The Last Empty Places (22 page)

And so Billy Bartram, as he ventured farther from Philadelphia and his father and deeper into the wild lands of the Southeast, grew emotionally closer to the Indians. He began to grasp their way of looking at the world and to reconcile it with his.

M
ARIE
L
E
R
OY AND
B
ARBARA
L
EININGER
showed little evidence of embracing the Indian way of looking at the world—at least not the Indian warrior way. They showed even less of embracing the French way. After General Armstrong torched the Indian village of Kittaning and blew up Captain Jacobs in his house, the Indians brought the two captives to Fort Duquesne—the French stronghold at the Forks of the
Ohio. Here the girls labored for several months as servants for the French, who paid wages to the girls’ Indian masters. Pleased to eat bread again (although they didn’t like the French bacon), they felt, in some respects, better off than in the Indian villages.

It’s easy to think that Marie and Barbara couldn’t “abide” the French because the French soldiers may have been interested in something more intimate than a simple housekeeping arrangement. Or perhaps, in fact, the girls made a coldly calculated strategic decision. Whatever the case, their Indian masters took the girls from the French at Fort Duquesne and brought them to the Indian town of Kaschkaschkung (or Kuskuski), on Beaver Creek, a river that flowed into the Ohio about twenty-five miles west of the Forks.

The girls remained at the Beaver Creek village, clearing fields for the Indian nobility, planting corn, tanning hides, through the year of 1758. On August 18 of that year, a white visitor—a German Moravian minister and cabinetmaker by the name of Frederick Post—suddenly appeared at Kaschkaschkung and gave Marie and Barbara, then in their mid-teens after three years in captivity, hope. Emigrating from Prussia to America as the disciple of a religious visionary, Post had married an Eastern Delaware woman and learned the Indian languages. He then had worked to convert the Indians to Christianity. Given his rapport with the Delawares, he’d now been tapped by Governor Denny of Pennsylvania to try to convince the Ohio Valley Indians, who included the Western Delawares, to leave the French and make a separate peace with the British colonials.

As soon as he had slipped into the Ohio Valley, word spread through Indian and French networks that Post was somewhere in the territory. The French sent out search parties to find him and, according to Marie and Barbara, threatened to roast Post alive for five days should they catch him. Well versed in native ways, however, Post enjoyed Indian
protection during his mission and was personally guided into the Ohio Valley by Pisquetomen, the older brother of Chief Shingas.

That August of 1758, both sides well understood, was an opportune moment for reconciliation between the British and the Indians of the Ohio Valley. The British, after their initial setbacks in the war, were now striking powerfully against the Indians’ French allies at Fort Ticonderoga (where, despite their attack with fifteen thousand men, they were forced to retreat), Louisbourg, and Fort Frontenac. Earlier that summer, the British started building another road through the wilderness and a string of supply forts to stage a major attack on Fort Duquesne
⁴²
at the Forks. But the British knew they would badly need the Ohio Valley Indians on their side in order to attack the French at Fort Duquesne. The Indians, meanwhile, sensed the momentum of the war shifting to the British.

Frederick Post spent two days at Kaschkaschkung, meeting with various Ohio Valley chieftains, before taking his offer to other villages along Beaver Creek and the Ohio River. Marie and Barbara described the excitement stirred by Post’s visit:

Post found a receptive audience among the chieftains, who wished to end the fighting. Post reminded them of the promise made by the colonial authorities at the Easton conference the previous year, that the Delawares could have lands to settle in the Wyoming Valley. He said the British didn’t want to settle the Ohio Valley. The British only wanted to push the French out of the valley.

Still, the Indians remained skeptical. It was difficult to argue with the chieftains’ logic:

T
HE DAY AFTER MY HIKE
down into Burns Run, I went looking for a link between that period in the mid-1700s when the wild Ohio Valley’s fate hung in the balance, and the Ohio Valley now. Specifically, I sought a local historian who could tell me about the earliest settlers around Renovo. While most of the area surrounding Renovo remained blank—wild and unpopulated and mountainous—a few hamlets lay scattered about.

It was raining in the morning as I left my things in my room at the Sportsman’s Motel and drove north from Renovo along Highway 144. The road climbed through misty, wet, forested mountains until topping out on a grassy, shorn plateau.

At first I thought it was a golf course planted out here in the forested mountains. Then through the mist I noticed that in the middle of the broad greensward squatted a modern industrial complex. Large pipes curved out of the ground and into the complex, like the legs of some great metallic insect sitting on a lawn. Later I learned it was a natural gas storage plant. This corner of Pennsylvania had been drilled for oil and gas over a century ago. Now the empty wells were used in reverse—natural gas was piped from Texas and Mexico, and with 25,000 horsepower pumps, injected back into the old wells here in the mountains of Pennsylvania, and stored underground until needed; for instance, to heat the homes of East Coast residents. It was the largest gas storage facility east of the Mississippi River. While the surface was forest or grass, underground, at least right here, was hardly blank—rather, it was the subsurface natural gas tank for New York City.

Winding on back roads into the forest, I reached my destination—an old frame house on a broad lawn surrounded by the dripping forest. This was the home of Eric and Peggy Lucas, whose late mother, Dorothy M. Bailey, was a prominent local historian.

“You came two years too late,” Peggy told me. “My mother knew everything about the area.”

As we sat in the Lucas’s living room, chatting amiably, they periodically dug into one of Dorothy’s files or another, photocopied its contents, and handed it to me, such as the brief biography of Simeon Pfoutz,
⁴⁴
the first settler on the fertile flats along Kettle Creek, now a well-known trout stream just off the plateau. He’d arrived by canoe in 1813 with his wife, Susannah, fathered nine children, raised several
baby mountain lions, and, after anointing himself the valley’s feudal lord, appropriated a share of the crops of later British settlers. This lasted until the British settlers, out of frustration with his bullying, brought in a tough Irish settler by the name of Ikey Corn who put a quick end to Pfoutz’s feudal pretensions. Pfoutz died abruptly in 1856 while showing off his parlor trick in which he slipped his “pet” rattlesnake down his shirt collar to show how it could crawl out his sleeve. On this particular occasion, the pet rattler chose to nail the radial artery in Pfoutz’s arm. He was dead within nine minutes.

Eric Lucas had worked at the gas plant that I thought was a golf course. He told me that decades ago, before the gas wells, Cross Fork had a booming lumber industry.

“All these mountains were covered with virgin timber. Some of that lumber built this house.”

They pulled out more photos from Dorothy’s files. One from 1905 showed dozens and dozens of houses in Cross Fork. Big stumps dotted the bare, surrounding hills where the loggers had cut. The next photo, from 1937, showed only about six houses sitting on big pastures where the rest of the town had once stood. Young forest sprouted from what had been the stump-dotted hills.

Originally erected as a four-room bunkhouse and cookhouse for a lumber camp, the Lucas’s house had later been expanded to ten rooms and was Dorothy Bailey’s childhood home. Born in 1915, the local historian, her daughter told me, had traced her ancestry back to Robert Campbell, who served as a piper and drummer for George Washington’s army during the Revolutionary War. It was through fellow soldiers in Washington’s army—though not Robert Campbell—that much of the Indian land in these parts of Pennsylvania ended up in white hands.

I drove from the Lucas’s house back to Sproul State Forest headquarters, where I learned more about these Revolutionary War land transfers. Two decades later, due in part to his military experience gained in the French and Indian War, George Washington would, of course, head the American army against the British during the Revolutionary War. The American Continental Congress didn’t have much money to feed or pay its soldiers to fight the British, but the new nation did have access to land—and, at least in Pennsylvania, a lot of it.

The Sproul Forest headquarters now manages 300,000 acres of land around Renovo, and the foresters unfolded old land maps for me.
They were crosshatched with an out-of-kilter checkerboard pattern—almost a jigsaw puzzle—of “warrants” of from 100 acres to 1,000 acres or so each. The first warrants dated to the years just after the Revolutionary War, and each still bore the name of the original soldier who had received it as pay from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

“In most cases, the soldiers didn’t even know where it was,” District Forester Doug D’Amore told me. “‘We owe you “x” dollars from the war—here’s your land.’”

The great majority of the land, as it turned out, was steep, mountainous, and rocky. Only very small fertile strips in the river bottomlands made decent farmland. That’s where the few settlers stayed. The rest was virtually worthless to these war veterans and simply abandoned. This reconfirmed what I’d found in Maine—that fertile land is settled quickly. Wherever the land is not suitable for farming, you’re most likely to find a blank spot.

“Some of these warrants sold numerous times at tax sales,” said D’Amore, who works closely with the Sproul State Forest’s landholdings and warrant issues. “Ultimately the warrants got in the hands of the early lumber companies. This valley was logged three or four different ways. They started probably in the 1830s cutting Kettle Creek for the big, fat white pine.”

The timber cutting lasted, off and on, for nearly a century—from the 1830s to the early 1900s. The early loggers rafted the logs down the streams and rivers. Later, company railroads were pushed into the forest to haul out timber left over from the first cut—hemlock trees to extract tannin for leather tanning, hardwood saw timber, and finally the small pulpwood to be ground up and made into paper. This forest cut, the railroads and logging companies then pulled up the tracks and moved on to a new forest.

By World War I, the region’s forests were all logged out. The timber companies no longer had any use for those Revolutionary War land warrants they’d assembled. They sold off the warrants cheaply to the state.

“Basically, you just take the resources off and let them go,” said D’Amore.

“You can’t farm rocks,” added the assistant forester Rich Kugel. “With the logging, everything was sucked out of it. In the 1930s the Commonwealth got most of the state forest land for a buck an acre.”

Not much had changed since the 1930s. With the logging lands up for grabs at so low a price, Pennsylvania purchased massive acreages and assembled its vast state forests in these western mountains. These are what showed up on my Earth-at-night photo as “blank spots.” Instead of a sea of stumps, trees now had regrown as a second-growth forest. This is the forest that exists today, and that I visited during my hikes down into various “runs” and along ridges. The manufacturing—what little had existed in some of the small towns—had largely died out. As a way to market its attractions to tourists, the state had recently re-branded this big, empty region the “Pennsylvania Wilds.”

Tourism, however, has remained slim.

“Right now,” said D’Amore, “the mind-set is we don’t want foreigners coming in hunting our deer, catching our fish, drinking our beer, chasing our women…and anybody who isn’t from this county is a foreigner. An ‘Influx Flatlander.’”

D’Amore, though raised in a still more mountainous region of Pennsylvania farther north—and at a higher elevation—said he is still considered a “Flatlander” here, while Kugel lives on Kettle Creek but is not considered a true “Cricker.”

“We’ll always be outsiders,” D’Amore said.

I
LEFT THE
S
PROUL
F
OREST HEADQUARTERS
and drove back up into the mountains to Jews Run Road, where the previous day I’d explored the deep ravine called Burns Run. Today, I planned to descend into Fish Dam Run—the place that Rich Kugel had recommended as the wildest of the wild in these parts. Leaving the car parked on the same open, grassy ridgetop, I followed the path to the right instead of the left as I had the day before, dropping over the ravine’s steep brink into Fish Dam Run. The afternoon already had grown late. Dark rain clouds blew over, lending a heavy gloom to the forest. I kept onward, more dutifully than enthusiastically. As I hiked down deeper into the forested ravine, I thought longingly of the cheery warmth of the Sportsman’s Motel back in Renovo. I’d come this far to seek out blank spots. Now I was in one.