CHAPTER ONE

NEWS TRAVELS. Slowly. But it travels.

Scraps ride on canoes sliding down the Ohio, fly on the flèches of Shawnee arrows, burrow in packs strapped on horses carrying wanderers from Pennsylvania or the old coast colonies or heartland Virginia, where the land is worn out and crowded, or on hand-drawn maps in the pockets of farmers, woodsmen, ne’er-do-wells, craftsmen, apothecaries, disinherited sons, demobilized soldiers—and their wives and sisters and daughters—all gone West to see the lay of the land—the land of milk and honey: Kentucky—the promised land on the other side of the mountains, pierced by only one crossing, Cumberland Gap, where a wide buffalo-trampled trail—sometimes called the Warriors’ Trace—leads at length and arduously to well-watered green prairies, land for the asking or just for the taking, according to the slowly traveling news.

By 1778 news had come to the little settlement of Greenbrier that Virginia’s laws now allotted five hundred acres to each settler on the remote and dangerous frontier, with two hundred acres added for each slave brought west, up to a possible total of four thousand acres, all this to any white man who would journey over the mountains, plant a crop and put up a cabin and survey his boundary to establish his claim, and men who had served in the Indian wars could claim even more.

Margaret’s husband, John Paulee, had fought White Bark and the Iroquois Confederacy in the Indian Wars in 1714. He had been awarded four hundred acres at Polly’s Bend on the Kentucky River and began to nourish expectations. He knew he was owed more than the meager living he was scratching out on a small patch of nearly ruined land in the Greenbrier Settlement on the western edge of Virginia.

Early in the summer of 1779, John and Margaret had heard that D. Boone (“D. Boon,” as he spelled it—it was said he killed a “bar” [bear] carved on a tree) had already explored the territory to the west and lived to tell the story of a land where every seed you put in the ground sprouted and grew. Boone had brought his family out to the fort at Harrodsburg and had survived captivity by the Shawnee. Now he was getting ready to depart on another expedition.

John knew neighbors who had already pulled up stakes and gone out with every relative and friend they could persuade, loading pack animals with household plunder, driving cattle and horses, whooping and waving as they left the Greenbrier Settlement—and all that summer wives and mothers, daughters, and sisters had listened to the stories, knowing their fate would soon be decided by husbands, brothers, or sons desiring more: more land, and better, more money from the sale of crops and hides, more risk—and that last was as potent an attraction as the first.

John had been complaining to Margaret that they were losing their chance for the betterment on which they had based their marriage three years earlier: not the hardscrabble life they had endured growing up in Virginia but the expansive hope and adventure of the West.

Now Margaret learned her fate: John said they were leaving on September 23, 1779, a day after Boone and his party planned to go.

Margaret tried to draw him back. She never could be said to resist, but she reminded him that their first child, a daughter, so sickly she was not expected to live and so had not been named, was only a few months old and Margaret’s milk failing. She reminded John of the horrors—bad news travels faster than good: it was only a year since Boone’s son James had been captured by a Shawnee hunting party, tortured and tomahawked in the Powell Valley, his mutilated body left for his father to find and bury.

John told her that the time of such atrocities had passed. The war they now called Lord Dunmore’s after the royal governor of Virginia, had been short and decisive for the tribes, with their defeat at Point Pleasant and the treaty of Fort Stanwix ceding their lands; the British, who had planned to seize those lands, were in retreat, and the French had also been driven off. Now, John told her, neighbors were pressing their claims to the good land on the other side of the mountains, and settled September weather would be perfect for their venture.

He had already cajoled his brother Alan and Alan’s wife, Agatha, to come along. Two young men, Ben Goodall and Steven Shoemaker, not yet encumbered with family, had signed on as well. Safety lay in numbers, John told Margaret, who was still hesitating (he laid her unusual timidity down to her fear for her child), and with a party of six, four of them armed men, they would traverse the mountains in safety.

Margaret studied his face and knew she had no recourse but to accept. She’d seen him listening to the travelers’ tales, not so much listening, Margaret thought—three years married but still noticing—as jumping at the news, grabbing it, strangling it like a baby bird—not that John would do such a thing, but he did have strong hands on the hoe and the pickax, although he was less certain on the flintlock, which he handled like a flower.

Later, much later, Margaret would think of that—the flintlock waving in John’s hands like the too-long stem of a tulip.

From the day they met, she’d known John had the itching foot. He’d complained almost as soon as their cabin was raised of seeing smoke from neighbors, hearing the crack of axes splitting firewood, even smelling burnt corncob coffee every morning, acrid and strong.

This, Margaret disputed. She disputed very little else.

Now she began to prepare. Their old buffalo robes must be rolled up and secured with twine—she practiced on one, making sure to get it tight—their blankets bundled together, one feather bed mashed into a ball, tallow candles packed in saddlebags along with fire-flints, the griddle, the jerky from hams cured the previous fall brought in from the smokehouse, corn for the four cows and two horses hulled and packed in homespun bags she sewed herself, and with each task moving closer to September 23, she packed a prayer, a simple word or two: Lord, deliver.

Her husband, John, was not a Believer. Margaret knew he put his faith in the strength of his back, his swift running in moccasins, his weeklong hunts without sufficient food or water, the winter he was lost and kept himself alive in a hollow tree.

He’d begun in the evenings to fashion boots for Margaret, measuring each of her feet with his hand. The boots were soft deerskin, stitched carefully with a big needle and leather thong. John Paulee was good at such tasks.

Margaret also had her skills: a dab hand with a needle, all mending, sewing, and knitting easy and even a pleasure; tough slabs of venison soaked and simmered to perfection; her mother’s knowledge of herbs and tinctures to heal every illness under the sun—but above all, and this she would not claim out loud—her smile, her laugh, the sunniness that shone every day as she sang at her work:

In Scotland town where I was born…

I gave my love a cherry without a stone…

There were three gypsies a-come to my door…

Equally precious although not equally prized by all were her book learning, her neat hand with a quill pen, the time she spent in the evening after chores reading a few pages of their two books, The Pilgrim’s Progress and Poor Richard’s Almanack. Her mother had seen to her children’s schooling even in the wilderness, finding and paying a widow woman to put them through their sums and recite the lessons in their chapbooks.

Margaret had proved strong enough to endure her first labor and birth almost in silence, as she had promised herself. Nothing, she knew, would ever make her scream, not even, she believed, the agony of Boone’s tortured son, begging the Shawnee to put him out of his misery.

But she knew for this journey she would need to be stronger still.

She began to haul pails of water from the town spring slung on a yoke across her shoulders, not only for her own family but for five or six neighbors. She labored to dig from the hard dirt of their garden patch the potatoes they would carry. She gathered all the blackberries she could find, dried them in batches on top of the wood stove, and mashed them with venison to make the hard pemmican they would soak in water to eat on the trail. Her arms and shoulders became stronger by riding every day, and she came to master her skittish bay mare, Jenny.

She liked to see herself at her tasks—it pleased her heart—her calico skirt flaring over her boots as she strode along, two pails swinging and dripping from her yoke. Her mother, Nancy, if she’d known, would have scolded her for vanity, but Margaret believed there were worse sins, although she could not have named them. Every night she washed her long arms and broad shoulders in a basin of water warmed at the fire, her skin pale and fine because protected from the sun, and when she had a moment, she brushed out her long light brown hair and admired her pointed face and blue eyes reflected in the pane of glass in the cabin window. John, catching her at it, smiled as though he knew that age and work would break her of all such displays, but Margaret was sure she would swing her skirts and brush out her hair even in the hard times they would encounter on the trail.

One evening as she rode through the home fields behind her cabin, memories of her father streamed back: how on their earlier allotment further south in Virginia he had offered her a crumb of the black ploughed earth on the tip of his finger, and she, a small girl trained to obey, had eaten it, not knowing what she was tasting for or why; and how, three years later, after they removed to the Greenbriar, he had offered her a crumb again and it had been gray and sandy-tasting. Seeing the face she made, he’d thrown his hoe on the ground—”Tobacco done ruint it!”—and never worked that field again. The tiny corn and squash seedlings he’d started wilted and died in the furrows during the hot summer. His death in a hunting accident had followed soon afterward.

Another evening she walked to Old Will’s cabin, their nearest neighbor, to deliver his pail of water. She found the old man girdling a large sycamore at the edge of his home field. Dropping his ax when he saw her, Old Will complained, “Never come to this durned place to farm. Come ’cause gold was sprinkled on the surface of the ground, or so they claimed.” He took her pail, emptied it into his trough, and thanked her curtly. “No more gold on this poor earth than back in Dorset, and now the durned tobacco took everything.” Margaret passed on without replying.

Old Will’s complaints were so familiar that no response seemed needed. She shifted her yoke to equalize her burden and turned on the footpath through the woods that led to the James Tyler cabin.

As she walked, she savored the new power in her shoulders, no longer galled as they had been at first by the weight of the rough wood yoke. Strengthened and enlivened by the prospect of change, she began to relish the oncoming adventure.

As she delivered her water to the Tyler cabin, she wondered if the day would come when this log cabin, hardly more than two sheds joined by an open dog trot, would be replaced by a brick house such as the ones she had seen on their trip up from lowland Virginia. Here the most substantial building she passed was Matthew’s Trading Post, where she hailed a woman coming out with a bag of ground corn, delivered once a week from the grist mill across the valley. It was too early for the men to gather; later, after their work was done, a dozen or more would congregate to drink watered rum with sugar—bumbo, they called it—and play cards. It was a disorderly place and she was grateful that John seldom went there.

Next she passed the little fort, just a square of wooden fences with a watch tower at each corner. The previous fall they’d had to fly there after a scout came warning of an Indian attack: he’d seen a bunch of Shawnee coming up the Kanawha River, painted for war. The Greenbrier settlers had stayed in the fort overnight until it seemed the warring party had passed on down the river without stopping. That year had come to be called the Year of the Bloody Sevens because of the number of attacks, the Shawnee fighting back fiercely as they were pushed ever farther west.

Margaret had felt more than relief when they returned to their cabin. It was the first time she’d known she loved the place, small and poor as it was.

And now they were about to leave it without any hope of ever returning.