An Embarrassment of Riches (12 page)

But other than the rotation of their crops, as Mr. Jefferson advocated, I could not see much difference in the way of life, the “slavocracy,” that men like Felix Ravenel were establishing on the frontier—though he seemed a kind-hearted, well-meaning man.

After a delicious supper of fresh ham, braised celery, new boiled peas, radishes, lettuce salad, and other garden delectables of which we had been sorely deprived so many weeks, and after desserts of ginger cake and strawberry pie, topped by a mountain of whipped cream, Uncle and I retired with the judge to his library. Mr. Hardin was left with the ladies. About thirty years old, soft-fleshed, and a little too quick to agree with whatever anybody said, he struck me as a supercilious, dull-witted man, and one could sense Ravenel's impatience at this son-in-law's every utterance. In any case, he was excluded.

In the library, over cups of Madeira, Uncle now revealed to Judge Ravenel the true business of our mission, while at his desk I produced quick [O11]pen-and-ink sketch of our quarry.

“Clumsy-looking brute,” the judge observed. “Is this the tail, here?”

“That is the snout,” I informed him.

“Ah yes. Of course.”

“And these, the forefeet. Note the unusually long claws.”

“Formidable,” he declared without apparent sarcasm.

“Hast thee ever seen such a monster, Felix?” Uncle inquired.

“Not in the flesh, William. But I have seen claws like these among the many bones unearthed at Mammoth Lick, not an hour's ride from here. I shall take you there tomorrow morning.”

Uncle and I shared an excited glance. Judge Ravenel unrolled a vellum map and spread it on his desk. This map showed the states of Ohio River drainage and the unincorporated Mississippi Territory to the south. I slid the candle closer.

“I have heard tales of monstrous large beasts lurking here,” the judge said, pointing to a blank area that would not become the state of Alabama for another decade and an half. “Men of good reputation have come back from this wilderness bearing all manner of strange reports,” our host went on, “of unknown animals, of Welsh-speaking savages, even of mermaids. One ranger, now thought mad, says he supped at the very table of the exiled king of France.”

Uncle chuckled at this drollery and the judge joined him.

“What is this waterway here?” I inquired, tracing my finger down a north-flowing tributary of the Ohio.

“The Tennessee, called by some the River of Misery, for it is a hotbed of ague and southern fevers.”

“Is it navigable?”

“Yes, and with a mild current in this season. But little is known about its upper reaches except that the Choctaw dwell there, a most obdurately uncongenial nation,” he understated with a half-hearted smile. “Perhaps that is the haunt of this beast you are seeking.”

“Thomas thinks so,” Uncle said, alluding to the President. “I expect that Sammy and I shall have a look down that way.”

Judge Ravenel did not condescend to warn us to be careful. It was taken for granted on the frontier that men penetrated wild country at their own peril, and to remind them of it was considered fatuous.

There next arose—with the second bottle of Madeira—the question of our resupply. Judge Ravenel promised to furnish us with all our needs, from pistols to salt pork. He decried the chaotic money situation west of the Cumberland Gap. Every coinage but that of the United States was in circulation here. The standard currency was the Spanish gold dollar. Of banknotes there were practically none, and what served in their place was ludicrous: grain warehouse receipts, assignable and passed from person to person as currency; also mortgages, land warrants, bills of lading, letters of credit, IOUs—everything but laundry lists, the judge joked ruefully.

“You have, of course, heard by now of our Louisiana purchase?” our host said almost off-handedly, as if the news were universally known.

“Only rumors,” said I.

“Well, it is a fact,” he avouched proudly. “The Mississippi Valley and the teeming prairies are ours. Why, you look dismayed, William.”

“Was it not sold to Imperial Russia?” he ventured.

“Russia? What an idea!”

“Such are the rumors that have come our way,” I explained airily, while poor Uncle harked back upon our late interview with Mr. Jefferson and how his old friend had deceived him with a bare face.

Soon, however, even this blow was allayed by the judge's wine. At midnight, the two old soldiers were reminiscing of the War of Independence and their youthful exploits under General Washington. It was good to see Uncle his merry old self again after our recent hardships. At length, we all three began to yawn uncontrollably. A courtly old house-slave was summoned to conduct us upstairs, where beds of fresh linen awaited us—luxury unutterable!

In the morning, after the best night's sleep I ever enjoyed, we ate breakfast on the verandah, amid hummingbirds and honeysuckle. With double helpings of souffléd eggs, Lewis County cob-smoked ham, hominy cakes slathered in butter, and the daintiest strawberries bathed in sweet cream all tucked 'neath our belts, we set out on Judge Ravenel's spirited Virginia-bred steeds for Mammoth Lick.

It had lately been exploited as a commercial salt operation by one Micah Peavy, another Virginia migrant like most Kentuckians, brawny and lean at about fifty. He evinced some rue at having invested in the forty-five-kettle operation, which, he told us frankly, had yet to turn a decent profit. But he was a man of inquiring mind, if little education, and he had saved all the bones that his excavations fetched up. He had found spear points embedded in some of the bones, he said, indicating that the lick had been an Indian slaughtering ground at one time. We were led to a simple shed that Peavy had built to keep the bones out of the rain.

They were thrown together in various heaps, by size and type rather than by individual skeleton. Here was a pile of huge thigh bones, there a heap of ribs, there a stack of jawbones, vertebrae, and boxes of smaller oddments, such as digits. The “horns” (i.e., the tusks) of these colossi Peavy said he kept at a secret place, under lock and key, these being “old ivory” and “worth a small fortune.”

Uncle and I were permitted to rummage about at our pleasure, and sure enough, in one of those odds-and-ends crates we found a telltale claw of megatherium, just like the one Mr. Jefferson had shown us at Washington. Uncle passed it to Judge Ravenel, who ran his forefinger up the long, burnished blade.

“I wouldn't go looking for the owner of this saber without a small-bore cannon and a cart of grapeshot,” he observed humorously.

Peavy told us it was the claw of a gargantuan cave bear, upwards of twenty feet tall standing on its hind legs, and that he had spoken to Chickasaws who claimed to have encountered such titans in their country to the south. I took out my sketch and showed it to him, furnishing as well a brief commentary on the beast's true nature.

“A ground sloth…?” Peavy frowned doubtingly and shook his head. “Why would the good Lord arm it with claws like these?”

“To rake trees of their foliage,” I proposed.

“Naw,” he disagreed, “these are weapons, meant to slice and maim.”

“You could say the same about a farmer's sickle,” I countered.

“Well reasoned, Sammy,” Uncle said.

Peavy squinted at the sketch again, then looked at each of us in turn, and with a twinkle in his eye said, “'Tis an ugly son of a bitch, whatever it is, ain't it though?” and handed back my portrait.

We tarried at Judge Ravenel's lovely estate two days more, resting, devouring his tasty victuals, and refitting our vessel. Finally, it was time to say goodbye. Uncle and his old comrade embraced at the quay, and joked that if Providence prevented them from meeting again in this world, then they should seek each other out in the next, which was sure to be a better one. But 'neath this show of merriment I detected that both men had tears in their eyes as we cast off into the current.

From Wildwood below stinking Babylon to Louisville and its famous falls was a five-day float. The second morning we came upon the fourteen-year-old settlement of Cincinnati, located on the Ohio side of the river opposite the mouth of Kentucky's Licking River. We were reluctant to stop there lest it turn out to be another squalid pit of barbarism like Babylon, but found that we must do so in order to purchase a new set of specimen containers and were delighted to find it a very clean village by frontier standards. This we attributed to the influence of Fort Washington, a garrison of an hundred-odd soldiers, their officers gentlemen who were able to impose a semblance of decorum on the human rubbish who came to dwell in town. Here, we purchased as tasty a dinner as ever I ate, at Hurley's Indian Queen tavern, being a saddle of spring lamb, fresh lima beans, early sweet corn, and mulberry tarts, all washed down with cataracts of very good ale. Uncle and I had become gourmands. Soon, we realized, we would be back on a diet of game, fish, and wild botanicals. While I can stomach a cattail tuber or a ragout of opossum, I much prefer a plate of succulent radishes, or minted new peas laved in fresh butter, or even a gherkin plucked fresh from the garden vine—don't you?

Once again, the hypnosis of stately flotation in perfect weather lulled us into a state of the most absorbing serenity. On the morning of June 21, we heard the distant rumble of the falls and not long after sighted ahead the whitewashed houses of Louisville, a town about the same size as Cincinnati—roughly three hundred white males and their families and perhaps twice that number of slaves. We could tell at once that the town's state of refinement was at the same swinish level as Babylon.

Of the seven retail establishments on its main street, five were taverns and one was a billiards parlor. The dusty street itself was lavishly littered with stable sweepings, kitchen refuse, wood shavings, leavings, and dead animals, including an horse that had lain in the road long enough for loose hogs to begin rooting in its putrefying carcass. Though it was a Tuesday and before noontime, we saw fully a dozen drunkards lurching on the sidewalks or sprawled in the gutter.

Amid these vignettes of low-life we did not wish to tarry, but stayed only so long as necessary to engage a pilot to guide us through the falls. These pilots were licensed by the county, and we were given the names of several reputable ones by the most visibly respectable citizen of the town, a prim, sober merchant named Ames who operated the sole business in town not devoted to debauchery—a store, where, by heavens, I bought a pound of chocolate filberts!

We found our pilot, Joseph Watts, at his office near the wharves, where he served as deputy of the inspection station. A sober, sinewy man bout thirty-five, he agreed to the job at its going rate of three gold dollars—out of the seven we had remaining from our loan of twelve from Judge Ravenel—but warned us that we were into the season of low water, when sharp beaks of rocks become visible and the passage is especially dangerous. We replied that the risk was acceptable, and so we set out at once to run the falls.

Watts took his position at the right sweep whilst Uncle and I doubled up on the left. We cast off and hove into the mainstream. Within an hundred yards our velocity speeded up to at least twice its usual rate, a wake churning out of our stern. Like the falls of the Dismal River, these so-called falls of the Ohio were really a set of wild, foaming rapids rather than a plunging cataract, but on a much bigger scale than the former and navigable, though hazardous.

As we approached, the mighty stream turned to a glassy sheet. Ahead, the water roared and boiled into a mist. It looked as though we would slip off the very edge of the world. I glanced over at Watts, whose jaw muscles twitched but whose face otherwise betrayed no emotion. The tumult became a thundering roar.

“Up sweeps!” Watts cried, and we raised ours, Uncle and I both falling to our knees and hanging on for dear life as we left the sunshine of a summer day behind and plunged into the misty maelstrom, waves dashing and foaming, our craft pitching forward and back and side to side like a child's toy boat tossed into the surf off Great South Beach. Here we entered what they called “the Chute,” our fate no longer in the hands of Pilot Watts but of Providence—and after seeing how Providence had looked after such poor souls as the Bottomleys, 'twas not a pair of hands I was altogether pleased to be in! Down we flew amid the angry currents, swirling eddies, and fearsome projecting rocks. Then, all of a sudden, it was over. The Chute discharged us and we emerged upon placid water, foam draining from our gunwales.

Not five minutes later, Watts steered us to a dock just out of the current on the Kentucky side, an half mile below the inspection station, to which he would now pleasantly stroll back, having earned the equivalent of a week's wages in less than fifteen minutes. I must add that he was as calm and collected as someone who had just climbed out of a pony cart, rather than one who had risked his neck in a churning deathtrap.

Before he departed, Uncle inquired of Watts if the pilot knew some distinguishing landmark that would help us discern the mouth of the Tennessee River from other tributaries of the Ohio. I was surprised to see him wince at the mention of it.

“You two gong down Misery way?” he replied, showing more trepidation than he had in the face of the falls.

“We are indeed,” Uncle affirmed. “Knowest thee that stream?”