The Last Empty Places (18 page)

Braddock—perhaps mercifully for his men—finally took a musket ball through the arm and lungs and fell from his horse. No longer forced to stand their ground in formation, his troops fell back toward the river, then broke and fled in terror—running for miles through the woods—as the Indians began scalping the fallen. For decades, a story persisted that Braddock had been shot by one of his own troops
²²
—an American provincial named Thomas Fausett of Pennsylvania. Years
later he admitted to cutting down his own general because if he hadn’t, all the men would have been killed.

It was an utter slaughter. Of 1,460 British and American troops that had actually gone into combat, 456 were killed and 421 wounded. Of the 89 commissioned officers, 63 were killed or wounded.

General Braddock, the architect of this disaster which would forever bear the ignominious name Braddock’s Defeat, managed to survive for four days. His men ferried their wounded leader back across the Monongahela, and began the long, stumbling road toward Maryland.

“Who would have thought it?”
²³
Braddock said quietly, as he lay dying. “We shall better know how to deal with them next time.”

His surviving officers buried Braddock in the center of the crude, muddy path named “Braddock’s Road” that he had pushed through the Pennsylvania wilderness. After interring Braddock under his road, the officers marched the remaining straggling, retreating troops and horses over his freshly dug grave to hide it, fearing that the Indians would desecrate his body.

“He looked upon us as dogs,”
²⁴
said Chief Scaroudy, explaining why the Indians had abandoned the British and allied themselves with the French in the battle for the Ohio Valley, “and would never hear anything that was said to him.”

Word quickly spread through the British Empire of Braddock’s crushing defeat in the Ohio Valley. British and French troops already in North America mobilized toward the Great Lakes border area and surrounding uplands and more were dispatched from abroad. These had been hazy regions of possession from the first colonial arrivals in the New World—the French colonized to the north and the British, in much greater numbers, to the south. But where was the line that separated them?

T
HESE KINDS OF HAZY BORDERLANDS
still exist all over the world. Political no-man’s-lands where there is a vacuum of international power, they often occur in rugged, remote regions, in mountainous highlands, and at the headwaters of river systems. The historian Owen Lattimore, writing in the mid-1900s, and referring to places such as Manchuria, Tibet, and Afghanistan, called these regions “storm centers
of the world.” In the mid-1750s the wild Ohio Valley, and the mountainous borderlands around it, was the storm’s epicenter.

With Braddock’s Defeat, London and Paris both quickly sent ships westward across the Atlantic, laden with men and supplies. The stakes now clearly had soared: which empire—French or British—would control the North American continent? Three months after Braddock’s Defeat in July 1755, British authorities questioned the loyalties of the French-speaking Acadians to the British crown, summoned them to the church at Grand Pré, locked the doors, read their eviction notice, torched their homes, and loaded them on ships.

Barely a month after the British started the “grand deportation” of the Acadians, the French, using their Indian allies, counterthrusted in Pennsylvania by “carrying terror” to the British settlers. That morning of October 16, 1755, the raiding band of Delaware and Allegheny Indians attacked the Le Roy and Leininger homesteads and captured the children—the first of many Indian raids on settlers of the Pennsylvania frontier, in addition to raids already under way on settlements in Virginia and Maryland. Many of these were led by the Delaware chief Shingas—he who had been rebuffed by Braddock—and the great warrior Captain Jacobs.

It was terror with a very specific purpose.

“Nothing is more calculated to disgust the people of those Colonies
²⁵
and make them desire the return of peace” than these random attacks on the settlers’ homesteads, wrote the Marquis de Vaudreuil, the governor-general of French Canada, who had many years’ experience in the North American wilds.

As panic and terror spread on the news of the multiple murders, kidnappings, and scalpings, such as the Le Roy and Leininger families suffered, the British settlers fled the frontier for the safety of the cities. One such haven for traumatized refugees was Philadelphia, sitting at the edge of this great swath of blank terrain.

That tumultuous autumn of 1755, Billy Bartram had begun his fourth year of studies at the prestigious Philadelphia Academy. A poetry-besotted youth of sixteen, Billy surely watched these developments on the frontier with great interest. Despite the wave of Indian-hating that engulfed much of Philadelphia as terror spread, Billy Bartram came to respect—even idolize—Indians.

Billy, writing under the name William Bartram, would eventually be a key player in the intellectual volleys across the Atlantic. While failing at many endeavors—merchant, planter, suitor—he spent years as a starry-eyed wanderer in the American wilderness, far ahead of his time, nearly a century before Thoreau. His book
Travels
, published in the late 1700s, would deeply influence the Romantic poets coming of age in Britain around 1800, and inspire the love for Wild Nature that later would be absorbed and refined by American wilderness writers—most notably Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir. Our vision of wilderness today, in other words, derives in good part from this poetic lost soul, Billy Bartram of Philadelphia, stumbling about in the American woods in the mid-1700s.

This is all the more remarkable because Indians killed Billy’s Quaker grandfather, who emigrated from England to Pennsylvania in 1682 when William Penn founded it as a Quaker colony. Billy’s father, John, was raised by his Philadelphia grandmother and started out as a Quaker farmer, but, falling in with a crowd of young Philadelphia intellectuals that included Ben Franklin, soon displayed prodigious skill as a self-taught botanist.

Botany had just arrived as a European science. For centuries, herbalists, “physicks,” and alchemists had studied and cultivated plants for their medicinal benefits. But with the dawning of the “Age of Sail” and global exploration, European ships in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries brought back exotic plant specimens from distant lands. The invention of the compound microscope in 1590 allowed Robert Hooke to identify the cell structure of plants and Stephen Hales to trace the movement of water in them—the start of experimental plant physiology. The European aristocracy planted botanical gardens on their estates, showcasing rare plants in the manner that today’s wealthy collect expensive works of art.

John Bartram learned how to use a microscope and the Latin plant classification system then being worked out in the 1730s by Linnaeus in Sweden. He was invited to join Ben Franklin’s new “Junto”—a club of young men started in 1727 who met every Friday evening in Philadelphia to debate “morals, politics and natural philosophy” (and provide a handy forum for the drinking songs Franklin liked to invent). Bartram’s farm—really a very shaggy botanical garden—on the banks of the Schuylkill River just outside Philadelphia soon became widely
known in scientific circles. European plant collectors commissioned Bartram to travel throughout the colonies—including the Pennsylvania wilderness—to gather new botanical specimens that had never before been seen in Europe.

It was no doubt through the Junto and the worldly Ben Franklin that Bartram received his first exposure to Deism and drifted from pure Quakerism. All those European expeditions around the globe had brought back accounts of religious practices in Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands. Scientists like Isaac Newton and thinkers like Descartes, meanwhile, had demonstrated a universe that operated according to rationalistic principles. Applying this rationalism to religion, European intellectuals now isolated the basic principles that they perceived united all religion—such as belief in a supreme being and that living a virtuous life was the highest form of worship. They shunned the literal word of the Bible, questioned miracles as “proof” of God’s existence, and rejected the Holy Trinity in favor a single divinity.

These beliefs eventually got John Bartram kicked out of the Darby Friends Meeting. While deliberating his case for fifteen months, the Meeting Overseers visited Bartram—who comes across as gentle and friendly in manner but firm in belief—at his house. They then reported back to the Meeting.

“[He] still persists therein to say the longer he lives the stronger he is in the disbelief of the divinity of Jesus Christ.”

At the time of his disownment by the Meeting, Bartram, in addition to his botanical reading on fruit trees, mosses, and herbs, was taking extensive notes on
²⁶
The Morals of Confucius
—a favorite philosopher of the Deists. He was also a fan of the British poet Alexander Pope, a dwarfish and sharp-tongued gardening devotee who celebrated nature in his verse and whose spiritual views—though he was a Catholic in name—leaned toward Deism. Above the entrance to his greenhouse, Bartram inscribed a couplet from Pope’s “Essay on Man”:

John Bartram’s own vision of spirituality, one that would prove pivotal in how we view nature today, developed from many influences—a kind of amalgam of science, Deism, and his precise plant observations,
all of it perhaps leavened with a little medieval cosmology and Chinese
qi:
God is manifest in all nature. All nature is animated by a divine spirit.

In particular, Bartram cited an “intelligence” in plants as evidence of divinity in nature—the same divinity that is present in all humans. Plants, he observed in letters to friends, respond to heat and cold, light and dark, and the petals of many flower species close up in rainy weather or as evening approaches. He especially mentioned the Tipitiwitchet of the Carolinas and the mimosa tree, a native of Asia, whose leaves fold up on cool evenings.

“[I]f we won’t allow them real feeling, or what we call sense, it must be some action next degree inferior to it, for which we want a proper epithet, or the immediate finger of God.…I have queried whether there is not a portion of universal intellect diffused in all life & self motion adequate to its particular organization.”

“It is through the telescope,”
²⁸
he wrote on another occasion that would echo through the centuries, “that I see God in his glory.”

Such was the unorthodox religious atmosphere and intensely botanical household in which young Billy Bartram, born in 1739, grew up. He seems to have been a moony, introspective youth, passionate about drawing and poetry. In 1752, at the age of thirteen, Billy entered the Philadelphia Academy—a progressive liberal arts school founded by Ben Franklin in an era when most schools focused on ministerial training. At this innovative school, Billy and his teenaged friends fell under the influence of the brilliant and fiery provost, William Smith, who had recently studied at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen.

Smith brought the latest European literary trends to little Philadelphia. These adolescent sons of the city’s leading merchants and scientists now became smitten by British pseudo-classical verse. With Provost Smith as their adviser, they founded a publication,
The American Magazine
, which showcased their poetry written in strict rhymed couplets and studded with references to ancient gods and bucolic landscapes.

Billy’s friend and classmate, sixteen-year-old Nathaniel Evans, published a poem wondering if the “sylvan muse” that inspired the great ancient Greek and Roman poets would ever appear in the New World or along Schuylkill’s banks—presumably among one of the circle of friends.

Billy didn’t publish in
The American Magazine
but he clearly absorbed the lush, yearning spirit of its verse. His greatest passion was drawing pictures of birds, plants, and flowers, a talent he honed at age fourteen on plant-collecting expeditions with his father such as to the Catskill Mountains, the Hudson Valley, and to visit the New York botanist Cadwallader Colden. But that fall of 1755 their plans for more expeditions—especially to Carolina to observe its rich subtropical vegetation—were disrupted by the outbreak of full-on warfare in North America for possession of the Ohio Valley.

The “treacherous” Indians, wrote Billy’s father, John Bartram, to a correspondent in Carolina, where his own father years earlier had apparently been killed by natives while traveling there, “have destroyed all our back inhabitants. No traveling now, to Dr. Colden’s nor to the back parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, nor Virginia.”

A
FTER EXPLORING THE WOODED RIDGETOP
above the old Le Roy place where the Indians had hidden their hostages, I said goodbye to Kim Mattern that sunny Sunday morning. I then traced the route of the young captives of the Le Roy and Leininger families, heading exactly into those “back parts” of Pennsylvania mentioned by John Bartram that the events of autumn 1755 had put off-limits. While the long, fertile valleys had been cultivated two centuries ago into rolling greenswards, the great northeastern-trending mountain ridges of these northern Alleghenies still rise up as thickly forested and nearly unsettled as in Bartram’s day.

Taking Mattern’s directions on back roads out of the charming Buffalo Valley, I soon connected with a four-lane highway that hugged the placid, languorous Susquehanna River and drove a few miles north, past the old river town of Sunbury, at the confluence of the river’s North and West branches. Here—although there was no evidence remaining—is where the ancient Indian village of Shamokin had stood.
From Shamokin I took to smaller roads again, trying to pick up the route on which their Indian captors led Marie Le Roy and Barbara Leininger westward, into what was then a massive blank spot for the European settlers of North America.