How the West Was Won (1963) (3 page)

'Yankee Doodle'! Lilith stared at them scornfully, Who wants to sing that? Their ma's dead, Harvey explained apologetically. They ain't had much schoolin' in the social graces, but they are good boys, an' strong. Go ahead, Lilith. Give them A Home in the Meadow.' Lilith looked at Eve again and shrugged, indicating her distaste for the whole idea, but she began to play and sing.

Prescott turned to his older daughter. Eve!

Reluctantly, Eve joined in, no more impressed with the three hulking, hovering Harvey boys than Lilith was. Coming closer, the boys began to follow the words of the song and, caught by the spirit of the thing, Zebulon himself started to sing in a deep, strong voice.

Zeb! Rebecca warned. Mind you don't drown them out! Several people from nearby groups drifted over to join in. As the group grew in number, Lilith lost her reluctance and, stepping out from the others, began to lead the singing with zest.

They sang for pleasure, without self-consciousness, or even awareness that most of them sang badly, and their singing seemed to brighten the whole shore. Men straightened from their work to listen, and from a distance a deck hand on one of the river boats joined in. A half-drunken Irishman cut a few quick steps in time to the music, and for a brief time that somber shore echoed to the sound of their voices.

As the song ended, Lilith, captured by the mood of her own playing, swung into The E-ri-e Canal, and everyone within hearing joined in. But they had scarcely completed the first chorus when the despatcher's voice boomed out, Loadin' for the Flyin' Arrow! All a-boarrrd for the Flyin' Arrow! Zebulon picked up a heavy sack. That's us! Pick up an' let's go! As they had moved closer on Sam's suggestion, they were only a few steps from the gangway, and Lilith, waving a response to the shouted good-byes of several of the singers, struck up a lively march and led the passengers aboard the waiting canal boat.

The deck was crowded and Eve was pushed to the rail, where she turned her back on the boat and looked back at Albany. Her throat was tight, for the very act of boarding the boat seemed to have finally committed them to a course from which there could be no retreat.

From Albany, a person could walk home if need be, and in Albany they were still among their own kind of folks, but the mere act of stepping aboard had put an end to all that. It was an act so different from any she had ever taken, and it indicated how deeply they were now involved. Now they no longer had roots. They were adrift.

All around strangers crowded, easy-going, boisterous strangers, but at that moment even her own family looked strange. Eve had stepped into another world, and she was frightened.

Under lowering gray skies, the clouds swollen with impending rain, the Flying Arrow started to move. Out upon the canal bank, a man in a checked shirt drove the team along the towpath, hauling the boat.

Slowly, as the passengers found places for their boxes and bundles, the stir upon the decks settled down. From behind her, Eve could hear the mutter of voices and occasional laughter.

From the Hudson River at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo, a ditch four hundred and twenty-five miles long had been dug. The digging had been done by several thousand wild, bog-trotting Irishmen fresh from the old country, and they had been eight years in the digging.

Governor DeWitt Clinton had opened the canal in the fall of 1825, and it was a major step in opening the West to settlement. Within twenty years, Ohio leaped from thirteenth state in population to third, and the population of Michigan increased by sixty times. Four thousand boats plied the waters of the canal, and more than twenty thousand people lived upon its waters. The Irish had built the canal, and they set the pattern for much that followed. Life along the waterway was a continual brawl and a struggle. Men fought over drinks, over women, over space at the docks, over horses, over anything they could think of ... often enough they fought for the sheer joy of fighting. Some of the Irish stayed with the canal, others moved west to build the railroads or to join the Indian-fighting army. Many an old-time army roster reads like a voter's list from Belfast or Dublin. A time came when their sons and grandsons were no longer despised as shanty Irish, becoming political, social, and industrial leaders in fifty cities-respected, honored, and wealthy men.

A canalboat had a crew of three to four persons. A boy or man, working for seven to ten dollars a month, drove the team along the towpath to haul the boat. The steersman might earn as much as thirty dollars a month, which was good pay for the time. The captain often did his own steering; otherwise, he sat on deck smoking his pipe and shouting insults at the other boats. Sometimes the cook was the captain's wife; more often she was one of the thousands of women who followed the canal, taking up with this boater or that, as jealous of her independence as any man on the ditch.

Of all shapes and sizes, and of every color, the boats moved up or down the canal, fighting or racing for cargo, all their actions accompanied by the shouting of men and the long-drawn-out sound of the horns-the horns of the boats along the Erie Canal.

The westward movement of which they were a part was more than a hundred years old, but only now had it gained the impetus that was to make it unique in the world's history.

There had always been men who went west, who probed the wilderness; there had been trappers of fur and traders with the Indians who each season went a little further into the wilderness. Like the mountain men who went to the ultimate West, they were adventurers and hunters, and they were single men. They filtered through the mountains and down the Ohio, and finally to the Mississippi. Daniel Boone was such a man.

Then in 1803 Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase, and overnight the young nation became a land of far-reaching boundaries. And with this change came a change in the national psychology.

The Lewis and Clark expedition went west, exploring a route across the distant mountains and down to the Pacific; and when they returned, a few, like John Coulter, elected to remain in the West. After them came Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Bill Williams, Joe Walker ... and Linus Rawlings. Boys from the farms walked away from their plows and headed west. St. Louis or Independence was the jumping-off place. Standing on the streets, the farm boys watched the keel-boats and canoes come down the Missouri from the Platte and the Yellowstone, and they watched the buckskin-clad men with the cool eyes come ashore, their leggings and breech-clouts leaving their bottoms exposed and brown as the buckskins they wore. Around the river-front taverns they consorted with river-front women, drank and shouted and told great yarns of the far-off mountains, the rushing streams of white water, and the fair Indian maidens. The farm boys listened and envied.

Some said it was fur that took them west, and some said it was gold or land; but in the last analysis it was simply the West that took them west. All the other things were easy excuses, obvious explanations for obvious questions. They went west for the wild, free life, the love of high adventure among the lonely peaks, and for the call of the open prairie where the long winds blew down a thousand miles of grassland.

They went by the Erie Canal, by the Wilderness Road, by the Natchez Trace, and strange names came back to awaken strange longings in the ears of listening men, names that made them restless and eager-eyed.

Men went west along the Overland Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, the Oregon Trail, the Hastings Cut-Off, the Applegate Road. And many of them left their blood upon the land, but where they died others followed and lived. Upon the plains they met the Indian, the greatest light cavalryman who ever lived and rode. The Indian lived for warfare and battle. He swept down upon the camps of the white men, and where he defeated them he looted and burned and tortured, returning to his villages laden with plunder. But still the white men came.

But now there was a difference in their coming, for they brought their women along. They came to stay.

The young, the old, the middle-aged-none were immune to the dream that drew men to the West. The weak fell by the way, or gave up and went back to their villages and safe streets to huddle frightened with others of their kind, but the strong survived or went down fighting, and those who survived grew even stronger.

It was a time of exploration, of struggle, of titanic men walking a titanic land. It was an age akin to the Homeric or the Elizabethan, and a man bred to either age would have been at home in the West, and would have talked the language of the men about him.

Achilles and Jim Bowie had much in common; Sir Francis Drake and John Coulter or Kit Carson would each have understood the other. They were men of violence all, strong men of strong emotions, men who lived with strength and skill. Ulysses could have marched beside Jedediah Smith, Crockett could have stormed the walls of Troy. Either would have been at home among the crews of Drake, Hawkins, or Frobisher.

Eve Prescott stood by the rail as the canalboat moved slowly along the dark waters; behind her the strange, musical, poetic names were spoken and their sound stirred her blood.

They were wonderful, exciting names, each one the symbol of some wild romance. Santa Fe and Taos, Ash Hollow and the Cross Timbers, the Arkansas, Boggy Depot, the Washita ... Cottonwood Creek and the South Fork of the Cimarron ... there was a magic in their sound.

The canal banks slid by, sunlight reflected from the staring windows of houses, and then the sudden call would ring out: Bridge! Bridge! Duck your heads or lose your scalps!

The great horns blared; from a voice nearby she caught the strange word Arapahoes; beyond it, other voices, all in their separate conversations, sent words that drifted to her ears in a confused medley that nonetheless made music. I favor the North carbine. Nobody can make a carbine like Simeon North ... Cheyennes ... lost his hair ... Spanish Fork ... Hal's patent, by Simeon North ... percussion rifle? What if you run out of caps? I favor the flintlock ... pick up a flint anywheres ... Comanches ... river pirates .. . Texas .. . live off the country ... fur so thick you wouldn't believe it ... thieves everywhere ... river pirates.

The horns sounded ... Bridge! ... a whip cracked like a pistol from the towpath ... too far south for Sioux ... down the Ohio ... never seen again ... Bridge! The horns again, blaring, the sound echoing back from the hills. Sam came up suddenly beside her. Hey, ain't you excited, Eve? I wondered where you'd got to. Think of it, Eve, we'll build rafts and float down the Ohio. Ain't that something?

Yes, Sam. Yes, it is.

But her thoughts were asking: Would that man she had never seen, that man of whom she dreamed, would he be out there somewhere? In the Ohio country? She looked up at Sam, so eager, so ready for the challenge. Suddenly she felt a sharp pang of fear, so sharp she almost cried out. Be careful, Sam, she said, almost whispering it. Oh, be careful!

He grinned at her, his eyes dancing. Careful? What's there to be careful about?

Chapter
3

Eve Prescott straightened up from the fire and brushed back a lock of her hair. Her face was hot from the flames and she stood back for a minute, listening to the bubbling of the pot.

The tall trees towered above them, blacker than the night itself, even this night without stars. They were ancient, massive trees ... her father, Sam and Zeke could scarcely have reached around the smallest of them with hands joined. The wind moved among the branches, and the fire sputtered briefly ... out by the riverbank, not twenty yards away, the water rustled mysteriously. The bright gaiety and easy talk of the Erie Canal lay far behind them. They had left the canal at its terminus in Buffalo and had paid a few dollars for a decrepit two-wheeled cart which would hold all their goods. Together they had pushed and hauled it nearly three hundred miles to the Ohio, and there rafts had been built-they had built one for themselves, and the Harveys, who were traveling with them, had built one.

Now the two rafts were tied to trees near the bank, and in the morning they would be gone again, floating the day long down the river that by now seemed endless. It was a strange life, this traveling. Each day was sufficient unto itself, and as long as they traveled there need scarcely be any thought except for today. Everything else was suspended until their journey was finished. The fire was a comfort. Even here in this clearing by the river's edge the distances seemed enormous. Sam and pa were rigging a canvas shelter for the night, and ma was cutting slices from a haunch of venison killed that morning by Sam.

Eve was beginning to realize what the wilderness could do to a man. For the first time she became aware of a subtle alteration in the attitudes of her parents toward each other. Ma had always been strong, and had stood upon an equal footing with Zebulon, and even at times superseded him in authority. Now she deferred more to pa. Zebulon went about everything-making camp, chopping wood, and all the other camp duties-with a quiet assurance, a forcefulness she had never noticed before. Never before had Eve realized what a tower of strength he was.

In the wilderness a man grew important, for on his strength others must depend. More than ever she could understand why men loved the wilderness, for it made demands on their strength, on their ingenuity; and they loved the feeling of doing and of accomplishment that the wilderness provided. Eve sat down and took up her book, leaning closer to the flames to see the print better. Lilith came up to the fire, and Eve looked up.

Lilith ... listen to this: Theirs was a poignant parting in the forest. The handsome young backwoodsman carved two hearts on a tree trunk, and then, from ten paces, hurled a knife at the junction of the two hearts- Junction-what's that mean?