American Ramble by Neil King

Author:Neil King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-01-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

One Winter Long Ago

Baron von Steuben arrived at Valley Forge to the jingle of little bells aboard a sleigh pulled by a team of black Percheron horses brought all the way from France. He wore a silk sash studded with medals and had beside him an Italian greyhound named Azor. Two horse pistols dangled from his hips. Among his retinue were an aide de camp, a military secretary, and two young advisers, any one of whom may have been his lover. He was, one soldier wrote, the personification of “the ancient, fabled God of War.”

I arrived in Valley Forge that Friday morning on foot, coming down fast through the woods on the Horseshoe Trail wearing shorts with a pack on my back and a right shoe still sporting a hole where the big toe poked through. My sole sustenance a warming slab of the previous night’s dinner and my water-filled Hydro Flask, from which I sipped.

What von Steuben found upon arrival that day—February 23, 1778—was a forlorn scene bordering on the grotesque. Melting snow, oozing latrines. Horse carcasses protruding from slush among denuded hills. Hundreds of timber huts housing soldiers short on clothing with not much to eat but hard tack. The bloody footprints left in the snow by the shoeless would later become legendary.

This was Washington’s Continental Army, midway through a winter that morphed, a century later, into our prime symbol of national grit and resilience. A winter that was a turning point in the war, thanks in no small part to the imposing von Steuben.

We were a poor, pathetic, naked infant of a country then. Without swift and significant help, Washington wrote Congress that winter, his army “must inevitably be reduced to one or other of these three things. Starve—dissolve—or disperse.” Congress had no money, no reliable way to raise funds. Shoes, pants, jackets, gunpowder, blankets, saddles were almost all nonexistent. Why should farmers supply the rebels, for nothing in return, rather than the British in Philadelphia for silver and gold? Washington wrote that a third of his men were “unfit for want of Cloaths.”

Such was the forlornness of what von Steuben found on arrival that day at Valley Forge.

What I found upon arrival was the historian Lorett Treese, climbing from the driver’s seat of her Honda Civic in the parking lot of the Valley Forge Post Office, a period piece of gray fieldstone with white shutters and a Stars and Stripes flapping high atop a flagpole.

“This post office,” Lorett announced, before anything else, “was built in the 1930s pretty much just so people could post letters from Valley Forge. Its purpose was really just the postmark.”

We hadn’t even said hello and she was singing my tune already.

Lorett had driven two hours to show me around a place she’d written a whole book about. Except her book, Valley Forge: Making and Remaking a National Symbol, wasn’t about that foul winter when Washington’s men nearly starved in their huts. It was about when and how we Americans decided to care about that winter, which is what I wanted to hear about.

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