The True Account (6 page)

Then, with yet another flourish in my direction, “And my squire and nephew, Ticonderoga Kinneson.”

Without further ceremony my uncle announced that though he respected no living man more than Tom Jefferson, he would, by the Great Jehovah, pay fealty to no one; nor suppress his opinion in regard to what he believed right; nor dance attendance on any man in the world. The President seemed very surprised but also amused at the figure of my uncle, looming up in his knight-errant's habiliments as he pushed brusquely past into the study. Mr. Jefferson shook hands with me. “I like your name, sir,” he said. “Ticonderoga. I imagine there's a story there.”

“There is, Mr. President. My uncle named me. It's Ti for short.”

“Well, Ti, come in and make yourself comfortable—as I see your excellent uncle has done. I admire a man who doesn't stand on ceremony.”

I loved Monticello, with its beds of multicolored tulips and stately white columns and clocks and books and pictures—grand pictures such as I had never dreamed of painting, by all the leading artists of the day. My uncle immediately conferred upon himself the full freedom of the President's study, as if he were at home in his own Library at Alexandria. Unrolling his “Chart of the Interior,” he began to point out to the President the sources of the Missouri and the Columbia and many other hitherto unknown features from our “trip” the previous summer, at the same time declaring that he stood ready to command the expedition being assembled to penetrate the wilds of Louisiana. And to show the President how well prepared he was to undertake this great journey of discovery, he got out his Dutch clock and astrolabe and, with the further aid of a sundial with the face of Jupiter inscribed upon it, which stood in the iris bed outside the study window, determined our longitude to be exactly that of—Bombay.

The President smiled. Assuring us that he was very impressed by the chart and by the drawings I had made on it of some bison and Indians, he asked if I would make a sketch of my uncle, which he would be honored to hang in his study next to Peale's portrait of himself. I was happy to oblige. As the private posed in his heroic gear, he reiterated his desire to lead the expedition to the Pacific. To which the President replied that, while deeply appreciative of such a kind offer, he had already appointed a young army captain named Meriwether Lewis, formerly his private secretary, to this commission, adding that Captain Lewis's official party would be leaving from St. Louis within a very few weeks.

Seeing my uncle's terribly disappointed expression, President Jefferson asked if he might have a word aside with me concerning my judgment of a little painting. My crestfallen uncle bowed his consent; whereupon Mr. Jefferson took me into an adjacent room and showed me a very pretty rendition of the Natural Bridge of Virginia. While I admired it, he said, “Ti, your uncle clearly has a superior imagination. Indeed, his faculties in that direction are those of a true genius. It appears to me that in his mind he really has traversed the continent, and back through time as well, and been in campaigns from Troy to Yorktown.”

“He was in fact with Ethan Allen at Fort Ticonderoga,” I said, unwilling to have the President suppose my uncle to be totally daft. “He was injured in the cranium there.”

President Jefferson nodded. After a moment's reflection, he said, “Do you think that if I were to furnish you and your uncle with two mounts suitable for this great adventure that he believes lies ahead, and you gently trended north with him, persuading him at the same time that you were headed
west
—there is a somewhat similar ruse in his beloved
Don Quixote
—that you might get him safely home to Vermont?”

In fact, I did
not
think any such thing. But all I could say in response to this most handsome offer was, “It is possible.”

“Well, let us try and see what happens,” the President said.

He returned to my uncle and informed him that while the official expedition commanded by Captain Lewis would get under way very soon, he would
not stand in our way
if we wished to strike out on our own, and that he hoped the private would permit him to outfit us for our own epic journey, wherever it led. He then conducted us to some stone stables behind his house, where he presented me with a tall bay stallion named Bucephalus, after that fabled steed of Alexander's, and my uncle with a deaf white mule called Rosinante in honor of the Knight of La Mancha's mount. With which the private was much delighted, though he immediately rechristened the mule Ethan Allen. The President also provided us with saddles and two twenty-dollar gold pieces; and, shaking hands very warmly, wished us the best of luck in Louisiana.

Saluting our benefactor and thanking him profusely, but reminding him that he would pay no fealty to any man, or call any man liege, my uncle with all his fantastical appurtenances and I with my gun and paints and tube of canvases headed back down Mr. Jefferson's little mountain and due west toward the Blue Ridge. A few minutes later we stopped to watch the last rays of the sun sparkle on the dome of Monticello. My uncle said that though he disagreed with the appointment of a young upstart to lead the official expedition, he was much pleased with the President's promise
not to stand in our way,
which he saw as an endorsement of our own expedition. I then suggested that the route to St. Louis lay to the north, but he briskly told me that we must go due
west,
into the mountains, to elude any pursuers who might still be on the track of a “runaway uncle.”

 

 

 

 

O
UR PASSAGE
over the mountains of western Virginia was very hard and very slow and most of all very wet. The road was little more than a wretched swamp, through which my uncle's mule and my horse picked their way, up to their fetlocks in mud. Usually they warned us well in advance of the approach of other travelers, tossing their heads and softly braying or nickering. At first when this happened, my uncle insisted that we rein our mounts off the track and wait out of sight until the wayfarers passed. It soon occurred to him, however, that if we were detected, this evasive conduct would seem suspicious; so, by the second or third day out of Monticello, he stopped avoiding the few people we encountered and merely kept his face turned aside and did not tarry to visit—though he and his costume drew many a long look. Fortunately, no one seemed much inclined to question us, perhaps because we were well armed—I with my flintlock rifle and the private with his arquebus.

I would not wish you to think that my uncle allowed my education to suffer merely because we were away from home. One morning the schoolmaster taught me the first thirty lines of the Prologue to Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales,
which he said was an appropriate poem for “two young blades” off on a springtide pilgrimage of their own. Another day he drilled me in the rudiments of Italian and Russian; on another, the dynasties of ancient Cathay. Each day, too, he encouraged me to stop and draw some of the many varieties of birds, both native and migratory, that were then in those mountains. Once we tarried for more than an hour while I sketched a fierce battle between a nesting pair of scarlet tanagers and a bold young blacksnake attacking their eggs; with some help from my uncle, who wished to assist the birds without harming the snake (or getting too close to it, if I did not miss my guess), the determined pair of tanagers drove the scaly marauder away. On another occasion I drew a rosy grosbeak that landed on my uncle's shoulder and repeatedly attempted to pluck off a fringe of the buckskin shirt he wore under his mail, to use in its spring house-raising. Seeing that I was amused by this scene, and fearful of being thought too tenderhearted, the private put on a blustering air and cried, in his stage voice, “O for some William Tell to shoot this feathered interloper from off my shoulder. See how even the birds of this abandoned southland violate our persons, Ti. Much more of this familiarity and I'll wring its neck like a Sunday dinner cockerel.”

Knowing that my uncle could never bring himself to harm any wild creature, I could not help but laugh. At this he drew his long-knife and made a vicious swipe—not at the bird but at his shirt, cutting off half a dozen leather thongs, which he left draped over a laurel branch for the grosbeak to appropriate at its leisure, at the same time muttering that he wished it would hang itself with them. Then he burst into such a hearty laugh that I wondered if it would not do all the people in the world the very greatest good to fall down and strike
their
heads, and if the world would not be a much happier place for it.

 

One of my happiest early memories is of my uncle brewing tea. He alone was the tea-maker in our household, and after pouring himself a cup with great ceremony he would set me on his knee and slop half an inch of that delicious beverage sweetened with maple sugar out of his blue mug into the saucer and announce, “Now, Ticonderoga, you may
chisel.”
Meaning sip tea from the saucer, which never failed to make me feel very grown-up.

Every day of our trip, rain or shine, we reenacted this pleasant ceremony. All morning and on into the afternoon my uncle would keep a sharp eye out for mint or wintergreen or pennyroyal or ginseng leaves or whatever local plant or herb came to hand for tea-making. He brewed the leaves in his all-purpose pannikin, then brought out the blue mug, and after pouring the tea he would announce, as if we were snug at home in our kitchen instead of in alien mountains a thousand miles to the south, “Now, Ticonderoga, you may chisel.” And we would share the mug, as it was the only one we had, and instead of feeling grown-up I felt like a young boy again.

Sometimes a saucy chattering gray squirrel or a white-footed mouse or a chickadee with a neat black cap would venture near. As my uncle tossed it biscuit crumbs, he would say, “Oh, so you too wish to chisel. Is that it? Where is my arquebus, Ti? Well, well. Why waste good shot?” No wild creature that begged ever went hungry, and this was a very agreeable way to travel with a very agreeable man, and though I still missed home, teatime made me feel as if we were taking part of Vermont with us on our adventure.

 

My uncle cunningly resisted all further attempts on my part to nudge him gently northward. And though we passed several rude inns or, as they were called in that part of the country, “stands,” he insisted that we stop only long enough to resupply ourselves with flour and cornmeal, otherwise steering clear of all vestiges of civilization in order to “harden ourselves off” for the western wilderness that lay ahead. But I was accustomed to hard lying and all kinds of weather from my hunting and fishing excursions in Vermont, and when we stopped in the woods for the night, while my uncle fashioned a snug little lean-to of woven pine boughs and kindled a cheery fire, I had no trouble acquiring our supper from the nearby forest. For while Private True Teague Kinneson could never bring himself to kill any living thing, and would gladly have subsisted on grass like an ox all the way to the Pacific if it had been left to him to get our meat, I did not share his scruples when it came to feeding ourselves. One evening I gobbled into range a fine bronze tom-turkey, which made capital eating at supper and provided us with the next day's breakfast and luncheon as well. A few days later I shot a yearling buck a-watering at an icy little spring-fed creek. We were delighted to discover that the stream contained small speckled trout identical in every respect to ours in Vermont, down to the milk-white edging along their orange fins. And when no other game presented itself there were pigeons, always pigeons, it being their traveling time. About five o'clock each afternoon they roosted for the night in the forests we rode through, and all but invited me to knock them on the head with a club. How their fat, juicy breasts sizzled in our fry pan; we feasted on them all the way to Tennessee.

Sometimes it seemed as if my uncle and I were back in Vermont playing at being explorers. At other times I felt a million miles away from our beloved Green Mountains, as if in a dream from which I would never wake up. But whether it was a good dream or not, I could not yet tell.

Each noon, on days when the sun was out, my uncle religiously fixed our latitude with his homemade sextant and essayed to take our longitude with his Dutch dock. On starry nights he confirmed our location by training his spyglass on Jupiter and ascertaining the time at which the moon Io disappeared behind it—though I confess that I could never discern the presence of that satellite, nor the great abandoned pyramids, walls, and fortifications of the once-flourishing civilizations my uncle claimed to see on the surface of its controlling planet, either. But on overcast days and nights, when he could not take his celestial measurements, he was restless and said that even the clouds of the heavens conspired against him, and it was beyond him how a human man could be expected to know who and where he was in poor weather. Then he would bravely ring his bell and announce, “Regardless of where Jupiter may be, here I am, Ti.”

To which I would reply, “Here you are, sir.”

And in this manner we were three full weeks getting to Nashville.

 

Though we expected something of a metropolis, Nashville was little more than an ill-assorted clutch of cribs and hovels along a muddy track in a bend where the Cumberland River hooked north for the Ohio. The three-story Talbot House Hotel resembled nothing so much as a hulking wooden beehive. Even so, I hoped to put up there for the evening. But fearing he would be recognized by Federalist spies, my uncle insisted that we stop only long enough to have our mounts reshod by a local blacksmith. Then we would proceed by a very circuitous route, south through Tennessee on the notorious Natchez Trace, west to Chickasaw Bluffs on the Mississippi, and then up the big river to St. Louis, rather than taking passage from Nashville on a Cumberland flatboat and then down the Ohio.