The Last American Man (17 page)

Crockett was a brilliant self-promoter who could always be counted on to give a reporter a witty, hillbilly sound bite or
a dramatic tall tale about an encounter with some wild and dangerous “varmut.” He was cunning enough to carefully time the
release of his heroic memoirs,
The
Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee,
to coincide with his 1833 congressional election campaign. “What a miserable place a city is,”moaned Crockett. And then went
to live in Washington, D.C., anyhow, where he willingly got in bed with his Northeastern Whig rivals in order to see that,
appropriately enough, his beloved land bill was passed.

In fact, these famous backwoods American guys all got to be famous backwoods American guys through their intelligence and
ambition and carefully styled self-representations. Daniel Boone, the very model of a free-living frontiersman, was a real
estate speculator (indeed, a developer) of the highest order. He founded the Kentucky town of Boonesborough and subsequently
filed over twenty-nine legal claims to land, eventually owning thousands of acres. He embroiled himself in litigation over
border disputes, including one nasty case that he fought through the colonial court system for more than twenty-three years.
(Even in the eighteenth century, even for Daniel Boone, the process of landownership was more bureaucratically complicated
than the statement “This is mine!” Boone knew how the world worked. As he wrote to one fellow settler, “No Dout you are Desireous
your Land Bisness Should be Dunn, but that is a thing impossible without money.”)

There happen to be a lot of heroic moments in American history that would have been impossible without money. The reason Daniel
Boone became famous was that he entered into a business deal with a schoolteacher from Pennsylvania named John Filson, whose
family also owned a lot of land in Kentucky and who was looking for a way to publicize the state and thus increase the value
of his property. Filson ended up writing a thrilling book,
The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone
, which became a best seller and, as intended, a lure for settlers to come down to Kentucky and buy up all that good Boone-and
Filson-owned land. It was a vastly profitable and clever venture on Boone’s part, and it also made him an icon in his own
lifetime.

Both Boone and Crockett were much sharper businessmen than you might have guessed by watching their TV shows in the 1950s.
(
“The rippin’est, roarin’est, fightin’est man the frontier ever knew!”
) And they weren’t the only clever ones. Kit Carson had dozens of adventure novels written about him and published in New
York City while he was still alive (
Kit Carson: Knight of the Plains; Kit Carson: The Prince of
the Goldhunters
, among others). And Carson’s old boss, the explorer John Frémont, was smart enough to add a little romantic dash to his congressionally
commissioned exploration reports to make them national best-sellers. Even Lewis and Clark knew how to sell it. When they were
returning from their famous expedition, they outfitted themselves all rugged and cool when they sailed up the river into St.
Louis to be welcomed by a thousand cheering residents and no small number of newspaper reporters, one of whom wrote, with
admiration, “They really did have the appearance of Robinson Crusoes—dressed entirely in buckskin.”

So when Eustace Conway hustles himself “a slick little business deal” or when he trades land for land or when he writes in
his journal, “I just put together a big packet of news articles for publicity; there are probably 35 major news articles done
on me over the years—this will be an impressive packet for selling myself,” or when he exploits his mountain man persona to
get himself an audience, he is not betraying his frontier American forefathers in any way; he’s
honoring
them. They would recognize immediately what he’s up to, and they would admire it, because running that kind of savvy operation
is what success has always been about on this continent.

“Working seven days a week, all hours of the day for a year now,” Eustace wrote in his journal after Turtle Island had been
open a few years. “I guess I am a good example of striving for a high goal, dependent not on immediate returns but on the
vision of the future, totally a part of my social and philosophical upbringing. My granddad set an example in many ways with
Sequoyah. Even now, a horned owl calls, reminding me of him as the warmth of the fire lives with me.”

He didn’t owe his father money anymore (“and it is truly a happy day to be releasing this burden”), but there was no end of
other chalt lenges facing him. It was an effort of organization to get Boys’ Camp and Girls’ Camp running at Turtle Island
every summer. And there were the realities of dealing with the kids themselves. Someone would cut his hand on sharp obsidian
and need stitches; someone would get poison ivy; someone would get caught smoking pot and have to be sent home because of
Eustace’s lifelong straight-edge intolerance for drugs.

Not to mention the issues of staffing. His personal standards of excellence being what they were, Eustace soon realized it
was going to be one difficult task to find solid workers whom he could trust. For a while, his brothers, Judson and Walton,
worked for Eustace as counselors. They were great, but they had their own lives going and couldn’t be relied on to teach at
Turtle Island forever. Walton had finished college and was heading to Europe, where he would live for several years. Judson
was already yearning to spend his summers in the West and would soon take off on his own adventures, riding boxcars and hitchhiking.
(“I was recently backpacking in the Wind River Range of Wyoming,” Judson wrote to Eustace in a typically exuberant postcard.
“I fought an early blizzard for 15 miles above the timberline—12,000 feet. It came close to taking my life. It was great fun.
I hope camp is going good. Oh, by the way, I’m a cowboy now.”)

Aside from his brothers, it was extremely tough for Eustace to find people who would work as hard (or nearly as hard) as he
did and still give him the respect he felt he deserved. For a man who often said that he found the idea of a mere eight-hour
workday “disgusting,” Eustace was rarely satisfied with his employees’ efforts. They would come to Turtle Island “awed, amazed,
and in love with this place” (as one ex-employee wrote) and then seem shocked that they had to work so hard. Again and again,
he lost his team, either by their deserting or by his firing them.

He wished he could magically have the staunch staff his grandfather had worked with at Camp Sequoyah back in the 1930s, instead
of these petulant modern kids with all their
feelings
and
needs
. His grandfather had demanded purity and perfection, and, by and large, he got it. If Chief so much as heard a rumor that
a counselor had been seen smoking a cigarette in town on his day off, that counselor would come back to camp and find his
bags packed for him. Chief never concerned himself with trampling on people’s feelings or being labeled as “unfair.” He had
ultimate authority, which was all Eustace was asking for. That, and a commitment from people to try to work as hard as he
did. Which was a tall order.

I’ve worked with Eustace Conway. Nobody gets to visit Turtle Island without working. I spent a week up there one autumn helping
Eustace build a cabin. There were three of us on the job—Eustace, myself, and a quiet and steadfast young apprentice named
Christian Kaltrider. We worked twelve hours each day, and I don’t recall lunch breaks. Silent, steady work. The way Eustace
works, it’s like a march—numbing and constant. You get the feeling you’re in a platoon. You stop thinking and just give in
to the pace. Eustace is the only one who speaks at all when it’s work time, and that’s to issue commands, which he does with
unassailable authority, although every command is polite. There was only one moment in the process where he stopped working.
Eustace asked me to please go to his pile of tools and fetch him an adz.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t know what that is.”

He described the adz for me—a tool that resembles an ax, but with a curved blade set at a right angle to the handle, used
for dressing wood. I found the tool and was walking back toward the cabin to return it, when Eustace suddenly put down his
hammer, stood up, wiped his forehead, and said, “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the word ‘adz’ used in literature. Wasn’t it Hemingway
who wrote about the sound of the adz coming from a front yard where someone was building a coffin?”

I slapped a horsefly on my neck and offered, “Are you possibly thinking of Faulkner? I think there’s a scene in
As I Lay Dying
where Faulkner describes the sound of someone building a coffin in a front yard.”

“Yes, of course,” Eustace said. “Faulkner.”

And he returned to work. Left me standing there with an adz in my hand, staring at him.
Yes, of course. Faulkner
. Now, back to work everybody.

Eustace wanted to finish the floor of the cabin by sundown that day, so we were working fast. He was so eager to get the job
done that he used a chain saw to cut up the bigger logs. Eustace was sawing through a log when the chain saw hit a knot, kicked
back, and jumped up toward his face. He deflected it with his left hand, sawing into two of his fingers.

He made one quick sound like “Rah!” and pulled back his hand. The blood started pumping out. Christian and I froze, silent.
Eustace shook his hand once, sending out a shower of blood, and then recommenced sawing. We waited for him to say something
or try to stop the bleeding, which was fairly prolific, but he didn’t. So we both kept at our work. He continued bleeding
and sawing and hammering and bleeding and sawing more. By the end of the day, Eustace’s entire arm, the logs, the tools, both
of my hands, and both of Christian’s hands were covered with blood.

And I thought,
Ah, so this is what’s expected of us
.

We worked until dusk and headed back to base camp. I walked next to Eustace, and his arm hung down, dripping. We passed a
flowering bush and, always the teacher, he said, “Now, that’s an interesting sight. You don’t usually see jewelweed with both
orange and yellow blossoms on one plant. You can make an ointment out of the stem, you know, to relieve the itching of poison
ivy.”

“Very interesting,” I said.

Only after dinner did Eustace bandage his savaged hand. He mentioned the incident just once, saying, “I’m lucky I didn’t saw
my fingers off.”

Later that night I asked Eustace what his most serious injury had been, and he said he’d never been seriously injured. One
time he did slice open his thumb in a careless moment while dressing a deer carcass. It was a deep, long cut “with the meat
hanging out and everything,” and it clearly needed stitches. So Eustace stitched it, using a needle and thread and the stitch
he knows well from sewing buckskin. Healed just fine.

“I don’t think I could sew up my own skin,” I said.

“You can do anything you believe you can do.”

“I don’t believe I could sew up my own skin.”

Eustace laughed and conceded, “Then you probably couldn’t.”

“People have such a hard time getting things done out here,” Eustace complained in his journal in 1992. “The environment is
so new. It really isn’t a problem for them. It is
my
stress over their slow, ignorant pace that bothers me.
They’re
blissfully enjoying every minute.”

Challenges were coming at Eustace from every direction. A friend pointed out that it was a mistake for Eustace not to carry
personal health insurance. “But I’m healthy!” he protested. So his friend explained that if Eustace were to be seriously injured
in an accident and needed intensive care, the hospital could raid all his assets, including the value of his land, to cover
the expense. Jesus Christ! Eustace had never thought of such a thing before. Plus he had no end of taxes to manage and surveying
to pay for. Plus he had to deal with poachers on his land. He ran down on foot some dumb young kid who dropped a buck out
of season with an illegal gun just a few hundred feet from Eustace’s kitchen. Even more horrifying, he himself had been accused
of poaching.

He was teaching a class of eighty young students one afternoon when four government cars and eight lawmen pulled up and arrested
him for poaching deer. Tipped off by a resentful neighbor, the game warden went straight to Eustace’s cache of dozens of deerskins
and accused Eustace of having killed the animals without a permit. In fact, the skins had been given to Eustace by people
who wanted them tanned. It was a terrifying moment.

Eustace had to spend the next month collecting letters of evidence from every person who had given him a deerskin, as well
as documents from environmentalists and politicians across the South swearing that Eustace Conway was a committed naturalist
who would never hunt more than was legally allowed. On the day of his trial, though, he had the balls to wear his deerskin
pants to the courtroom. Why not? It’s what he always wore. He strode into his trial looking like Jeremiah goddamn Johnson.
Ma-Maw, the elderly Appalachian neighbor who lived down the holler and who hated the Law as much as the next hillbilly, came
with Eustace to give him moral support. (“I’m afraid the judge might take these buckskin pants right off me and throw me in
jail,” Eustace joked to Ma-Maw, who said sternly, “Don’t you worry. I have my bloomers on under this skirt. If they steal
your pants, I’ll just take off my bloomers and give ’em to you. You can just wear my bloomers to jail, Houston!”) Ma-Maw loved
all the Conway boys, but she never
could
get their names quite right . . .