“The end is coming!” he bellowed, holding up his scuffed and worn text at the end of his arm, a long staff in the other, exhorting his gathering. “In this—His own word—God Himself has ordained the end to arrive in just such a way. Take heed of my pronouncement, for the mouth of that comet unleashed by His great hand has brought nigh the end of man.”
“The comet!” some in the crowd shouted in eager response.
“Yes—the comet!” the anointed one shrieked. “The earth has quaked because of the comet that made its appearance across God’s firmament months ago. A comet with two great horns, like the devil has horns himself!”
“Work of the devil!” one in the crowd roared.
“Two great horns!” the prophet shouted. “And this frail, temporal scrap of earth where man has made his home now quakes because we have rolled over one of those horns on that comet, and now lie lodged betwixt that pair of horns that adorn the devil’s own brow!”
So it was they flooded east in small groups and by droves, all those who feared lying in the lap of the devil when the hand of God returned to smite them again … leaving behind those who did not believe in such superstition, those who relished the depravity of living there in the lap of the devil himself, and even one lone man who had vowed he would not be the first to leave.
After all, enough folks remained behind, or migrated downriver, that Titus still had his job, could go on working through each day, spending each night waiting for her and wondering if the following morning would be the dawn when she failed to return.
Here in Owensboro there were many who celebrated their deliverance from destruction by merrymaking. When the aftershocks rocked their houses and saloons in the following weeks, they clung to one another or the walls until the trembling subsided, and they dared dance once more. It was this indomitable spirit that had brought such hardy souls to this land. Only those who truly belonged at the edge of that new frontier elected to stay on.
They always had.
The French and their Indians hadn’t run them off their holdings sixty years before. A generation later the English and their Indians had failed to scare off their kind. Those of pioneer stock were not about to be deterred by something so insignificant as the trembling of huge plates of rock beneath the surface of the earth. They had the matter of living to be about. And whether it was enemy armies, or skulking Chickamauga and Shawnee, or whether it was capricious skies and stillborn babes, those steadfast pioneers hung on. Some had no choice: they had come to make a stand and dared not return to what lay behind, what they had fled, back over the mountains. If anything, they would move from this ground torn and rent asunder—move on to new land they could clear and make fruitful.
Time and again in those days and weeks and eventually months of tumult within the unsettled earth, Titus thought again of his grandpap. Once more he realized there was no threat big enough to frighten away those who were truly westering, truly moving toward the setting sun, seeking that most fertile of valleys. After all, that breed of folk believed, a man could be buried anywhere. A man had himself a choice: back there where they had come from, where most folks claimed it was one hell of a lot safer to keep his woman and raise his family. Or he could always lay his bones down here in the western extent of the Illinois country, here along the lower Ohio, or those new settlements of Missouri. Just as well a man be buried after making his life count for something, no matter how short.
Better to live their lives full, than long, some of the hardy ones declared. Better to be buried in sod where few men would ever walk than lie a’moldering beneath ground trampled by the boots of thousands.
In late winter word drifted downriver to Owensboro of something folks were calling a steamboat. Talk was that Nicholas Roosevelt’s
The bearer of the news shared his report with his wide-eyed, yet skeptical audience there in Owensboro late that March of 1812: “It reached Louisville in the middle of the night, rousting folks from their beds to come scurrying down to the dock to watch it tie up. Didn’t dare take on the Falls—water too low. So the captain turned it about at the harbor and marched that boat right back upriver to Cincinnati.”
“Against the Ohio?” asked an astonished citizen.
“Yep.”
“They had to have ’em a big crew paddling,” Titus scoffed.
Others in the crowd agreed, doubting this outlandish monk’s tale.
“Not a one,” the reporter went on undeterred. “Not an oar in sight. Only that wheel paddling agin the current.”
Less than a week later the
Nothing short of a pure wonderment, that was, Titus thought, standing at the new wharf in awe. Why, to push upriver and down at will, that crude, hissing engine throbbing noisily, black smoke chugging against the winter sky. By some mysterious force able to sail upriver against the Ohio that long ago had borne the downriver fleets of the great prehistoric mound builders, then the birch-bark canoes of French and English explorers, next the dugout pirogues of Indian traders and Kentucky longhunters, followed by the bateaux of George Rogers Clark in his daring conquest of the Old Northwest, not to mention the first flatboats of those westering pioneers come to that new land little seen by white eyes.
What would become of these great, untamed rivers now—Bass wondered with a twinge of painful regret—if man could construct a craft such as this? Why, all the wildness would go out of the rivers, and eventually the land itself. The Ohio would soon be tamed, and the mighty Mississippi no longer feared by rivermen.
Only the Missouri remained.
The same faraway river that had beckoned Levi Gamble to join Manuel Lisa’s fur brigades yearning toward the distant, as yet unseen, spaces. Farther on, those mountains few could speak of having seen, fewer still could claim to have crossed.
The world was changing around him, too damned fast for his comfort. Something on the order of a year and a half had passed since he’d fled those fields tilled by Thaddeus Bass. This second winter on his own, having watched the frightened and weak of heart turn about and take their families back, despite the relentless press of others surging ever westward.
Nothing would stop the killing. The wildness of the land was dying still.
Who was he to expect that it would be any different out here? Generations gone had crossed the mountains and flooded into the canebrakes, streaming down the Cumberland, killing the last of the buffalo not already run off. Now their kind was killing off the great rivers that for so long had been the final barriers holding back those of lesser fiber.
Now with a wet squeal of a whistle, the steamboat announced its coming. True enough, he had seen only one. But Titus knew there would be others, one day soon. Such noisy, belching monsters would put an end not only to the great mysteries of the western rivers, but to the rivermen as well. No more would the Kentucky boatman float and pole, cordelle and warp his way up and down the waterways that had moved America west. No more would there be any room for that breed that had spawned the likes of Ebenezer Zane and Hames Kingsbury.
And when the wild rivers no longer served as a final, immutable barrier, and every last person in the east could come west, then it would be time for him to move on again. If there was no more wildness in that move west—there was no heart in the journey. No spark in the spirit. No dance on the wind.
But move on he must.
For he had come to sense instinctively there in the first months of his eighteenth year that his feet itched perhaps every bit as much as his grandpap’s had. So he prayed there would always be country to see, rivers to ride, those mountains to climb.
And winds to dance upon.
