Peter Loon (2 page)

CHAPTER 15.
Concerning New Visitors to Captain Clayden and Their Opinions
.

CHAPTER 16.
Of the Road to New Milford, and What They Discovered at Great Meadow Copse
.

CHAPTER 17.
Concerning the Encounter at Benjamin Brook
.

CHAPTER 18.
How Opinion Differed over the Course of a Few Hours and a Few Miles, and What Was Said at the Sign of the
Star and Sturgeon.

CHAPTER 19.
Concerning Matters with Elspeth Gray and Gray Farm
.

CHAPTER 20.
How the Parson Was Accused by–and Peter Attached to–Nathan Barrow
.

CHAPTER 21.
Concerning the Disposition of Two Hundred
.

CHAPTER 22.
Concerning the March to Wiscasset
.

CHAPTER 23.
How Peter Came to His Third Tavern, and How He Put the Night's Adventures into Motion
.

CHAPTER 24.
How Peter Loon Came to the Jail at Wiscasset and What Happened There
.

CHAPTER 25.
How Peter Loon Returned to New Milford and How He Left There Again
.

CHAPTER 26.
How Peter Journeyed Home and What He Found There
.

CHAPTER 27.
Concerning Peter Loon's Decisions and also What Was Decided for Him
.

THE BACKCOUNTRY SETTLEMENTS IN THIS BOOK WERE REAL PLACES
, though their names were changed in the course of incorporating them into townships. Eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century New Milford is now the town of Alna, Balltown was divided into Whitefield and Jefferson, and Plymouth Gore became Washington. Some boundaries are not so neatly described, so that Patricktown seems to have become part of Windsor and part of Somerville, and Sheepscott Great Pond is more or less present day Palermo.

By the end of the eighteenth century, many common folk in the United States believed that the American Revolution had not fulfilled its promise, and that the true war was but half done. The subsistence farmer and the laborer asserted that a relatively small number of families–wealthy, and long-established in the New World–controlled the political arena, the courts, and even the
official
interpretation of recent history. Many veterans of the Revolution believed that this rule by the few and the wealthy was no more than a new face on the Old World's system of aristocratic privilege
.

Several armed rebellions were mounted as the nineteenth century drew close, particularly in the northern states, and often against that “old devil”
taxation;
but these small insurrections were quickly put down by either federal or state authority
.

In the District of Maine (then part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts), men known as the “Great Proprietors” claimed vast tracts of territory on the strength of old King's Grants and often contradictory Indian deeds. Their claim of entitlement was a direct extension of the very system of European aristocracy that the United States of America had ostensibly turned its back upon
.

Meanwhile, the poorer folk, who were clearing the great forests of the northeast, believed that unsettled land was the right of any who could physically wrest it from the wilderness, and they used sometimes brutal tactics to drive off and intimidate the proprietors' land agents and surveyors. These bands of settlers who organized themselves against law and authority called themselves first the “White Indians” and then the “liberty Men.”

IN THE FOURTH YEAR OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, A MAN NAMED
Ezekiel Peter Black came to the settlement of Sheepscott Great Pond, in the District of Maine, with his daughter Rosemund. There was a great deal of speculation regarding Black and his daughter, these stories being fed by the appearance of the man himself, who was taller than other men and powerfully built; he was swarthy skinned and his beard and his long hair, worn in a queue, were blue-black. It was rumored that his father was Black Peter himself, the African slave who rose up against his tormentors and became a pirate, and that this Ezekiel Black had himself harried the southern coasts and got his daughter by the kidnapped wife of a plantation owner in South Carolina.

Rosemund was twelve years of age when she was brought to Sheepscott Great Pond, and people thereabouts had never seen beauty like hers. Her hair was not as black as her father's, but it was long and thick, and her eyes were almost black and her lips (even when she was a child) were full and red. She considered her neighbors with a certain unmasked sense of superiority, and even her father, who himself walked like a king among other men, treated her always as his equal.

Adding to the speculation about Black's past was the amount of
coin in hand
he carried to Sheepscott Great Pond, and his neighbors were greatly encouraged to accept him on his own silent terms when he purchased their labor in the clearing of his acres and the raising of his home. Two young men in particular were furthered in their own substance by the wages they earned in working for Ezekiel Black. Silas Loon and Obed Winslow were fast friends who all but lived on the Black homestead while it was yarded, raised, and planted.

Silas and Obed were not the only young men to pine after Rosemund as she thrived from child to girl, but they were of an age with one another and only a year or two older than Rosemund herself, and from the moment they both saw her, which was the same moment, they could see the blossom inside the bud. They ingratiated themselves with her father with honesty and hard work, and Rosemund would sometimes allow them to speak to her at the end of the day.

Homesteading in the Maine wilderness was a hard bargain, however you looked at it. The ground was stony, the summers were humid and filled with storm, the winters were deep with snow, and perhaps worst of all were the black flies in spring, and the mosquitoes in warmer months–horrible swarms, huge and hungry that made work bitter and defense useless. But as a rule, those who came stayed, and the children of those who stayed cut new farms and new settlements out of the deeper precincts of the forest.

When Silas and Obed were seventeen and Rosemund was fifteen, the two young men struck out on their own–one to the north and one to the west–and began to clear the land they would lay claim to. This was in a season when the agents of Henry Knox and the other proprietors were increasing their presence in the wilderness and demanding payment for land that the backcountry folk had settled. Undeterred by the presence of land agents and surveyors, the young men went to Ezekiel Black and spoke to him, taking turns.

“We both flatter ourselves in thinking we have your regard, Mr. Black,” they said to Ezekiel Black.

The father said directly, “Honest labor, even when recompensed, merits regard.”

Then the young men said, “And we further flatter ourselves, that your daughter thinks none too poorly of us.”

Mr. Black might have expected this, for his expression never altered. His arms were crossed before him. “I believe she finds your company tolerable,” he replied.

“We both of us love your daughter, Mr. Black,” they told him.

He said nothing.

“We are friends to the end of our days, and will not fall out, even for love,” they continued. “So it is that we come to you, each begging your Rosemund's hand, and if you discover virtue in us and if you choose one of us for your daughter's husband, the other will quietly abide.”

“I will not drive you away,” said Mr. Black, “but I would not presume to choose a husband for Rosemund. She is too young besides, but when she is of age I will not refuse her if she chooses one of you. Go back and work your own land. Her love may not take the form of the biggest house or the most acres, but it would not hurt your suit, either of you, to have them when the time comes.”