The Fabric of America (24 page)

There was reason for self-congratulation. Before Ellicott's arrival in Natchez, Spain's control of the Mississippi had extended beyond the mouth of the Ohio. Now it was only a few miles north of New Orleans, and the effects of the new frontier were already being felt. U.S. citizens had begun to exercise their right to warehouse goods in New Orleans—Clark's customs records show that he had in store cotton from Natchez and Nashville to be shipped on to Virginia, as well as flour from the Ohio Valley and tobacco from Kentucky in transit to Atlantic ports. Less obvious but in the long term no less significant was the way the line was beginning to separate the old mixture of nationalities. In 1798 Gayoso had issued a proclamation that no one living north of the thirty-first parallel could own land south of
it except with his express permission. On the other side of the line, people such as Minor and Dunbar, formerly Spain's most useful citizens, as well as British supporters like Hutchins, now transferred their loyalties to the United States. The nation was taking shape in the south and west.

Ellicott's sense of triumph burst out in full splendor when he wrote his wife late in February. With the letter came gifts—a cask of sugar, fans, pecan nuts, and a miniature portrait painted by a Spanish lady. In it he appears serious and gray-haired with shadows beneath his dark eyes. But the dress is that of a hero: silk stock, ruffled shirt, high-collared broadcloth coat, a man of distinction.

“
When you look at the picture,”
he told Sally, “you will see the face of a person whose life has been devoted to the service of his country, who has ever since he left Philadelphia been up by brake of day and through the encampment. A person who disconcerted all the plans in this country injurious to the interests of the United States, and tho frequently attacked by a set of as complete villains as ever fled from one country to another, he succeeded in every attempt to serve his country, and will without bloodshed have the treaty in a very few months completely carried into effect.”

It would have been administratively neat had the frontier continued along the thirty-first parallel right to the Atlantic coast. However, for the last third of its length, it followed the old British line, which was dictated by geography rather than the stars. From the point where it reached the Apalachicola River, the boundary was to descend about twenty miles downstream to its junction with the Flint River—now drowned by the massive, dam-created Lake Seminole—“thence straight to the head of the St Mary's river and thence down the middle thereof to the Atlantic Ocean.”

All this was Creek territory. A reputation for ferocity, and the shrewd diplomacy of their half-Scots chief, Alexander McGillivray, who, until his death in 1793, played off Spain against the United States, kept outsiders at bay. Apart from twelve hundred British and Americans living around Fort St. Stephens on the Tombigbee River, there were no settlements between the Pearl River and the Atlantic, and Spain's possessions were situated on the coast. That situation would change once Ellicott's line showed how far U.S. jurisdiction reached. A road connecting the Mississippi with the
Atlantic coast would soon follow, and the knowledge that federal troops offered protection brought an increasing flow of settlers into the area. In the long run, a boundary would prove as fatal to the Creeks as to the Iroquois. But for almost twenty years, Benjamin Hawkins, the chief Indian agent for the south, was responsible more than any other for preventing conflict between the settlers and the Creeks.

A former senator and aide to General Washington, Hawkins was committed to his old chief ‘s program of inclusion. Almost alone in the federal government, he had developed a coherent policy so that Native Americans could live alongside incomers. “The plan I pursue is to lead the Indian from hunting to the pastoral life,” he told a Moravian missionary, “to agriculture, household manufactures, a knowledge of weights and measures, money and figures, to be honest and true to themselves as well as to their neighbors, to protect innocence, to punish guilt, to fit them to be useful members of the planet they inhabit and lastly, letters.”

Despite its undertones of cultural superiority, his policy of peaceful assimilation earned him the title
Iste-chatelige-osetat-chemis-te-chango
or The Beloved of Four Nations—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek— a marked contrast to the derisory nickname the Dirt Captain that his predecessor, Blount, had earned for his greed in stealing land. Hawkins's approach was most effective among the Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw, earning them the label of “the civilized nations” in the nineteenth century. But paradoxically, Hawkins felt most at home with the more hostile Creek, among whom he lived and farmed with his Creek wife.

Ellicott badly needed the help of this legendary figure. He had mishandled the existing policy of the United States, to buy goodwill with gifts and money, by failing to discuss with the West Florida Choctaws his plans to run a frontier through their territory. Belatedly he sent them a message in the summer assuring them, “As soon as the line is marked all our Choctaw brothers who fall on the north side of it will be remembered with our Chickasaw brothers and receive good presents.”

His lack of diplomacy infuriated the Choctaws, whose suspicions had already been aroused by Gayoso's hints that the Americans intended to take more of their territory. They expelled the local Indian agent, and word rapidly spread eastward as far as the Creeks in East Florida that the boundary due to come through their territories was intended to take land from the
American Indians. Before leaving New Orleans, Ellicott sent Hawkins an urgent message to meet him in Pensacola.

Despite Pickering's almost despairing pleas for economy, Ellicott decided to buy a boat in New Orleans for this final part of the frontier and, finding none for sale, had a two-masted schooner built, which he named
The Sally
. It was not an entirely quixotic decision. His precious instruments and rapidly growing stack of official correspondence could be more safely stored aboard ship than hauled across the rough land beyond the Pearl River. The vessel would be sufficiently shallow in draft to sail up the Mobile and Apalachicola rivers to establish exactly where the thirty-first parallel crossed them, and thereafter it would carry most of the team round the tip of Florida and north to St. Marys. Meanwhile the actual line would be marked out by his young surveyors, and especially by an unstoppable northern Irishman named David Gillespie, who ran random and true lines back and forth like a weaver's shuttle.

What was quixotic about Ellicott's choice of transport was his decision to skipper the vessel himself, never having been to sea in his life. Ahead lay shoal waters and privateers in the Caribbean and blue waters in the Atlantic, challenges to make the most experienced mariner pause. When the forty-ton schooner cast off from a New Orleans dockside on March 1, 1799, with the U.S. boundary commissioner as captain, onlookers must have wondered how so sensible a man, one so dedicated to the pure rationality of science, could be so rash.

Surprisingly, the plan worked well initially. The schooner was hauled by teams of laborers thirty miles up the Mobile River to meet the surveyors at a point close to the junction between the Tombigbee and Alabama rivers. After three weeks of painstaking celestial observation, Ellicott established that the thirty-first parallel was precisely 518.55 perches, or 1 mile, 1,189 yards, and 9 feet to the south, a distance that was measured out with chain and compass and checked again. On April 10 a boulder was set in place to mark the boundary's exact position, and this three-foot-high, iron-red marker, despite being half-hidden by trees and blasted by buckshot from drunken hunters, remains intact. On the south side are carved the words “Domino de S M [Kingdom of His Majesty] Carlos IV, Lat.31., 1799,” and on the north, “U.S Lat.31., 1799.”

A voyage along the coast brought them in July to Pensacola, a larger and more prosperous port than Mobile, whose well-protected bay—“justly considered one of the best on the coast” in Ellicott's opinion—provided quantitites of succulent fish, oysters, and crabs. There, Ellicott encountered the Spanish governor of East Florida, Vicente Folch, who ruled with a harsher discipline than Gayoso used in New Orleans and exercised an active influence over the roughly twenty-thousand-strong Creek population through bribery and political manipulation. To Ellicott's relief, Hawkins was there too, a sparely built man with the contained, almost impassive demeanor that Native Americans often looked for in counselors.

Folch greeted him with the warning that the Upper Creeks, those farthest from the coast, were extremely hostile to the frontier. Hawkins learned, however, that their hostility was being stirred up by Folch himself. Like the Iroquois, the Creek organized their society round a system of checks and balances that divided groups into factions labeled
Italwalgi
, meaning White or peaceful, and
Kipayalgi
, which meant Red or war. The agreement of both sides was necessary before a decision was made.

Far upstream on the Escambia River,
The Sally
was stopped by the Tallassee, the dominant Creek group in the area, under their leader, Mad Dog. In a dramatic encounter, Hawkins persuaded the White majority that the frontier was an international agreement, accepted by both the United States and Spain, and not a device to take their land. Half-convinced, Mad Dog replied that if Hawkins was right, Folch would not appear at the meeting because “his tongue is forked, and as you are here, he will be ashamed to show it.”

Folch duly stayed in Pensacola and sent a deputy instead, who was forced to declare publicly that Spain supported the need for a frontier. With that assurance, Mad Dog agreed to accompany Gillespie on the increasingly dangerous task of running the guideline through to the next major river. Two weeks of laborious observations amid clouds of mosquitoes and stinging insects allowed Ellicott to complete his observations on the Escambia. Then
The Sally
slipped back down the river to Pensacola, and out into the Gulf of Mexico once more, rounding the promontory of Cape San Blas that protects the harbor of Apalachicola from westerly storms, and into the port then known as St. Marks.

To Ellicott's dismay, the officer in command of the Spanish fort was Captain Thomas Portell, the man who had physically delivered the sum of
$9,640 to Power for payment to Wilkinson in 1796. The money, he testified, was indeed for the general's services as a Spanish agent. Ellicott's bitterness at this independent confirmation of Wilkinson's treachery found an outlet in his reply in July to yet another of Pickering's dispatches protesting the cost of the expedition. Angrily Ellicott reminded him of the length of the Natchez negotiations, the difficulties of running the line through swamp and forest, and the threat of Indian attack. He ended with a declaration that sounded as though it were addressed not to Pickering but to Wilkinson: “My desire is to support a government I venerate, and my pride to serve faithfully a country which I love, the country in which I was born, and which contains everything I hold dear.”

By then he was almost alone in his determination to persist with
The Sally
strategy. Pickering wanted him to cut the expedition short, and Minor, Spain's boundary commissioner, was growing desperate to get back to Natchez. But Ellicott pressed on up the Apalachicola River to meet the survey party. Here the overhanging trees were covered in poison ivy, and a childhood allergy caused blisters from head to foot. “The evaporation from the dew from this plant in the morning falling upon me is sufficient to produce the effect,” he observed, and the intensity of the inflammation forced him to plunge into the river, “which was the only relief I could find.”

Nevertheless, three weeks were spent taking delicate measurements from the edge of the moon's circumference to the dazzle of the sun and the shimmer of Castor and Pollux at their zenith. On August 21 Ellicott wrote wearily to Thomas Pickering, “I positively am almost worn out by the excessive heat, want of sleep, long, tedious and laborious calculation, in which I have no assistance.” He promised himself three hours sleep, then “near three o'clock in the morning, I shall observe an immersion of the first satellite of Jupiter.”

On the banks of the Apalachicola they constructed the last observation point marking the thirty-first parallel, loaded the canoes, and while Gillespie returned with his Tallassee escort to run the true line back to the Escambia, Ellicott and the main party paddled down to the junction with the Flint River. There he set himself to another marathon of sky-gazing, but by now his relentless pursuit of exactness had tried everyone too far.

Sixteen months after he had set out with Ellicott from the banks of the Mississippi, the uncomplaining Minor had finally had enough. So long as
the Upper Creek inhabited the area, he argued, Europeans would be kept out, and so an exact boundary was irrelevant. They should sail immediately to St. Marys on the Atlantic coast and simply calculate back from there where the boundary should run. Without warning, he dismissed the Spanish military escort and most of the Spanish laborers, telling them they were no longer needed because the line would not be run any farther east. “I suppose you will be angry,” he said to Ellicott, “but I must now tell you those men of yours are no longer necessary either.”

It was a fruitless protest, and with infuriating persistence, Ellicott once more had an observation hut constructed on the nearest high ground to establish the precise location of the mouth of the Flint River. But the patience of the Upper Creek had also broken. Despite Hawkins's intervention, warriors from the Red factions began to circle the camp threatening to attack. Reluctantly Ellicott packed up his instruments, and under cover of
darkness and torrential rain he and his assistant sailed back to Apalachicola while Minor traveled overland with the remainder of the party and the escort to St. Marys.