Читать книгу Enchanted Ground - Sharon Hatfield - Страница 12

2

“The Place of My Nativity”

IN THE fall of 1833, 22-year-old Jonathan Koons set out to see a new world. He was bound for the Ohio Country, where the corn was said to grow 14 feet high in the river bottoms and the juice of wild strawberries could reach a horse’s knees. Venturing out from his home near Bedford, Pennsylvania, he traveled first to Pittsburgh and then to Mercer, Pennsylvania, on the Ohio border, where his two uncles lived. Over the next several months he would traipse through 14 Ohio counties, eventually finding the one in which he would cast his fortune as an adult.

Koons was not alone in his desire to see the western lands. For over 30 years his fellow Pennsylvania Germans had been crossing the mountains in search of new opportunities. The pace had accelerated in 1811—the year Koons was born—with the start of construction of the National Road at Cumberland, Maryland. Even then the presence of Pennsylvania Germans was considerable in places like Lancaster, Ohio, in the southeast, where signs were printed in both English and German, and settlers could peruse a German-language newspaper. “I enjoyed this trip very much—scarcely a day passed by, but what I met with some friend or acquaintance from the place of my nativity,” Koons wrote.

His trip was something of a rite of passage. He had just completed an apprenticeship as a carpenter and joiner—surely a handy trade in a new land where buildings were multiplying and Ohio’s population was nearing one million. Two and a half years earlier, when he had left home for the first time at age 19, Koons had apprenticed himself to a master carpenter, Elias Gump of Reinsburg, Pennsylvania. The small town (now spelled Rainsburg) was located in a valley called Friends Cove, about 11 miles south of Bedford toward the Maryland state line. Along the town square Gump had built a house and a carpenter shop where his employees turned out cabinets. In addition to acquiring the fine woodworking skills of a joiner, Koons had learned how to play the fiddle while in Reinsburg. As he would later write, a “vast plain of social relations” soon opened up to him: “The love of music was also a prominent feature of my character which led me into a practical performance of the same. It was not long until I acquired an admirable degree in the skill of its performance—which became an agreeable source of recreation, and it also opened a channel through which I gained admission in social society and assemblies that would have denied me admittance under any other qualification, except wealth and pomposity.” With his connections in the carpentry business and his newfound talent for music, Koons soon found himself feasting at a cultural banquet. “These humble professions gained me admittance to . . . public orations, delivered by patriotic and able minds at military picnics, festivals and balls,” he wrote. “They also opened my way into social family circles, private halls, [singing] parties, discussions, religious assemblies, weddings, huskings, raisings, theatrical performances, etc., etc., which were constant contributors to my little store of practical, experimental[,] exemplary, and theoretic knowledge. Scarcely an act or idea ever escaped my consideration.”

Whether he brought his fiddle along on the journey is not known, but he certainly carried his curiosity with him as he made his way south through Ohio in 1833. In Canton he could not resist joining the multitudes who flocked to see a murderer hanged in the public square. That November, while boarding at New Harrisburg, in Carroll County, he stumbled half-dressed into the street to witness a spectacular nighttime meteor shower but was equally fascinated by the reaction of the townspeople—“some were praying, some laughing, some weeping, and others mocking; while at the same time the surrounding elements seemed all on fire.” Years later he was able to joke: “Thinks I, surely, Hughes and Miller [millennialists] are true prophets; and they only made a slight mistake in computing the time of the destruction of the world by fire.”

* * *

IN a letter Koons described his father’s side of the family as being “of German extraction throughout.” In the Old World the family name may have been spelled Countz. Upon reaching the colonies the family used the German spelling of Koontz, but later generations took up the more Americanized spelling of Koons. Jonathan’s father, Peter, who fought against the British in a German unit in the Revolutionary War, had settled with his wife, Margaret Snyder, on Clear Ridge in Bedford County, Pennsylvania.

Growing up on his parents’ farm with four brothers and five sisters, Jonathan was a sickly child, given to physical ailments and prone to anxiety and depression. “I became afflicted with rheumatic affections at an early age, by exposure and hard labor, which caused my aching limbs at times to disobey the volition of mind in the discharge of their physical office,” he recalled in his 1856 autobiography. “This in effect afflicted the mind also, and I would have ofttimes cheerfully dispensed with my frail physical bark, and launched my mental existence upon the mysterious ocean of a future state.” The only thing that kept him from suicide was the thought of the “horrible scenes and penalities” that religion prescribed.

Peter Koons was from the “old school Presbyterian church,” and accordingly the infant Jonathan was baptized there, among the Friends Cove congregation. But his Lutheran mother, Margaret, provided most of his religious instruction at home. “The first education I received on the subject of man’s immortality, or soul, was impressed on my mind by my kind and affectionate mother,” he wrote. Margaret taught her son Bible stories about the Creation, the flood that wiped wickedness from the earth, Jonah and the whale, Joseph with his coat of many colors, and the downfall of Sampson. From the New Testament she related Christ’s miracles and his mission of redeeming humanity from original sin. “In that age I did not doubt the correctness of all she taught out of her rule of faith—being at that time led by her fascinating charms into implicit confidence of all she declared unto me,” Koons explained.

Despite the trust he had in his mother’s wisdom, young Jonathan was nonetheless possessed of a questioning mind. As he grew older, he wrote, “I was considered a tedious pupil, in consequence of being prone to inquire into all the whys and wherefores of my mental attractions, while under the instruction of my preceptors.” This contrariness caused problems for the boy, as his mother had taught him that God would hold him accountable for “every idle thought” as well as for words and deeds. To covet someone’s property was just as bad as actually stealing it, and “the conception of a false conclusion was the same in effect with God, as if we had proclaimed it.” Jonathan persisted nonetheless; “every pebble in the pathway of my life was turned up under the expectation of finding an index to true knowledge,” he would later write. He asked his mother why God had created hell and the devil. Her answer was that God was an “unfathomable mystery”—and to doubt his word was to sin against the Holy Ghost, “which sin cannot be ratified under the atonement of Christ, neither in this world, or in the future state of man.”

Over the course of these lessons Jonathan became convinced he was going to hell, a certainty that propelled him to a mental health crisis. He told of a short period in his youth (no age given) when he became anxious at bedtime—“a haunted and fearful condition.” He could not sleep, he said, for fear that “Satan would snatch me from the arms of kind Morpheus.” Jonathan would ask his mother to pray with him. She would oblige and tell him a Bible story, which would usually put him to sleep. But the boy’s dreams were filled with “horned and cloven footed devils” that dragged his playmates into hell with evident delight. Jonathan dreamed they were chasing him, too, and he would wake up in the act of jumping out of bed. The nighttime terrors soon became so strong that sunlight could no longer dispel them, and he sank into a deep melancholy from which his loved ones could not arouse him. “This sad predicament of my mind caused me to sob and sigh aloud,” he recalled. “All the kind entreaties of the family for an explanation of the cause, were made in vain.”

Finally, Jonathan fell into a trancelike state in which he imagined that a stranger—“a pure and noble personage”—was leading him through “successive plains [planes]” of heaven, where he recognized “the old prophets and patriarchs.” They eventually reached the zone of ultimate perfection, but Jonathan was allowed only to behold it without actually entering. He begged his guide to let him stay, but he had to go back to Earth to perform important duties before he could return.

When he woke up, Jonathan was troubled to find himself still in mortal form. “The thoughts of prolonging my days upon the earth after [this] experience, afflicted my mind very grievously,” he wrote. “This vision gave me a sort of foretaste of what I began to hope for; and the idea of spending my earthly career in such doubts and fears as those I had already experienced, was painful in the extreme.” Once again the boy turned to his mother for help. She listened intently as he told the story of his visit to the realm of light. “She informed me of her faith in the guardianship of angels, whom she believed hovered around us, and exercised their kind protecting influence in our favor, against temptations of Satan,” he recalled. At last Jonathan had found the comfort his soul required. Perhaps the kind stranger who had led him through heaven was an angel himself.

The healing vision replaced the dark thoughts that had clouded Jonathan’s young mind: “From that time forward . . . I became newly inspired with dawning hopes and prospects, that God could not reasonably act so cruel in his judgments as he is represented by the clerical Bible canonaders of the day and age. I hoped most anxiously that God would be kind enough to overlook my unavoidable fruits of imperfection.” Jonathan Koons not only found a more positive worldview but became intrigued with the altered state of consciousness that was the instrument of his deliverance. From then on, he would meditate—and in doing so, find the space to turn his theological world upside down.

* * *

THE stories Koons heard from his father were entirely different from those of his saintly mother. Sitting around the fire at night back in Bedford, Peter and other relatives would tell tales of magic and wonder—of haunted groves in the woods, a mysterious light seen steadily traversing the ridgetops, and witches shape-shifting into animals. As a grown man, Koons remembered those tales and took the time to write them down. “These were listened to attentively, with a sort of reverential awe, and were generally believed,” he wrote. “Many of these occurrences, as was claimed, took place within my father’s family and circle of friends. This inspired me with a sort of fear and desire to see a ‘ghost’ or ‘spook’ as the Germans denominated a spirit, although I can not positively say that my desires were granted until recently.”

One such story involved his father and a neighbor woman named Mrs. ——, whom the family referred to derisively as “that old rib.” On a Sunday morning Peter went out to round up his cows and took along a rifle in case he chanced upon some game. As the family prepared breakfast, they heard several shots fired in quick succession. They guessed that he had come upon a flock of turkeys. Breakfast was postponed, and the family’s expectations grew high as they waited for Peter’s return. Soon he appeared with the cows—but minus the birds or any type of wild game.

Disappointment spread among the children, but as the head of the household Peter was not questioned. The family silently took their places around the breakfast table. Young Jonathan could tell that something was bothering his father. In fact, Peter had no appetite and Margaret had to beseech him to even sip a cup of coffee. Finally, Solomon, the second-oldest son, who had already taken a wife, summoned up the nerve to ask his father what had happened.

“When I came upon the cows I saw a small deer in the midst of the herd,” Peter related. “I fired upon it. This only caused it to give one or two bounds, and stopped without manifesting any fear or alarm. I repeated my firing; this caused it to act with a sort of contemptuous defiance, without expressing the least degree of alarm. Thus I continued to fire at my object which at times was within five or six paces, until all my balls were exhausted.” When the smoke cleared, the little deer had vanished.

Without another word Peter rose from the table, grabbed his hat, and set off, all the while mumbling something to himself. The family knew exactly where he was headed: to see a witch. Jonathan listened in fascination as his brothers and sisters, sister-in-law, and mother speculated about what would happen next.

“I wonder if that old rib will be able to relate the morning transaction without personal information as she is in the habit of doing,” said Margaret.

“I have no doubt of it,” her daughter Rachael replied, “for she appears to know everything that transpires in the neighborhood, and of course she will know the present occurrence.”

“I wonder how she comes by her intelligence,” said Lewis, one of the Koons brothers.

“Why! The Devil brings her the intelligence, and it was none else but Satan who transformed himself, to deceive father,” Rachel explained.

“Moderation, children,” Margaret broke in. “You must not be so profane. Let us look to God for protection, and we need not fear the power of Satan.”

“I will not judge, but I can not avoid an opinion,” said Solomon. “If half the reports are true, she evidently is a witch.”

The group fell into a discussion of the evidence against the “old rib.” Solomon’s wife Nancy said that one night she had been alone in her bedchamber awaiting her husband’s arrival when someone entered the room. She assumed it was Solomon and lifted her head from the pillow; by the light of a few coals from the fire, she saw Mrs. ——standing by the bed in a nightdress. Nancy found herself pinned to the bed, rendered powerless to move, and felt a weight upon her breast. Solomon quickly dismissed his wife’s experience as a classic nightmare, but his sister Elizabeth insisted that the same thing had happened to her.

“Hark,” Margaret said, silencing the back and forth. “Father is coming home. Let us wait and see what discoveries he has made.”

As Peter entered the room, Solomon’s wife could not resist teasing her father-in-law. “Been taking abroad, eh?” she asked.

“Yes,” Peter replied with a smile playing on his face.

“Suppose we shall have a wedding soon, seeing [as] you visit Mrs. ——so frequently?” Nancy continued. She turned to Margaret. “What do you say, Mrs. K, do you not entertain fears of your husband’s becoming espoused to Mrs. ——?”

“Judging from previous visits, we might presume so,” Margaret said.

“All but the wedding,” Peter shot back. “I have peculiar objects in view, besides her personal beauty and deportment, which incite my frequent visits.”

When his audience could bear the suspense no longer, Peter explained that he had hurried to the woman’s house so that he would be the first to see her after his encounter with the deer. He had long entertained suspicions about “that crooked rib” and her ability to tell of events she had not personally witnessed or heard about. He wanted to outrun any news that might have traveled about the peculiar animal in the forest. Mrs. —— was waiting for him at the door, as if she knew he was coming.

“Well Mr. Koons,” she said, “you have been shooting at a deer this morning, and you did not get it either.”

“Yes,” Peter said, “and a tormenting deer it was too! I shall take a little further trouble in ascertaining the character of such mysterious forms.”

“Oh, you need not take that trouble,” his neighbor assured him. “The next deer you fire upon you will get.”

Peter left her home feeling a bit sheepish about the prediction. If it proved to be true, he would have game for the family—but would have been “out generaled” by the witch, his reality shifted.

About a fortnight later Peter set out again with his rifle. At a spot about 4 miles from the home of Mrs. ——, he took down a deer from an unusually long distance. He was surprised to have hit it, but he wasted no time in hanging the carcass up in the woods and made a beeline for his house, where he dropped off the rifle without a word to his family. Soon he was back at the doorstep of Mrs. ——.

“Well! Mr. Koons, you got your deer this time, eh? Did I not tell you so?”

* * *

WITH such recollections to amuse him as the days grew shorter, 22-year-old Jonathan continued south on his journey through Ohio and eventually reached Athens County. By the time of his visit Europeans had been living in the area for more than three decades. Athens County had been established in 1805 and the town of Athens—the county seat and home to Ohio University (founded 1804)—was incorporated in 1811. The first generation of settlers, erstwhile wearers of coonskin caps and tanned deer hide, now garbed themselves in linsey-woolsey or calico. These elders and grandparents had stories to tell any newcomers willing to learn from the prior generation’s hard-won experience.

As the old-timers would recall, the end of the Revolutionary War had left many American veterans, in the words of the historian Charles M. Walker, “with an abundance of liberty but no property, and their occupation gone.” In the Northeast many set their sights on the frontier west of the Alleghenies. Two veterans, Rufus Putnam and Benjamin Tupper, advertised their new firm, the Ohio Company of Associates, in the hope of raising the capital necessary to purchase western lands from the United States government. After several investors bought subscriptions and the firm completed negotiations with Congress in 1787, the Ohio Company bought 1.5 million acres in the Appalachian foothills of the future state of Ohio. The acreage lay just north of the Ohio River, with Virginia on the other side. The entrepreneurs planted their initial settlement at Marietta at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers in 1788, giving that city the distinction of being the first permanent settlement in the Northwest Territory.

To reach the frontier from the Northeast, the so-called Wilderness Yankees had to move their belongings by wagon to the headwaters of the Ohio near Pittsburgh, where flatboats or large canoes could be sent downriver. The 48 pioneers in the first group—all men—floated down the river to the mouth of the Muskingum, where they erected a fort called Campus Martius. Tall tales—both inviting and ominous—soon spread back East by word of mouth. These legends told how brandy flowed from underground springs, how cloth grew on trees, and how poisonous hoop snakes could chase the unsuspecting to their deaths. Mostly, though, the fertility of the land was an enticement that overcame the threat of animal or Indian attack—the saying went that the rich Ohio farmland “needed only to be tickled with the hoe to laugh with the harvest.”

The settlers had kept coming, not only from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania but from Virginia and Kentucky as well. By 1790 Marietta boasted 100 cabins, and a second outpost had been established farther west at Cincinnati. The Delaware, Shawnee, and other Indian tribes were not about to go quietly, however, when confronted with the loss of their hunting grounds. In response to stepped-up attacks from the native people, the federal government sent troops to drive out the estimated 15,000 Indians living in the future state of Ohio. Two US armies were roundly defeated, but a third, led by General Anthony Wayne, crushed a confederation of Indian tribes at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in western Ohio in 1794. The Indians were forced to cede all but the northwest corner of Ohio to the government in the Treaty of Greenville. Soon the unbroken forest would ring with axes as the trees were felled to make way for farmland.

In this postwar period settlers spread out from Marietta into the interior of the vast Ohio Company purchase. Meandering across southeast Ohio on a northwest to southeast diagonal was the placid river the Delaware Indians had called Hockhocking, or bottle river. The Hockhocking and its tributaries, fringed by white-barked sycamores, soon became rolling highways. In 1797 several families from Marietta ascended the Hockhocking and established the first permanent settlement in what would become Athens County. They paddled as far as the present-day town of Athens, said to be “40 miles by water from the Ohio.” Others attempting an overland route had to navigate through virgin forest where oaks, maples, and hickories towered above and raccoons and red foxes scampered below among thickets of sassafras, dogwood, witch hazel, pawpaw, and hornbeam. They quickly subdued the land. The last buffalo was captured and put in a traveling show in 1799, and bears and wolves were hunted down and scalped for bounty money. By the time Koons arrived in 1834, other towns and settlements dotted the county map. The Indians had been forced out decades before, giving way to European excavators who would uncover treasures of stone, copper, and shell that the ancestors of the exiled Native Americans had secreted in burial mounds. A nascent saltworks—soon to become the dominant industry of the county—had supplanted one of the Indians’ former haunts where Sunday Creek joined the Hockhocking.

Why Jonathan Koons chose this place above all others he visited in Ohio is not clear. Perhaps he felt at home in the hilly landscape, which may have reminded him of mountainous Bedford County and the Juniata River that flows through it. He set his sights on acreage 7 miles outside Athens, a tract that was too steep to be considered prime farmland but could be had for as little as 25 cents an acre. In his autobiography he merely said: “Enroute for home, I purchased the property upon which I now reside, without a dollar to advance on the contract—save a rifle worth about seven dollars, which I had procured in exchange for an old silver watch, during my sojourn in Athens County. This exchange [for the rifle] was made for the purpose of enabling me to sport amongst the Athen’s hills that abounded with game at that time.”

The records of Athens County, however, do not mention any of the colorful details that Koons has supplied. They say simply that in February 1834 Koons bought 262 acres in Dover Township. He paid $65 to James and Lucinda Fuller for the tract. Whether by impulse or careful design, Koons had started the trip as a tourist; now, at only 22, he had become a landowner.

Koons returned to Bedford in the spring of 1834 and worked as a joiner to raise cash for the farm in the Ohio Country; he supplemented his income by teaching school the following winter. By the spring of 1835 he was ready to cross the mountains a second time, to Athens County where his own land awaited him.