The True Account Read online

  Being a kind of perpetual boy himself, though a big one, my uncle was a great favorite with all the boys and girls in the village, for whom he invented huge kites, spinning whirligigs, velocipedes with sails, magic lanterns, catapults, wheeled siegetowers, fire-ships, rockets, and I don’t know what else—none of which ever, to the best of my knowledge, had the slightest practical application. Besides his vast fund of classical stories and poems, he knew a thousand tales of witches, ghouls, and ghosties, in the telling of which he terrified no one so much as himself. He was deathly afraid of large dogs, small serpents, lightning—he had been struck eight times since the installation of his copper crown, and it was said in the village that, like a tall ash tree in a Vermont hedgerow, he “drew electricity"—and of nearly all women, though he had the greatest respect for and confidence in my mother, as did my father and I.

  One of my uncle’s most curious inventions was a wooden, Dutch-style shelf dock, about a foot and a half tall, without any works or innards but with a very passable painting he had done on it of his hero Quixote, that Knight of the Woeful Countenance, doing combat with a windmill. The painted hands of this clock were set forever at twenty minutes past twelve, which hour had a triple significance to my uncle. First, he was utterly certain that this was perpetually the correct time at Greenwich, England, so that by knowing the hour where he was, and the altitude of the sun, he could always calculate his correct longitude and divine where he was in the universe. And it distressed him not in the least that no matter how many times he made these calculations, his position never came out the same twice but varied wildly, from the longitude of Calcutta to that of Venice.

  The second point of significance concerned a saying in our family, which was that whenever a lull fell over the conversation, it must be twenty after the hour. Admittedly, between my uncle the ex-schoolmaster and my father the editor, one or both of whom seemed always to be discoursing from dawn straight through until midnight, there were not many such lapses of silence in our household. But when by chance no one happened to be talking, my uncle would leap up and dash out to his Library at Alexandria to check the time on the Dutch clock and confirm that it was indeed twenty past the hour, which was a great relief to him. And though the clock was less reliable as a timepiece than was entirely convenient to one wishing to know the actual hour, it was so reliable as a conversation piece that it never failed to set the talk in motion again.

  Third, and finally, it was inside the hollow case of this remarkable clock that my uncle stored his hemp tobacco.

  From what I have retailed to you thus far, you might well suppose that mine was a very odd and somber boyhood. Odd, I will grant you. But somber? Never in this world. For my uncle was ever a second father to me. In fact, it might be said that between my true father and my uncle True, the pair of brothers made one complete and perfect father. Or so I thought, at least. And no boy could ever have had a more complete education than I. When my interest first in sketching, then painting, birds and wildlife began to emerge, my uncle even took me on a tour of the great museums of England, France, Italy, and the Lowlands. By which I mean that we canoed across the “Atlantic Ocean”—our pond, that is—and on the far side he described the great paintings of the world so exactly that I all but saw them. Say what the village might, then, it was a splendid way to grow up. And to anyone who thought differently, Private True Teague Kinneson doffed his belled cap, bowed low, and said, “Why, bless you, too, sir. With a tooleree and a toolera and a tooleroo!”

  4

  OF ALL MY UNCLE’S many schemes and projections, the one nearest his heart was no more and no less than to discover the Northwest Passage. From my earliest visits to the Library at Alexandria, I remember him poring over the old histories of his mostly ill-fated fellow expeditionaries and visionaries who for more than three centuries had sailed in quest of that elusive route to the riches of Cathay. On a wall map of North America behind his writing desk, the blank territory to the north and west of the Missouri River was labeled terra incognita; and when my uncle’s saffron-colored eyes grew weary during our school lessons or his interminable revisions of his play, he liked to pause and gaze at those intriguing words and muse about the great foray that he and I would someday make into that unknown land.

  In the spring of 1803, when I turned fifteen, my uncle received, from his Boston bookseller, Alexander Mackenzie’s Voyages from Montreal, on the River St. Lawrence, Through the Continent of North America, to the Frozen and Pacific Ocean. The intrepid Mackenzie, it seemed, claimed to have done that which, above everything else in the world, my uncle himself had long wished to do—to have forged his way through the wilds of America to the Pacific. “‘With a mixture of bear grease and red vermilion,’” my uncle read aloud to me in his harsh, nasal, schoolmasterly voice, “‘I wrote on a rock above the western sea, Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada by land, the twenty-second of July, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three.’

  “Oh,” he cried out, smiting his metal dome in a way that would have done credit to my father, “I am bested. It’s already been done, Ti. And wouldn’t you know, by a fellow Scotsman.”

  My uncle could scarcely have been more distressed had Mackenzie’s words “from Canada by land,” etc. been branded on his forehead with a sizzling hot iron. But then his eyes gleamed with a new light—for his spirits never flagged longer than a minute or two—and he said that to go overland in Canada was one thing; but to cross through the Territory of Louisiana, to Oregon and the River Columbia, was something else again. “That will be our route, Ti. Eureka! We leave tomorrow.

  “What’s more,” he continued, “to make sure we get to the Columbia and not some puny, less illustrious Canadian river, we will start there. We will make the trip backward. From the Pacific.”

  “But, uncle,” I protested, “how will we get to the Pacific? How can we start from there until we get there?”

  Whereupon he smiled and said, “We will go round the Horn by ship, Ti. You might ask Helen of Troy to put us up a lunch.”

  Early the following morning we prepared to embark. We allotted an entire day for the journey, including our return trip overland. Besides his chain mail, the belled stocking cap over his copper crown, and his galoshes, my uncle carried a flagstaff and flag, his umbrella, his collapsible spyglass, his arquebus, and his homemade sextant and astrolabe for determining our latitude and longitude. Instead of sea biscuit and salt beef, we had laid in a stock of my mother’s most delicious baked-bean sandwiches, a brown crock of her famous ginger cookies—which we called cartwheels because of their prodigious size—and a stone jug of switchel, the popular Vermont haymakers’ drink distilled from pure mountain spring water slaked with a touch of molasses and a touch of vinegar; for we did not know where we would find our next supply of fresh drinking water.

  We set sail at sunrise on my fishing raft, which my uncle had christened the Samuel de Champlain, he wiping his sleeve across his eyes at the thought of leaving his beloved Green Mountains for a whole day, my mother calling “Bon voyage, my brave expeditionaries”—and my father mouthing to me, “Not your fault, Ti. Not your fault.”

  The first leg of our trip went capitally. We stopped to visit the Amazonian delta, where one Sucker Brook debouched into the Kingdom River. There my uncle, briefly disembarking from the Samuel de Champlain to perform a necessary office in the alders, was harried back onto the ship by a thirty-foot anaconda—which bore more than a passing resemblance to a spotted yellow newt sunning itself on a tamarack stump. Our vessel was three times beaten back around the tumultuous Cape Horn (the High Falls at Kingdom Common) by fierce headwinds laden with hail, sleet, and driving snow. At last, on the fourth attempt, we cleared the tip of the Cape with room to spare and sallied on up the west coast of South America past the Juan Fernandez Islands, as my uncle called the stone-filled timber cribs in the river designed to regulate log drives. Then on to the Galapagos, where he had arranged for us to be set upon by a party of three lads from the vill
age, their faces all besmeared with blue river clay, in the guise of cannibals. After putting these savages to rout and beating up the coast of Spanish California past the mission of San Francisco—the little French Canadian chapel just outside town—we reached the mouth of the Columbia—Kingdom Brook—at noon. Out came my uncle’s sextant and astrolabe, out came his book of navigational tables. After the most elaborate mathematical calculations, he estimated our latitude at about 60° north, from which he concluded that the Columbia entered the Pacific not far south of Alaska. To celebrate this surprising news he smoked half a pipe of hemp.

  With the daunting overland portion of our trip through terra incognita now at hand, our explorations were about to begin in earnest. Reminding me that everything we saw next would be country viewed by Americans for the first time, and that we were about to venture where the foot of civilized man had never trod before, and, furthermore, that I should take particular notice of everything I saw so that, when home again, I could paint what had “ne’er been painted before,” and commending us both to Providence and to our Maker, my uncle planted the flag on a little knoll overlooking the river and we started out again. Our struggles up the rapids of the Columbia, as represented by several old beaver dams, were Herculean—indeed, a hotter, wetter, more tedious and arduous four hours than we had getting to the Rockies, or Kingdom Mountain, can scarcely be imagined. But our travails were not yet over. In the thick hemlock woods on the mountainside we fought off a horde of black flies, which my uncle mistook for “the all-puissant Blackfeet”; and as evening drew near, and we waded back down the little foot-wide rill on the back side of the mountain—the “broad Missouri”—a swarm of mosquitoes descended on us with all the savagery of the “treacherous Sioux.” Seth Hubbell’s sheep pasturage my uncle denominated the great western prairie; Seth’s dozen merino sheep, a thundering herd of bison.

  As twilight settled over the mountain and we started down the last slope, my uncle said, “Ti, we’ve done it. We have discovered the Northwest Passage—backward. I only wish Colonel Allen could have been with us.”

  Exhausted, soaked through and through, bruised and bugbitten, we arrived home at a little after eight o’clock, to a heroes’ welcome from my father and Helen of Troy, who fixed us a late supper of ham and eggs and pancakes laced with maple syrup. I ate eleven pancakes, my uncle twenty-six, my mother four, and my father one and part of another, which I finished for him.

  My uncle then fired up his long, curved hemp pipe and began to recount our adventures of the day. Stimulated by the mild cannabis fumes, he told how the Samuel de Champlain had been wrecked on the Columbia and how, having been cast away, we had made our way back afoot. My father’s arms and elbows were now sticking directly out from his head in an attempt to exert more pressure upon that seat of reason. Warming to his subject, True fetched his map of North America, and, in the large blank section, began to trace our route very exactly, marking down the places where we had skirmished with the Blackfeet and Sioux and asking me to draw in a few bison. At this juncture my father rose from the table and declared that even if I should turn out to be a Vermont Michelangelo, he did not believe he could bear to have another artistical relative. My uncle, in the meantime, had neatly inscribed on the map, “Private True Teague Kinneson’s Chart of the Interior of North America, Designating His Journey, by Land, from the Mouth of the Columbia to the United States. As attested to by True T. Kinneson, May 15, 1803.”

  5

  SO MATTERS RAN ALONG in our home for the next several weeks. At fifteen, I was reading changeable old Ovid’s lively Latin and, in the Greek, Thucydides, as well as my uncle’s favorite historical chronicler of all time, Herodotus, who wrote of giant crocodilos and flying lizards and other marvels stranger still. When I came to Xenophon’s The March Upcountry, we enacted his incredible trek through the land of the Persians and Medes by hiking up into Canada and back one sunny day. En route we encountered a great homed owl, which I later painted, life-size, presenting the picture to my mother.

  By then it had become apparent—my father’s concern about another artistical Kinneson notwithstanding—that I had a real flair for drawing and painting, particularly birds. I loved best their colors. The reddish brown thrasher with its long narrow tail, the indigo backs of our little northern bunting, the bright lemon plumage of the winter grosbeak against the snow. Indeed, there was no bird or animal that I did not find beautiful in its own way. For several months my mother fed an orphaned fox at the back door, a slinking young vixen that tolerated only her. I sketched this she-fox and many other animals as well—deer, beaver, and a bear that raided my uncle’s hemp garden and gourmandised on the ripening flower buds, then lolled on his back with his four black paws in the air like a big dog wishing to be scratched. But portraits of people were difficult. My best effort in this department was a group arrangement of my family seated in the farmhouse kitchen one winter evening. Here is my mother, Helen of Troy, baking her cartwheel cookies; my father slumps at the table with his hands pressed to his head, looking on as my yellow-eyed uncle, in full explorer’s regalia and belled stocking cap, works on his “Chart of the Interior of North America.” “And what, Mr. Mackenzie, say you to this?” he would say to himself as he inked in our route. What indeed!

  There was, at about this time, some talk between my parents of sending me down to Boston to study with Copley or Stuart, or perhaps to the great artist-scientist Charles Willson Peale in Philadelphia. But they had meager funds to underwrite such a venture; and who would then keep track of my uncle? Whose little ways and stays, I must say, seemed to grow ever more extravagant.

  Then came July 4 and the great news from Washington. “‘President Jefferson, in a single bold stroke,’” my father read to us from the Washington Intelligencer, “‘has more than doubled the land mass of our young nation by buying, from France, the territory called Louisiana, stretching from west of the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains and north to Canada. Moreover,’” he continued, “‘trusted sources report that the president will soon appoint an expedition to go overland to the mountains and beyond, to discover the most practicable watercourse to the Ocean Pacific.’”

  My uncle, who, though listening to my father, had seen fit to thrust his ear trumpet close to the newspaper itself, was in a frenzy of anticipation. “Great Jehovah!” he cried. “Did you hear that, Ticonderoga? An overland expedition to the Ocean Pacific. I must lead that expedition. Having made the same tour backward, I can see no obstacle to completing it frontward.” He now put the trumpet to his mouth and, clapping the larger end to my father’s ear, he roared into it, “I’m going back to the Pacific, Charles, or I shall know the reason why.”

  After recovering somewhat from this rather excruciating experience, my father started to say, “The reason why, dear brother, is that, not to put too fine a point on the matter, you have never been—”

  “Ah, ah, Charles,” said my mother, smiling and shaking her head, while my uncle now scanned the piece in the Intelligencer through the small end of his trumpet, alternately nodding his head in agreement or frowning and shaking it, so that the little bell on the end of his cap jingled like a whole carillon.

  “The reason why, dear elder brother,” my father tried again, “is that—is that—oh, to the devil with it—the reason is that you might as well undertake to guide Captain Lewis to the Great Khan of China, like our ancestor, Chief Tumkin Tumkin.”

  My uncle raised his thickety white eyebrows. “China,” he said, casting a glance out the back window of the kitchen at the stone wall angling up the slope. “China—”

  Hurriedly, to deflect this dangerous train of thought, my father read on. “‘The expedition will travel up the Missouri, whose ultimate source is believed to rise near that of the Columbia, then proceed down that river to the Pacific, in what is projected to be one of the greatest journeys of discovery in history.’”

  “Do you see, nephew?” cried my uncle, now gazing at me through the big end of his tru
mpet. “Exactly our route in reverse. They can’t do it without us. Take a letter, lad.”

  The Honorable Thomas Jefferson,

  President of the United States of America

  Dear Mr. President,

  Having just returned by land from the mouth of the River Columbia and the Oregon Territory, I will undertake, for two dollars a day and found, to lead an expedition safely across Louisiana to the Pacific Ocean, through the land of the all-puissant Blackfeet and the treacherous Sioux, whom I plan to pacify and win over by introducing them to the propagation, cultivation, and inhalation of that panacea for all the spiritual ills of mankind—hemp. Eagerly awaiting your confirmation of this assignment, I remain,

  Your friend,

  Private True Teague Kinneson

  Green Mountain Regiment

  First Continental Army

  “And back?” my mother suggested.

  “And back?” my uncle said.

  “Yes. To the Pacific and back?”

  “Oh, yes. Of course ‘and back.’ Write, ‘Postscript—and back,’ Ti.”

  I did so, and then, lest this matter of high state policy fall into the hands of spies, my uncle had me transcribe it into Greek. Not knowing the Hellenic for “Blackfeet” and “Sioux,” I found myself at a standstill. But my unperplexed uncle, thumbing through Xenophon, found a phrase for “sooty-footed Persians,” which took care of the Blackfeet; as for the Sioux, on reflection he thought it safe simply to write—Sioux.

  He posted this proposal the next morning and followed it up with many more communications to the President, including a thirty-page treatise in Latin called A Brief History of the Flora, Fauna and Native Peoples of the Oregon and Louisiana Territories. Also, he sent Mr. Jefferson a copy of his revised “Chart of the Interior of North America.”