An Embarrassment of Riches (3 page)

“Don't bother me with countinghouse blather, Sammy,” Uncle railed on. “'Tis a matter of honor. And to lack a name, some signature of our endeavor…. O, shame and shame again!”

“Why not invent our own?”

“Without an official commission? Pah!”

“Who is to say that those two officers did not think up the Corps of Discovery on their own? Why not call ourselves the Corps of Wonders and Marvels?”

“Corps of … hmmmm. It rings nicely upon the ear.”

“Go to sleep then, Uncle, whilst I spend an hour sketching a portrait of this handsome fellow, megatherium.”

Uncle undressed and climbed into bed.

“Hmmmph … Corps of Discovery, indeed….” Uncle fluffed his pillow and drew on his nightcap. “Perhaps,” he mused drowsily, “they have been sent out to hunt for mastodon …?”

“Could it be?” I replied vaguely, trying to address my drawing tablet.

“Yes,” Uncle mumbled. “Louisiana would be the place for it. All that prairie … high grass … Corps of … piffle…!”

Then he was snoring.

The fearsome skeleton glowered up at me from the page in Cuvier's monograph. Soon, the great beast, scimitar claws clacking, began to lumber through my imagination. I turned up the wick of the lamp and dipped my nib into the inkwell.

“Why, this is a splendid portrait, Samuel!” the President declared. “It is just as I imagined megatherium. Magnificent!”

It was a few minutes past noon the next day. There was to be no luncheon, however, for Mr. Jefferson was dyspeptic. As for the portrait, I believe in truth it fell somewhat short of the President's glowing testimonial. For the result of my night's labor resembled not so much any noble beast apt to emblemize a nation's honor but rather a gigantic furry garden slug; a fat and shapeless brute with a tail like a sausage, forefeet like unto canoe paddles tipped with daggers, and a fleshy snout that called to mind a bee-stung swine. Jefferson doted upon it at great length, however, holding the sketch to the light at different angles and admiring it with encomiums at which even Uncle winced.

“O proud and massive ruminant …! O modest giant …! O noble genus …!”

Nor did it stop there. For so inspired was he by the sketch that he launched into a visionary discourse of America transformed by megatherium: of a fabulous international trade in megatherium furs; of French ladies in ground sloth coats; of gentlemen in sloth hats; of vast industries, whole economies, based upon the enormous pelts; of wagons creaking northward under heaps of them; of great ranches established for the propagation of them, with selected Indian tribes trained as sloth herdsmen; of tanneries and factories….

Indeed, this performance was so strange and compelling that for the third time in as many days I was constrained to utterly revise my opinion of the President's character. For where I first thought him a diabolical hypocrite, then a multitalented Machiavel, I now perceived him as a lunatic polymorph—and fretted both for my country and my own fate in the unknown adventure ahead. This impression was only reinforced when Uncle inquired of his “dear friend” Mr. Jefferson about the pending expedition of those two officers, Clark and Lewis, and the President tried to feign ignorance of them.

“But … but they were in this very office just yesterday, Thomas—”

“O,
them
,” Jefferson pretended to only now recall. “They are but a smokescreen to conceal the activities of the truly important mission, which is your own.”

“Yes, of course,” Uncle accepted the assertion, “but how is it they are commissioned at twenty-five hundred dollars for fifty men whilst we receive a mere hundred dollars?”

“Is that what they told you?” Jefferson said, his jaw dropping with incredulity. “Twenty-five hundred dollars?”

“'Pon my oath, they did, sir.”

“'Tis sheer posh and piddle, William. They are but a party of two at fifty dollars entire.”

“They are?” Uncle shook with glee. “O, Thomas, thou art as full of cunning as the red fox
(Vulpes fulva)
! Ho ho, a joke on those two! And they are not going to Louisiana?”

“Is that what they told you?”

“'Pon my honor, sir, they did.”

“They are dispatched to Maine,” Jefferson said. “To take an inventory of standing timber.”

“Ho ho!” Uncle was now nearly beside himself with delight. “And the government has not purchased French Louisiana?”

“Heavens no!” Jefferson said, his eyes darting wildly all over the room. “Bonaparte will sell that wasteland to Imperial Russia.”

The rest of that day's interview was a brief rehash of our mission, salutes to it, to Uncle and myself, to our republic, et cetera, and a fond farewell. Then, with an hundred dollars of the taxpayers' gold in our purse, Uncle and I departed Washington City for the transriverine wilderness.

On April 13, 1803, Uncle and I set out across the budding Maryland countryside north to Pennsylvania; there struck the Lancaster Pike, traversed the Allegheny Mountains by coach and upon foot, and arrived in the booming town of Pittsburgh astride its three rivers on April 19.

There we set about procuring all the necessaries for our long trip, beginning with the most important item: a boat. The crafts typical of the great inland rivers of that day were quite different from the graceful sailing ships and boats of my coastal home. In general, these river craft comprised a class of clumsy arks. One type was the ubiquitous flatboat, a sort of floating box of great cargo capacity, built in a slapdash manner—for these were strictly one-way vessels, meant to drift downstream only and then be broken apart at the final destination. But they were cheap and much favored by settlers headed down the Ohio Valley. Larger flatboats, called broadhorns or Kentucky or New Orleans boats, carried commercial loads, and we saw some behemoths as long as 125 feet, with sweeps, or steering oars, cut from entire trees.

The boat we required, and engaged to be built, was another popular craft, called a keelboat. With a curving hull and pointed bow and stern, the keelboat could be poled upstream in a slow current or hauled from the bank by means of a rope or cordelle. It was more maneuverable than any kind of flatboat—though no match for the crudest Long Island fisherman's dory—but its term of service was expected to exceed a mere one-way float.

Now there were many persons at Pittsburgh whose business was the accommodation of strangers descending the river. Uncle and I spent two full days haunting the boatyards. The prices, we learned, were uniform, being $1.25 per running foot for a flatboat and $3.00 PRF for a keelboat. The smallest keelboat any builder would undertake was a twenty-five-footer. While such a sized boat answered our needs, simple arithmetic shows that the cost would run to $75, or three quarters of our entire expeditionary budget. (It had already cost us $12 in coach fares to reach Pittsburgh, while our lodging and board ran 25 cents each per day). Uncle was not a rich man, but nor was he a poor one, and it became clear that he would have to underwrite himself the partial cost of this expedition. It galled him, but to dispose of the matter he made up his mind that it were the same as his previous botanical excursions, paid out of his own pocket, and that would be the end of it. In fact, he had brought another $100 in gold of his personal funds, whilst I had $7.12 of my own—or should I say of Papa's.

This decision reached, we ordered just such a keelboat as I have described at the yard of Charles Axley & Sons; and in the five days required for its construction, we set about procuring all the other necessaries for our journey: biscuit, flour, meal, bacon, sugar, molasses, two Pennsylvania rifles, two muskets, a fowling gun, four pistols, a cask of Monongahela whiskey, blankets, boots, specimen jars (Uncle had a standing contract with Cheatham, the London apothecary, to supply them specimens of herbs, roots, berries, et cetera), and last we laid in an assortment of gewgaws to mollify the savages we expected to meet upon our unknown way.

The great day of our departure came. (For some reason, I was surprised that all the inhabitants of Pittsburgh did not drop their business, declare the occasion a holiday, and see us off from the quay with trumpets and waving handkerchiefs.) We shoved off into the current with no more audience than Charles Axley, Boatwright, and his two assistants. Even so, my heart, like the magnificent river, was full to o'erflowing.

With both Uncle and I at the sweeps, our solid little craft bobbed on the swollen Ohio past the small whitewashed towns downstream and a teeming of other river craft, including many small skiffs and gundalows. Collisions threatened at every turn, and learning to maneuver the bulky keelboat was an adventure in itself. Yet everyone we passed, even those we almost plowed over or banged into, was filled with the same bursting exuberance as we, and not a man failed to cry out, “where are ye bound for, friends?” to which we replied, with equal zest, “the Unknown!”

Our rate of speed averaged three miles to the hour. Toward afternoon, the river towns grew sparser, giving way to desultory farmsteads, some of them very handsome and prosperous. It was, we quickly learned, a task of infernal vigilance keeping to the channel and avoiding snags. For with the spring flood, dangerous debris littered the water like bones in a chowder. Monstrous tree trunks rolled up from the roiling depths like sea serpents of the vasty deep. Almost everywhere, smaller limbs stuck out of the water like the spars of a thousand sunken yawls. Often they denoted submerged islands that would rise above water in midsummer and bloom with wild flowers. Frequently we felt our hull scrape ominously against them. Uncle and I would glance anxiously across the cabin roof from our posts at the sweeps, expecting imminent calamity. Other times we heard a sinister musical creaking as a submerged snag bent and gave way under the force of our heavy keel.

By sunset that first day, we rounded the wan little hamlet of Monaca at the first big bend of the Ohio, and hove to shore off the northern bank in a quiet eddy below the outlet of the Beaver River. Here we anchored, waded to shore, and made fast our craft between two stout chestnut trees. Uncle remained ashore to botanize, whilst I set about securing us a supper. Not less than a minute after I had flung a salt-pork-baited hook over the side did my line tauten with such a jerk as almost fetched me headlong over the gunwale. I had caught many a sea bass in the waters off my home, and even sharks, but none fought like the monster here on my line. For half an hour the combat was joined, I running all around our little deck as the invisible brute sounded 'neath the hull. My palms, already a mass of blisters from a day at the sweeps, ran red with blood. At last my opponent gave up his struggle and I hauled him up from the muddy netherworld like a great sodden timber. So affrighted was I to see his gaping, bewhiskered jaws that I quick snatched a pistol and beat him about the head as we would club a shark back home to ensure his subjugation. I was another quarter hour hoisting him aboard. He proved to be not any ravening shark, of course, but a superlative catfish
(Ictalurus furcatus)
as big as a calf. I soon had him skinned and filleted—flinging the offals to a flotilla of honking grebes
(Podilymbus podiceps)
. I fired the iron brazier on our foredeck, and by the time Uncle returned with his pouchful of specimens, our supper was aromatically roasting.

“Look, Sammy!” he exclaimed, producing in one hand a little yellow blossom, and in the other a pink. “A new species of
Potentilla!
And
Corydalis
too!”

“Hurrah!” I congratulated him. My zest for things botanical never was the equal of Uncle's, but I was happy for his jubilation. To him, the most trifling weed took on heroic grandeur, particularly when he thought himself to be its discoverer.

“Barely one full day outbound, and already are we two species richer. Why, I feel like a man at large in El Dorado, gold everywhere underfoot! Does thee realize, nephew, that at this rate we might find virtually hundreds of new species? What—halloo! Why, hurrah for thee, boy! What succulent is this a'roasting?”

“'Tis a catfish, Uncle.”

“And where didst thee get him?”

“Not at market, I assure you, sir.”

“O, Sammy, 'tis a fine delicacy! And a mild evening, and a glorious end on our first day abroad. Let's to the trenchers, eh? My backbone is a'touching my belly!”

And so did we pass our first night aboard the keelboat, by mutual consent named
Megatherium
(for its massive, lumbering beauty as much as its being the raison d'être of our expedition). Picking our teeth after the feast, we listened to the evening song of the Ohio: waterfowls quacking in the reeds, the millionfold chorus of peeping froglets, the horned owl hooting in the nearby forest, and the plangent cries of wolves ranging distantly in the hills beyond the river valley. Beyond the embers of our little brazier teemed a billion beings, proclaiming themselves in as many notes and tunes. In a little while, the moon rose above the eastering hills, lustrous, lucent with mystery. Nighthawks swerved against the glowing disc.

“Well,” said I to hear a human voice amid all these animal croakings, quacking, howlings, wingings, and hootings, “'tisn't like home, is it, Uncle?”

“Thee will get used to it, Sammy,” Uncle said. “Hear that wolf pack yonder?”

“Yes.” I drew my blanket up beneath my chin. My head rested upon a sack of Pennsylvania cornmeal. “Do you think we shall find him, Uncle?”

“Him…?”

“Megatherium.”

He chortled and sighed. “Perhaps. 'Tis a big, empty continent, my boy.”

“It does not sound empty to me, Uncle,” I shuddered. He remained silent. “How long do you think our search shall require?”

“'Tis hard to say. When we reach Indian country we shall inquire of the savages thereabouts and perhaps employ a gang to get our specimen. Why, 'pon my ramble to the Niagara, I found the Tuscaroras very helpful at the price of a few trinkets.”

“Are you not afraid in a wild country, Uncle?”

“'Tis an acquired taste, I suppose—but O how savory when once acquired. Some of the happiest days of my life were those summer weeks in Labrador, alone amongst the puffins and the bears.”

“I would have gone mad with loneliness.”

“I was never idle for a moment; I never stopped to think about it.”

“It is a thing beyond my power to comprehend.”

“Perhaps thee will learn to comprehend it in the weeks ahead.”

My belly tightened. A shooting star etched a trail across the blue-black dome of sky.

“Look,” he said.

“Another angel, fallen from grace” said I. “How is it we never find them lying where they fall, Uncle? Broken-winged like sparrows in the road.”

“They fall through the earth, Sammy,” Uncle replied in all earnestness. “To the bad place.”

“Through the earth? Clear through to the other side?”

“Of course not.”

“To the center then? Is that where hell is located?”

“'Tis an ether of the spirit. Of mind.”

“And heaven?”

“Likewise.”

“And God?”

“Yes …?”

“Where does he dwell?”

“Why, everywhere.”

“I was taught that he dwelt in heaven.”

“Had thy father kept his Quaker faith, thee would have learned where God doth dwell and how.”

“Perhaps the earth is an ether of spirit. How do you know you are not dreaming right now?”

“Because I hear thy lips flapping.”

“How do you know you're not dreaming it?”

“Enough, thou atheist clod. Goodnight.”

Soon he was snoring. I lay beneath my blanket long into that fiercely beautiful night, listening to the cries of beasts and the water gently laving our boat. At length I too succumbed to slumber and dreamed of home; but someone in the dream called it heaven, and I believed it was.

For the next week, we floated downstream in perfect weather, pausing where we pleased to make botanical forays on shore, as carefree as two runaway boys off on a lark. We soon “got the hang” of steering our boat with the sweeps, though practice did not improve its inherent clumsiness as a craft. My blisters became calluses. My face and hands turned brown in the sunshine. My back grew strong.

The settlements were sparse after Wheeling, but it was exciting to think that the far bank was the half-wild state of Ohio, and we landed on its shore so I could say I had been there. The individual farmsteads along the shore grew likewise fewer and farther between, while the houses took on a more rough-hewn character and their fields were still full of stumps. Many long stretches of the river now contained no signs of settlement at all, but pale columns of smoke rose here and there from the forest's depth, and who could say whether they issued from a pioneer's cabin or an Indian's wigwam?

As the days wore on, the sun's strong rays brought forth all the furled foliage of the hardwoods and many a bright spring blossom. Deer disported along the banks, heron and other great fisher-birds skimmed the silvery surface for glittering fish. Often we saw bears grubbing at the water's edge. Sometimes the strange illusion struck me that our boat was still while all the world went by in slow and stately motion. Time itself no longer reigned as tyrant to a workaday world. It became water, light, wing, and fin, an ether of the spirit, of mind.

I awoke on deck one morning to the unpleasing sensation of raindrops pelting my face. A chill gripped the air, my breath issued in steamy huffs, while a dreary mist blanketed the river, obscuring the shore not twenty yards from our anchorage. Even the ever-teeming creatures of the riparian world lay silent and concealed in their holes, nests, or dens. I set about kindling a fire in our brazier, hoping to make a pot of cornmeal porridge. But as soon as I arranged my tinder and struck my flint, the main deluge commenced as though a million water buckets were overturned at once. We rushed down the companionway into the hold. It was less a cabin than a mere cargo bin. For the rest of the day, we stayed inside, I writing in my journal and reading from our copy of
The Navigator
, that indispensable guidebook of the Ohio River traveler, while Uncle made botanical notes and snoozed. Night turned mere gloom to oppression. We supped on soggy biscuits. I prayed for a return to sunshine and fell asleep.