by Lori Benton
“The gold was given me in payment some while back, as I pass it on to ye,” Ian replied, also not for the first time.
“Payment for your Carolina land?” Cooper probed, but when Ian only smiled, the man desisted. “I see you wish to keep the knowledge close. But I’ve long harbored hope that such treasure lies beneath our Otsego soil, awaiting some fortunate soul’s discovery.” The man gave a hearty laugh. “Perhaps it lies beneath the land you’ve just purchased!”
“That would be something,” Ian said, his mind teeming with the gathering of provisions and breaking the news that, at the wagon’s speed and the conditions of the western New York roads, they had another week of travel ahead.
Before he could properly take his leave, the room’s door burst open and a lad of about six years rushed in, dark-haired and exclaiming, “Papa! Papa!” stopping short at sight of Ian, having apparently forgotten his presence in the house.
“James Fenimore!” Cooper waved the lad over before Ian could admonish him to further discretion about the gold. “See this, my boy? You’re looking at gold come straight from the earth, untouched as yet by fire or hammer. What think you of that?”
“Is it ours, Papa?” the boy queried, reaching a fingertip to poke the nearest flake.
“Indeed, it is,” Cooper confirmed, whereupon the lad peered up at Ian with keener interest, until his father added, “Now, back to whatever it is you’re meant to be doing. I’ve not yet finished my business with Mr. Cameron.”
James Cooper cast Ian a last appraising glance, then scampered from the room. When the boy was gone and the door shut, Ian cleared his throat. “I’ll take my leave as well, sir. There’s much needing done to see those in my care secure for the winter and little time for doing it. Before I go, might I beg a favor?”
“Of course,” Cooper said, rising from the desk to see him out. “You’ve but to name it.”
He hoped the man meant it. “Would ye keep word of where ye came by the gold—indeed the gold itself, can it be managed—between us two?” Three, counting young James. Ian doubted Cooper’s son would remember his name, but the judge, he had come to realize, was fond of telling tales. “At least here, in Cooperstown?”
The man took a moment to think through the request, before grudgingly nodding. “I shall in any case need wait until I’ve returned to Philadelphia before attempting to exchange the gold for coin.” Cooper shot a regretful glance at the ore on his desk, as if he would fain keep it in its present state, had he no pressing expenses of his own.
Ian left William Cooper with the man’s good wishes and his own resolution to secure permanent title to the land on Black Kettle Creek as swiftly as possible—should that narrow vein on John Reynold’s land not fail.
23 August 1796
To Seona Cameron
Beachum Lane
Boston, Massachusetts
Dear Seona—
I have written Da, detailing our Journey to Cooperstown and our dealings here (be sure he shares that Letter) and have procured our Winter provisions. The morrow begins the final leg of our Journey, back toward the Mohawk River, then north along West Canada Creek to Black Kettle Creek. Our destination, Shiloh, is situated some Miles above their confluence. I am thankful for the Almighty’s mercy in seeing us safely thus far, for preparing the way before ever I saw the need.
Naomi, Malcolm, and Ally say their time with you proved too brief. I find myself in full agreement. From the moment I set my gaze on Gabriel and he permitted my embrace, I wished to never let him go. At our parting I fought the urge to cling to him, who knows me not as Father. Or could it be he does? When you bade him, “Say goodbye to your Daddy,” and he said the word I’ve most longed to hear—“Da!”—my Heart did claim it, whether I have the right. It was a wrench, parting from my wee Lad again.
Mandy misses her Brother, having asked for him daily the first week of our Journey. They got on well, those two, more like twins never parted than half siblings who could not possibly recall one another. Though I would rather have remained near Gabriel and, by your leave, behaved toward him as a Father, I value this chance to establish a Place, a home that will outlast me and benefit my Children. There is more I could say on that, as there was more I wished to say that day on Copp’s Hill. Could you sense it? I felt your holding back as well. Much has changed in a short time. Perhaps you find your head (and Heart?) reeling more than a little. Mine do. Still I was pleased to find you making a life in Boston and am sensible that, at present, I have little to contribute to its betterment. God willing, that will change.
Meantime, will you write and tell me all that is happening with you? Tell me of Gabriel, how he grows, what new skills he masters. What words he is learning to say. What delights him. I would know my Son, as you allow. He and you are much in my prayers. By them I remain Your Most Obedient Servant—
Ian Cameron
Cooperstown, New York
13
SHILOH, NEW YORK
September 1796
While Cooperstown had been a carefully plotted affair, all straight lines and right angles, the village of Shiloh resembled nothing so much as a scattering of forest mushrooms; structures sprouted wherever nature’s whimsy decreed or the hilly terrain proved amenable. The final mile to reach its cabin-dotted outskirts was some of the roughest they had encountered. Malcolm and Naomi, Mandy astride her hip, had alighted to walk it while Ian went before, leading Ruaidh, calling guidance to Ally to bring the wagon safely over the stony track, while the rush and tumble of Black Kettle Creek kept them company.
With the sun past midday, they reached the village proper, nestled in a hollow surrounded by wooded slopes. A cleared level ground was shared by a low-roofed trade store and smithy, both built of square-hewn logs, shaded by the same great oak, and several cabins, also log-built. The track they followed swept up to where a mill sat astride the creek, taking advantage of a waterfall’s natural force. Its weathered timbers marked it of an age with store and smithy.
From the latter came a hammer’s ringing, a tinny clanking on the warm late-summer air. The smithy seemed as good a place as any to stop and gain their bearings. Other tracks led away from the village besides the one snaking up past the mill. Ian didn’t want to make a wrong turn so near their destination.
On the trade store’s porch, an old man in a rocker smoked a pipe. In a cabin-yard some ways off, a woman tended a wash kettle. In the same yard, a boy chopped wood. All shot glances their way as Ally set about watering the wagon team from a nearby well, though none forbade them its use.
Ian left Ruaidh hitched to the wagon’s tail to receive his share, but before he could cross the yard to the smithy, a rider came into the village from a track that wound over the wooded ridge to the west. At first it seemed the man meant to pass on, up the rise to the mill. Catching sight of wagon and team, he reined his mount in Ian’s direction.
While the smith’s hammering and the thwack of wood-chopping filled the air, Ian watched the man’s approach. His horse, a dark bay roan, was showing its age but seemed in good condition. The man was dressed in linen breeches and a well-fitted broadcloth coat, with a felt hat nicely cornered. What could be seen of the hair tailed back from a clean-shaven face was nearly black, though gray-streaked.
He dismounted and walked his horse to the wagon, where Ally held a bucket for their horses to drink in turn. Ian for the first time noticed what else the old horse bore: full saddlebags, with a small wooden chest tied between that put Ian in mind of Lily’s simples box, only larger. The trappings of a country doctor?
“Passing through Shiloh, are ye?” the man inquired. His eyes were very blue, with creases gathered at the corners. His accent was markedly Scottish and reassuringly amiable as he added, “Though to where, I’ve no notion, save it be Canada.”
“Not passing through,” Ian replied, hearing his own faint lilt deepen in response to the other man’s. “We’ve lately come from Otsego County, where I purchased land here. From William Cooper.�
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The name sparked recognition and interest. The man’s gaze looked Ian up and down. “Oh, aye? Land whereabouts here?”
“To the eastward, along Black Kettle Creek, which I’m guessing that track up along the mill ought to follow. I cannot tell from here whether it takes a bend in that direction.”
“It does. Creek and track both bend eastward above the mill and head on up into the hills for a bit.” Upon shifting his horse’s reins to his left hand, the man proffered the other. “Neil MacGregor, pleased to make your acquaintance.”
“Ian Cameron, likewise.” They shook; then with a nod toward the man’s saddlebags, Ian asked, “Is it Doctor MacGregor?”
“It is,” the man said with a broadening smile. “But Neil does as well.”
MacGregor. The name niggled at a memory. At last Ian bethought himself of Judge Cooper’s map and his chosen tract with its lake and spring and the neighboring farm labeled with the name just spoken. “I think I’ve bought the parcel of land adjoining your farm. If ye’re the MacGregor who lives out east along Black Kettle.”
“Wi’ a wee lake between?” Neil MacGregor asked.
“The very one.” Ian turned to indicate Ally, standing now with Ruaidh’s muzzle deep in the water bucket, listening with unabashed curiosity, and Naomi, Malcolm, and Mandy, peering through the wagon’s canvas. “We’re just up from Cooperstown, where the sale was made. Before that we came from North Carolina, by way of Boston.”
“Then I daresay ye’ll be ready to end your journey,” the doctor said. “’Tis but two miles to my farm, half another at most to yours. I’ll keep ye company if ye’re of a mind to conclude your adventure now.”
“Yes, sir, we are!” Naomi answered for one and all. “Mister Ian, back in Carolina you asked did I want to see the world. I done traipsed over enough of it now for seven lifetimes. I’m ready to sit me still.”
Had he not been of similar mind, Ian would have made himself so after that declaration. Assured the track beyond Shiloh was none so difficult as that last stretch leading into it, Ally drove the wagon up the slope past the mill, with Ian and Neil MacGregor riding ahead.
“Keppler’s Mill,” Neil named it. “And that,” he added as the road bent eastward past a new-built cabin, “is where my daughter, Maggie, will commence to teaching school, once harvest is past.”
Proving an amiable guide as they rode the winding forested track, the man spoke of Shiloh’s history before and after the war. Ian gathered that the late conflict with the Crown had been hard on the folk thereabouts. As well as losing sons, husbands, and brothers in battle, they had suffered the depredations of invading British armies. And their allied Indians.
“And ye? Have ye been settled here so long?” Ian asked over the steady clop of their horses’ hooves and rattling wagon coming along the gently climbing track.
The simple question yielded Neil MacGregor’s story in brief. A physician trained in Edinburgh, he had come into the region some twelve years back as the dust of war was settling, sent by the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia as a naturalist. His aim being to create a field guide to the flora of the Adirondacks, he had encountered some unspecified misfortune that stranded him in Shiloh.
“Where I found both place and people so diverting,” he added with a flash of humor Ian was certain disguised a far more complicated tale, “that in the end I couldna tear myself awa’.”
“Did ye never complete your field guide?”
“I did. Over the next three years. I’ve a copy at the farm should ye fancy a keek.”
Ian assured the man he did, but as they rode the track, creek flashing through the trees on their right, he was keen to observe the living flora itself. He recalled Cooper waxing eloquent about New York’s northern forest, how his cabinetmaker’s heart would rejoice at the sight. The man had not been wrong. Mighty shading chestnut, oak, beech, and maple met his gaze, spiced through with the white of birch and poplar, graced by the somber notes of pine, spruce, cedar, and hemlock, all scenting the warm summer air.
They had traveled nigh two miles to Ian’s reckoning when Neil pointed out a particular stand of maples, their broad trunks sprouting plugs Ian recognized before the man declared the stand his wife’s sugar bush, where she harvested sap each spring for boiling syrup.
“I helped with such when I lived with an uncle,” Ian said. “Among the Chippewa near the western lakes.”
From his saddle Neil MacGregor cast him an appraising look but didn’t remark; they had emerged from the wood to find themselves at the edge of a broad field of corn, planted in a manner Ian, with no small surprise, recognized as native—not in uniform rows but in mounds, with beans coiling up the stalks and broad-leafed squash vines shading the earth below. Along its edge sunflowers grew, tall and yellow-headed. Neil MacGregor scanned the bladed stalks beyond. They rode but a short way farther before he halted his horse and called, “Willa! I’ve brought ye and the bairns a surprise. Neighbors.”
As Ally brought the wagon to a halt and climbed down to help the others out of its bed, voices called back from various parts of the field. First to emerge from between the sunflowers was, Ian presumed, the woman Neil had called—his wife, Willa MacGregor—and much like a sunflower she was in appearance herself. Nigh six feet tall, Ian realized once he dismounted to greet her, still slender as a lass, though her face bore the freckling of years of fieldwork and her reddish-brown hair showed white in its rusty hue.
More arresting than her height were her eyes. One was brown, the other predominantly green.
Ian had but a moment to be disconcerted by the striking oddity before two lads came bursting from the cornfield. Ian mistook them briefly for twins, but turned out they were two years apart in age, which the elder, Jamie, was keen to clarify. “This is Liam. He’s only nine.”
Liam gave his brother’s ribs a nudge. “Almost ten—but tall for my age!”
Both had their father’s dark hair and blue eyes. Ian presumed the same of the two who next issued from the standing corn, a young man in his early twenties and a lass about Catriona’s age, until they drew near enough for Ian to see plainly they were both dark-eyed, their complexions darker than the rest of the family’s. The lass’s was a pale-fawn shade, her brother’s a slightly darker copper. The cast of their features marked them Indians, though Ian didn’t think them full-bloods.
His heart gave a squeeze; the sight of them minded him of Seona. It had been nearly a month of thinking of her, days in the saddle wondering what she was thinking, having seen him after so long only to have him leave again with vague promises of going off to settle in the hope it might benefit her and Gabriel . . .
But now Neil MacGregor was introducing this second pair as his son Matthew and daughter, Maggie—the one soon to be teaching school in that cabin above the mill. No explanation was forthcoming of their familial connection to the elder MacGregors, who clearly had no Indian blood between them.
Swallowing back his curiosity, Ian introduced himself and his wee girl, then the others. “Malcolm and his family chose to come north with me,” he added, wanting their status to be clear from the start. “To make a life for themselves as well.”
His companions were greeted as the free persons they were. Ian watched with pleasure as Willa MacGregor engaged Naomi in conversation and Maggie coaxed a shy smile from Mandy.
With an invitation to return and sup with the family that evening—gratefully accepted—they bade the MacGregors farewell, save for the doctor, who swung back into the saddle to accompany them down the track past his well-tended fields.
Neil MacGregor’s house soon came into view: framed and solidly built, modeled like Judge Cooper’s but with a stone foundation and deep veranda giving it a greater sense of permanence. Then the track led on through forest again, roughening for its general disuse, precipitating such a jolting ride that Naomi, Malcolm, and Mandy again alighted to walk.
Ian was about to dismount as well when he caught sight of sheeted
water glinting between the trunks of red pine lining the track, the first feature he recognized from Cooper’s map, besides the creek. The lake was smaller than Otsego but of a similar limestone green, with a fringe of cattail reeds along its irregular shore and an islet there at its southern end.
“Where,” Neil MacGregor informed him, “my wife, as a lass, was wont to retreat wi’ a book to read. The land was once her father’s.”
Ian halted Ruaidh. Neil followed suit, while those on foot and Ally, with the wagon, caught them up. They were not yet past the lake, but Ian knew what lay beyond. So did his new neighbor, who said, “Welcome home, Ian Cameron. And may the grace of the Almighty be upon ye and yours.”
10 September 1796
To Seona Cameron
Beachum Lane
Boston, Massachusetts
Dear Seona—
We are come to the Adirondack foothills and have at last seen our Land, indeed are settled upon it. By lantern glow I take up pen as, for the first time since leaving Mountain Laurel, Mandy sleeps enclosed within our own squared walls. As yet they are but waist-high, hewn of unchinked log, our floor bare earth, our roof a span of stars. Naomi and Malcolm sleep nearby. Ally does not, having declared some while ago, “I’m meaning to sleep out by the stock again, Mister Ian, till all them beasts is settled in their spirits.”
I have been eager to tell you of the Family who claims the farm west of us. We met Neil MacGregor upon our arrival in Shiloh and had his company the last leg of our Journey. Along the way we met his wife, Willa (of striking interest are her eyes, which do not match in color, a thing I have never before seen), and their four Children, two of whom are, I have since learned, of Mohawk Indian blood. The eldest, Matthew, is well-grown at twenty-two and a great help with the farming when not training Horses, for which skill he has a high reputation. Maggie, a quiet lass, three years younger than her brother, begins this Autumn to teach a village School. Two younger sons are called Jamie and Liam. Neil MacGregor came to the frontier as a Naturalist, sent to create a Field Guide to the mountain flora (perhaps Da knows of this book?), and serves as Physician hereabouts as well.
