The True Account
Authors: Howard Frank Mosher
PRIVATE TRUE TEAGUE KINNESON
1748â1846
First Mariner Books edition 2004
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Copyright © 2003 by Howard Frank Mosher
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
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ISBN
-13: 978-0-618-19721-7
ISBN
-10: 0-618-19721-4
ISBN
-13: 978-0-618-43123-6 (pbk.)
ISBN
-10: 0-618-43123-3 (pbk.)
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Mosher, Howard Frank.
The true account : concerning a Vermont gentleman's race to the Pacific against and exploration of the western American continent coincident to the expedition of Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark / Howard Frank Mosher,
p. cm.
ISBN
0-618-19721-4
ISBN
0-618-43123-3 (pbk.)
1. Overland journeys to the PacificâFiction. 2. ExplorersâFiction. 3. VermontâFiction. [1. West (U.S.)âDiscovery and explorationâFiction.] I. Title.
PS3563.08844 T78 2003
813'-54âdc21 2002032804
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e
ISBN
978-0-544-39126-0
v1.0614
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Map by Jacques Chazaud
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T
O
P
HILLIS
aka Yellow Sage Flower Who Tells Wise Stories
June 1, 2003
Dr. Stephan T. Black Elk, Curator
Museum of the American Plains Indians
Browning
Blackfoot Nation, Montana Territory
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Dear Dr. Black Elk:
Enclosed is the manuscript I wish to donate to your museum. As I explained to you during our conversation last week, the manuscript has been handed down in the Blackfoot branch of the Kinneson family from mother to daughter for five generations. My late husband, Professor J. D. Greenblatt, formerly chair of the American Studies Program at the University of Montana, was, of course, aware of the manuscript. Frankly, he did not put much credence in it. His skepticism brings a smile to my face even now because it was very nearly the single ongoing point of contention between us; finally we had to table all discussion on the topic in order to maintain matrimonial harmony. Perhaps it would have been different if I had shown him the contents of the crates that will arrive at the museum next week, after you have had an opportunity to review the manuscript. But I never felt comfortable showing those to anyone outside the tribe. And my husband the professor, for all his wonderful qualities, was not, as you might guess from his name, a member of the Blackfoot Nation.
At any rate, as the last living member of the Montana Kinnesons, I feel that, for better or for worse, the time has come for me to bring the manuscript and the contents of the crates before the public. And I can think of no more suitable occasion to do so than the upcoming bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
As to being the guest speaker at your bicentennial ceremony next month, and formally presenting the manuscript and related materials to the museumâmy word, what a very gracious offer! May I consider it for a few more days? It has been a long time since this retired schoolteacher and Blackfoot elder has done any speechifying. But I shall try to get up some brief notes to see how they sound, and will notify you soon.
Very truly yours,
Cora Soaring Eagle Kinneson
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P.S. The crates will arrive by express truck next Tuesday. At the risk of sounding like the fussbudget old schoolmarm I am, please do use the very greatest care in unpacking them. Thank you again.
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1
W
E HAD SET
a very close watch over my uncle, Private True Teague Kinneson, since his triumphal return from the Pacific and the Columbia River. I say “we,” but in fact, keeping track of the comings and goings of the renowned expeditionary, schoolmaster, inventor, and playwright had, since my early boyhood, devolved mainly to me. My father had his newspaper to print, the
Kingdom County Monitor
, in which he kept track of the events in our remote little Vermont village. My mother kept track of our family farm, a job that required her entire attention from before dawn until after dark each day. And ours being a very small, if very affectionate, family, this left me to keep track of my uncle. Who, as my father often said, clapping the heels of his hands to his temples and pressing as hard as he was able, as if to keep his brain from exploding, bore much watching.
From the time I was six or seven I was the private's constant companion, pupil, fishing partner, apprentice, and confidant, not to mention his co-expeditionary. Nor is it surprising that we were inseparable, when one stops to think that it was he who christened me TiconderogaâTi for shortâafter the principal matter of his play and the signal event of his lifeâthe fall of the fortress of that name on the narrows of Lake Champlain to Ethan Allen and a handful of Vermont woodsmen and farmers in 1775.
Unfortunately, it was that same milestone in the history of our Republic that resulted in Private True Teague Kinneson's own fall and subsequent afflictionâor, as my kindhearted mother called his strange disorder of the imagination, his “little ways and stays.” As he was drinking rum flip with Ethan and celebrating their victory by singing a ballad, most of which has now been lost to posterity but whose refrain was “Tooleree, toolera, tooleroo,” my uncle lost his footing and struck his head so sharp a blow on the gate of the fort that he never, I am grieved to report, quite regained his correct wits.
I
T IS AN IMPORTANT POINT
of information in the history of the Kinneson family that from the moment of his mishap at Fort Ti, my uncle supposed himself to be constantly engaged in the prosecution of many heroic enterprises. These adventures often involved travel to far-flung places, great raging battles, and encounters with all manner of plenipotentiaries and unusual personages. The hillock behind my mother's cow barn he called the Heights of Quebec; and many a summer afternoon we stormed it together, taking the Citadel on the Plains of Abrahamâa large granite boulder atop the hillâas he believed he had done with General Wolfe in '59. In the winter, when a thick sheet of ice and snow covered the hill, he stationed me on this boulder in the role of the French commander, Montcalm, and had me repel his assaults by pushing him whirling back down the frozen slope on the seat of his woolen pantaloonsâa terrifying spectacle to me and to my parents, calling up in our recollections his fateful accident of years before. There was no doubt, from my uncle's easy talk of embrasures, fortifications, enfilades, scaling-ladders, and cannonadings, that he fully
imagined
himself to have been present at the fall of Quebec. But when I drew my father aside and asked him privately whether True had been involved in that battle, his hands shot up to his head and he said that, while he ruled out no improbability when it came to his older brother, if he had been, he was the youngest foot-soldier in the history of the worldâbeing, according to my father's calculations, but seven years of age at the time.
Sometimes my uncle and I journeyed to the rapids on the St. Lawrence just west of Montreal to reenact a historic meeting between the explorer Jacques Cartier and my great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Chief Tumkin Tumkin of the Abenaki tribe. Hearing that Cartier was searching for China and the Great Khan, and learning something of the dress and customs of that distinguished emperor, Tumkin Tumkin had stationed himself just upriver from the rapids in a robe of muskrat pelts dyed bright vermilion, with an absurd little round yellow hat on his head; his design was to impersonate the Celestial Personage and receive whatever gifts the French explorer had laid aside for him. In the event, Cartier instantly saw through our ancestor's ruse, but was so amused that he gave Tumkin Tumkin his second-best chain-mail vest and named the region of the rapids Lachineâor China, as it is called to this day.
The cedar bog to the north of our farm my uncle designated variously as the Great Dismal Swamp, or Saratoga, or Yorktown. From it we routed many a vile Redcoat, every last one of whom we put to the sword. For Private True Teague Kinneson was a ruthless soldier and showed no mercy to his captives. In his capacity as an inventor, he attached a sail made from an old flannel sheet to my little fishing raft on the Kingdom River, where we played by the hour at Captain Cook and the South Sea Cannibals. And when the ice began to form on my mother's stock pond, we recreated the scene of Washington crossing the Delaware.
During the long Vermont winters, when the wind came howling down out of Canada and the drifts lay six feet deep between the house and the barn, my uncle taught me Latin and Greek and astronomy and mathematics and the physical sciences. He read to me by the hour from both the ancients and moderns, and in the evenings we frequently cleared away my mother's kitchen table and chairs and performed scenes from Homer or Virgil.
“
Arma virumque cano,
” he would roar out in his booming stage voice. And it was off to the races with the brave hero of the
Aeneid,
while my mother, baking the next day's bread or peeling apples or doing the farm accounts in her black daybook, smiled, and my father's ink-stained hands shot headward. When we undertook the
Iliad,
my mother sometimes agreed to play the part of Helen, and my uncle and I carried her in her rocker from the window by the door to the chimney corner we called Troy; and indeed, with her tall slender form and long golden hair and eyes as blue as the sky over the Green Mountains on the fairest day of summer, she fit the role of Helen as well as any woman could. But on another occasion my uncle mistook my father for a Cyclops and chased him round and round the kitchen with the fire poker.