“Yes,” Uncle mumbled. “Louisiana would be the place for it. All that prairie … high grass … Corps of … piffle…!”
Then he was snoring.
The fearsome skeleton glowered up at me from the page in Cuvier’s monograph. Soon, the great beast, scimitar claws clacking, began to lumber through my imagination. I turned up the wick of the lamp and dipped my nib into the inkwell.
“Why, this is a splendid portrait, Samuel!” the President declared. “It is just as I imagined megatherium. Magnificent!”
It was a few minutes past noon the next day. There was to be no luncheon, however, for Mr. Jefferson was dyspeptic. As for the portrait, I believe in truth it fell somewhat short of the President’s glowing testimonial. For the result of my night’s labor resembled not so much any noble beast apt to emblemize a nation’s honor but rather a gigantic furry garden slug; a fat and shapeless brute with a tail like a sausage, forefeet like unto canoe paddles tipped with daggers, and a fleshy snout that called to mind a bee-stung swine. Jefferson doted upon it at great length, however, holding the sketch to the light at different angles and admiring it with encomiums at which even Uncle winced.
“O proud and massive ruminant …! O modest giant …! O noble genus …!”
Nor did it stop there. For so inspired was he by the sketch that he launched into a visionary discourse of America transformed by megatherium: of a fabulous international trade in megatherium furs; of French ladies in ground sloth coats; of gentlemen in sloth hats; of vast industries, whole economies, based upon the enormous pelts; of wagons creaking northward under heaps of them; of great ranches established for the propagation of them, with selected Indian tribes trained as sloth herdsmen; of tanneries and factories….
Indeed, this performance was so strange and compelling that for the third time in as many days I was constrained to utterly revise my opinion of the President’s character. For where I first thought him a diabolical hypocrite, then a multitalented Machiavel, I now perceived him as a lunatic polymorph—and fretted both for my country and my own fate in the unknown adventure ahead. This impression was only reinforced when Uncle inquired of his “dear friend” Mr. Jefferson about the pending expedition of those two officers, Clark and Lewis, and the President tried to feign ignorance of them.
“But … but they were in this very office just yesterday, Thomas—”
“O, them,” Jefferson pretended to only now recall. “They are but a smokescreen to conceal the activities of the truly important mission, which is your own.”
“Yes, of course,” Uncle accepted the assertion, “but how is it they are commissioned at twenty-five hundred dollars for fifty men whilst we receive a mere hundred dollars?”
“Is that what they told you?” Jefferson said, his jaw dropping with incredulity. “Twenty-five hundred dollars?”
“’Pon my oath, they did, sir.”
“’Tis sheer posh and piddle, William. They are but a party of two at fifty dollars entire.”
“They are?” Uncle shook with glee. “O, Thomas, thou art as full of cunning as the red fox (Vulpes fulva)! Ho ho, a joke on those two! And they are not going to Louisiana?”
“Is that what they told you?”
“’Pon my honor, sir, they did.”
“They are dispatched to Maine,” Jefferson said. “To take an inventory of standing timber.”
“Ho ho!” Uncle was now nearly beside himself with delight. “And the government has not purchased French Louisiana?”
“Heavens no!” Jefferson said, his eyes darting wildly all over the room. “Bonaparte will sell that wasteland to Imperial Russia.”
The rest of that day’s interview was a brief rehash of our mission, salutes to it, to Uncle and myself, to our republic, et cetera, and a fond farewell. Then, with an hundred dollars of the taxpayers’ gold in our purse, Uncle and I departed Washington City for the transriverine wilderness.
2
On April 13, 1803, Uncle and I set out across the budding Maryland countryside north to Pennsylvania; there struck the Lancaster Pike, traversed the Allegheny Mountains by coach and upon foot, and arrived in the booming town of Pittsburgh astride its three rivers on April 19.
There we set about procuring all the necessaries for our long trip, beginning with the most important item: a boat. The crafts typical of the great inland rivers of that day were quite different from the graceful sailing ships and boats of my coastal home. In general, these river craft comprised a class of clumsy arks. One type was the ubiquitous flatboat, a sort of floating box of great cargo capacity, built in a slapdash manner—for these were strictly one-way vessels, meant to drift downstream only and then be broken apart at the final destination. But they were cheap and much favored by settlers headed down the Ohio Valley. Larger flatboats, called broadhorns or Kentucky or New Orleans boats, carried commercial loads, and we saw some behemoths as long as 125 feet, with sweeps, or steering oars, cut from entire trees.
The boat we required, and engaged to be built, was another popular craft, called a keelboat. With a curving hull and pointed bow and stern, the keelboat could be poled upstream in a slow current or hauled from the bank by means of a rope or cordelle. It was more maneuverable than any kind of flatboat—though no match for the crudest Long Island fisherman’s dory—but its term of service was expected to exceed a mere one-way float.
Now there were many persons at Pittsburgh whose business was the accommodation of strangers descending the river. Uncle and I spent two full days haunting the boatyards. The prices, we learned, were uniform, being $1.25 per running foot for a flatboat and $3.00 PRF for a keelboat. The smallest keelboat any builder would undertake was a twenty-five-footer. While such a sized boat answered our needs, simple arithmetic shows that the cost would run to $75, or three quarters of our entire expeditionary budget. (It had already cost us $12 in coach fares to reach Pittsburgh, while our lodging and board ran 25 cents each per day). Uncle was not a rich man, but nor was he a poor one, and it became clear that he would have to underwrite himself the partial cost of this expedition. It galled him, but to dispose of the matter he made up his mind that it were the same as his previous botanical excursions, paid out of his own pocket, and that would be the end of it. In fact, he had brought another $100 in gold of his personal funds, whilst I had $7.12 of my own—or should I say of Papa’s.
This decision reached, we ordered just such a keelboat as I have described at the yard of Charles Axley & Sons; and in the five days required for its construction, we set about procuring all the other necessaries for our journey: biscuit, flour, meal, bacon, sugar, molasses, two Pennsylvania rifles, two muskets, a fowling gun, four pistols, a cask of Monongahela whiskey, blankets, boots, specimen jars (Uncle had a standing contract with Cheatham, the London apothecary, to supply them specimens of herbs, roots, berries, et cetera), and last we laid in an assortment of gewgaws to mollify the savages we expected to meet upon our unknown way.
The great day of our departure came. (For some reason, I was surprised that all the inhabitants of Pittsburgh did not drop their business, declare the occasion a holiday, and see us off from the quay with trumpets and waving handkerchiefs.) We shoved off into the current with no more audience than Charles Axley, Boatwright, and his two assistants. Even so, my heart, like the magnificent river, was full to o’erflowing.
With both Uncle and I at the sweeps, our solid little craft bobbed on the swollen Ohio past the small whitewashed towns downstream and a teeming of other river craft, including many small skiffs and gundalows. Collisions threatened at every turn, and learning to maneuver the bulky keelboat was an adventure in itself. Yet everyone we passed, even those we almost plowed over or banged into, was filled with the same bursting exuberance as we, and not a man failed to cry out, “where are ye bound for, friends?” to which we replied, with equal zest, “the Unknown!”
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