancouver, we could ride their big horses behind them. We agreed, and for the first time since I was very young (when there’d been no one around to see), I sat astride a horse, my left knee no longer steadied by the lower hook. I put my arms around a perfect stranger. We were on solid ground, off of the water.

I could have stayed at Olympia forever. We spent our first night there at Edmund Sylvester’s Olympia House Hotel. I heard even more strange languages spoken, including a high-pitched staccato chatter from the kitchen, where I caught a glimpse of an Asian man, his thin
long braid swinging like a metronome as he bustled about. For dinner that evening we were served an appetizer Christian understood to be pickled blackberries. “A Chinese delicacy,” he told me.

A newspaper lay on the hotel desk counter, and I read its name in English, the same as the river:
Columbia
.

Puget Sound lapped up to Olympia, a body of water as smooth as fine tin. Christian said, “It’s the ocean,” but it had none of the white-caps I expected from having seen paintings made by those who’d traveled west. The town stepped down from a timbered bluff toward the sea. Houses sat on flattened spots between sawed-off trunks still being pulled by horses and chains. It was a growing place. I loved seeing stumps with steps cut into them for ease in mounting a horse and the window boxes that dotted the few frame houses. Such sights promised the presence of women.

But we were not to stay here. We headed east the next day, merely checked in at Fort Nisqually, a former Hudson’s Bay site. There we received directions to the place where Christian (or at least someone) had decided we would spend the winter.

Fort Steilacoom became my home. Located about four miles from the little town of Steilacoom, and some distance from Olympia, it boasted a few log buildings, fenced-in gardens, and an orchard with chickens pecking about. A man named Heath had farmed it for the Agricultural Company, then left when the Company sold it to the U.S. Army.

Most importantly, Christian told me, a doctor remained quartered at the fort. At least I believed he’d chosen for my benefit this little clearing in the timber separated from the town. I suppose he thought that having the doctor would give me peace about this birthing, or give him peace, as he had plans he just now decided to tell me about, plans that offered me no peace at all.

A three-story gristmill in Steilacoom promised wheat and population. A sawmill on a place called Chambers Creek meant frame houses rose here in a place named for a group of sturdy-looking Indians known as Steilacooms. The Indians lived in cedar houses nestled back from the shoreline like quiet beneath trees. I noticed their presence first from the smoke rising as if from blackberry brush, then looking closer, I could see the outlines of the houses. When I encountered one or two of the Steilacooms on the paths, they kept their eyes lowered and always stepped aside. They didn’t look cowed as those at the auction in The Dalles or Wascopam or whatever they called that town that week. Neither did they look frightening or fierce. Polite. They were simply polite.

Fruit trees grew here—propagated they’d have to be because they couldn’t be so large grown from seed. People hadn’t been here all that long, at least not white people. The trees promised apples and pears, and I could taste the
Strudels
I’d bake. This would indeed be a good landscape for all of us. Not unlike Olympia, it boasted storefronts and a wagon maker and a church, and women with children walked on the board streets while white birds, seagulls Christian called them, dipped and cried overhead. Christian said there were two settlements here: a Port Steilacoom near the bottom of the bluff and a Chapman’s Steilacoom farther up, though I couldn’t tell where one began and the other
ended. It was how I’d begun to think of our journey here, too. Had it ended? Or were we just beginning the next phase?

The scouts remained at Chapman’s Steilacoom, talking to locals, I assumed, gathering new information with Adam Schuele to translate.

But Christian said that he and I needed to walk on through the cedars and blackberry bushes along a narrow trail to reach the fort before dark. We found it clearly defined not by fortlike walls, but by the split-rail fences surrounding large cultivated fields. This garrison didn’t match what one might expect at an eastern fort. It consisted of a few log structures, one frame building under construction, barns, small outer buildings, and clothes hanging limply on a line.

Captain Bennett Hill once served as commanding officer, having taken over the land after the death some years earlier of the man who cleared these fields, 106 fenced acres planted in wheat, peas, and potatoes. That commander had been recently replaced by an Irishman, Captain Maurice Maloney. It seemed no one stayed at Fort Steilacoom for long.

Captain Maloney knew not a word of German. His dark blue uniform, frayed at the cuffs, merely heightened the red of his hair and the verdant green of his eyes.