The Last Empty Places (19 page)

Mattern had told me that the retreating raiding party probably avoided the Great Shamokin Trail, a kind of ancient, foot-trodden superhighway connecting Shamokin on the Susquehanna, which flows to the Atlantic Ocean, to the Indian towns to the west. These villages sat on the Allegheny River and other Ohio Valley tributaries, which flow to the Mississippi and then to the Gulf of Mexico. In the millennia before European settlement this route served for long-distance, cross-country travel much as today’s Interstate 80 does, and connected the great watershed of the Atlantic Coast to that of the Mississippi Valley. In fact, today’s I-80 follows the Great Shamokin Trail through a good deal of Pennsylvania.

By avoiding the Shamokin Trail, the captors stayed off the obvious route white searchers would follow when looking for the girls. The Indian captors probably took the smaller Karondinhah, or Penn’s Creek Trail. I followed this more obscure route, the captors’ route, by driving along Pennsylvania Highway 45. The highway rolled atop a gentle ridge in beautiful green farming country dotted with enormous Amish barns that resembled stoutly built country inns with shuttered windows, the wooded ridges rising as backdrops. Corn grew in thick, even rows, and herds of black-and-white-spotted Holstein cows grazed. On this Sunday afternoon Amish buggies trotted up the road with their bonneted women and vest-jacketed men in bushy beards, going Sunday visiting to their neighbors’ farms. Small boys in their vests played on shady lawns while parents chatted on porches. I wanted to stop at the prosperous farmsteads offering eggs, cheese, raw milk for sale, but the hand-lettered signs all said, “No Sunday Sales.”

I felt that thrill of discovery that comes from unexpectedly stumbling upon someplace very different from one’s own culture. I was swept up by the beautiful landscape, the elaborate barns that showed so much craftsmanship, this place so rooted in the fertile earth and in the work of one’s hands compared to modern strip-mall America. I was reminded of a larger-scale version of the rolling Wisconsin dairy-farming country of my childhood. It was clear why, as the events unfolded on October 16, 1755, the day of the attack on the Le Roy and Leininger
farmsteads, the white settlers coveted these rich, productive valleys and graceful, wooded hills—and why the Indians were not ready to forsake them.

Immediately after their capture, the Indians had led the girls to the top of a nearby high hill
²⁹
—no doubt the one beside the Le Roy homestead where Kim Mattern had led me poking for artifacts with his golf-club shaft. The rest of the Indian raiding party arrived toward dusk, the girls reported later, and tossed six fresh, bloody scalps on the ground at the girls’ feet, saying they’d had a good hunt that day.

The Indians conducted more raids on settlers the next day, returning with nine scalps and five more prisoners. On the third day they divided up the spoils, reported the girls, which totaled ten captives, fourteen horses, and abundant food taken from the farmsteads. The two girls—Marie Le Roy and Barbara Leininger—went to an Indian named Galasko, along with two horses. As they later described it:

As I drove west on Highway 45 dark clouds swept in. Somewhere along here, west of modern-day Lewisburg, the Indian raiding band had split into two groups, apparently to avoid detection by white searchers, with the girls’ group heading toward a Delaware Indian town called Jenkiklamuhs (now Clearfield), which sat on the West Branch of the Susquehanna. The farming valley along Highway 45 looked peaceful and prosperous. A shimmery curtain of rain briefly veiled the wooded ridges. The sun returned and the narrow, sinuous strip of asphalt glistened, my tires zipping over it. The road wound upward, over a mountain ridge, through remnant groves of big white pine trees—the
species that once cloaked much of this mountain landscape before it was logged. Here ran one of the long fingers of the northern Allegheny Mountains like a great curved claw. I guessed Galasko had led Marie and Barbara on his stolen horses through this same mountain pass. I descended again into farm country. Villages eventually yielded to subdivisions. Highway 45 fed into a four-lane. The four-lane roared into the town of State College, home of Pennsylvania State University. Here, in the collections of Pennsylvania Archives, I hoped to find what I needed to retrace Marie and Barbara’s captivity. Maps. Old, old maps.

At the same time that Galasko led Marie and Barbara westward through the Pennsylvania wilds, in October 1755, back in Philadelphia, John Bartram started thinking that his son Billy should get a job. A
real
job. Enough dallying in the arts. By then, Billy had attended the Philadelphia Academy for about three years, with its poetry and classics, its playwriting and liberal arts (the school would eventually become the University of Pennsylvania). He’d become very proficient at drawing, but his father wanted him to have a means to make a hard-earned, decent living beyond what he considered these leisured—and unprofitable—aristocratic pursuits. He didn’t want Billy to be “what is commonly called a gentleman,”
³⁰
he wrote in a letter to his London botanical friend Peter Collinson. In turn, Collinson, who had much admired Billy’s botanical drawings, now advised Billy “to leave off his Darling Delights to qualify himself to live in the world.”

When he turned sixteen, John presented Billy with various career options. Billy shunned each one, struggling to find his place.

Medicine, thought John. He purchased medical texts for Billy to study, but then he complained that Billy didn’t turn a single page.

Surveying, thought John, as it would allow Billy the chance to study and draw plants. Then he reconsidered, remarking, “We have five times more surveyors already than can get half employ.”

John consulted with his friend, the ever-practical Ben Franklin. Like the confused Dustin Hoffman character in
The Graduate
who is told by his father’s friend to go into the fast-growing field of plastics, the at-loose-ends young Billy heard only one word of advice from Ben Franklin—“Printing.”

John nixed it, knowing that “as [Ben] well knew, he was the only printer that did ever make a good livelihood by it, in this place.”

Ben thought it over a bit, then suggested engraving. That didn’t
work out either. What Billy really liked was botany and drawing—pursuits that John worried “won’t get him his living.”

Finally, the practical-minded father took the initiative for the moony son and apprenticed him to a prosperous Philadelphia merchant, Captain Child, to learn how to trade in cargoes of goods. Billy spent four years with Captain Child—who felt toward him like a father to a son—and then set off to Cape Fear, in Carolina, where his uncle lived, to go into business as an independent merchant himself.

Billy’s entrepreneurial foray soon failed. He endured the ocean voyage to Cape Fear badly seasick, then floods ruined much of the Carolina countryside, he reported in a letter home upon his arrival, undermining the chances of selling much merchandise. He did manage to sell one shipment of thirty-five barrels of turpentine, but no evidence exists of any merchant trades beyond that. In fact, there is little evidence of Billy of any kind during most of this period. What survives is an absence of Billy—a kind of blank spot of Billy. His father and Peter Collinson wrote him repeatedly, their surviving letters displaying a growing annoyance that Billy doesn’t respond to them, nor to their requests to send back a few plants or seeds from Carolina’s warm coastal climes.

“[T]hee need not hinder half an hour’s time
³¹
to gather them,” father admonished son for his laziness, “or turn 20 yards out of thy way to pluck them.”

John began to lose faith in Billy, especially compared to his two other industrious sons, John Jr. and Moses.

“I doubt Will,” he wrote to Collinson. “He will be ruined in Carolina. Everything goes wrong with him there.”

“Billy, so ingenious a lad,” wrote Collinson to John, “is as it were lost in indolence and obscurity.”

Billy may have started drinking heavily. His father’s letters to him of this period are filled with references to “temperance.” Or he may have fallen secretly in love with his first cousin, Mary Bartram, on whose family’s estate he lived at Cape Fear, perched high on a river bluff that offered stunning views of forest and cane meadows spreading below. Letters written years later point to that possibility, as does family tradition. Whatever the case, Billy certainly seems to have been intoxicated by the sheer, flowering lushness of Carolina compared to spare Pennsylvania.

And so Billy idled at Cape Fear, with cousin Mary, in the climate’s “eternal spring.” He got along well with his uncle. He drew. He studied plants. He worked lackadaisically at trading. His business affairs deteriorated, and he fell deeper into debt to creditors back in Philadelphia.

Meanwhile his father, thanks to diligent letter-writing by his friend Collinson to the duke of Northumberland, was appointed as the King’s Botanist for America. The appointment came to John with a stipend of fifty pounds a year. Collinson proposed to the king that John Bartram travel through the wilderness of the Florida interior to send back to Britain exotic and wonderful plant specimens.

Thus appointed, John Bartram wrote to Billy proposing that he join him as assistant on the Florida expedition. He should sell off his remaining trade goods, John advised, and put his financial affairs into the hands of an attorney. Happily bailing out on the merchant’s life, Billy accompanied John through eastern Florida on a journey that was supposed to last one month but extended to more than five, so engrossed were the Bartrams with the flowering plants, the swamps and pine barrens, the gushing springs and bellowing alligators.

Not wishing to leave the tropical exotica to return to the dull merchant’s life, Billy fixated on the notion that he’d like to set up as a rice planter on a remote, swampy stretch of Florida’s St. John’s River. Although his father considered this another “frolic” of Billy’s, John staked him to the necessities, which were dispatched from Charleston to Florida as John headed back north, for Billy to start a plantation in the wilderness. These necessities included four slaves to clear the land, an iron pot, axes, seeds, barrels of corn and pork, and a pot of sugar.

Six months later, a Charleston acquaintance of the senior Bartram’s, Henry Laurens, visited Billy at his so-called plantation and reported to John back in Philadelphia that Billy was living in a leaky hovel beside a stinking malarial swamp. He was sick and feverish, out of food, and the labor of clearing a plantation was clearly beyond his “tender and delicate frame of body and intellect.”

“[N]o colouring,”
³²
he wrote, “can do justice to the forlorn state of poor Billy Bartram.”

Billy returned to Philadelphia by year’s end, working as a day laborer despite his expensive education in the classics and poetry. He then suddenly bolted and disappeared from Philadelphia after his creditors apparently threatened him with physical harm if he didn’t make
good on his debts. After several months, he eventually showed up at Cape Fear again, reestablished communication with his family, and John paid off the creditors with “one hundred pounds ready cash.”

Billy lingered at Cape Fear for another two years despite the death of his uncle. It was as if he were taken with some spirit of the age, some intangible zeitgeist of his generation that he couldn’t name, wandering about seeking a place, or simply the start of his path, in the world.

That path finally arrived in the form of Dr. John Fothergill, a renowned London physician who was creating a large botanical garden on his Essex country estate. The ubiquitous Collinson had shown him Billy Bartram’s impressive drawings of American turtles made at Cape Fear. Fothergill commissioned Billy for more drawings, and Billy eventually suggested Fothergill stake him to another botanical excursion through Florida. Fothergill hesitated—was he sober and diligent? wrote Fothergill to Bartram senior—but the doctor finally offered Billy fifty pounds per year to go exploring on his own, which was the start of Billy’s remarkable journey that would shape the way we look at the wilds.

I
T WAS ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL
J
ULY MORNING
the next day as I jogged along the pathways and green lawns of the Penn State campus. Rummaging through library card catalogues and computer records, I found on microfiche the map I sought. It had been compiled by Paul A. W. Wallace, who spent a lifetime researching the old Indian trails of Pennsylvania. Wallace’s central map showed the entire state—or what’s now the state—etched with an intricate spiderweb of ancient trails. There were dozens and dozens of them, a kind of shadow image of how intimately the region was known to Indians. One of the most prominent trails, the Great Shamokin Path, ran east-west across the network like a spine. Just to the north of the Shamokin Path several big holes showed in the web—“blank spots” even on this Indian traveling map. One especially large blank spot was labeled “Buffalo Swamp.” If I had hostages, and were hiding from white pursuers, this is where I’d head.

I veered north. I drove with a Starbucks coffee—purchased from an outlet near the Penn State campus and its archives—in the cup holder and the modern
Rand McNally Road Atlas
opened on the passenger seat of my rental car. Even the Rand McNally map showed big blank spots,
which happened to correspond with the blank spots of the Wallace map. Some now bore the designation of “state forests” and were shaded a light green, while some remained simply white and empty.