The First Frontier by Scott Weidensaul

Author:Scott Weidensaul [Weidensaul, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2015-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

PART III

“WE THAT CAME OUT OF THIS GROUND”

Chapter 8

“One Head One Mouth, and One Heart”

When the winter ice and snow melted, the runoff from thousands of square miles of forest wilderness in the Allegheny Mountains flowed down countless steep-walled valleys, feeding the monster known, to the handful of English traders who had seen it, as the Ohio River. At one particular bend, the river piled up the scarred, waterlogged trunks of immense trees, barkless and silvered with age and abrasion. The village that sat on a high bluff above that bend was, appropriately, called Logstown.

Now it was early autumn, and the Ohio was running smooth and placid, the kind of forgiving river on which travelers could paddle to the center current at dusk, lash their canoes together, and sleep through the night without fear of rocks or rapids. The air in Logstown was cool; humid with weeks of rain; and heavy with smoke and the odors of simmering corn mush and bear fat, damp old blankets and deerskins, and wet camp dogs. Logstown wasn’t much to look at—a collection of sixty or seventy log or bark cabins clustered near a more substantial trading house—but it was a wonder to listen to. The chatter that filled the air was a babel of tongues reflecting the town’s accidental nature—a place where the exiles of many Indian nations (from the Carolinas to the Great Lakes, Delaware Bay to the mountains of New England and the edges of the buffalo prairies) had created a community of necessity.

It was September 1748, and Conrad Weiser was feeling weak. Strong stomach cramps had kept him confined to his bed for some time, and he’d allowed himself to be bled in the hope it would purge his bad humors. He finally felt well enough to proceed with the task that had brought him from his quiet farm, a day’s ride from Philadelphia, hundreds of miles across the hazy mountains to the far edge of what was known simply as the “back parts.”

The lives and histories of Weiser and the three men with whom he sat, in the rough trading house at Logstown, around a smoldering fire, knotted up many of the threads of frontier reality in the mid-eighteenth century. Perhaps no one in the so-called Middle Colonies was as adept at navigating the overlapping worlds of Natives and colonists as Conrad Weiser, a man in his early fifties who spoke English and the Iroquois dialects with a German accent, having been adopted by the Mohawk as a teenager and applying himself thereafter to the study of Indian cultures. He was Pennsylvania’s provincial interpreter—its primary diplomat to the Six Nations, who had given him the name Tarachiawagon, meaning “Holder of the Heavens.” More recently, he had been known as Brother Enoch, having for some years dropped out of secular life to become a monk in the strange, pietist sect of a charismatic preacher, but Indian politics had pulled him out of the cloister and back into the woods.

Sitting near Weiser was George Croghan, who was as far from a religious ascetic as one could imagine.

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