From Sea to Shining Sea (100 page)

G
EORGE
AND
F
ANNY
KNEW
BETTER
THAN
TO
EXPECT
ANY
more letters from William for a long time, but whenever the post rider came up the hill, they thought of him. He had written last letters to them just before setting out up the Missouri last month, and they had no reason to expect any more word from him for a year at least.

Now they sat opening a bundle of mail on the porch as the post rider went away down the hill toward Clarksville, and quickly ascertained that there was nothing from William.

George would always divide his letters, putting those from friends and relatives in one stack and those concerning business or civil matters in another.

Fanny’s were all personal. She was looking for one in particular. And here it was: Young Judge Fitzhugh’s flamboyant script. It would be the same thing he wrote her every time: a plea for her to move back across the river to Louisville so they could see each other every day. She was weakening on that point, and she knew that one of these days she would likely be having to tell George. She dreaded that; she dreaded the thought of leaving him here alone. And so she kept hoping that his mail would contain some happy news, some great turn of fortune in his favor, so that he would be cheerful about other things and not so likely to plunge into a drinking spell when she left. She felt guilty about the mere thought of leaving his roof. But after all, she was being courted by a truly charming and worthy man, and she was not getting any younger. And her sons, though they doted on their Uncle George and probably learned more from him than they would in any school, really should not grow up little recluses here on this wild and lonely Point o’ Rock. So now she opened Dennis Fitzhugh’s letter, smoothing back a wayward lock of hair at the edge of her dustbonnet, as if Dennis could look up from the page of his letter and see her. George saw the
tenderness melting her face, and so he delved into his own letters.

A shiver ran through his cheeks. There was one from Breckenridge, in the Senate. The sight of it made his hand tremble. He decided he would read it last, knowing that its contents, whether good or ill, would so outweigh the others as to distract his attention from them altogether. Besides, he wanted to have just that exact degree of a rum buzz in his head when he opened that one, and he had not yet had even a sip today. So, while Fanny read her love letter, George unstoppered the little jug beside his chair as unobtrusively as possible, and trickled a dram into a glass, and sipped this while opening the personal mail. These were the usual things. Inquiries as to his health. Invitations to the birthday parties of nieces and nephews and the sons and daughters of old comrades. A note from Diana Gwathmey, his favorite niece, that she would like to come up to Point o’ Rock for a few days’ visit. Requests to borrow books from his library. A request for advice on personal conduct from Lucy’s son George Croghan, now thirteen. Some questions from Brother Edmund, now a Louisville Trustee, concerning the town’s earliest surveys. A letter from some stranger asking whether George thought the recent murder and scalping of Jim Harrod might somehow be connected to the mysterious councils being held everywhere by the young Shawnee war chief Tecumseh. A letter of good wishes from old Francois Vigo, dictated by him and signed with his X. George read all these and let the rum diffuse throughout his body.

Eh, well, he thought. Now for John Breckenridge and news on my land petition. He poured two fingers of rum into his glass, paused, saw that Fanny was not looking, poured two more, gulped half of it, then broke the letter’s seal, ready now for anything, though his heart was pumping mightily.

It was a short and apologetic note from the Senator, enclosing a report from the Committee on Public Lands. George read, his mouth gradually dropping open, a great heat slowly building in his breast.

He could hardly believe the course of reasoning that the Committee had followed to decide on his petition: They had twisted the language of his request around so as to imply that he had asked for the original Piankeshaw grant itself. Then they had gone on to rule that that piece of land was not available to give, since it had already been divided up among the veterans of the Illinois Regiment.

George threw the whole contents of his glass down his throat
and banged a fist on his chair arm. “I didn’t ask ye for
that
land, God damn it!” he shouted at the report in his hand. “I made it plain I was asking for a
like
piece!”

Fanny had started up from her love letter and when she saw George scowling red-faced over his letter, the rum glass shaking in his hand, she thought:

Oh, no. Someone’s dashed him again, and bad this time.

The report concluded:

He rose from his chair, flung the report to the porch floor, and stamped on it. “By th’ Eternal! Can’t senators even
read
?”

“George, what is it?” Fanny asked.

He didn’t answer. He sloshed another long ration of rum into his glass, and then as quickly down his throat. He paced back and forth the length of the porch, teeth bared, eyes blazing, spitting on the report or spurning it under heel each time he passed it. Finally he flung the empty glass down at it; the fragments shot out into the sunlight. “George!” she cried. Cupid’s face appeared at the doorway and then vanished.

George stood scowling down at the soiled report now, chest heaving. He picked up the jug from the bench and took a long pull direct from it. “O’ course they can read,” he snarled. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “They
pretended
to misread it, for an excuse to say no. Deliberate God-damn pettifoggery’s all it is!”

“The Indian’s grant?” Fanny queried.

“Aye. Congress didn’t like my bedtime story.”

“George, oh, I’m so sorry.”

Maybe it’s because o’ the Genet thing, he thought. That had long been in the back of his mind. Some people back East chose to consider him a traitor, though he had never, in writing, actually quite got around to expatriating himself.

“Well, by damn, that’s the last time Congress will ever hear from me! Those ingrates shall never have the satisfaction o’ turning me down ever again! If they gave me something now, I’d pound it up their nostrils! I’ve lived broke a quarter century on account o’ what I gave this country. I reckon I can keep on living
broke. What’s it matter? I’m richer than any scoundrel in Congress anyhow, for I’ve got my honor in me!”

And with that, he sank into his chair, tilted up the jug again, guzzled, then began bellowing the old marching song, the one his boys had sung on the way to Vincennes, while Fanny shrank in her chair, blinking, her love letter clenched in her hand. He sang gruffly, grimacing, waving the jug:

Well, this is no time to leave him, Fanny thought, and she joined in her small voice:

W
ILLIAM
TRIED
TO
CONCENTRATE
ON
HIS
JOURNAL.
B
UT
IT
was hard to write when a whipping was on his mind.

There was always so damned much writing to be done!

William sat at his field desk under an awning with his leather-bound journal open in front of him and wrote laboriously, trying to bring it up to date. It seemed that every spare minute had to be devoted to writing, and there were few spare minutes. Sometimes days would pass before any opportunity presented itself for journal-keeping, and then there would be such a backlog of notes, so much to record, because every day in this new country brought to their eyes new kinds of plants and animals Jefferson
wanted to know of. And there were descriptions of the land, the weather, the minerals, the Indians; the health of the party: the ax wounds, the snakebits, the boils, the dysentery, and the treatments thereof; reports on food: the successes of the hunting parties, the amount of flour and meal and salt pork consumed, the new kinds of edible vegetation found along the way. William found himself writing and thinking constantly about food. Food was a preoccupation for a party of forty-five men engaged in endless labor of the heaviest kind and having to live primarily off the land. It was hard to believe how much meat the men required; William had been calculating, and it seemed to average eight to ten pounds of fresh meat a day for each man. Fortunately, game animals were various and abundant, and so tame and inquisitive sometimes as to make killing them seem more like murder than hunting. But the party’s appetite was not surprising, considering their exertions. They were up every morning at dawn light, out on the water doing battle with the swift current and obstacles of this demon of a river. In suffocating heat, they rowed, poled, towed, and pushed the fleet upstream. Several times in their six weeks of travel thus far, the boats had been nearly swamped or overturned by encounters with trees and sandbars and rocks. Masts had been broken, pirogues punctured, oars shattered. Three weeks ago the keelboat had been snagged and spun around broadside to a veritable avalanche of floating timber. Only the quickness and strength of the men, leaping overboard to manhandle the huge craft, had saved the vessel. Private Gibson had nearly perished as the keelboat swung over him and ground him against the riverbed. More than once the captains had been moved to praise their soldiers. “
I can say with confidents that our party is not enfereor to aney that ever was in these watters
,” William had written on that day. And five days later, the
Discovery
again had been almost swamped by collapsing riverbanks, and he had written, “
We saved her by som extordenerry exersions of our party who are ever readdy to incounter the fortigues for the promotion of the Enterprise.
”

William’s affection and admiration for the men, and their appreciation of each other, was unexpectedly becoming one of the best aspects of the adventure. Comradeship kept their morale high even through the fierce, sultry heat, the sudden windstorms, the long downpours of rain, the ceaseless torments of mosquitoes, ticks, flies, and gnats.

Fine as they were, though, they were men, and therefore not perfect, and the imperfections of a couple of them had brought up this gloomy prospect of the whippings.

Collins had disappointed him again.

Three days ago, while several tons of flooded baggage from the
Discovery
were spread on the shore to dry, Private Collins had been assigned to guard the whiskey barrels. Private Hugh Hall, tempted by his usual great thirst, had persuaded Collins to relax his vigilance. They had been caught at it. A five-man court martial had been assembled under Sergeant Pryor, and had sentenced Hall to fifty lashes for stealing whiskey and Collins to one hundred lashes for being negligent on guard duty. The punishments were to be administered this evening by the enlisted men.

That dadblamed Collins, William thought. I hope for his own good that he learns this time. I’d hate to have to give up on a man of such spirit and send ’im back.

He returned to his journal. It was hard to think and write now. A whipping upset his day. It always had. As his mother had often said, “The worst way a body can waste his time is in hurtin’ another body.”

Brother George had been right about one thing, this journey had proved already: about songs and jokes. The best part of these days for the men had been the evenings, when Cruzatte and Gibson would get out their fiddles and play dancing music around the campfires. Men whom one would have thought too exhausted to move would get up and dance like dervishes, yipping and stamping and cavorting. And they would sing home songs sometimes, and josh each other about things that had happened on the river during the hard, hot days. It was high spirit, not fear of the whip, that made them try so hard.

William sighed and dipped his quill. This is surely the writin’est expedition as ever was, he thought, and we Clarks never were much for talkin’ with ink. He and his brothers had kept journals at particular times—usually times when they suspected they were making history and would have to be accountable for their actions. George had kept journals when he could during the Revolution, and William had kept one, mainly for Fanny’s pleasure, during his years under General Wayne. Brother Jonathan, methodical as he was, had kept a daily diary since he was twenty, but it wasn’t very enlightening. Its usual entries were only a one-word description of the weather and where he had happened to be that day. Once in his childhood, William had snooped in Jonathan’s diary, looking for any references to himself, but had abandoned it with a mighty yawn aften ten minutes.

But now here he was trying to keep up this elaborate log of the Voyage of Discovery, with its narratives and descriptions, with its
map-sketches and coordinates, its sketches of places and artifacts and animals. And Lewis! Well, Meriwether Lewis was a bona fide writin’ fool. He not only told everything that happened and how everything looked, but also how he felt about it. Lewis
really
had the sense that he was making history, and he felt that even whether he had the flux or hard stools was history.