Dance on the Wind

teach, to open up the widening world to a young runaway from Rabbit Hash, in Boone County.

And if Root, Ovatt, and Kingsbury were his uncles … then Ebenezer Zane must surely be like the father he wished he had been born to. An unfettered spirit, instead of a man like Thaddeus Bass, who lived out his days tied down to one place—his dreams, his very vision, content to take in no more than what he could see of the forested hills around him. Less than a mile, no more than two miles at most—that was all a man could see in that cramped country his father had chosen to live out his days.

How was it that a man could satisfy himself so easily? Titus asked. How could a man content himself with so small a world, when the rest of it lay right out there for the taking? Had his father never had a dream like his own? Or was it simply that the older a man became, the more tarnished and smaller, the less important and more unrealized his dream became?

It was during the days as they floated toward the Mississippi that he thought on such things, with every new sunset and all the miles they put behind them, sensing all the more just what he had chosen to leave back there— pulled by all that which lured him onward.

Few people lived southwest of Louisville that early in the new century. No longer so hilly and broken, the countryside slowly flattened into a rich and fertile region.

“Good for the farmers what’s coming,” Hames Kingsbury stated. “Only a matter of time before they fill it up too.”

Surveyed only nine years before, Henderson, Kentucky, was beginning to flourish as a crossroads for the state’s Green River region. Floating on past Diamond Island, the boatmen then swept past the mouth of the Wabash, the western boundary of Indiana and one of the largest navigable rivers in the Northwest Territory.

Early one afternoon Kingsbury took to singing a jaunty tune.

“Some row up,

Some row down.

All the way—

To Shawnee town.

Pull away—pull away now!”

“Ain’t far to Shawnee town now,” Ovatt declared, pointing downriver.

A few miles down from the Wabash they put to at Shawnee town, a wild and raucous river port then beginning to flourish on the north side of the Ohio, its new citizens finding easy profit in satisfying all a boatman’s hungers. A little farther on Ebenezer Zane brought them to Cave-In Rock on the “Indian side” of the Ohio.

“Times was, there was talk river pirates hid out in this place,” Hames Kingsbury explained to Titus as the crew put over to the north shore and climbed up to take in the legendary landmark.

“Pirates?” Bass inquired.

“Ain’t no pirates working the river like they done of a time not so long ago,” Ebenezer added. “Things pretty quiet nowdays.”

Inside the cave the boatmen showed Titus where they had first inscribed their names on the walls, beneath them the dates of their first trips down the Ohio. The walls were covered from floor to a full arm’s length above them with the names of hundreds of other river travelers.

“Here,” Reuben Root said, holding out his belt knife to Titus by the blade. “Scratch your name in there.”

As the youth finished the second S on his last name, Ovatt said, “You’ll have to ask Ebenezer what day it is. He’s the only one among us what pays heed to such things.”

“It’s your good fortune I do pay heed to such as that,” Zane replied. “It’s November the twenty-eighth, Titus.”

“So that means the year still is eighteen and ten.”

“Oh, you’ll know when we get to the new year, all right,” Kingsbury exclaimed. “That’s good cause for celebration with this bunch.”

“It’s my birthday,” Titus told them as he finished gouging out the last number.

“New Year’s Day?” Ovatt asked.

Nodding, he turned and handed the knife back to Root.

“Way I hope things to go, Titus,” Zane said, “we’ll be on the Trace come 1811.”

Titus asked, “The Trace? What’s that?”

“It’s the road we’re walking home from the Mississap, through Tennessee and on to Kentucky,” Kingsbury answered.

“A wilderness road that points us north,” Zane added, turning toward the wide mouth of the cave. “Time we was setting off again.”

Farther down the Ohio they passed the Cumberland River, commonly called the Shawanoe by the locals in the new nearby settlement of Smithtown, slowly spreading into the bottomland forest. In less than an hour they passed the Tennessee, both rivers flowing in from the south within a few miles of one another.

“That Smithtown is one place a man’s life goes damned cheap,” Root grumped as they passed by the wharf where a couple of dozen men came out of log cabins to hail the flatboat passing on by.

“Lots of knockabouts: fellas like you there, Titus,” Kingsbury declared.

“Like me?” he asked, watching the men on the wharf wave, holler, attempting to attract attention and flag the boat over.

“Homeless runaways, I’ll say. Young men with nothing but time on their hands. Even some boatmen what don’t have jobs. They all waiting there to hire on as hands to any of the boats what hap to put in at Smithtown.”

“A scurvy lot those wharf rats are,” Ebenezer spat with a doleful wag of his head.

By this point the Ohio was becoming more and more crowded with river traffic originating all the way from the Allegheny and Monongahela, the Muskingum, Scioto, and Kentucky. Within some two hundred miles, four major rivers—the Green (what some locals still referred to as the Buffalo), the Wabash, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee, also known by the earliest settlers as the Cheraqui—all flowed into the Ohio. No more was she la belle riviere of the French traders. Yet she had become something quite grand, widening with mounting strength as each new river fed her its waters.

Past the Tennessee they floated by Fort Massac, first erected in the Illinois country back in 1757 … then Wilkinsonville, a crude frontier station named after the young country’s treasonous brigadier general James Wilkinson who continued to dabble in boating, soldiering, and conspiring to carve out his own empire in the West. Little more than clusters of cabins and riverside wharves, these were among a handful of tiny outposts cropping up here and there to signal the inevitable spread of a thriving frontier civilization. Over each village, smoke smudged the air as open fires, rock chimneys, and hundreds of smoldering tree stumps all raised their oily black columns into the late-autumn sky. Each of these riverside ports was simply a pocket of land stripped of its timber and brush to make room for a cluster of cabins, a common stockade, and a few cleared fields just beyond.

Why they hadn’t left the forest the way it was … why men like his pap, and his grandpap before that, figured they could improve on what was there to begin with—Titus figured he never would know. Whoever, whatever, put the trees and critters there at the start likely had the best idea of all, he decided.

“It’s up to man to bring peace to the hills and valleys,” his father often repeated his litany of subduing the earth. “Up to man to pacify the land and make it fruitful—just as God commands us do.”

If his pap’s God wasn’t the same what made all the hills and valleys and critters, then Titus would simply find himself another God to believe in. A God who could make such a luxurious garden of forest and timber and critters could never be a God that set silently with seeing his creation destroyed by man.

The farther west they floated, the more startling the contrasts became to him. With fewer and fewer settlements and outposts, with more and more long stretches of untouched wilderness—the differences between Titus and his father became all the more clear. While most came to a new land to conquer it, desiring to subdue all within sight, to make of it something in their own image … with every day Titus all the more sought the wilderness on its own terms.