Читать книгу Under a Wild Sky - William Souder - Страница 17
ОглавлениеTurdus polyglottus: The Mocking Bird
See how he flies round his mate, with motions as light as those of the butterfly! His tail is widely expanded, he mounts in the air to a small distance, describes a circle, and, again alighting, approaches his beloved one, his eyes gleaming with delight, for she has already promised to be his and his only. His beautiful wings are gently raised, he bows to his love, and again bouncing upwards, opens his bill, and pours forth his melody, full of exultation at the conquest which he has made.
—Ornithological Biography
The newly married Audubons and friend Rozier had spent a couple of weeks in Pittsburgh, arranging passage downriver and acquiring more inventory for the store in Louisville. Lucy, like other visitors to the city, found its smoky streets oppressive. But she was impressed by the goods to be had and by the hum of activity along the riverfront, where she managed to ignore that portion of the action occurring in the saloons and brothels catering to the watermen. Having set out so soon after their wedding, the Audubons were happy to be in one place for a time. In the evenings, Audubon and Lucy had their honeymoon. Lucy, in a letter sent back to England, coyly informed a cousin of the “most excellent disposition” of her new husband, hinting at an unspecified but powerful attraction that “adds very much to the happiness of married life.”
Now twenty-one years old, Lucy was wildly in love with Audubon—and also committed to the obligations of marriage. These she construed as meaning she was henceforth first and foremost a partner and companion to a husband whose expectations and demands were hers to fulfill. Lucy apparently never hesitated or offered the slightest protest over Audubon’s abrupt decision to take her away from her family and the comforts of Pennsylvania to a remote, thinly populated frontier town. While she had found the trip at times difficult, especially in the mountains, she took care to emphasize the positive. Without even mentioning the overturned wagon that might have killed her, Lucy gamely told her cousin merely that “great stones beneath the wheels make the stage rock about most dreadfully.” Putting a sunny spin on the journey to Pittsburgh, Lucy added that she was sure anyone would have enjoyed the many beautiful sights they took in along the way—if only it were somehow possible to do so without enduring the “fatigues” of the actual trip. In any event, if this was where her life now led, then this was where she would happily go in the performance of her “new duties.”
“As yet they have been light,” Lucy said of her marital responsibilities, “and be they what they may I hope I shall ever perform them cheerfully.”
Eager to proceed from Pittsburgh, the three found space, finally, aboard a flatboat. These cumbersome but serviceable craft, which were also called “Kentucky boats,” were the workhorses of the river. Half barge, half houseboat, they came in many sizes and could ship great loads of people, livestock, furniture, and the like. A typical boat large enough to accommodate a single family and their possessions was twelve to fifteen feet abeam and thirty or forty feet long. One could be purchased for under $50. Vessels twice that size were not uncommon, and a large flatboat could carry seventy tons or more. All were built on a simple configuration. The hull was essentially a rectangular wooden box, flat on the bottom, sometimes with a slightly angled bow and stern. Fully loaded, a flatboat had only a couple feet of freeboard. Extra caulk and a pump were essential gear. A low, shedlike house sat amidship. Though austere, these shelters could be fitted out with brick fireplaces for cooking and some heat.
Flatboats were not so much piloted as they were passively ridden. Travelers were advised to let the current do the work of finding the channel as it meandered among the Ohio’s many islands and sandbars, though the boats could be steered a little with a long sweep on the stern and oars deployed toward the bow. The trip downriver was usually smooth and safe, but a flatboat could be swamped if unevenly loaded or carelessly handled. Overnight changes in the level of the river could put a corner of an improperly moored flatboat under—and the rest might follow in short order. Tangles of fallen trees that collected in “snags” at the heads of islands were a common hazard—it could take several days to free a boat caught in a snag. In fair weather and high water it was considered prudent to put ashore as infrequently as possible and to travel through the night, though there were so many boats on the river that groups of pioneers often tied up alongside one another for company after dark. Encounters with hostile Indians or pirates were possible, but such risks diminished with each passing year as the river valley filled with settlers. Travelers were more likely to be accosted by entrepreneurs and pimps who converted flatboats into floating taverns. By the time the Audubons set out for Louisville, people were already talking about how crowded with towns and farms the riverbanks had become. The frontier was moving west. And however far you went, that was where you stayed—flatboats were one-way propositions. At their final destination, the boats were knocked apart and their timbers sold or used to build a house.
The Audubons’ departure in late April came at an auspicious time. Spring brought high water and easy navigation on the Ohio. The boat, Lucy reported, was reasonably comfortable, with a cabin ceiling “just high enough to admit a person walking upright.” The ride was surprisingly smooth, Lucy said, though on one windy section of the river the boat began to pitch sufficiently that she felt momentary seasickness.
Ashore, the new season had replenished the woods along the river with game, and it was quick work for Audubon to disappear into the trees with his gun and return with a turkey or a brace of wood ducks. Lucy packed bread and ham, plus some beer, for the trip. They bought milk, eggs, and an occasional chicken en route. The suddenly lush forests lent an almost submarine quality to the journey. Lucy found the dense wall of trees and flowers flanking the river remarkable, though she was disappointed that the closeness of the overhung shorelines and high bluffs limited the vistas from midstream. Even so, it was the river itself that bedazzled.
The name Ohio, puzzlingly, seemed to have been derived from an Indian expression meaning “bloody river.” The French, however, who were probably the first Europeans to descend the Ohio, called it La Belle Rivière—“the beautiful river”—and settlers who came later agreed. The Ohio, it was said, was “beyond all competition the most beautiful river in the universe.” At its head in Pittsburgh, the more powerful and crystal-clear Allegheny pushed across the darker current of the Monongahela at a right angle, so that the waters of the two did not mix for several miles. Below Pittsburgh, the Ohio blended and broadened and took on the color of the sky. An abundance of navigable tributary streams, many beautiful in their own right, gave the Ohio communication with a vast region on its way west. In fact, as Lewis and Clark had discovered only a few years earlier, it was possible to descend the Ohio, proceed up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, cross the continental divide, and then continue down the Columbia all the way to the Pacific Ocean. This great network of rivers seemed to many people proof that the young country’s destiny ultimately reached across North America. Zadok Cramer, a Pittsburgh bookseller and expert on Ohio River travel, saw a link between America’s rivers and America’s future that filled him with optimism: “No country perhaps in the world is better watered with limpid streams and navigable rivers than the United States of America,” Cramer wrote, “and no people better deserve these advantages, or are better calculated to make a proper use of them than her industrious and adventurous citizens.”
The Ohio River’s uniform breadth was striking—it was generally between four hundred and six hundred yards across along its entire length, except near Louisville and at the river’s end at the Mississippi, where it was wider. Much of the land on either side of the river was a steady procession of hills standing in ranks, changeless waves on an emerald sea. Seams of coal had been found between Pittsburgh and Wheeling, but where the land had not been cleared, a formidable forest remained. The uplands were thick with oak, walnut, hickory, chestnut, and ash. Willows, locusts, mulberry, beech, elm, aspen, and maples filled the bottoms. Tremendous stands of cedar and cypress grew in the swamps below Louisville.
