‘This dirt makes New England look like a rock pile!’
While the Ohio Territory was pockmarked with new clearings, it retained vast tracts of virgin forest where the world remained primeval. Oak, beech, hickory, chestnut, and elm, budding now with spring green, reared up to one hundred and fifty feet in height. Tree trunks were so thick that Magnus and I couldn’t encompass them with linked arms. Limbs were fat enough to dance on, and bark so wrinkled that you could lose a silver dollar in the corrugations of an oak. The arcing lattice of branches met neighbours like the peak of a cathedral, and above that great flocks of birds would sometimes fly, so thick and endless that they blocked out the sun, their cries a raspy cawing. The trees seemed not just older than us but older than the Indians, older than woolly elephants. They made me think of Jefferson’s baleful spirits.
‘You could build a grand house out of a single tree,’ Magnus marvelled.
‘I’ve seen families camp in hollow ones while they work on their cabin,’ I agreed. ‘These trees are as old as your Norse explorers, Magnus.’
‘From the time of Yggdrasil, perhaps. These are the kinds of trees the gods knew. Maybe that’s why the Templars came here, Ethan. They recognised this land was the old paradise, where men could live with nature.’
I was less certain. I knew my race, and couldn’t imagine any white men coming to America and not doing what these settlers were doing right now, converting these forest patriarchs to corn. It’s what civilisation does.
‘Why do you think the trees here grow so big?’ Magnus asked.
‘Electricity, perhaps.’
‘Electricity?’
‘The French scientist Bertholon constructed what he called an electrovegetoma machine in 1783 to collect lightning’s energy and transfer it to plants in the field, and said it radically enhanced their growth. While we know lightning can damage trees, could electrical storms also make them grow? Perhaps the atmosphere of the Ohio country is different than that of Europe.’
At last we ferried the Sandusky and, at its outlet to Lake Erie, a clearing finally gave a view.
‘It’s not a lake, it’s a sea!’
‘Three hundred miles long, and there are bigger ones than this, Magnus. The farther west we go, the bigger everything gets.’
‘And you ask why the Norse went that way? Mine were a people fit for big things.’
He made a point of cupping his hand to drink, confirming this vastness wasn’t salt. We could see the lake bottom to forty feet. As planned, we sold our horses and took passage on a schooner called Gullwing for Detroit, since the land route from here led into the nearly impassable Black Swamp that divided the Northwest Territory from Ohio. We sailed across Lake Erie, breasted the current of the Detroit River, and came at last to the famed fort. There I found us an easier way west – by flirting with a woman.
I have a knack for agreeable company.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Detroit was one hundred years old when I arrived, but had been under the American flag for only the past five. What had first been a French post and then a British one – finally surrendered under the terms that ended the American Revolution almost two decades before – now sat atop a twenty-foot-high bluff along the short, broad Detroit River connecting Lakes Erie and Saint Clair. The establishment consisted of approximately a thousand people and three hundred houses behind a twelve-foot log stockade. Canada was on the opposite shore, the Union Jack flapping there as a reminder of former rule.
Despite the political division, trade across the river was ample. Detroit’s economy was governed by furs and farming, with Norman-style French farmsteads spread up and down the American and Canadian sides for twenty miles.
‘It’s a mongrel town,’ described Jack Woodcock, our schooner’s skipper. ‘You’ve got the Frenchies, who have been there nearly as long as the Indians and do all the real work. The Scots, who run the fur trade. The American garrison, made up mostly of frontier misfits who can’t find a job anywhere else. Then there’s the Christian Indians, the tribes who come to trade, the black servants and freemen, and across the river the British waiting to take it all back again.’
‘Surely there’s new pride in being a part of the United States.’
‘The French like us even less than the British. They’re hiving for Saint Louis. Town’s lost half its population.’
The land and waterscape was flat, the sky vast, and the April sun bright. The most curious sight was the scattering of windmills, their arms turning lazily against the scudding white clouds of spring.
‘The land’s such a pancake there ain’t no rapids for water power,’ our captain explained. ‘We’s like a bunch of damn Dutchmen.’
Near the walls were clusters of domed bark wigwams and crude lean-tos used by the deposed Indians who clung near the post. Our craft tied to a long wooden dock at the base of the bluff, gulls wheeling and crows hopping in hunt of spilt corn or grain. Sloops, canoes, flatboats, and barges were tied along the pier’s length, and the boards rang and rumbled from stomping boots and rolling kegs. The language was a babble of English, French, and Algonquin.
‘We’re not even halfway to the symbol of the hammer,’ Magnus said with wonder, consulting the charts he’d bought in New York City.
‘If we can continue by water it will be faster and easier,’ I said. ‘We’ll show Jefferson’s letter of support to the commander here and ask for military transport to Grand Portage. We have, after all, the backing of the American government.’
There was a dirt ramp leading from the dock to the stockade gate, split logs bridging puddles. A steady stream of inhabitants moved up and down like a train of ants, not just transporting goods to and from ships and canoes but dipping water. The wells had been spoilt by the town’s privies, said Woodcock.
Three-quarters of the inhabitants looked to be either French or Indian. The former had long dark hair and skin burnt almost as brown as the tribes. They wore shirts, sashes, and buckskin leggings, with scarves at their neck, and they were crowned with headbands or bright caps of scarlet. Clad in moccasins, they had a jaunty gaiety that reminded me, however remotely, of Paris. The Indians, in contrast, stood or sat wrapped in blankets and watched the frantic industry of the whites with passive, resigned curiosity. They were refugees in their own country.
‘The drunk and diseased fetch up here,’ the captain said. ‘Be careful of the squaw pox.’
‘Not much of a temptation,’ I said, eying the squat and squalid ones.
‘Wait till you been out here for six months.’
Inside the stockade was crowded with whitewashed log houses and dominated at its centre by a large stone catholic church. ‘Headquarters is that way,’ Woodcock said, pointing. ‘Me, I’m stoppin’ at the tavern.’ He disappeared into a cabin rather more populated than the others.
The western headquarters of the United States Army, governing three hundred unruly soldiers, was a sturdy command building of squared logs and multipaned windows of wavy glass, its official purpose marked by a flagstaff with stars and stripes. There was no guard, so we walked unannounced into a small anteroom, where a grizzled sergeant sat hunched over a ledger book. We inquired about Samuel Stone, the man Lewis had told us was the commanding officer.
‘The colonel’s out at the graveyard again,’ said the sergeant, mumbling through a bristle of grey whisker while he held a quill pen like a dart, as if uncertain where to point it. He had none of Meriwether Lewis’s military bearing and squinted at a ledger sheet as if looking at the alphabet for the first time. Finally he scratched through a name.