The Last Empty Places (20 page)

Some months earlier I’d met a young forester at a conference in Santa Fe. Although now based in the Southwest, he’d worked for several years in Pennsylvania.

He’d scrawled “Renovo” on the back of his card and handed it to me.

“Go to Renovo,”
³³
he’d told me. “You won’t believe there’s a spot that remote in the East.”

I still had his card. So now I headed for Renovo.

I exited I-80 at the old river town of Lock Haven. As late afternoon slipped toward evening, I twisted along a two-lane road, overhung by dense forest, that hugged the West Branch of the Susquehanna. Glimpsed through the trees, the river slid by smooth and quiet and dark. There were no houses. The air felt cool. Steep, wooded mountainsides slanted upward from both banks. Starbucks belonged to a different civilization, a distant dot whose buzzing and sparking couldn’t penetrate these quiet, dark forests. Ahead, there would be no designer coffee bars, no
New York Times
, no Internet access.

It felt lonely. I missed my family back in Montana. It occurred to me that one definition of remoteness—a blank spot—has to do with accessibility to distant information. Crouched low, studying flower petals and leaf structures, the Bartrams collected information that was profoundly local. An Indian hunter along this river studied the soil, the grasses, the wind, the weather, for signs—signs of bear, or deer, or elk, or enemies, or berries that were about to ripen. They were far better informed than we could ever be on the minutiae, the details, the subtleties and profundities,
of this place
. Instead, I lived in a world where information—much of it—came from afar. In my world, information had become a
commodity
—a raw material traded in great quantities. Its details might or might not apply to my immediate surroundings. It arrived in huge dollops and I had to sieve through it at high speed to determine if any bits of it applied to my circumstance, discarding the vast majority of it. But out here, for a Delaware Indian studying animal prints, or a John or William Bartram bent to a flower’s petals, all information was local and specific. All of it counted. All was useful and thus valuable.

A whole corridor of modern American life—Interstate 80—a giant
coast-to-coast pipeline through which washes our commerce and what we call our culture, lay only twenty or thirty miles south of me, linking New York and San Francisco. Goods and information—semi-loads of freight and electromagnetic signals bouncing between cell-phone towers—followed the roaring highway across the continent. But just north of it lay this kind of blackness of information, a blank spot. So-called civilizations—including ours—judge their state of “advancement,” in one measure, by the speed and accessibility of information traveling within their borders: Phoenician ships. Roman roads. Incan runners. The British postal system. Our Internet…as if civilization were a giant organism that processed information instead of food. I thought of those computer-chip makers engaged in their titanic engineering wars to design the fastest systems.

But there was no system here. Or if there was a system, it was so ancient I didn’t understand it.

I pulled off the road at a small clearing in the forest along the river. A historical marker stood there.

Here was a key spot on that ancient map. Here, in these mountains, the headwater streams of the Susquehanna reached up from the East Coast, while the headwaters of the Allegheny reached up from the Ohio Valley. With a short carry of their canoes at Portage Creek, the East Coast tribes met the Great Lakes tribes, bridging two large chunks of the continent. Every day we move unknowingly through thousands of “links” scattered across the Internet. The Sinnemahoning trail was a link, too, but one both local and profound at the same time, a path through the forest that connected cultures.

The road finally emerged from the woods. Narrow, grassy flats lined the river. A cabin or a house sat here and there, mountains rising steeply behind them. I passed a sign announcing the town of Renovo, “Home of the Pennsylvania Railroad.” The tracks traced the river valley. This, too, had once served as a major high-speed link across the continent, the tracks tracing the Susquehanna River valley through these mountains, tying the East Coast to Chicago and St. Louis.

Renovo’s population, currently 1,232, was now shrinking by about 1 percent per year. The town possessed that one-car-at-a-time-down-the-street feeling of boomtowns from which the action had moved on decades ago. Stretched out along the rail line that paralleled the river were small, faded frame houses. Unlike the older river towns I’d seen, such as Sunbury, which centered on the river, the houses faced the Penn Railroad tracks instead of the Susquehanna. I could see parallels between this area and the blank spot of northern Maine. During the height of the timbering era, the St. John River had been a major thoroughfare for logs. Now only wilderness existed along its banks. Here in Renovo, the era of the railroad was passing and the town shrinking, and around it lay hundreds of thousands of acres of steep, wooded mountains.

I pulled into the Sportsman’s Motel on the east edge of town, checked into a room, and sat at the motel’s bar for a steak dinner and cold mugs of the local beer. Savoring the warm and lively atmosphere, the locals and visitors mixing, I spread out my maps on the bar. On some of the modern maps, this section of the state, blanketed with mountains and several state forests, was marked “The Pennsylvania Wilds.”

The owner, Cindy, sat kitty-corner from me at the bar, sipping a martini while waiting for her friend Kim. I thanked her for the delicious dinner.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“Montana.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“It’s a long story,” I replied. “I’m searching for the emptiest places on the map.”

“Well, you’re here.” She laughed. “We’re still trying to get cellphone coverage.”

“With all these mountains, I believe it,” I said. “You’d need a tower every fifty feet. With so few people, it couldn’t be worth the expense for the telephone company.”

“I’ve met with Verizon about it,” said Cindy. “They just laugh.”

M
ARIE
L
E
R
OY AND
B
ARBARA
L
EININGER
, with their Indian captor, Galasko, passed close to the south of this remote area—the blank
spot—of state forests now centered around Renovo. Joining the Great Shamokin Path, the party traveled west across the divide between the Atlantic and Ohio watersheds. After two months of travel, they arrived in December 1755 at Galasko’s destination—the Indian village of Kittaning, located at the present-day town of the same name but slightly different spelling. Kittaning sat on the Allegheny River about forty miles upstream from the strategic Forks, where the Allegheny joins the Monongahela River to form the Ohio. Reported the girls:

The village consisted of about thirty houses of the Ohio Delaware tribe, and was the stronghold of Chief Shingas and Captain Jacobs. These were the two Delaware warriors and leaders who had repeatedly approached the British with offers to help drive the French from the Ohio Valley but were repeatedly rebuffed, most arrogantly by General Braddock, who had told them the British didn’t need their help.

In response, the enraged chiefs and their people had allied themselves with the French, who had built their Fort Duquesne at the Forks, only a few days’ travel downstream from Kittaning. Braddock, meanwhile, had come to rest under the muddy road he and his now-slaughtered men had chopped through the wilderness. The fruits of his arrogance—the spoils of Indian raids on British settlements—were now returning to Kittaning and other villages in the form of hostages such as Marie and Barbara.

Galasko put the girls to work at Kittaning as domestics. They tanned leather for moccasins, cleared land and planted corn, cut down trees and made huts, washed clothes and cooked food. There were times of deprivation, however. The village was forced to subsist at periods on acorns, bark, and roots.

In the summer of 1756, six months after their December arrival at Kittaning, political shock waves roiled out around the entire globe
³⁴
from this remote forest of the Ohio Valley. A delicate web of alliances
that had prevented hostile European empires—Britain, France, Prussia, Austria, Russia—from attacking one another now began to shred.

France looked for some diplomatic or military threat to use against Britain in Europe in order to force Britain to back off from its claims in North America—the Ohio Valley in particular. But Britain had forged such a tight web of European treaties and alliances that France could find few chinks in its armor in Europe. Seeking a vulnerability, France finally dispatched warships from its Mediterranean ports to attack the British military stronghold on the Mediterranean island of Minorca. Britain responded poorly by sending a barnacle-encrusted and ill-commanded fleet under Admiral Byng to “defend” Minorca. The island’s St. Philip’s Castle fell to French siege. The defeat so humiliated the militant duke of Newcastle and other authorities back in London that Admiral Byng was not only court-martialed but executed by firing squad.

“In England,” cracked the French philosophe Voltaire, “it is good to kill an admiral from time to time, to encourage the others.”

Frederick of Prussia chose this delicate moment to attack the Austrian Empire of Empress Maria Theresa. As Frederick was allied with Britain and Maria Theresa allied with France, France now had to come to the empress’s defense. This caused Russia to bail out of its treaty with Britain, since Russia didn’t want to confront France in helping Britain help Frederick of Prussia fight the Austrian Empire of Maria Theresa…

The whole web unraveling…

It was just as messy back in Philadelphia in late 1755 and early 1756. In the Pennsylvania Assembly chambers, the traditionally pacifist Quakers wanted to negotiate with the Indians instead of fight them. Quakers in the assembly didn’t think it right that the regular farmers should pay a tax
³⁵
to fund fighting the Indians while the enormously wealthy Penn family was exempt from paying taxes on its vast land holdings. The shady land dealings of William Penn’s sons had helped ignite the Indian anger in the first place.

The all-purpose fixer Ben Franklin finally ironed out a deal in which the Penns ponied up what they delicately called a “gift” of five thousand pounds sterling so it wouldn’t set a tax precedent on their lands. Governor Morris of Pennsylvania then formally declared war on the French and Indians and appointed a defense commission. The commission promptly threw the assembly, with its many Quakers, into
chaos when it advertised bounties on the scalps of any Indian over ten years old, male or female, and a special bounty of seven hundred dollars each for the scalps—or rather the heads—of Chief Shingas and Captain Jacobs. The horrified Quakers at this point withdrew
³⁶
from assembly politics and negotiated informally with the tribes.

Still the Indian raids continued. Settlements were torched and forts overrun frighteningly close to Philadelphia itself. Virginia mounted a regiment under the young George Washington—who might have stopped the fighting before it started back at Jumonville Glen—while Virginia’s terrified frontier settlers fled to the cities. The one military bright spot of 1756, if you could call it that, was a bold raid by Colonel John Armstrong and his three hundred provincials on the village of Kittaning, the stronghold of Chief Shingas and Captain Jacobs and where a number of captives were held. The Le Roy and Leininger girls, however, were spirited away as his men attacked. As recounted by the girls:

Armstrong’s dawn attack surprised much of Kittaning village, leading to a bloody shoot-out. While some of the Delawares escaped the village, others, like Captain Jacobs, held out in their houses. Captain Jacobs fired from his window with great accuracy, witnesses reported, as his wife quickly reloaded muskets for him. But, despite heavy losses, Armstrong’s men closed in on the holdouts.

They called for Captain Jacobs to come out—he who had spoken before the Pennsylvania Assembly with an offer to help the British colonials fight the French. The alternative, they said, was being burned alive in his house.

“I can eat fire,” he shouted back to the Pennsylvania militiamen.

Despite his deadly musket fire, they managed to set his house alight. Captain Jacobs’s powder kegs ignited and the house exploded with a tremendous roar.

“[T]he Leg and Thigh of an Indian
³⁷
with a Child of three or four years old,” reported an eyewitness with Armstrong, flew to “such a height that they appeared as nothing and fell in the adjacent Corn Field.”

Armstrong had lost about forty men killed or wounded, and the Delawares lost ten or twelve, whose scalps were taken by Armstrong’s troops for bounty back in Philadelphia. Armstrong also managed to rescue eleven of the English captives. But Marie and Barbara were not among them. Reported the girls: