by David Nevin
“I hoped I’d see you, Mr. Secretary,” he said. “Last time we talked, memory tells me I did a little unseemly gloating. So now, the way it’s worked out, I reckon it’s your turn to gloat. You won fair and square, and it looks to me like your party’s future is assured. That don’t make me too happy, but I gotta say I’m glad we don’t need to fight a war; and believe me, my folks out in West Pennsylvania are feeling good. You Democrats have won, and all I can say is more power to you.”
Jimmy smiled. “We won’t disappoint you, Senator.”
“Maybe I was wrong all along,” Ross said. “I always said you put things in the common man’s hands and he’ll blow up. We saw it in the French after their revolution.”
“But we’re not French,” Dolley said.
“Yes, ma’am, we ain’t, and maybe my fear was unfounded. When I think about it, I find that folks in Pennsylvania are smart and sensible. They don’t run very wild; keep their eye on what’s good for them.” He shrugged. “Anyway, risky or not, it’s the way the country’s going. We’ll see what happens.”
“You’d better join us,” Jimmy said.
Ross laughed. “Oh, doubtless I will. I’m a practical fellow. But you know, it’s kind of chastening to see how narrow a cut can decide the future. Think of it. If Napoleon had forced our hand, I’m convinced you Democrats would have been finished and the American future would be Federalist. But he didn’t force our hand, and so the opposite is true. Maybe it’s the way of fate.”
At which he gave them a curious little salute and touched heels to his horse. They watched him go, raising his hat to women, turning the horse out to avoid a child who’d darted into the way. “The way of fate?” she asked. “Maybe it’s the way of God.”
He smiled. “Do you think God takes a hand in politics?”
“I hope He disdains politics but cares about nations’ destinies. Good nations, anyway. This was noble work.”
She rode in silence, thinking about it. Ross was wrong to equate freedom with license. Freedom was opportunity, the realization of possibilities. Yes, Britain and France were the great powers now, but already American craftsmen had cracked the Industrial Revolution’s secrets, and history insists that empires must ultimately die of their own weight. The Spanish empire was moribund now, Napoleon’s hopes had just come to grief, and Britain’s would too, in time.
“Jimmy,” she said, “will steamboats really ply the rivers someday? Is that practical?”
He shrugged as they swung their horses aside to avoid a carriage. “In time … well, our position on the Mississippi assured, there’ll be demand and demand stimulates achievement, that’s the story of modern industry—look at the new spinning mills in Massachusetts, turning out cloth, I guess by the millions of yards.”
“In other words,” she said, “progress follows freedom to seize opportunity. That’s why we’re right and Mr. Ross is wrong.”
“Ross sounded like a convert.”
She laughed. “Or a recruit. For after all, we are soldiers of democracy, are we not?”
He bowed in his saddle. “Yes, madam, we are surely that—soldiers of democracy.”
He looked at her, poised on her sidesaddle; this last month of relief had taken years from her face and made her fresh as spring. Soldiers of democracy … yes, he’d say so, crashing through barriers, carrying the assault, planting the flag on the highest peak. Yes … this was triumph almost beyond believing.
It was so much more than they had dared to dream. They had asked for rights on the river—to purchase New Orleans or a part of it or a terminal, three or four acres with the promise of American sovereignty—and they had acquired an empire, a continent. To seek a sliver and gain a continent snatched them ahead by years, by decades. It was triumph, for it made real the continental nation that had lived in their dreams. Soldiers of democracy …
41
WASHINGTON, JULY 1803
“Hold up, Miss Dolley! Mr. Madison!”
They reined up their horses. Again! They’d never get to the picnic on the river at this rate. But then she saw it was Meriwether Lewis, tall and lean, loping long-legged over the mansion lawn.
“I’m leaving,” he cried. “I’m off today!” His face was shining.
“On the great adventure?” she cried. “Oh, Merry, we didn’t know you’d go so soon. We’d have had a party, a farewell party, a bon voyage—” She moved her horse to a convenient step and slid down as Jimmy dismounted.
“That’s mighty nice, Miss Dolley,” Merry said, “But I’m on my way. High time too.” His mouth drew tight as string. Poor Merry, he would never relax. “It’s July and we’re just starting. Why, in three months snow will fly on the plains. I’m way behind—”
She cut him off. He was darkening before her very eyes. What a way to start! “Merry, dear,” she cried, “I envy you so. You’ll see wondrous things. Why, the president says he expects you’ll find a live mammoth waving those big, curved horns.”
“The president has very rich hopes,” he said, voice gone suddenly dry. She wondered if he’d seen through her concern.
“But there’s a core of instruction too?” Jimmy said.
“Exactly, Mr. Secretary. I’m to find the Northwest Passage. All else subordinates to that—examine terrain, identify flora and fauna, analyze the country’s receptivity to settlers.” He smiled. “And look for mammoth sign.”
Finding the Northwest Passage would be wondrous enough, the route to the spices and silks and tea of the Orient that men had been seeking for five hundred years. She said as much, nattering on a bit. Columbus sailing west to reach east and bumping into the Americas, the long, fruitless search for the strait that must split the Americas to let the ocean through, and now the conviction that rivers must be the avenue to the Orient. She ran down, wondering if her enthusiasm sounded girlish.
The captain’s smile was ironic but kindly. “We know the Missouri runs out of the mountains to the east. We know the Columbia runs westward to the sea. The president is quite convinced that they rise near each other with an easy portage between. I’m to learn whether conviction equals geography.”
Again she had that odd sense of strength or focus or command or some distinct change in the young man. That he was finally going had to mean a lot, but she thought there was more to it. He’d always been strong and rather rough, nothing new about that, but this was different. It was mysterious but quite real.
It also struck her as he talked that what really interested her was not mammoths or even the Northwest Passage, but how it would feel to step so boldly into the unknown. Would they be awed or frightened? Or would it be mile by mile just another wilderness trek? It seemed so vast an undertaking, leading a handful of men over two thousand miles of terrain unknown to white men. But she knew such thoughts would embarrass him, and she didn’t voice them.
“Oh, Merry,” she cried, “God speed to you, dear,” and she threw her arms around him and hugged him. When she stepped back, he caught her hand and held it a moment.
“Thank you, Miss Dolley,” he said. There was something in his eyes and then he turned abruptly to shake hands with Jimmy.
As they remounted and turned their horses toward the river, she asked Jimmy if he had noticed that difference in Merry. “Yes,” he said, “subtle but there, all right. He seems a little different around Tom too. Respectful as always, of course, but—I don’t know—I have a feeling something happened when he was gone, in Harper’s Ferry or Philadelphia.”
Early the next morning Captain Lewis was on the stage for Fredericktown, Maryland, two heavy seabags with his gear lashed to the top of the coach, first leg of the run to Pittsburgh. In Fredericktown that evening, forty miles on and making good time, he slept with other passengers on the dirt floor of a tavern and was off to Harper’s Ferry the next day.
He rode in silence, answering fellow passengers in monosyllables, buried in thought. He’d seen the way Miss Dolley had cut across his worries as if to deny them; she thought he w
as a pessimist when he knew better. It was very late in the year, and everything had conspired to delay him—the boat in Harper’s Ferry, the extra training in Philadelphia, the supplies and the need for maps traced on oil paper reflecting the best rumors of the West—and then the incredible news from France.
The Louisiana Purchase changed everything. Suddenly the vast range of country wrapped in mystery from Saint Louis to the Stony Mountains was U.S. territory. He would march as the representative of the new nation, not as an intruder dodging enemy patrols. As a practical matter, yes, a Spanish patrol finding him would have been two needles mating in a haystack, but the assurance he now felt was surprising and made him realize how much enemy territory had weighed in his thinking. He had a new mission, too; tribe by tribe he must present himself and his country to the Indian inhabitants.
The water passage he sought through the far mountains would open the nation to direct China trade, not immediately, of course, but in due time. Now the way from the East to the passage would be clear—and the chances of beating the British in the area beyond the passage had increased a hundredfold. He doubted the British would even contest seriously, for the Pacific Northwest—what some already were referring to as the Oregon country—had become a natural extension of the United States.
Which meant we were well along to being a continental nation, the Atlantic washing one shore, the Pacific the other. The purchase made all the difference. But hold up! This was thinking for Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Madison over fine porcelain teacups. It was drawing room thinking, with a nice comfort that really had little to do with the man who still must find his way across two thousand miles of territory unknown to any white man. And that man, truth be told, was cutting it very close. Too close. He thought he still could get on the Missouri this year, but how far could he go before winter trapped him? He had hoped to reach the Mandan villages eight hundred miles or so upriver. The Mandans were the trading tribe of the northern plains, dealt with Indians all around, and factored the results off to British and French traders who came down from Canada. Unlike most plains tribes their villages were permanent, with structures that protected against the cold, which commonly dipped as much as forty degrees below zero on the high plains, or so traders’ tales claimed. They needed to be moving. Get on down the Ohio and up the Mississippi to Saint Louis and the great juncture of the Missouri from the West … .
July already … now he must detour to Harper’s Ferry to be sure the teamster bringing his supplies from Philadelphia had paused there as ordered to load weapons, tools, and the iron boat. Everything should be in Pittsburgh now, ready to be loaded aboard the keelboat he had commissioned Samuel Hawkins, by reputation the master boat builder of the West, to have ready for him. Another week to reach Pittsburgh, then draw army boatmen from the cantonment and start down the Ohio before the river got too low, all with fall approaching. And Miss Dolley thought he was a worrier!
But thinking of her brought back forcefully the surge of feeling when he took her hand. He’d betrayed nothing, but suddenly she had seemed supremely desirable. Older than he and safely married and she’d always been pretty, but this was different. The way she’d looked at him, kind, sweet, generous, open, understanding—oh, all the things you’d want in a woman. Maybe that’s what he needed, an older woman. He wasn’t making much headway with the pretty girls who drew him.
June Landros in Philadelphia, she’d seemed head over heels in love with him. He’d visualized going off on his great adventure with a miniature of her face and a curl of her hair in a locket on a chain of gold. And then she’d gone off to New York without a word. He suspected her mother—maybe a soldier wasn’t good enough for her family—but you’d think June would have found a way to get a note to him if she’d really cared. He sighed. Maybe an older woman, maybe a widow …
Jimson and Bit greeted him as a comrade in arms at Harper’s Ferry. Mr. Perkins seemed pleased to tell him the Philadelphia teamster had judged the load too heavy for his team and had gone on to Pittsburgh without it. Another day to find a substitute. He reached Pittsburgh a week later at two in the afternoon, dashed off a letter to Mr. Jefferson for the five o’clock mail saying he would load and depart the next morning, and then went down to the river.
He came to Hawkins’s boatyard—and stopped in sheer horror. There was his keelboat still high on the ways, keel laid, ribs in place, and some planking on the port side of the hull but none on the starboard, no deck planking, no sign of special equipment he had designed. It looked weeks from completion. A half-dozen men were working in desultory fashion on a couple of punts.
“Where’s Mr. Hawkins?” he asked.
One of the men jerked a lazy thumb toward a shed with the door closed. He wore an ugly grin. Lewis knocked on the closed door, then opened it. A man was asleep, head flat on the desk, snoring loudly.
Lewis prodded him. “Mr. Hawkins? Mr. Hawkins?” After a while the fellow raised his head. His cheeks were veined, nose bulbous, eyes bloodshot. The smell of whiskey filled the shed. He held up a trembling hand.
“What—what d’ye want?”
“I want my boat, damn you. I’m Meriwether Lewis.”
“Oh, my God.” Hawkins stared at Lewis, mouth twitching, then slowly stood, wiping his lips. “We’ve had some problems, going slower’n I expected, but we’re getting there. And I been sick—”
“You’ve been drunk. You’re drunk now.”
“Now you’re right about that.” He gazed earnestly at Lewis. “I’m one hundred percent teetotally drunk, and I’ll tell you what, mister, I don’t sit down, I’m going to fall down.”
A workman put his head in the door. “Let him sleep it off. He’ll be all right in a couple of hours.” Lewis stepped out and looked at the river. A marker showed it had dropped an inch overnight. Soon commerce would stop moving until late fall.
It was too late to go to another builder, and anyway, a few questions in town told him that Hawkins was the best, though yes, he did like his glass and little work was done when he wasn’t in shape to push it. Anyway, starting over would be ruinous for this was a very special boat created to Lewis’s own design. It was oversized at fifty-five feet with an eight-foot beam, carried a mast jointed to fold that would support both square sail and foresail. Ten feet fore and aft was decked for quarters, eleven benches centered had space for twenty-two oarsmen and left space on each side to pole her forward. He had designed storage lockers that could be raised to form a barrier against Indian arrows, should any fly. It was a superb boat; it just wasn’t finished. Lewis set out to drive Hawkins and the workers by combining threats, pleas, and promises of rewards; and plank by plank the boat advanced as inch by inch the river lowered.
At last a ray of sunshine: a letter came from Will Clark far down the river at Clarksville in Indiana territory. The president had immediately approved Lewis’s choice of Clark as co-commander; he knew George Rogers Clark, Will’s older brother, very well. The elder Clark, as a young warrior, had saved the Far West during the revolution, and Jefferson had called on him more than once. So Lewis had posted his invitation with instructions to answer to Pittsburgh.
Lewis’s hand trembled as he cut through the sealing wax and opened the letter. He had an alternative candidate if Clark refused, but for a trip that was shaping up as monumental indeed he wanted a man he trusted implicitly at his side.
And Clark agreed! With the same high enthusiasm that Lewis himself felt, he wrote, “I will cheerfully join you. My friend, I do assure you that no man lives with whom I would prefer to undertake such a trip as yourself. My friend, I join you with hand and heart.”
Almost a month passed before the boat was finished. The river fell steadily; old hands said it was no longer passable. Lewis said they would try it anyway. He bought a pirogue to carry some of the load and sent part of his supplies on by wagon to Wheeling, where the water deepened, further to lighten the keelboat. Then he set out with eleven oarsmen from the cantonment; they would get him downriver, where
he would gather soldier-volunteers for the great adventure.
It was the last day in August in 1803; sassafras leaves were turning, he saw a gum tree with flashes of orange, the buckeyes showing color. Winter was coming and now he knew the great trek could not begin this year. He would push on to the Mississippi, hook up with Clark, and gather his men, add to his supplies, winter near Saint Louis, and start up the Missouri in the spring: 1804 instead of 1803. So be it.
Off McKee’s Rock he saw a ripple in the water and a moment later the boat grounded. He leaped into the water, the men after him. For twenty minutes of agony they dragged and lifted the heavy boat over the shoal. When she floated free, he was gasping and his legs trembled. He hauled himself back aboard and helped others. At Little Horse Tail Riffle, she grounded again and he waved them over the side. He was on his way and going through, take whatever it took; the Pacific Ocean glimmered in the distance.
42
WASHINGTON, AUGUST 1803
The sale of Louisiana was a blessing for Danny Mobry. It solved all problems but those of the heart. Her shipping business would prosper, sugar exported freely, finished goods returned, the wine runs from the south of France. It was more than rescue; it gave her enormous advantage over shippers who hadn’t deigned to speak to her, a woman in a man’s business. The New Orleans trade set free would surely boom. American vessels would flock up the river, but she was already there.
The Frenchmen greeting these captains from Baltimore and Boston would be angry and suspicious, but they would feel good with Danny, no matter her sex. Men who had been reluctant to deal with a woman would be delighted to deal with a Frenchwoman who spoke their language, knew their customs, understood their worries, carried the family imprimatur of Daniel Clark, and had made herself a success in the land that now governed their future. She must go immediately to capitalize on her advantage.
