An Embarrassment of Riches Read online

  Judge Ravenel cleared his throat and ground his teeth as though trying to masticate some distasteful fragment.

  “Sheriff Lusk, you are charged by the grand jury with fifty-six counts of profanity and one count of drunkenness. How do you plead?”

  “Not guilty to the former; guilty to the latter, your honor.”

  A witness was called and sworn, a toadlike man as wide as he was tall, with barely any neck, one eye missing from what was now a sunken socket, left unpatched for all to see, as if it were an emblem of local citizenship. His checkered waistcoat was a tattered, grubby thing, his linen unwashed, and breeches streaked with grime. This witness testified that while residing in the town jail, he had overheard instances of blasphemous talk by Lusk directed at another citizen of the county, the aforesaid Randolf Rudge, apparently a political rival of Lusk’s, which oaths were now solemnly read by the plaintiff’s lawyer:

  “… nineteen usages of ‘by God,’ seventeen of ‘by Jesus,’ twelve of ‘damn it to hell,’ and eight of ‘I’ll be Godalmighty damned.’”

  Compared to a Bilbo, this Lusk was obviously a rank amateur.

  The defendant’s lawyer then asked the witness upon what charges he had been placed in jail, so as to overhear the oaths in question.

  “For treating with tender affection my livestock,” the witness replied.

  “Fornicating with a sheep, you mean,” the lawyer said, and the courtroom erupted in laughter. “No further questions, your honor.” The witness left the stand, well, sheepishly.

  Rudge next took his place and testified that he had been blasphemed and abused by Lusk whilst attempting to negotiate a purchase price for Lusk’s office as sheriff. The selling of public office was a common and legal practice in the Kentucky of that day. The plaintiff rested. The petit jury deliberated without leaving their seats. A verdict of guilty on all counts was pronounced. Judge Ravenel fined Lusk one cent per oath plus twenty-five cents for his drunkenness and the case was concluded.

  An half dozen disputes over debts, chattels, and land ownership followed—including the aforementioned boundary quarrel. Finally, after these interesting preliminaries, came what was to be the main attraction, so to speak: the case of the People versus Jasper Jarkus, for the capital crimes of murder (eleven counts), horse theft (forty-one counts), receiving stolen goods, i.e., Negro slaves (seven counts), and attempting to escape whilst in custody (three counts). Unfortunately, the defendant could not be produced before the court, to the embarrassment of Sheriff Lusk and his deputies, for Jarkus had succeeded in his third escape attempt and was now at large.

  Thus the quarterly proceedings of the Lewis County Circuit Court adjourned on a somewhat disappointing note to the assembled throng. And it seems to have been an equal letdown for Judge Ravenel, who scolded Lusk in the most opprobrious terms, even threatening a fresh bill of indictment for dereliction of duty. But he heard Uncle crying, “Felix! Felix!” and looked up from the red-faced sheriff to see his old comrade-in-arms bunting up the aisle. He stood at the bench likewise crying, “William! William!” and soon all the vexations of his judicial office were laid aside for the joys of this reunion.

  It was decided at once that we should join Judge Ravenel at his plantation, Wildwood, some seven miles downriver from Babylon, and so we returned to the boat, paid the dutiful Negro with a handful of fish hooks and a pound of sugar, and cast off, whilst our host set out on his fine gray-spotted horse, Heracles, along the wilderness trail.

  What a sublime spectacle was Wildwood, a fine, three-story clapboard mansion with a columned portico set grandly on a hill overlooking the river and the endless Ohio wilderness to the north! At its river frontage was the judge’s own wharf, where his crops might be conveniently loaded for transport to Louisville and New Orleans. A road winded lazily up the hill from the quay, between lush plantings of azalea (Rhododendron maximum) in the very peak of fragrant pink blossom. It was certainly the finest house we had seen since leaving Pittsburgh in April.

  Our host arrived home well before we tied up at his quay and came down to await us with a gig for the ride uphill to the mansion. We had barely time to apologize for our disheveled state when we were led to Ravenel’s fine bathhouse behind the main dwelling. Here we happily scrubbed our skins pink and were barbered and shaved by an elderly slave, expert in his office, and finally were treated to the ultimate delight of fresh linen shirts and breeches. I tell you, the aroma of soap had as much intoxicating power to me as the most potent liquor. I felt like a new man.

  Thus bathed, barbered, and attired we were conducted to the front portico, where Judge Ravenel, his plump, good-natured wife, Martha, their daughter, Clara, and son-in-law Joseph Hardin awaited us with a tray of dainty eatables and a pitcher of that region’s favorite beverage, the mint julep, a decoction of powerful Kentucky whiskey doctored with a spoonful of sugar syrup and crowned with a sprig of mint leaves. Though he hotly deplored the gross drunkenness we had witnessed at Babylon, our host and his family were obviously used to strong refreshment themselves—even the women.

  But the hour of the day was so lovely, the sun a rosy disc above the westering hills, the river far below a silver sash girdling the tender green mounds of virgin hills, the smell of azaleas and honeysuckle so sweet, and a soft, balmy breeze keeping the mosquitoes at bay, one could scarcely believe that we were anywhere but the most beneficent pastoral corner of the earth, a very Arcadia.

  The judge was anxious to know our mission in the river country. In this general company Uncle coyly answered, “A search for botanicals,” not wanting to publicize our true objective, and shifted the focus of conversation to Mr. Ravenel himself. Uncle had last known him as a planter and jurist of Goochland County, Virginia. It had been more than fifteen years since the two old war comrades met at the constitutional convention of 1787 at Philadelphia, and much travail and heartache had ensued for planters like Ravenel during the “noxious nineties.” The endless wars between the nations of Europe had played havoc with the tobacco market. Years of drought, like ’93, were followed by devastating floods in ’95. In between, weevils ravaged the corn. Worst of all, his ancestral lands were “played out to sterile dust,” the judge said, by decades of profligate and unscientific exploitation.

  “Tobacco, tobacco, tobacco! Year after year after year!” he lamented, “or corn, corn, corn, to feed the hogs that fed the slaves that brought in the crop of tobacco. With never a rest, never an ounce of manure! What a ruinous economy!”

  By the time he had inherited his ancestral soil, it was too late. Kentucky, he said, had been good to them, though his heart ached for “Old Virginny.” The sale of his Virginia holdings had fetched half the price Ravenel’s grandfather paid for the 1,700 acres in ’54. Other old families had not got out at all, but watched their fortunes ebb away to nothing, slaves sold one or two at a time to pay debts, horses and livestock traded off, finally the sad spectacle of home and family heirlooms on the auction block. Here in Kentucky, they would not make the same mistakes, he avouched.

  But other than the rotation of their crops, as Mr. Jefferson advocated, I could not see much difference in the way of life, the “slavocracy,” that men like Felix Ravenel were establishing on the frontier—though he seemed a kind-hearted, well-meaning man.

  After a delicious supper of fresh ham, braised celery, new boiled peas, radishes, lettuce salad, and other garden delectables of which we had been sorely deprived so many weeks, and after desserts of ginger cake and strawberry pie, topped by a mountain of whipped cream, Uncle and I retired with the judge to his library. Mr. Hardin was left with the ladies. About thirty years old, soft-fleshed, and a little too quick to agree with whatever anybody said, he struck me as a supercilious, dull-witted man, and one could sense Ravenel’s impatience at this son-in-law’s every utterance. In any case, he was excluded.

  In the library, over cups of Madeira, Uncle now revealed to Judge Ravenel the true business of our mission, while at his desk I produced quick [O11]pen-and
-ink sketch of our quarry.

  “Clumsy-looking brute,” the judge observed. “Is this the tail, here?”

  “That is the snout,” I informed him.

  “Ah yes. Of course.”

  “And these, the forefeet. Note the unusually long claws.”

  “Formidable,” he declared without apparent sarcasm.

  “Hast thee ever seen such a monster, Felix?” Uncle inquired.

  “Not in the flesh, William. But I have seen claws like these among the many bones unearthed at Mammoth Lick, not an hour’s ride from here. I shall take you there tomorrow morning.”

  Uncle and I shared an excited glance. Judge Ravenel unrolled a vellum map and spread it on his desk. This map showed the states of Ohio River drainage and the unincorporated Mississippi Territory to the south. I slid the candle closer.

  “I have heard tales of monstrous large beasts lurking here,” the judge said, pointing to a blank area that would not become the state of Alabama for another decade and an half. “Men of good reputation have come back from this wilderness bearing all manner of strange reports,” our host went on, “of unknown animals, of Welsh-speaking savages, even of mermaids. One ranger, now thought mad, says he supped at the very table of the exiled king of France.”

  Uncle chuckled at this drollery and the judge joined him.

  “What is this waterway here?” I inquired, tracing my finger down a north-flowing tributary of the Ohio.

  “The Tennessee, called by some the River of Misery, for it is a hotbed of ague and southern fevers.”

  “Is it navigable?”

  “Yes, and with a mild current in this season. But little is known about its upper reaches except that the Choctaw dwell there, a most obdurately uncongenial nation,” he understated with a half-hearted smile. “Perhaps that is the haunt of this beast you are seeking.”

  “Thomas thinks so,” Uncle said, alluding to the President. “I expect that Sammy and I shall have a look down that way.”

  Judge Ravenel did not condescend to warn us to be careful. It was taken for granted on the frontier that men penetrated wild country at their own peril, and to remind them of it was considered fatuous.

  There next arose—with the second bottle of Madeira—the question of our resupply. Judge Ravenel promised to furnish us with all our needs, from pistols to salt pork. He decried the chaotic money situation west of the Cumberland Gap. Every coinage but that of the United States was in circulation here. The standard currency was the Spanish gold dollar. Of banknotes there were practically none, and what served in their place was ludicrous: grain warehouse receipts, assignable and passed from person to person as currency; also mortgages, land warrants, bills of lading, letters of credit, IOUs—everything but laundry lists, the judge joked ruefully.

  “You have, of course, heard by now of our Louisiana purchase?” our host said almost off-handedly, as if the news were universally known.

  “Only rumors,” said I.

  “Well, it is a fact,” he avouched proudly. “The Mississippi Valley and the teeming prairies are ours. Why, you look dismayed, William.”

  “Was it not sold to Imperial Russia?” he ventured.

  “Russia? What an idea!”

  “Such are the rumors that have come our way,” I explained airily, while poor Uncle harked back upon our late interview with Mr. Jefferson and how his old friend had deceived him with a bare face.

  Soon, however, even this blow was allayed by the judge’s wine. At midnight, the two old soldiers were reminiscing of the War of Independence and their youthful exploits under General Washington. It was good to see Uncle his merry old self again after our recent hardships. At length, we all three began to yawn uncontrollably. A courtly old house-slave was summoned to conduct us upstairs, where beds of fresh linen awaited us—luxury unutterable!

  In the morning, after the best night’s sleep I ever enjoyed, we ate breakfast on the verandah, amid hummingbirds and honeysuckle. With double helpings of souffléd eggs, Lewis County cob-smoked ham, hominy cakes slathered in butter, and the daintiest strawberries bathed in sweet cream all tucked ’neath our belts, we set out on Judge Ravenel’s spirited Virginia-bred steeds for Mammoth Lick.

  It had lately been exploited as a commercial salt operation by one Micah Peavy, another Virginia migrant like most Kentuckians, brawny and lean at about fifty. He evinced some rue at having invested in the forty-five-kettle operation, which, he told us frankly, had yet to turn a decent profit. But he was a man of inquiring mind, if little education, and he had saved all the bones that his excavations fetched up. He had found spear points embedded in some of the bones, he said, indicating that the lick had been an Indian slaughtering ground at one time. We were led to a simple shed that Peavy had built to keep the bones out of the rain.

  They were thrown together in various heaps, by size and type rather than by individual skeleton. Here was a pile of huge thigh bones, there a heap of ribs, there a stack of jawbones, vertebrae, and boxes of smaller oddments, such as digits. The “horns” (i.e., the tusks) of these colossi Peavy said he kept at a secret place, under lock and key, these being “old ivory” and “worth a small fortune.”

  Uncle and I were permitted to rummage about at our pleasure, and sure enough, in one of those odds-and-ends crates we found a telltale claw of megatherium, just like the one Mr. Jefferson had shown us at Washington. Uncle passed it to Judge Ravenel, who ran his forefinger up the long, burnished blade.

  “I wouldn’t go looking for the owner of this saber without a small-bore cannon and a cart of grapeshot,” he observed humorously.

  Peavy told us it was the claw of a gargantuan cave bear, upwards of twenty feet tall standing on its hind legs, and that he had spoken to Chickasaws who claimed to have encountered such titans in their country to the south. I took out my sketch and showed it to him, furnishing as well a brief commentary on the beast’s true nature.

  “A ground sloth…?” Peavy frowned doubtingly and shook his head. “Why would the good Lord arm it with claws like these?”

  “To rake trees of their foliage,” I proposed.

  “Naw,” he disagreed, “these are weapons, meant to slice and maim.”

  “You could say the same about a farmer’s sickle,” I countered.

  “Well reasoned, Sammy,” Uncle said.

  Peavy squinted at the sketch again, then looked at each of us in turn, and with a twinkle in his eye said, “’Tis an ugly son of a bitch, whatever it is, ain’t it though?” and handed back my portrait.

  We tarried at Judge Ravenel’s lovely estate two days more, resting, devouring his tasty victuals, and refitting our vessel. Finally, it was time to say goodbye. Uncle and his old comrade embraced at the quay, and joked that if Providence prevented them from meeting again in this world, then they should seek each other out in the next, which was sure to be a better one. But ’neath this show of merriment I detected that both men had tears in their eyes as we cast off into the current.

  From Wildwood below stinking Babylon to Louisville and its famous falls was a five-day float. The second morning we came upon the fourteen-year-old settlement of Cincinnati, located on the Ohio side of the river opposite the mouth of Kentucky’s Licking River. We were reluctant to stop there lest it turn out to be another squalid pit of barbarism like Babylon, but found that we must do so in order to purchase a new set of specimen containers and were delighted to find it a very clean village by frontier standards. This we attributed to the influence of Fort Washington, a garrison of an hundred-odd soldiers, their officers gentlemen who were able to impose a semblance of decorum on the human rubbish who came to dwell in town. Here, we purchased as tasty a dinner as ever I ate, at Hurley’s Indian Queen tavern, being a saddle of spring lamb, fresh lima beans, early sweet corn, and mulberry tarts, all washed down with cataracts of very good ale. Uncle and I had become gourmands. Soon, we realized, we would be back on a diet of game, fish, and wild botanicals. While I can stomach a cattail tuber or a ragout of opossum, I much
prefer a plate of succulent radishes, or minted new peas laved in fresh butter, or even a gherkin plucked fresh from the garden vine—don’t you?

  Once again, the hypnosis of stately flotation in perfect weather lulled us into a state of the most absorbing serenity. On the morning of June 21, we heard the distant rumble of the falls and not long after sighted ahead the whitewashed houses of Louisville, a town about the same size as Cincinnati—roughly three hundred white males and their families and perhaps twice that number of slaves. We could tell at once that the town’s state of refinement was at the same swinish level as Babylon.

  Of the seven retail establishments on its main street, five were taverns and one was a billiards parlor. The dusty street itself was lavishly littered with stable sweepings, kitchen refuse, wood shavings, leavings, and dead animals, including an horse that had lain in the road long enough for loose hogs to begin rooting in its putrefying carcass. Though it was a Tuesday and before noontime, we saw fully a dozen drunkards lurching on the sidewalks or sprawled in the gutter.

  Amid these vignettes of low-life we did not wish to tarry, but stayed only so long as necessary to engage a pilot to guide us through the falls. These pilots were licensed by the county, and we were given the names of several reputable ones by the most visibly respectable citizen of the town, a prim, sober merchant named Ames who operated the sole business in town not devoted to debauchery—a store, where, by heavens, I bought a pound of chocolate filberts!

  We found our pilot, Joseph Watts, at his office near the wharves, where he served as deputy of the inspection station. A sober, sinewy man bout thirty-five, he agreed to the job at its going rate of three gold dollars—out of the seven we had remaining from our loan of twelve from Judge Ravenel—but warned us that we were into the season of low water, when sharp beaks of rocks become visible and the passage is especially dangerous. We replied that the risk was acceptable, and so we set out at once to run the falls.