Читать книгу Enchanted Ground - Sharon Hatfield - Страница 16

6

A Buried Man’s Instructions

CITY DWELLERS making the pilgrimage through hilly southeastern Ohio to the door of Jonathan Koons in 1852 encountered what seemed to them a strange and exotic landscape, one sometimes called the Huckleberry Knobs. Farmers and merchants had access to faraway markets through the Hocking Canal, built in the 1840s, but a railroad would not reach Athens County for another four years. “This country is about 50 years behind the age,” wrote a clergyman visiting the Koons homestead from afar. “The inhabitants are a plain, simple-hearted people, dressed in their plain, homespun clothes, males and females; living in log cabins, such as the early settlers occupied about a century ago. A kinder-hearted people I never saw.”

The clergyman failed to note the stately brick buildings and elmshaded grounds of Ohio University just 7 miles from Mount Nebo, but it didn’t take a wild-eyed romantic to see how remote the countryside actually was. Whether visitors were stoked by religious zeal or plain curiosity, just getting there required stamina and determination. Approaching from the west, a pilgrim would take a train to Lancaster, Ohio—the nearest point by railroad—and travel more than 40 miles by stagecoach or canal packet to Chauncey, a village in Athens County’s Dover Township. Travelers from Columbus would have to take the stagecoach through Lancaster and proceed to the southeast on a journey spanning more than 70 miles. “I staged over a country that enabled me to fully realize the inspiration of that elegant song, ‘Jordan is a hard road to travel,’” wrote a visitor from New York City. “But I feel myself amply repaid for the wear and tear of my journey, and would again undertake the same, as cheerfully as did ever a pilgrim to the holy land.”

Some pilgrims coming from the east fared better by a water route: a steamboat carried them from Zanesville or Marietta to McConnelsville on the Muskingum River, where they were obliged to hire a private carriage for the last leg of the journey. Others approaching from Cincinnati could travel upstream on the Ohio River, disembarking at Pomeroy for the inland trip. When traveling by coach or carriage, however, “the miles bear no correspondence to the hours, for on every route they think they do well if they accomplish two and a half miles an hour,” an Illinois passenger wrote. Once in Chauncey, weary travelers had to walk 2 or 3 miles to the Koons home or find a local willing to take them there on horseback or by carriage. “Fare, hog and homminy,” quipped one wit, “and he needs to endure that travels in that country!”

Though visitors were still only in the foothills of the Appalachians, they faced an arduous climb to reach the Koons farm, poised more than 1,000 feet above sea level. “The way to Mr. Koons’ house leads through several miles of mountainous woods,” a visitor named J. B. wrote. “It is one of the wildest countries I ever saw. Here and there bright little streams come jumping over the rocks and down the mountainsides; echoes ring through the thick forest—it seems, indeed, the fit abode for Spirits.”

“When you finally get into Koons’s vicinity,” an Illinois man reported, “you find the essence of hills personified; there is no such thing as a level spot large enough to put a house on. Koons’s house is located on the southeast angle of a sharp ridge, some few rods below the edge of the ledge, and where, when the native trees occupied the ground, the lightning was wont to make frolic among them; and where it still likes to sport.” During his visit “the stove-pipe above the spirit room was burst off, and a number of times during the sitting of the mediums, electric sparks were seen to play over the wires of the spirit table.”

More than one writer would comment on the unusual electrical properties that seemed to infuse this locale. The chemist, professor, and author Robert Hare—one of the most prominent converts to spiritualism in the United States—believed that “there is something in the locality that favours mediumship.” A curious person once asked the presiding spirit during a séance why the manifestations were seen in the vicinity of the Koons farm rather than elsewhere. “[He] was told that it was owing to the peculiar geological formation; the material on which, and by which, spirits act, existing there, in singular abundance. He said he had never seen such a rich out-cropping of minerals, combined with richness of vegetation, and salubrity.” Another visitor called it simply “the enchanted ground.”

Although the atmosphere may have been electric, the appearance of the Koons homestead bespoke thrift and industry rather than magical largesse. Koons’s friend David Fulton wrote, “He is a plain, unvarnished farmer, having a large family of small children, [and] owns a small piece of very rough land indeed, has it well fenced in small fields, and cultivates it in the neatest manner; and in addition to his regular set orchard, he has his fence-corners generally set with the choicest of fruit trees. On this small, rough bit of ground, Mr. K. so managed it as to make a comfortable living for his large little family.” An out-of-state visitor found the Koons home place “a very romantic spot among the hills,” adding that the groves of apple and peach trees “give something of the appearance of comfort to the surrounding scenery.”

When the spiritualist publisher Charles Partridge made the trip from New York City, on a spring evening he saw “from thirty to fifty men sitting on stones, logs and fences around a dilapidated log-cabin” with their carriages parked and horses tied nearby. “The men looked respectable, and their deportment and conversation bore the impress of a religious meeting,” Partridge reported. In the same yard, not far from the Koons residence, sat the spirit room that was attracting crowds almost nightly. “I inquired [of the men] what Spirits lived there, and was told that it was the room where people go in to talk with their Spirit friends who have gone out of their earthly tabernacle,” he wrote.

Adding to the spookiness of the place were stories about the Koons family’s knowing things about their guests they shouldn’t have known, had no way of knowing. Several high-profile visitors took deliberate steps to conceal their identity as a means of testing the Koonses. The Reverend Thomas Benning of New York, riding over the hills to the Koons homestead, “was suddenly impressed to maintain a profound incognito while there.” Once inside the spirit room, Benning remained tight-lipped about his identity and place of origin, only to be astonished by the spirit King’s words to Jonathan: “Do you know who you have got here? We do. He has come a long ways. We sent him.” This statement alone did not prove that King, or Koons for that matter, knew Benning’s identity. Perhaps it would have been easy to deduce from the minister’s city dress that he had come a far distance. But when Benning entered the room a second time that same day, he found a letter “addressed to his initials and in the proper handwriting of his deceased wife,” the Spiritual Age reported.

Benning was not the only one to be so greeted. When Partridge arrived at the Koons establishment, he, too, found that Koons was expecting him, although the two had not corresponded about the visit, much less met face to face. Just as a real telegraph carried messages in a mysterious fashion, the “spiritual telegraph”—the name of Partridge’s newspaper—seemed to be operating between New York City and the wilds of Ohio. And a Pennsylvania medium, traveling with a friend by steamer down the Ohio River, made his way to the Koons place and got a hearty welcome from the family. Jonathan Koons “was aware of our coming,” the medium explained, “for he had been in communication with me two days previously, by spirit power.”

* * *

A November day in 1852 found Jonathan Koons digging for treasure. He was spading up the ground under a hickory tree in the woods near his house, just as the spirits had told him to. The adventure had begun the day before when his sons Nahum and Samuel, aged 15 and 12, were herding some cattle home from a pasture about a mile away. While passing by a scattering of stones that circled the hickory, the boys felt something plucking at their arms, grabbing their wrists, and trying to pull them off the path and toward the rocks. Spooked, they returned home and wasted no time in telling Abigail what had happened.

Their mother guessed that the spirits were trying to communicate, so she, Jonathan, and probably Nahum repaired to the spirit room to find the source of the boys’ scare. The shade of an Indian chief revealed that he and another entity had accosted Nahum and Samuel to call attention to what was actually a burial place. Within the rocky circle, Jonathan would find the ashes of the chief’s body, together with his weapons. The invisible gave his name as Jewannah Gueannah Musco and explained that his tribe had waged war on another tribe that was siding with the whites—an alliance the chief deemed traitorous. His warriors, Musco explained, had “persued them unto death, as they would the wolf and the bear.”

Despite the ferocity of Musco’s attacking force, he was fatally struck by an arrow. To honor his dying request, Musco’s warriors burned his body on a pile of wood and buried his ashes and personal effects under the hickory tree, placing the stones around it. As proof of his authenticity and as an example to unbelievers, the spirit asked Koons to take two neutral observers to the spot and dig up the relics.

The message made sense to Koons and may have come as no surprise. He had whittled a rude homestead out of the forests of Mount Nebo, one of the highest elevations in the county, in an area prone to lightning strikes and carved in legend as a sacred spot for the Shawnee Indians. Maps made much later would depict the Mount Nebo Trail threading along the ridgetop, perhaps referring to a timeworn path trod by Native Americans. By the time Abigail and Jonathan took up farming there, the Indians had been driven out, yet here in this western land some believed their spirits still lurked among the glades they had once inhabited. Some people even told that Koons had been able to purchase the land so cheaply because others were afraid to live there.

Just a few miles southwest of Mount Nebo fanned out the broad expanse of Wolf’s Plains, where monuments to a much earlier Indian presence remained. Here along the Hocking River the ancient people had constructed a 3-square-mile complex of earthworks. Settlers had noticed not only conical burial mounds but circular enclosures that reminded them of an old fort. Later scholars, however, would interpret these open-air structures as ceremonial theaters where shamans, often under the influence of psychoactive drugs, sought entry to the spirit world. Here in these sacred circles, perhaps two millennia before Jonathan and Abigail Koons’s day, Native Americans had donned wolf skins and lit fires, performing their sacred rites under the light of the moon. In his role as ambassador and guide, the shaman would contact spirits from the other side, sometimes those of animals—and sometimes those of the dead.

The magnetic pull of the buried man’s instructions led Koons to the woods where the boys had been affrighted. Koons had convinced two local men to join him and Nahum on the quest. They had walked southward only about three-quarters of a mile when they encountered a large hickory “near a broken strata of sand rock, that projected from the bluff point of an adjacent hill.” With the two witnesses looking on, Koons scraped aside the ocher husks of the last summer’s leaves and began to dig. The black loam of the forest yielded to red clay, but at a depth of 24 inches, still not a trace of anything unusual had turned up. The neighbors might have wondered whether they had been called away from their chores on a fool’s errand. Finally, 3 feet down, came the clank of the shovel hitting something solid. Just as the Indian had foretold, Koons pulled from the grave a stone battle-ax, arrows, and a stone breastplate. These artifacts, Koons believed, would make a fine display at his home—yet another proof of the wonders, as if any more proof were required.

* * *

AS Koons’s spirit guide, King, had told him, Ohio was once deluged by a primordial sea. King’s observation did not contradict the conventional wisdom, for everybody who read the Bible knew that in the beginning the earth was “without form and void, and waters moved upon the face of the deep.” But that was just the starting point for King’s controversial views; he was not satisfied with the six-day story of Creation. The earth had roiled with change through endless eons: “Periods of duration have elapsed too great for human powers to estimate,” King advised. “Vast and successive revolutions have taken place. . . . The space of time since ADAM is but a single link, of the almost endless chain which stretches forth from the moment that matter first began to be brought together, by the Almighty Power and wisdom of God.”

Early nineteenth-century geologists studying southern Ohio likely would not have faulted King’s conclusions. The landscape told a story that did not support the time line of Genesis, either. Eons before, even before there were humans to behold them, some of the area’s waterways had flowed in the opposite direction from what Jonathan Koons would have observed in his time. Starting in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, a river of Nile-like proportions had cut a gorge as much as 500 feet deep through Virginia and West Virginia before entering southern Ohio and carving its way into Indiana and Illinois. Tributaries of the northwestward-flowing Teays River had drained all of Athens County about five million years earlier.

Much later, repeated intrusions by glaciers had changed all that, damming up the waterway and forming a giant frozen lake. When the glaciers retreated, they dumped their mighty load of silt and gravel into the Teays’s drainage system, burying it and creating the Ohio River. The new channel, which flowed south, eventually brought European settlers to the newly contoured land. But the old pattern was not obliterated; the trained eyes of early geologists still could discern extinct valleys and dry riverbeds. And every so often a goose flying aloft would spy the ancient trace of the Teays and land by mistake as if on water; and in some places wild magnolias flourished along the riverbanks, far from their southern origins.

Human beings also were of much more ancient origin than commonly believed. Even though bitter debate about human evolution was still several years away, King provocatively declared that the planet “has been successively inhabited by new races of beings,” of which his pre-Adamite order was only one. And even around Dover Township in the 1850s, oddities of a much more recent character were yet to be explained. The native people whom the Europeans first encountered in Ohio had no origin stories to attach to the numerous mounds and earthworks in the area, leaving early surveyors to speculate about who might have built them. Ruminations on the role of the ancient Scythians of Asia, Toltecs, and even “Hindus” would persist for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Koons would come to believe that he himself had found the key to the Indians’ past. “I am in possession of a history of the origin of the red Men, given by a very ancient spirit . . . who claimed to be one of the ancient fathers of that race,” he wrote.

Thus part of the angels’ mission was to bring scientific truth to those who would open their minds to their true place in the universe. “Should I succeed in surmounting your sinful ignorance in this respect, then you may be visited by a host of ancient spirits, with healing in their wings,” King informed the circle. But such startling messages—so out of step with the times—were easier for a spirit to utter than for a mere mortal to profess.

* * *

ONE night, just before Christmas 1852, Jonathan Koons watched as flames licked at the smoldering remains of his barn. Gone were his crops from the past growing season, along with a new wagon, plows, and other farming tools. By the time the blaze had been discovered, about nine o’clock, nothing could be saved but a visitor’s horse.

Koons knew immediately that the fire had been no accident. Threats of mob action had been bandied about the neighborhood, forming a dark undercurrent to his shining new life as a medium. “The fat was in the fire as soon as the news was spread abroad, that the spirits of the departed friends, were corresponding with their survivors on earth at my residence,” he wrote. According to the Athens Messenger, “a gang of drunken rowdies” had been harassing the Koons family and their guests “almost nightly” for several weeks. Whiskey had finally given license to someone to light the torch.

Koons chafed at the injustice. “While my property was consuming, I asked, what have I done—what authority insulted—what law violated that I should suffer this malice and vengeance?” he wrote. “It was done because I persisted in affording opportunities to investigators: this, and nothing more.” Still, he knew that it could have been far worse. The elements were on his side that clear and cold night, withholding any wind that could have spread the flames to nearby structures. “But for the calm, house, spirit-room, family, all, would have shared the common fate,” he mused.

The Athens Messenger weighed in with a call for redress. “We sympathize with our friend [Koons] in his misfortune and hope the guilty scoundrels may be arrested and brought to justice,” the newspaper said. Koons had a good idea of who had carried out the nighttime attack but decided not to press charges—owing to an act of piety, as he later said, or perhaps to a lack of proof. The identity of the arsonists would remain an official question mark. Yet in Koons’s view, they were only a stalking horse for the religious establishment. “The clergy denounced me from their pulpits as a child of Satan, and a perverter of the Christian Church, saying that I ought to be burned out of house and home, with my family of mediums in the midst of the flames,” he later charged. “These Christian incendiaries thought thereby to compel me to discontinue my séances, for the want of provisions for the use of my family and truth-seeking guests.”

Koons also realized that the barn burning might be a harbinger of greater calamities. “I was well informed, that on a previous night arrangements were made to assassinate myself and eldest son, but were thwarted by the presence of a crowd of visitors,” he wrote. Such gruesome knowledge must have given the husband and father pause, for ambush might be just a rifle shot away as the family went about their chores on this lonely woodland farm. But Koons would not be dissuaded. Having found the light he had searched for all his life, he would resist all attempts by his enemies to extinguish it.