The Fabric of America (25 page)

Esteban (Stephen) Minor

Ellicott's despair was clear in the report he sent to Pickering. “It is with the most sensible mortification I have ever experienced that I have to inform you of the failure in part of our business,” he wrote, seemingly oblivious to Pickering's repeated hints that it was time to abandon running the last part of the line in order to save money.

Waiting for him at Apalachicola was an appeal for rescue that briefly revived his hope. Lieutenant James Woolridge of Britain's Royal Navy had been shipwrecked on a nearby island, and among his passengers was William Augustus Bowles, who claimed to be leader of all the eighteen Creek tribes. “Understanding that you have been driven by the Indians from the country where you were employed,” wrote Woolridge, “I beg leave to inform you that General Bowles, the Chief of the Creek Nation expresses his wish to see you much, as he thinks your unfortunate differences may be settled.” To Ellicott the message appeared to offer a final opportunity to establish an exact frontier between the Flint and St. Marys.

Loading supplies into an open boat, he sailed with a couple of crew for the sandy strip of land where the British ship was wrecked. There they were stranded for a week by a ferocious storm, in which time Ellicott discovered that Bowles was an adventurer being used by the British against Spain, and that like Cresap and every other adventurer living beyond the reach of formal government, Bowles loathed boundaries. Far from encouraging the Creeks to accept Ellicott's work, he promised to mobilize them to prevent the establishment of any sort of frontier, and to capture the fort at St. Marks, as part of a general uprising to resist any extension of Spanish rule.

With his last hopes dashed, the U.S. commissioner finally did what everyone from the secretary of state, Esteban Minor, and the court at Madrid down to the least important Creek warrior wanted and, in mid-October, set sail for St. Marys. A warning was sent to Hawkins and Pickering of Bowles's plans, but no mention was made of his own folly in aiding them.

Yet the future provided some vindication for Ellicott's obsession. In 1800, Bowles launched his promised attack on St. Marks fort and captured it before embarking on a general campaign of Creek resistance to Spanish rule. The mayhem he created forced Governor Folch to put a reward of $4,500
on his head, but the bounty did nothing to prevent Bowles's influence from spreading in East Florida. It was Ellicott's frontier that proved his nemesis. North of it, Hawkins's influence pervaded everywhere, and when Bowles made the mistake of crossing it to stir up trouble in the United States, Hawkins had him arrested by friendly Creeks. In 1803 he was taken to Pensacola and handed over to Folch, who kept him imprisoned until his death.

Unexpectedly, Ellicott proved a masterly skipper, although he had never been out of sight of land before. The majority of sea captains still relied on dead reckoning—calculating direction from compass measurement and distance from the passage of a float attached to a line thrown overboard—but with a sextant, an equal-altitude instrument, and a chronometer, Ellicott could estimate their location so precisely that when they reached Tampa Bay in October, he could confidently state, “[It] is laid down on our charts too far north by at least 15 minutes [about seventeen miles].”

As they swung eastward through the Keys, the sort of eighteenth-century science practiced by members of the American Philosophical Society allowed him to make himself at home in islands he had never visited before. He ran chemical tests on a specimen from the rocks and “found it to effervesce with the vitriolic acid,” showing that it was lime made from dissolved shells. He examined the reefs and concluded, “Coral is not as was formerly supposed a vegetable substance, but a vast collection of small animals which build up those rocky edifices from the bottom of the ocean!” He found freshwater that had been filtrated through the lime and was stored in natural cavities in the rock. He told the crew that it was safe to eat the prickly pears growing wild on the islands, although “my people were not a little surprised the next morning on finding their urine as if it had been highly tinged with cochineal.” He identified a score of different kinds of fish pulled from the surrounding sea, ranging from hogfish, grunts, and groupers through snappers, turbot, and stingrays. He fed the crew on three different kinds of turtle and supplied them with meat by shooting deer and plover.

In the Atlantic,
The Sally
and her crew faced starvation, a long chase from a hostile privateer, and a storm that threatened to capsize them. Their hunger was ended by the gift of a fresh turtle and a barrel of pork from friendly privateers, and having “crowded all our sail,” they were able to draw
away from their sinister pursuer. And off the coast at Cape Canaveral, “a sudden and violent gale [that] laid the vessel almost on her beams before the sails could be handed” proved that
The Sally
was not only fast but seaworthy. “The appearance of the sea was truly alarming,” Ellicott wrote in his journal, “and though our vessel laid to with ease, and laboured but very little, the main deck was constantly covered with water, and the seas broke over us with such rapidity for some hours that I was seriously apprehensive of foundering.”

On December 2, the gale blew itself out after forty-eight hours, and the same day they sighted land. Ellicott's noon observation showed that they were just north of St. Marys River, where the frontier began and ended. Waiting impatiently for them were the remaining members of the expedition, Esteban Minor, David Gillespie, and George Cochran, who had walked there from the Flint River. They had arrived in early October and, as an irritated Minor informed Ellicott, “have been in daily expectation of seeing you arrive. This state of suspense and expectation joined to the desire of returning to our families has made these two months go with a leaden step, and increasing tediousness and anxiety. Do for heaven's sake be quick, and let us have done with this disagreeable business.”

Being quick was impossible for Andrew Ellicott if it meant skimping on accuracy. Because the treaty stated that the line from the Flint was to run to the source of the St. Marys River, he was determined to find it. Unfortunately it was lost somewhere in the seven-hundred-square-mile expanse of the Okefenokee Swamp. Almost everyone, but especially Gillespie and Minor, was prepared to accept an educated guess at a place just outside the swamp, because no one, not even the Creek Indians, went into it. But Ellicott insisted on hiking right into the waterland until he found a lagoon that fed the stream. From there he ran a traverse line back to the first solid bit of land where an observatory hut could be built and endured two nights of mosquito torture to take his observations.

“The trip was a disagreeable one,” he told Hawkins with masterful understatement, but could not help boasting of having gained some unexpected territory for his country. “The United States extends further south than we had any Idea of, and the source of the river is 30 degrees 34′ North.”

On February 26, 1800, he and Minor marked the spot with “
a mound of earth thrown up on the west side of the main outlet, and as near to the edge
of the Swamp as we could advance on account of the water.” With that the boundary was complete. They descended downriver to St. Marys, drew up their official report, and went their separate ways.

Minor, Ellicott's childhood friend and constant supporter, never spoke to him again, driven as near to outright enmity as someone of his patient nature could be by the torture of the Ellicott passion for exactness. Gillespie too departed in a fury of irritation. But George Cochran, who only had to supply the food, left a testimonial expressing his admiration for Ellicott's “indefatigable zeal and perseverance” and his “gratitude and esteem for the man that so highly contributed to the fortunate issue of affairs at Natchez.”

A remnant of the crew helped sail
The Sally
to Savannah, Georgia, where she was unloaded and sent back to the U.S. fort at St. Stephens on the Mobile River for use by the garrison in patrolling the river. Meanwhile a letter dated April 5 was being delivered to Sally Ellicott in Philadelphia: “My Love, I once more have a speedy prospect of returning to you, for whom alone with our dear children, relations and friends, does life appear desirable—I have done my duty to my country to the extent of my abilities, and my ambition is fully gratifyed. I am my dear Sally Your affectionate Husband.”

Contrary winds held up the boat from Savannah to Philadelphia, but finally on May 18, 1800, more than than three and a half years after he'd left, he arrived back in his home city. It was dark by the time he stepped inside the door, but once it closed behind him, “all the fatigues, hardships and difficulties I had been exposed to during a long absence were more than compensated by the pleasure I experienced in meeting my family in good health.”

The farther we go northward, the more undecided is the frontier [of Louisiana]… this part of America contains little more than uninhabited forests or Indian tribes, and the necessity of fixing a boundary never yet has been felt there.

DENIS DECRÈS, France's minister of marine and colonies, 1802

Ellicott returned like Rip Van Winkle to a country he barely recognized. Philadelphia was no longer the capital, Timothy Pickering no longer the secretary of state, George Washington was dead, so too was David Rittenhouse. Robert Morris, John Nicholson, and James Greenleaf, the millionaire land speculators who had dominated the economy, were all bankrupt. Most astonishingly, a nation that had stretched only raggedly beyond the Appalachians now ran west to the Mississippi, south to the thirty-first parallel, and was overflowing northwest through the territories of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois as far as Michigan. The new republic was growing into what Andrew Ellicott proudly described as “the American Empire.”

The sheer size of the United States that Ellicott had defined—“with room enough for all our descendants,” as Jefferson told Congress in 1801, “to the thousandth and thousandth generation”—created its own impetus toward greater freedom. Many moved west to escape the long-established, hierarchical government of the Atlantic states that always weighed most heavily on the poorest. Squeezed between subsistence farming and county
courts geared to the demands of banks and creditors, New England and Pennsylvania farmers headed toward the prairies. And in the south, the exhausted soil and the monopolization of good land by politically well-connected planters pushed tobacco and cotton farmers toward the Mississippi Territory.

They were moving away from the Atlantic states psychologically as well as physically. Formed by British colonialism and the Revolution, the instinct of the east coast, typified by Jefferson's recommendation for tight federal control of the territories, was to see itself as the privileged custodian of republican democracy. Until the Spanish were worried out of Natchez, frontier families remained, as Ellicott noted of those in the Ohio Valley, dependent on the eastern states for their markets, their cash, and their protection. With the Mississippi open, however, those ties were immediately weakened. Increasingly the “brave, enterprising and warlike” people to be found on the frontier relied on their own resources, developing an independent outlook at odds with that of the eastern establishment. Had Ellicott retraced his voyage down the Ohio River on his return, he would have found the poverty-stricken past rapidly disappearing. The 1800 census counted in excess of 45,000 settlers on the Ohio side and 220,000 in Kentucky, with more following on their heels faster than ever.

In one important respect, however, settlers still had to look east. So long as they remained within its frontiers, the United States guaranteed their property and liberty. Thus to safeguard those rights, westerners needed influence in Washington.

During his absence, the past had almost disappeared from Ellicott's neat brick house on Market Street. The three eldest children were ready to leave home and begin new lives as married adults. The youngest, born after his departure, had died before his return, to Ellicott's “inexpressible concern”; the two infants had grown to childhood, and the middle three were now adolescents. In his absence, Sally Ellicott had held the household together, paying bills, wheedling allowances from the State Department, and, when her father died, spending her inheritance as she wanted. A miniature painted of her at this time shows someone solid and unaffected, with a determined chin and steady gaze, but missing from it is the quick, teasing humor that her
daughters learned from her. In law, wives might be dependent upon their husbands, but by character and necessity Sally Ellicott demonstrated that she possessed a wholly independent spirit.

The demands of modern life were soon brought home to her husband. With a gentlemanly disdain for practicalities, Ellicott had refused to draw his salary while away and expected to receive $8,000 in back pay and expenses on his return. In the dying days of the Adams administration that proved impossible. Pickering had been fired, and his successor would not authorize payment of so large a sum. Twice Ellicott wrote to President Adams, asking for an interview to discuss his work, but was ignored. Then, a few weeks after he had presented his report with its accompanying charts, the Treasury where it was housed caught fire, destroying the only official record of his work. It was as though he had no real existence.