Lake Wobegon Days (6 page)

A hike of three days brought them to the site of the present Lake Wobegon, where they built a lean-to of alder branches and settled in to await the leading of the Spirit, and where two days later they looked out in the morning to see a foot of new-fallen snow. Prudence’s certainty and rejoicing were just about all used up.

Lay awake all night hearing cries of wild beasts, hoots, screams &c. Elizabeth sleeps easily but our diet of nuts & berries does not sit well & makes me restless & agitated & also Henry & George snort & grunt in their sleep & throw their arms & legs about & disgust me [with] their gross sensuality & brute appetites. This is a desolate & God-forsaken land & I do not see that any civilized society could find comfort and nurture here. Would that I had brought warm clothing!!

By Thanksgiving Day, Prudence had said her prayers, laid down, crossed her arms, and hoped to die, when crashing was heard in the underbrush and into the clearing rode an immense swarthy man
wrapped in bearskins who dismounted from his spotted pony, threw back his huge hairy head, and laughed out loud: “Haw! Haw! Haw!”

“He was covered with sweat & filth & phlegm ran down his face unchecked & he gave off the aroma of one for whom bathing is as unwelcome a prospect as a broken leg,” wrote Prudence, but he was also, she learned, Basile Fonteneau, a French trapper, who knew his way around those parts, and when he offered to lead them to his hut at the other end of the lake and put them up for the winter, she did not say no. She was cold and hungry and wasn’t sure that Providence would make a better offer.

In a few weeks, her spirits lifted somewhat. “M. Fonteneau delights in half-cooked bear meat which he eats
sans
utensil & sleeps in a heap with his four brutish dogs & sings bawdy ballads in a coarse voice & relieves himself in the open & engages in other lewd practices, but I am satisfied that Providence has led us here in order to test us with fire & I am happy to be proved & strengthened in my Faith,” she wrote.

By the spring thaw, she had found in her heart some fondness for Basile and written two sonnets on the letters of his name. One of them began:

By May her thoughts were centered on him. She gazed on him as he slept, and his face seemed to possess nobility of purpose and a spiritual demeanor she had not noticed during the cold months. “Compared to Basile—his strength, his native cunning, his constant good humor—Henry & George seem pale & slender stems of some weaker strain of plant. They while away the hours perched on rocks above the Lake & dispute theology & amuse themselves with their own wit & in their placid ignorance never take note that there is wood to be got. Each day I invent new reasons why we cannot press on with our Mission and must remain here a little longer,
but there is no need to convince them—they would be content to sit until fall.”

One evening as the sun set and a warm breeze carried the thought of spring flowers, Basile asked Prudence to walk with him to a peninsula to pick lady-slippers. As they walked, she found herself talking about her Mission to the Indians and her feeling that dance, not oratory, is the basis of true religion. As she talked, she began to dance for him. He ran after her as she danced on and on until, exhausted, she fell in a heap and he picked her up and carried her to the water’s edge and threw her in. He stripped off his clothing and jumped in after her.

“I was astonished to see that he is actually quite a young man,” she wrote in her journal that night. “It was only his husk that was old & smelly & degraded & corpulent & when he shed it he appeared quite slender & muscular & all in all a very comely individual. We swam & sported in the cool waters & my petticoats were so cumbersome I dispensed with them &c. ‘You must not look upon me!’ I cried &c. He spoke to me in French, which I took to mean that he felt it was his Duty to look on me or else I might drown & he then took my hand & guided me to deeper water for modesty’s sake & showed me to swim &c. We returned to camp very damp & much refreshed & when I saw the others, reclining where I had left them & murmuring about the Spirit of Truth, I determined to send them back East & remain with Basile.”

There her journal ended. She and Basile were married in St. Anthony in July by a Fr. Sevier, who also had come west to convert the Indians, and settled in St. Paul, where Basile built a hotel called The World, and they prospered and had seven children. The first account of Lake Wobegon to reach the East was Henry’s, in his poem “Phileopolis: A Western Rhapsody,” which begins

The poem, all 648 lines of it, was never published in the East, where Henry hoped it would make his reputation and lead to something, perhaps an introduction to Longfellow. The short and insistent meter, the sheer length (which, by line 182, is already leading to such rhymes as “sibylline/porcupine” and “cereal/immaterial”), and the burden of the poem—the emptiness and spiritual languor of the frontier and the comfort of civilization as found in dreams of Greece—left even Henry’s friends a little sleepy after a few pages, and the poem was eventually returned by James Russell Lowell at
The Atlantic
with a note: “We are grateful for having had the chance to see this and trust you will understand that, whatever the qualities of the poem, it does not meet our particular requirements at this time. (In the future, please enclose postage with your submissions.)”
^*

Henry Francis was not easily discouraged. Back in Boston by
September of ’51, he tried the lecture circuit and spoke in several towns and made a good impression on some people, including a handsome young woman in Amherst who became his wife and also a wealthy Boston coffee broker who was a partner in the Albion Land Company which, as it so happened, was looking to the Minnesota territory with an eye toward speculation.

Henry’s lecture was entitled “Descriptions of Innocence & Independence in the West.” He had changed his mind. He had grown fond of “this desolate place” after a few months in the East, had come to imagine it as his true spiritual home. He wanted to leave Boston, which was crowded with poets and philosophers, and return to the lake and woods where he was the sole proprietor of serious thought. In “Descriptions,” he gave such a fine account of his thoughts, feelings, etc., as a poet in the West, and rose to such flights of imagination that he himself could not believe he had left such a paradise for “the stale, tedious, over-travelled roads of transcendentalism.”

“Saw Emerson at a dinner,” he wrote in his journal. “How tired he looks! If that is what fame leads to, I would as soon be a simple schoolteacher in the wilderness!”

A portrait of Henry and his new young wife shows a plump, somewhat damp young man with a faint aura of beard, seated, gazing far beyond the camera, with a sturdy woman in black silk standing at his side. She smiles modestly, her hand on his shoulder. On her fingers are three rings bearing large stones. His mother opposed the match. “My dear Son,” she wrote from Cambridge, “do you really
know
Elizabeth as a man should know his intended wife? Have you looked into her history, her family, etc.? Do not be enchanted by the flutter of talk & the whisper of feminine dress & the thin veil of youthful romance, but gather the plain facts as you would if you were entering into any other enterprise. Elizabeth impresses me as a peasant woman, quite possibly one of gypsy blood, who is unsuitable for a man of your sensitive health. This is sound advice from your mother. Ignore it at your peril.”

Henry didn’t care about her history. It was enough for him that his wife looked on him as her teacher, her truest friend and her one sure guide. Nobody had ever trusted him so much. Far from questioning his dream of returning west, she encouraged it. “I wish to begin life
anew in a new country,” she wrote, “and I pray God it will be with you, my friend.”

His dream was simple. He would return to Minnesota and found a college, a city of learning on a hill, and would give his life to it. Harvard had turned him down as a teacher, so had Yale. Everywhere he encountered failure. Even “Descriptions” got him only five bookings in three months, and of those, three refused to pay the agreed amount after the performance and insisted on a much smaller fee, which he was forced to accept. The inheritance from his father’s furniture shop was small.

So his meeting with the coffee broker was pure godsend. The man, whose name was Bayfield, was coarse, untutored, favored garish clothing, and had an unpleasant habit of chewing coffee beans and letting the brown juice run down his chin, but Henry swallowed his pride and cultiyated him, regaling him with pictures of the distinguished institution they two would together create, until at last Bayfield agreed. In the spring, Henry would travel to St. Paul, join a wagon train of the Albion Land Company, accompany them to a site, and begin construction of a town named New Albion and a college. Henry argued for stone; surely there must be a good supply of granite somewhere close by, and granite would speak for the permanence of New Albion in such a way as to encourage settlement; but Bayfield said no, it would be brick.

Henry described the beautiful spot by the lake where so much poetry had come to him. He pleaded with Bayfield to build his town there. “Fortune is drawing me to that spot,” he said. He didn’t know that Bayfield already owned it.
^*

In late August 1852, a train of heavy wagons rumbled north on the Winnipeg Trail, drawn by octets of oxen, the drovers walking alongside, followed by a coach carrying seven bricklayers and a carriage
driven by Mr. Bayfield with Henry and Elizabeth aboard, drawn by two high-stepping grays who tossed their handsome heads, upset at the slow pace. Twenty miles a day the caravan moved, along what is now U.S. 10, from St. Paul (formerly called Pig’s Eye) to the lumbering camp of Anoka and through the Benedictine mission of St. Cloud, then struck out cross-country to the Albion site north-northwest. In six days, they met up with only one southbound traveler: a man named Moon, on foot, who stood in their path and inquired for news. “You are the first I’ve seen all summer!” he cried.

He was wrapped in rags tied with leather thongs and wore a good beaver hat and carried a sack on his back that jingled when he set it down. “Tools of the trade,” he said. “Tinkering, preaching, and doctoring. Man and beast.”

“You’re far from any settlement to practice trades like those,” Bayfield said. “I know that now!” the man replied. He clutched at Bayfield’s sleeve and looked deep into Bayfield’s eyes—“The war with Mexico! Tell me how the battle goes!” he cried. “Has General Taylor yet taken Santa Anna?”

“The war is won, I’m pleased to tell you, and General Tàylor has been rewarded with election to the Presidency three years ago, but now that Mexico has surrendered, the country is under attack from the north.”

“The north?”

“Sir, let us speak privately so as not to alarm the lady—” and Bayfield led him away from the wagons, Henry following, to a low sandy hill under a small oak tree—“war with Canada is coming as sure as I stand here. The East is all ablaze with it. Villainy, sir! Unspeakable things! Crimes that no God-fearing man would care to contemplate! Yes, sir, the vicious Canuck will not rest until the Republic is lying in its own blood and gore! And where will they strike next, sir? Why, right here, in the most defenseless regions! That is why we are headed north, sir. And that is why you must continue south—to warn the citizens of St. Paul that the Canucks are moving! They are coming overland, they are moving by the rivers. And what is more heinous—their armies are infested with smallpox! Yes! Great swarthy brutes with rheumy eyes and fevered brows, open red sores on their bodies and green pestilence running down their legs! Go, sir! To St. Paul! And trust no man who denies the truth of it! Their agents are thick in the countryside. Spread the word! Go! Godspeed!”

The poor man looked at them in horror and ran away south, his bag jangling at his side. Henry watched in disbelief. “The frontier is for the strong,” Bayfield said. “Let rumors of war and disease keep the weak at home so the strong can flourish.”

“Lies,” Henry whispered. He sank to the ground. “Lies. You shouldn’t tell so many lies.”

“Courage!” Bayfield grabbed his hand and hauled him up. “A little courage, sir. We’ve come to build a city, a great, rich, populous city, and before we build, we must believe in it. Is that a lie? Is this a lie?”
He reached into his coat and pulled out a sheet of paper which he unfolded and thrust at Henry.

It was a printed poster entitled
NEW ALBION, THE BOSTON OF THE WEST
, and under the title, a perfect picture of a town with great buildings, stately homes under broad trees, avenues thronged with traffic. “Home of New Albion College, World Revered Seat of Learning Set in This Mecca of Commerce and Agriculture. Dr. Henry Francis Watt, Ph.D., Litt. D., D.D., President. Choice Lots Remain For Purchase, $100.”

“Mr. Bayfield,” Henry gasped. “You take me for a much better man than I am!”

“Mr. Watt,” Bayfield replied, “you will do just fine, sir. You will accomplish the purpose admirably, I have every reason to believe it.”

“But
Doctor!
You have me a doctor of philosophy, literature, divinity—great God! I’ll be found out! There will be scandal! Outrage! People will never forgive it!”

Bayfield put his arm around the young man’s shoulders. “You seem to be ignorant of the true nature of doctors,” he said. “My boy, the first and foremost work of a doctor is to inspire confidence in his being one. So long as the public has faith in him, then any man can be a doctor, and if the public hasn’t faith, then the greatest doctor in the world will have no effect on them.”