The Last Empty Places (15 page)

Some six thousand Acadians were deported in all, and, by some accounts, half died of disease and hunger. Some were made into indentured servants to the British colonists. Some returned to France. Others ended up in the French West Indies. One group eventually moved to New Orleans and the Mississippi Delta country—French territory, with a lot of wilds still left in it. Those Acadians in Louisiana invited their scattered relatives to join them. Thousands finally showed up. The name “Acadians” in Louisiana became “Cadians” became “Cajuns.” In the Mississippi River bayous, they carried on their traditions of hunting and fishing and “ranging in the woods” and letting the Good Times roll.

Some—no one knows just how many—escaped Le Grand Dérangement
⁶²
(“The Great Disturbance”) and hid in the woods of Acadia or fled to nearby Quebec. Over the years, some trickled back. They settled in unclaimed pockets on the fertile lands of Acadia.

Thirty years after that first expulsion in 1755, a small party of Acadian families who had been living quietly in the lower St. John River
Valley, once again, during a period of tense relations between empires, came under pressure by the British to leave. In 1785, they boarded small boats and headed up the St. John, past the Grand Falls. After ten days of traveling they pulled ashore at a broadening of the valley and a fertile flat that they named St. David, and where Joseph Daigle built a wooden cross that first evening. In some ways, it is an Acadian version of Plymouth Rock. Their settlement on the banks of the St. John—deep in what was then a wilderness—probably escaped detection by the fledgling United States
⁶³
for a number of years and was largely ignored by the British. The Acadians had found a perfect hiding spot.

This was the spot where I now stood. There was no one around. Green wooded hills and meadows rolled up and down the river valley. I could see prosperous farms in the distance. A warm summer breeze blew and the sun sparkled on the riffled water of the St. John. I would have chosen this spot, too.

I got back in the car and drove down the highway to the little town of Van Buren, Maine. It was still before noon, but I was hungry, and so I walked into Josie’s Diner. A roundish, friendly man with dark hair and a mustache, a gravelly voice and an apron, took my order. As I sat at the lunch counter, I realized he was speaking in a language unintelligible to me, and with a kind of guttural intonation, with the man sitting two stools down.

“Is that French?” I asked as he came by again, wiping the counter.

“That’s right,” he replied. “I speak French to the people who want to speak French and English to the people who want to speak English. French or English, as long as everybody is happy, I don’t care, right?”

It was the perfect Acadian response. He laughed, deeply and easily. We talked. His name was Gil Thibodeau—an old Acadian name, like the names of most people in Van Buren, Maine. Two hundred and fifty years ago, his family had been evicted from Acadia during
Le Grand Dérangement
. Some had ended up in Louisiana—today the town of Thibodeaux in bayou country west of New Orleans bears the family name. Another ancestor, Baptiste Thibodeau, had arrived here on the banks of the St. John with Joseph Daigle, who erected the Cross of St. David in the summer of 1785.

Sitting there at Josie’s Diner with my cheeseburger and cup of tomato soup, I had arrived where the Acadians disappeared.

E
arly on October 16, 1755,
¹
Jacob Le Roy’s hired man had gone out to the pastures and woods of the family’s farmstead in the Buffalo Valley on the Pennsylvania frontier to herd the cows back for milking. Le Roy’s wife was away on some morning errand. It was right after autumn harvest and there was much work to be done. But Le Roy himself was home that morning. So were the children, Marie and John, and a girl visitor from a neighbor’s homestead, as a band of eight Allegheny and Delaware Indians moved silently down the ancient trail that followed nearby Penn’s Creek—Karondinhah, as the Indians knew it
²
—having traveled nearly two hundred miles from the deep wilds of the Ohio River Valley. With their torsos blackened and facial features emboldened in the geometric red and black designs of war paint, it happened that the Le Roy place, on the very farthest western edge of the frontier, was the first white homestead the Indians encountered as they moved east toward the white settlement burgeoning from the British colonies of the Eastern Seaboard onto tribal lands.

The band of Alleghenies and Delawares found Jacob Le Roy fetching water in a leafy glen beside his cabin where a bountiful artesian spring burbled up. They either shot or tomahawked him.
³
It’s not quite clear which. They then dragged his body to the cabin, laid it half inside the doorway, buried two tomahawks in the skull, and set the cabin afire. After taking his two children, Marie and John, as well the visiting little girl, they disappeared.

Simultaneously, two Indians arrived at the cabin of the Leininger family, German immigrants who had settled in the Buffalo Valley a half mile from the Le Roy homestead. Mrs. Leininger had gone off that morning to the grist mill and left her three children at the cabin with her husband. At first they had no cause for alarm, as it was not unusual to have occasional Indian visitors at white cabins on the Pennsylvania frontier in the mid-1700s. The two Indians asked Leininger for rum, the strong drink available in colonial America brought from the West Indies. He said he had none. They asked for tobacco instead. Leininger
gave them a plug. The two Indians filled a bowl, and finished smoking their pipe.

“We are Allegheny Indians, and your enemies!”
⁴
they suddenly declared, according to an account the girls later gave. “You all must die!”

They shot the Leininger father, and tomahawked his twenty-year-old son. Once they’d dispatched the adult males, the Indians captured Barbara Leininger, aged twelve, along with Barbara’s little sister, Regina, aged nine, and fled into the forest that covered the rounded ridges.

“T
HIS IS THE OLD
L
E
R
OY PLACE
,” said Kim Mattern, climbing out of his battered pickup and shaking my hand.

We were standing in front of a weathered red barn on a warm Sunday morning in July. A slender middle-aged man, Mattern wore shorts and a T-shirt and had long, grayish hair protruding from under his baseball cap. His casualness contrasted with the occupants of an Amish horse-drawn buggy that clip-clopped down the country road nearby—women and girls wearing bonnets, men and boys in white shirts and dark vests, going Sunday visiting. Green pastures and lush cornfields spilled up from the valley bottom to break gently against the rising wooded ridges. The old farmhouse stood beside the barn, looking both cheery and lonely out here, in the middle of the bucolic Buffalo Valley, with no other dwelling around.

He first checked for permission at the house’s front door.

“Follow me,” Mattern said.

I followed him across the grassy front yard. Mattern spent part of his childhood in the nearby hamlet of Penn’s Creek, and at the age of eight discovered his first Indian artifact. Now working by day doing building maintenance in nearby Lewisburg, he spends his off hours scanning the countryside for new Indian sites as an amateur archaeologist, reporting his findings to the state. His artifact collection currently numbers about fifteen thousand pieces.

A hundred yards from the farmhouse, we descended into a beautiful little glen filled with the sound of dripping water and shaded by overhanging trees. A spring burbled out of the ground into a pool formed by a miniature dam, and cascaded over the dam’s edge in a tiny waterfall that gathered into a stream, meandering through the grove toward Penn’s Creek.

Mattern squatted down beside the pool, and scooped up some water in his palm. He drank.

“The Indians came from the west,” he said, taking another scoop of water. “They were incited by the French to take back their lands from the settlers coming from the British colonies. Le Roy was the first settler here. My irony is that he was the first guy here and the first one killed.”

Here, at this spring where Mattern drank, the Indians had come upon Le Roy on that October morning in 1755. And so one thread of the story began.

T
HE
B
RITISH AND
F
RENCH EMPIRES
of the mid-1700s acted like two giant rival corporations battling for market dominance in a globe whose vast entirety had just been revealed. The French and Indian War, as we know it—or the Seven Years’ War, as Europeans call it—was one major fight in this battle for global dominance. Far more than the Revolutionary War,
⁵
which followed it by two decades, the French and Indian War shaped the cultural geography of North America. Had it gone the other way, and the French and Indians won instead of the British, the “blank spots” of which I write in North America—including those of Pennsylvania—might be larger and emptier today, given the difference in the two empires’ cultural interaction with the Indians and their differing settlement practices.

The mid-1700s were also a time of tremendous intellectual ferment. As the French and British empires struggled for global ascendancy, the thinkers and writers who were hunkered down within them, oppressed by the heavy discipline imposed from above by king and church, embarked on their own struggle for individual rights. They heard explorers’ accounts, now coming in from all over the globe, of how humans in their “natural” state—without the iron-fisted institutions of church and king—could live in dignity and freedom. For these and many other reasons, they began to cast aside their ancient bonds to biblical scripture and strict fealty to one’s sovereign. Their view of the world and of the state, coming unmoored from these linchpins, shifted dramatically.

With it shifted their view of nature—or “Wild Nature,” as some of them called it, or wilderness, as we think of it, in contrast to, say, the genteel and cultivated countryside of Britain or France. The wider
world had grown far more accessible by the mid-1700s via sailing ship and carriage. Confronted with the vast and wild landscapes of the Alps or North America—or even the Sahara Desert or the Amazon forest or the Arctic—these city-dwelling thinkers groped for a vocabulary to describe Wild Nature’s awesome power. A century or so earlier, Europeans, seeing some of them for the first time, portrayed these landscapes with the biblical imagery that flowed so easily from their pens. They cast the wild, unfamiliar spots of the earth in terms either black or white—either an Eden-like Paradise or a Satanic Hell.