The True Account (3 page)

The first leg of our trip went capitally. We stopped to visit the Amazonian delta, where one Sucker Brook debouched into the Kingdom River. There my uncle, briefly disembarking from the
Samuel de Champlain
to perform a necessary office in the alders, was harried back onto the ship by a thirty-foot anaconda—which bore more than a passing resemblance to a spotted yellow newt sunning itself on a tamarack stump. Our vessel was three times beaten back around the tumultuous Cape Horn (the High Falls at Kingdom Common) by fierce headwinds laden with hail, sleet, and driving snow. At last, on the fourth attempt, we cleared the tip of the Cape with room to spare and sallied on up the west coast of South America past the Juan Fernandez Islands, as my uncle called the stone-filled timber cribs in the river designed to regulate log drives. Then on to the Galapagos, where he had arranged for us to be set upon by a party of three lads from the village, their faces all besmeared with blue river clay, in the guise of cannibals. After putting these savages to rout and beating up the coast of Spanish California past the mission of San Francisco—the little French Canadian chapel just outside town—we reached the mouth of the Columbia—Kingdom Brook—at noon. Out came my uncle's sextant and astrolabe, out came his book of navigational tables. After the most elaborate mathematical calculations, he estimated our latitude at about 60° north, from which he concluded that the Columbia entered the Pacific not far south of Alaska. To celebrate this surprising news he smoked half a pipe of hemp.

With the daunting overland portion of our trip through
terra incognita
now at hand, our explorations were about to begin in earnest. Reminding me that everything we saw next would be country viewed by Americans for the first time, and that we were about to venture where the foot of civilized man had never trod before, and, furthermore, that I should take particular notice of everything I saw so that, when home again, I could paint what had “ne'er been painted before,” and commending us both to Providence and to our Maker, my uncle planted the flag on a little knoll overlooking the river and we started out again. Our struggles up the rapids of the Columbia, as represented by several old beaver dams, were Herculean—indeed, a hotter, wetter, more tedious and arduous four hours than we had getting to the Rockies, or Kingdom Mountain, can scarcely be imagined. But our travails were not yet over. In the thick hemlock woods on the mountainside we fought off a horde of black flies, which my uncle mistook for “the all-puissant Blackfeet”; and as evening drew near, and we waded back down the little foot-wide rill on the back side of the mountain—the “broad Missouri”—a swarm of mosquitoes descended on us with all the savagery of the “treacherous Sioux.” Seth Hubbell's sheep pasturage my uncle denominated the great western prairie; Seth's dozen merino sheep, a thundering herd of bison.

As twilight settled over the mountain and we started down the last slope, my uncle said, “Ti, we've done it. We have discovered the Northwest Passage—backward. I only wish Colonel Allen could have been with us.”

Exhausted, soaked through and through, bruised and bugbitten, we arrived home at a little after eight o'clock, to a heroes' welcome from my father and Helen of Troy, who fixed us a late supper of ham and eggs and pancakes laced with maple syrup. I ate eleven pancakes, my uncle twenty-six, my mother four, and my father one and part of another, which I finished for him.

My uncle then fired up his long, curved hemp pipe and began to recount our adventures of the day. Stimulated by the mild cannabis fumes, he told how the
Samuel de Champlain
had been wrecked on the Columbia and how, having been cast away, we had made our way back afoot. My father's arms and elbows were now sticking directly out from his head in an attempt to exert more pressure upon that seat of reason. Warming to his subject, True fetched his map of North America, and, in the large blank section, began to trace our route very exactly, marking down the places where we had skirmished with the Blackfeet and Sioux and asking me to draw in a few bison. At this juncture my father rose from the table and declared that even if I should turn out to be a Vermont Michelangelo, he did not believe he could bear to have another artistical relative. My uncle, in the meantime, had neatly inscribed on the map, “Private True Teague Kinneson's Chart of the Interior of North America, Designating His Journey, by Land, from the Mouth of the Columbia to the United States. As attested to by True T. Kinneson, May 15, 1803.”

S
O MATTERS RAN ALONG
in our home for the next several weeks. At fifteen, I was reading changeable old Ovid's lively Latin and, in the Greek, Thucydides, as well as my uncle's favorite historical chronicler of all time, Herodotus, who wrote of giant crocodilos and flying lizards and other marvels stranger still. When I came to Xenophon's
The March Upcountry,
we enacted his incredible trek through the land of the Persians and Medes by hiking up into Canada and back one sunny day. En route we encountered a great homed owl, which I later painted, life-size, presenting the picture to my mother.

By then it had become apparent—my father's concern about another artistical Kinneson notwithstanding—that I had a real flair for drawing and painting, particularly birds. I loved best their colors. The reddish brown thrasher with its long narrow tail, the indigo backs of our little northern bunting, the bright lemon plumage of the winter grosbeak against the snow. Indeed, there was no bird or animal that I did not find beautiful in its own way. For several months my mother fed an orphaned fox at the back door, a slinking young vixen that tolerated only her. I sketched this she-fox and many other animals as well—deer, beaver, and a bear that raided my uncle's hemp garden and gourmandised on the ripening flower buds, then lolled on his back with his four black paws in the air like a big dog wishing to be scratched. But portraits of people were difficult. My best effort in this department was a group arrangement of my family seated in the farmhouse kitchen one winter evening. Here is my mother, Helen of Troy, baking her cartwheel cookies; my father slumps at the table with his hands pressed to his head, looking on as my yellow-eyed uncle, in full explorer's regalia and belled stocking cap, works on his “Chart of the Interior of North America.” “And what, Mr. Mackenzie, say you to
this?
” he would say to himself as he inked in our route. What indeed!

There was, at about this time, some talk between my parents of sending me down to Boston to study with Copley or Stuart, or perhaps to the great artist-scientist Charles Willson Peale in Philadelphia. But they had meager funds to underwrite such a venture; and who would then keep track of my uncle? Whose little ways and stays, I must say, seemed to grow ever more extravagant.

Then came July 4 and the great news from Washington. “‘President Jefferson, in a single bold stroke,'” my father read to us from the
Washington Intelligencer
, “‘has more than doubled the land mass of our young nation by buying, from France, the territory called Louisiana, stretching from west of the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains and north to Canada. Moreover,'” he continued, “‘trusted sources report that the president will soon appoint an expedition to go overland to the mountains and beyond, to discover the most practicable watercourse to the Ocean Pacific.'”

My uncle, who, though listening to my father, had seen fit to thrust his ear trumpet close to the newspaper itself, was in a frenzy of anticipation. “Great Jehovah!” he cried. “Did you hear that, Ticonderoga? An overland expedition to the Ocean Pacific. I must lead that expedition. Having made the same tour backward, I can see no obstacle to completing it frontward.” He now put the trumpet to his mouth and, clapping the larger end to my father's ear, he roared into it, “I'm going back to the Pacific, Charles, or I shall know the reason why.”

After recovering somewhat from this rather excruciating experience, my father started to say, “The reason why, dear brother, is that, not to put too fine a point on the matter, you have never been—”

“Ah, ah, Charles,” said my mother, smiling and shaking her head, while my uncle now scanned the piece in the
Intelligencer
through the small end of his trumpet, alternately nodding his head in agreement or frowning and shaking it, so that the little bell on the end of his cap jingled like a whole carillon.

“The reason why, dear elder brother,” my father tried again, “is that—is that—oh, to the devil with it—the reason is that you might as well undertake to guide Captain Lewis to the Great Khan of China, like our ancestor, Chief Tumkin Tumkin.”

My uncle raised his thickety white eyebrows. “China,” he said, casting a glance out the back window of the kitchen at the stone wall angling up the slope. “China—”

Hurriedly, to deflect this dangerous train of thought, my father read on. “‘The expedition will travel up the Missouri, whose ultimate source is believed to rise near that of the Columbia, then proceed down that river to the Pacific, in what is projected to be one of the greatest journeys of discovery in history.'”

“Do you see, nephew?” cried my uncle, now gazing at me through the big end of his trumpet. “Exactly our route in reverse. They can't do it without us. Take a letter, lad.”

 

The Honorable Thomas Jefferson,

President of the United States of America

 

Dear Mr. President,

Having just returned by land from the mouth of the River Columbia and the Oregon Territory, I will undertake, for two dollars a day and found, to lead an expedition safely across Louisiana to the Pacific Ocean, through the land of the all-puissant Blackfeet and the treacherous Sioux, whom I plan to pacify and win over by introducing them to the propagation, cultivation, and inhalation of that panacea for all the spiritual ills of mankind—hemp. Eagerly awaiting your confirmation of this assignment, I remain,

Your friend,

Private True Teague Kinneson

Green Mountain Regiment

First Continental Army

 

“And back?” my mother suggested.

“And back?” my uncle said.

“Yes. To the Pacific and back?”

“Oh, yes. Of course ‘and back.' Write, ‘Postscript—and back,' Ti.”

I did so, and then, lest this matter of high state policy fall into the hands of spies, my uncle had me transcribe it into Greek. Not knowing the Hellenic for “Blackfeet” and “Sioux,” I found myself at a standstill. But my unperplexed uncle, thumbing through Xenophon, found a phrase for “sooty-footed Persians,” which took care of the Blackfeet; as for the Sioux, on reflection he thought it safe simply to write—Sioux.

He posted this proposal the next morning and followed it up with many more communications to the President, including a thirty-page treatise in Latin called
A Brief History of the Flora, Fauna and Native Peoples of the Oregon and Louisiana Territories.
Also, he sent Mr. Jefferson a copy of his revised “Chart of the Interior of North America.”

The fact that we received not a single word in reply to these missives did not deter or discourage Private True Teague Kinneson in the least. Indeed, I must say that my uncle seemed impervious to discouragement. When he rose in the morning, he never once, so far as I knew, doubted that his commission and summons to Washington would be coming through that very day; throughout the summer and fall of 1803 we made trial runs with my raft on the Kingdom River and compiled lengthy lists of what we would need to take with us.

Vermont's red and yellow autumn gave way to winter. At Christmas, from his hemp income my uncle presented me with a new muzzle-loading flintlock rifle, my mother with a brindled cow for her dairy, and my father with a padded vise of his own invention, in which to clamp his head when the world was too much with him.

One day in March, when the sap had just started to flow in our maple-sugar orchard, my uncle strapped on his snowshoes and said he planned to go to the top of Kingdom Mountain and reconnoiter our route to the Pacific. It seemed safe enough to let him conduct this reconnaissance on his own, so I went to work with my father, the
Monitor
being due out the next day. That evening, however, we were met at the door by my most anxious mother, who had just discovered a note from the private informing us that he had left for Boston to raise money for our trip.

My father's hands were already fluttering upward, like two large moths toward a candle. Pressing his head down from the top, as if to prevent himself from taking flight, he said, “Fetch me my clamp, Ti.”

I ran for the Christmas vise. After my mother and I had affixed this apparatus to his head, screwing it down very tightly, he seemed to experience some relief.

“What, sir,” I inquired, “are we to do?”

“Why, Ti, I suppose that we must wait a day or two and see if your uncle comes back. If he does not, we will have to go after him and run him to ground. Else I fear greatly for his sake and, frankly, for the sake of Louisiana and the Republic.”

In truth, my uncle had run off two or three times before, once to the neighboring village of Pond in the Sky, which he had mistaken for Dover, on the English Channel, to assist Lord Nelson against Napoleon; and again over the border into Canada, to escape the blandishments of a determined local widow-woman named Goody Kittredge, who had set her cap for him and his hemp income. In both instances he had been home by nightfall.

Now, as evening came and my uncle did not, my father had us ratchet the head vise ever tighter, until his kindly gray eyes began to start out of their sockets; my mother continued to go to the window and look out into the blue twilight creeping over our mountain; and I began to feel dreadfully remiss that I had not kept better track of my ward. The night wore on, and eventually my mother coaxed my father, still wearing the vise, to bed. But by then I was more alarmed than I could ever recall being.