London, April to September 1822
MY GUIDE and I mounted our horses again. Our route, which now became more and more grueling, was marked only by a line of felled trees. The trunks of these trees served as bridges over streams and fascines over bogs. The American population was then moving toward the Genesee land grants, which sold for a higher or lower price depending on the quality of the soil and the trees, and on the course and abundance of the waters.
It has been observed that settlers are often preceded in the woods by honeybees: the vanguard of farmers, they are the symbol of the industry and civilization they announce. Strangers to America, having arrived in the wake of Columbus’s sails, these peaceable conquerors have robbed the New World’s flowers only of those treasures that the natives did not know how to use, and they have made use of these treasures only to enrich the soil from which they harvested them.
The clearings on both sides of the path that we traveled offered a curious mixture of nature and civilization. In the depths of a forest that had never heard anything but the screams of savages and the bellowing of wild beasts, we came across a plowed field; from this same vantage point, we might also see an Indian wigwam and a planter’s dwelling. Some of these dwellings, already finished, recalled tidy Dutch farmhouses; others were not yet half completed and had no roof but the sky.
I was welcomed into these houses, the work of a morning, where I often found a family with all sorts of European accoutrements, mahogany furniture, a piano, carpets, and mirrors a stone’s throw from an Iroquois hut. At night, when the servants had come back from the woods and the fields with their hatchets and their hoes, the windows were thrown open. My host’s daughters, their pretty blond hair in ringlets, would sing the duet from Paisello’s Pandolfetto or one of Cimarosa’s cantabiles in sight of the wilderness and sometimes to the murmur of a waterfall.
On the best sites, market towns had been built. The spires of new churches soared from the depths of an ancient forest. As English customs follow the English wherever they go, after crossing miles and miles of country where there was no trace of habitation, I would see the wooden sign of an inn swinging from the branch of a tree. Trappers, planters, and Indians converged at these caravansaries. The first time I stayed at one, I swore it would be the last.
Entering one of these hostelries, I stood dumbfounded by the sight of an immense bed built in a circle around a post. Each traveler took his place on this bed with his feet against the center-post and his head at the circumference of the circle, so that the sleepers were arranged symmetrically, like the spokes of a wheel or the sticks of a fan. After some hesitation, having established that nobody was there, I inserted myself into this contraption. I was just beginning to doze when I felt something sliding against me: it was the leg of my big Dutchman. Never in my life have I experienced a greater horror. I leapt out of this hospitable basket, heartily cursing the customs of our good old forefathers, and went to sleep in my cloak beneath the moonlight, out where the traveler’s bedfellow was nothing less than agreeable, fresh, and pure.
On the bank of the Genesee, we found a ferry. A troupe of settlers and Indians crossed the river with us. We camped in meadows slathered with butterflies and flowers. In our various costumes, our different groups around the fire, our horses tethered or grazing nearby, we had the look of a caravan. It was there that I encountered the rattlesnake that let itself be charmed by the sound of a flute. The Greeks would have transformed my Canadian into Orpheus, his flute into a lyre, and the snake into Cerberus, or perhaps Eurydice.