How the West Was Won (1963) Read online

  Inwardly she shrank from the dust, the coal smoke, and the confusion of Albany. The green fields of her upstate home had been fresh and cool. They had been home-but they were home no longer.

  The farm had been sold. Other feet trod the boards of the house now, and it was just as well. She felt that there was nothing for her. You dream too much! Her father often told her that in his half-irritated yet affectionate way, and it was true. Now her dreams lay westward, somewhere down the Ohio.

  She knew only vaguely where the Ohio River lay, or the lands to which they were going, those uncertain lands, theirs for the taking, which no one had seen. Her father had not even seen a map, if any existed. All they had seen was some scratchings in the dirt near the back stoop as a drifter traced with a stick the course of the Ohio River and pointed out the lands that lay open to taking. The Ohio country was the wild west, the wilderness. And that was where they were going.

  For several years now she had been hearing that name … the Ohio … until it was burned into her consciousness. Men talked of it as they talked of the Promised Land.

  Nearby a bearded man talked knowingly of the Missouri and the Platte, of keelboating and the fur trade. He was talking to two drunken Carialers about the Indians in the wild lands along those rivers. She had never heard of either of those distant rivers-the Ohio was far enough west for her. A self-contained girl, she quietly watched the movement about her, but her thoughts were far away in that yet unknown Ohio country. If she had met no one here, how could she expect to find anyone out there where there were even fewer people? More than one of her friends had settled for less than they wanted. When a girl passed eighteen she began to feel a little desperate. Her face, though, showed none of the thoughts that was held tightly within her. Her sister Lilith, slender, pretty, and sixteen, turned swiftly and came to her side. Oh, isn’t it exciting, Eve? But I don’t understand why we have to go west. Why can’t we stay here?

  Pa’s a farmer. He’s got to go where there’s land to be taken. Besides, you’d soon find this very dull. Things are only exciting until you get used to them, until you know their pattern, and then it all becomes humdrum. But don’t you ever want to do anything different? Eve, I just don’t understand you at all!

  Why should you? Sometimes I think you don’t even understand yourself. Lilith glanced quickly at her sister. But you do, don’t you? I mean, you know what you want, and everything. I wish I did. Her brow furrowed. Eve, I don’t know what’s the matter with me. All I know is that I don’t-I just don’t want any of this … of the farm, either. She looked out over the crowded river. Am I bad? Or just a fool? I mean, I dream about so many things … impossible things.

  Are they impossible, Lil? If you can dream of them, maybe they are possible.

  And in the meantime they help you to be happy. It helps … I know it helps. It’s easier for you. You know what you want. You want a man, and you even know the kind of man … and you want a home. That … that isn’t what I want at all. Not for a while, at least.

  I know.

  Eve … what if you never find him? After all, you’re twenty and an-And an old maid? Eve smiled. Don’t be afraid to say it, Lil. But I know I’ll find him. I just know I shall.

  A shrill, piping whistle came from a boat on the river, and then a blast from the horn of a canal boat. The boat reversed its wheels and the water flew. It isn’t a place that makes you happy or unhappy, Lil, it’s the people you love, and who love you.

  Ma says I’m flighty. Do you think I am, Eve?

  No. Eve paused. You’re different from us, Lil, but in your own way you’re just as steady. I never did see anybody catch on to the accordion the way you did … Pa says you take after Aunt Mae.

  The one who ran off with a gambler? Pa has never said any such thing to me! Why, he would never even mention her name in front of us! Whatever happened to her, Eve? Was she awfully unhappy?

  Just then their brother Sam, a lean, husky young man of nineteen, with a quick, easy smile, came strolling up from the river and paused alongside of Zeke, who was lying on their rolled-up bedding. It will be soon now, he said. How are you, Zeke?

  Zeke opened his eyes abruptly. I ain’t half as poorly as ma makes out. If she’d stop spooning that medicine into me, I think I’d get well. Eve’s eyes went from her brother to her parents. Zebulon and Rebecca Prescott looked every inch of what they were-sturdy, independent farmer folk … and pioneers. At first her mother had objected to leaving a home that was becoming more comfortable year by year; but once their decision had been made, the excitement had taken hold of her too.

  Zebulon’s best argument was a good one. They were not getting rich where they were, which was not important, for they lived well, but there was no land for the boys-not for more than one of them, at least. Suddenly there was a surge in the crowd about them and over the confusion they heard a voice proclaiming: The Pride of Utica, now loading! All a-boarrrd for the Pride of Utica! The Ramsey family … the Peter Smiths … John and Jacob Voorhies … L. P. Baker … the Stoeger family, all eight of them … all a-boarrrd for the Pride of Utica.

  We’re next, pa, Sam said, stooping to lift a trunk to his shoulder. We’d best move down to the shore.

  A gaunt Scotsman in a faded homespun shirt let his glance fall to Zeke, who was struggling up from his temporary couch. The boy’s health your reason for goin’ west, Prescott?

  Partly … only partly. Mostly, Zebulon said gravely, our trouble was rocks.

  Why, there’d be years when we’d crop a hundred bushels of rocks to the acre.

  Now, Zebulon, you shouldn’t lie to the man like that. Ours was good land. Lie? Now, Rebecca, you know I’m a God-fearing man, and I’d not lie. I tell the truth as I see it. Why, in that country where we lived a man never used a plow. He just blasted out the furrows with gun powder. Time came it was too much for me. When I hauled the bucket out of the well, even that was full of rocks, and I says to myself, Zeb, here you be with an ailin’ son an’ a twenty-year-old daughter who won’t take to herself a husband-Pa! How you do go on!

  -and another daughter who acts like she ain’t just right in the head,’ so I just made myself a vow. If I could find a man who had five hundred dollars there’d be another fool ownin’ that farm. Well, sir, the Good Lord provided such a man and here we are!

  Mr. Harvey, Rebecca protested, don’t you believe a word of it. We had the best farm in the county. It was pa’s itching foot that brought us to this, and heaven knows where we’ll end up.

  I’m headed for Illinois, Harvey replied, and folks say there are grown men out there who have never seen a rock.

  He gestured toward the three hulking young men who lurked nearby, staring hungrily at the girls. These are my boys, Angus, Brutus, and Colin. I think they want to become acquainted with your daughters. Single, I take it.

  Harvey nodded. So far … but they’re girlin’. That Illinois country sounds good to me. Lilith, take up your accordion an’ strike up a tune for the lads.

  I ain’t in the mood, pa.

  Lilith, her father said sternly, there’s a time for coaxin’, but this here ain’t it. You play something.

  She shrugged, and picking up the accordion with a disgusted glance at Eve, she started to play and sing Miss Bailey’s Ghost. It became apparent at once that she both played and sang with an uncommon flair. Now, you see here, Lilith! You know better than to play that one! Play something the boys can sing.

  She glanced at the three boys. What songs do you know?

  I can sing Yankee Doodle,’ Colin suggested.

  ‘Yankee Doodle’! Lilith stared at them scornfully, Who wants to sing that? Their ma’s dead, Harvey explained apologetically. They ain’t had much schoolin’ in the social graces, but they are good boys, an’ strong. Go ahead, Lilith. Give them A Home in the Meadow.’ Lilith looked at Eve again and shrugged, indicating her distaste for the whole idea, but she began to play and sing.

  Prescott turned to his older daughter. Eve!

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p; Reluctantly, Eve joined in, no more impressed with the three hulking, hovering Harvey boys than Lilith was. Coming closer, the boys began to follow the words of the song and, caught by the spirit of the thing, Zebulon himself started to sing in a deep, strong voice.

  Zeb! Rebecca warned. Mind you don’t drown them out! Several people from nearby groups drifted over to join in. As the group grew in number, Lilith lost her reluctance and, stepping out from the others, began to lead the singing with zest.

  They sang for pleasure, without self-consciousness, or even awareness that most of them sang badly, and their singing seemed to brighten the whole shore. Men straightened from their work to listen, and from a distance a deck hand on one of the river boats joined in. A half-drunken Irishman cut a few quick steps in time to the music, and for a brief time that somber shore echoed to the sound of their voices.

  As the song ended, Lilith, captured by the mood of her own playing, swung into The E-ri-e Canal, and everyone within hearing joined in. But they had scarcely completed the first chorus when the despatcher’s voice boomed out, Loadin’ for the Flyin’ Arrow! All a-boarrrd for the Flyin’ Arrow! Zebulon picked up a heavy sack. That’s us! Pick up an’ let’s go! As they had moved closer on Sam’s suggestion, they were only a few steps from the gangway, and Lilith, waving a response to the shouted good-byes of several of the singers, struck up a lively march and led the passengers aboard the waiting canal boat.

  The deck was crowded and Eve was pushed to the rail, where she turned her back on the boat and looked back at Albany. Her throat was tight, for the very act of boarding the boat seemed to have finally committed them to a course from which there could be no retreat.

  From Albany, a person could walk home if need be, and in Albany they were still among their own kind of folks, but the mere act of stepping aboard had put an end to all that. It was an act so different from any she had ever taken, and it indicated how deeply they were now involved. Now they no longer had roots. They were adrift.

  All around strangers crowded, easy-going, boisterous strangers, but at that moment even her own family looked strange. Eve had stepped into another world, and she was frightened.

  Under lowering gray skies, the clouds swollen with impending rain, the Flying Arrow started to move. Out upon the canal bank, a man in a checked shirt drove the team along the towpath, hauling the boat.

  Slowly, as the passengers found places for their boxes and bundles, the stir upon the decks settled down. From behind her, Eve could hear the mutter of voices and occasional laughter.

  From the Hudson River at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo, a ditch four hundred and twenty-five miles long had been dug. The digging had been done by several thousand wild, bog-trotting Irishmen fresh from the old country, and they had been eight years in the digging.

  Governor DeWitt Clinton had opened the canal in the fall of 1825, and it was a major step in opening the West to settlement. Within twenty years, Ohio leaped from thirteenth state in population to third, and the population of Michigan increased by sixty times. Four thousand boats plied the waters of the canal, and more than twenty thousand people lived upon its waters. The Irish had built the canal, and they set the pattern for much that followed. Life along the waterway was a continual brawl and a struggle. Men fought over drinks, over women, over space at the docks, over horses, over anything they could think of … often enough they fought for the sheer joy of fighting. Some of the Irish stayed with the canal, others moved west to build the railroads or to join the Indian-fighting army. Many an old-time army roster reads like a voter’s list from Belfast or Dublin. A time came when their sons and grandsons were no longer despised as shanty Irish, becoming political, social, and industrial leaders in fifty cities-respected, honored, and wealthy men.

  A canalboat had a crew of three to four persons. A boy or man, working for seven to ten dollars a month, drove the team along the towpath to haul the boat. The steersman might earn as much as thirty dollars a month, which was good pay for the time. The captain often did his own steering; otherwise, he sat on deck smoking his pipe and shouting insults at the other boats. Sometimes the cook was the captain’s wife; more often she was one of the thousands of women who followed the canal, taking up with this boater or that, as jealous of her independence as any man on the ditch.

  Of all shapes and sizes, and of every color, the boats moved up or down the canal, fighting or racing for cargo, all their actions accompanied by the shouting of men and the long-drawn-out sound of the horns-the horns of the boats along the Erie Canal.

  The westward movement of which they were a part was more than a hundred years old, but only now had it gained the impetus that was to make it unique in the world’s history.

  There had always been men who went west, who probed the wilderness; there had been trappers of fur and traders with the Indians who each season went a little further into the wilderness. Like the mountain men who went to the ultimate West, they were adventurers and hunters, and they were single men. They filtered through the mountains and down the Ohio, and finally to the Mississippi. Daniel Boone was such a man.

  Then in 1803 Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase, and overnight the young nation became a land of far-reaching boundaries. And with this change came a change in the national psychology.

  The Lewis and Clark expedition went west, exploring a route across the distant mountains and down to the Pacific; and when they returned, a few, like John Coulter, elected to remain in the West. After them came Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Bill Williams, Joe Walker … and Linus Rawlings. Boys from the farms walked away from their plows and headed west. St. Louis or Independence was the jumping-off place. Standing on the streets, the farm boys watched the keelboats and canoes come down the Missouri from the Platte and the Yellowstone, and they watched the buckskin-clad men with the cool eyes come ashore, their leggings and breech-clouts leaving their bottoms exposed and brown as the buckskins they wore. Around the river-front taverns they consorted with river-front women, drank and shouted and told great yarns of the far-off mountains, the rushing streams of white water, and the fair Indian maidens. The farm boys listened and envied.

  Some said it was fur that took them west, and some said it was gold or land; but in the last analysis it was simply the West that took them west. All the other things were easy excuses, obvious explanations for obvious questions. They went west for the wild, free life, the love of high adventure among the lonely peaks, and for the call of the open prairie where the long winds blew down a thousand miles of grassland.

  They went by the Erie Canal, by the Wilderness Road, by the Natchez Trace, and strange names came back to awaken strange longings in the ears of listening men, names that made them restless and eager-eyed.

  Men went west along the Overland Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, the Oregon Trail, the Hastings Cut-Off, the Applegate Road. And many of them left their blood upon the land, but where they died others followed and lived. Upon the plains they met the Indian, the greatest light cavalryman who ever lived and rode. The Indian lived for warfare and battle. He swept down upon the camps of the white men, and where he defeated them he looted and burned and tortured, returning to his villages laden with plunder. But still the white men came.

  But now there was a difference in their coming, for they brought their women along. They came to stay.

  The young, the old, the middle-aged-none were immune to the dream that drew men to the West. The weak fell by the way, or gave up and went back to their villages and safe streets to huddle frightened with others of their kind, but the strong survived or went down fighting, and those who survived grew even stronger.

  It was a time of exploration, of struggle, of titanic men walking a titanic land. It was an age akin to the Homeric or the Elizabethan, and a man bred to either age would have been at home in the West, and would have talked the language of the men about him.

  Achilles and Jim Bowie had much in common; Sir Francis Drake and John Coulter or Kit Carson would each have understood
the other. They were men of violence all, strong men of strong emotions, men who lived with strength and skill. Ulysses could have marched beside Jedediah Smith, Crockett could have stormed the walls of Troy. Either would have been at home among the crews of Drake, Hawkins, or Frobisher.

  Eve Prescott stood by the rail as the canalboat moved slowly along the dark waters; behind her the strange, musical, poetic names were spoken and their sound stirred her blood.

  They were wonderful, exciting names, each one the symbol of some wild romance. Santa Fe and Taos, Ash Hollow and the Cross Timbers, the Arkansas, Boggy Depot, the Washita … Cottonwood Creek and the South Fork of the Cimarron … there was a magic in their sound.

  The canal banks slid by, sunlight reflected from the staring windows of houses, and then the sudden call would ring out: Bridge! Bridge! Duck your heads or lose your scalps!

  The great horns blared; from a voice nearby she caught the strange word Arapahoes; beyond it, other voices, all in their separate conversations, sent words that drifted to her ears in a confused medley that nonetheless made music. I favor the North carbine. Nobody can make a carbine like Simeon North … Cheyennes … lost his hair … Spanish Fork … Hal’s patent, by Simeon North … percussion rifle? What if you run out of caps? I favor the flintlock … pick up a flint anywheres … Comanches … river pirates .. . Texas .. . live off the country … fur so thick you wouldn’t believe it … thieves everywhere … river pirates.

  The horns sounded … Bridge! … a whip cracked like a pistol from the towpath … too far south for Sioux … down the Ohio … never seen again … Bridge! The horns again, blaring, the sound echoing back from the hills. Sam came up suddenly beside her. Hey, ain’t you excited, Eve? I wondered where you’d got to. Think of it, Eve, we’ll build rafts and float down the Ohio. Ain’t that something?