Chapter 2 - THE WILDERNESS TRAIL

AD his fields been in corn, Johnny could have sold or aban- doned them and journeyed west- ward on the crest of that ex- alted mood. But with a nursery a man must keep faith from sea- son to season, and hold his plantation in trust for the community he serves. He could not sell to the first or highest bidder, but only to the man who was best fitted to continue his work in Pittsburg. Then he had to tarry until autumn for the ripening of seeds ; spend the winter in gleaning them at scattered farm cider-mills, and delay his going until the frost was coming out of the ground. But the orchardist must know how to wait, for other sowers reap ten times before he gathers his first harvest. Blossom-time had almost come



'round again before Johnny was off on his lifelong mission in the wilderness.

It was not until fall that he parted with his little Eden for a sum that would barely out- fit him for travel  that would buy him a good horse and saddle, leather saddle-bags to hold safe and dry quite a bushel of apple-seeds, a blanket and a rifle. Of food he meant to carry only a small bag of meal and a lump of salt. Gun and fishing-tackle must sup- ply his needs. For the rest, he had the light hoe, rake and hatchet that had grown to his hand, a coil of rope and a hunting-knife. Flint and steel for fire-building were in his pouch with his Bible and the small sum of money that he had collected on his notes.

About money Johnny was in no way con- cerned. It would be of less use to him than courage and resource, and the co-operation and faith of the many people, both around Pittsburg and in Ohio, to whom he must look for help. Seeds were his first necessity  seeds in quantity limited only by his ability to gather, carry and plant them, and for as many years as the West might require to grow its own supply.

The task he had set himself was appalling,but the result was assured. He had but to sow a hundred seeds for one to survive to the transplanting; set out ten trees to bring one to the age of bearing, and grow an uncertain number of those to secure one of value. Most of his seedling trees, he knew, would revert to their wild ancestry. Only now and then would one come true to its variety or develop some rare perfection of its own. And budding and grafting must long be as impossible in the backwoods as they were for the Pil- grims of the Mayflower. But it was thus that, in spite of stony ground, bitter cli- mate and Indian wars, orchards blushed and fruited within a generation in every col- ony of New England. The West must re- ward his devotion much more quickly and generously.

Since the best investment he could make of his walletful of notes was to put them into men's good -will, Johnny tucked them under the front logs of glowing fireplaces be- fore the eyes of the poor farmers who had given them. And to men who protested that they still owed him, he said:

" You owe orchards to pioneers in the back- woods. Let me collect the debt in seeds and

in a winter night's lodging now and then for the next twenty years or so."

With that he went whistling to the heap of fermenting or frozen pomace with an iron soap-kettle of warm water to wash out the seeds. There, in an open pole shack or under the bare trees, he worked in wind or rain, snow or bitter cold. At nightfall he brought in a small measure of sorted seed, for he saved only the brightest and plumpest, and spread them on the chimney-shelf to dry.

One place exhausted, he shouldered his bag and tramped to the next. Now and then he lay out among the hills to harden himself to danger and exposure, or in times of spiritual stress to keep a vigil with the stars. In that first winter of wandering in the sparsely set- tled and drift -filled valleys about Pittsburg he grew lean and long of stride, and his eyes took on the look of one who sees no hard or hindering circumstance, but only the distant and splendid goal.

Except in moments of excitement, Johnny was a man of brief and diffident speech. It was only by accident that he fully revealed his unworldly and perilous scheme of life, and won the approval of more prudent friends.

In reading of the miracle of the loaves and fishes to an illiterate family, about a fire where apples sputtered in a spicy row, he had a vision of his orchard multiplied. Then his dark-gray eyes went black and luminous. Words tumbled out in one of those cataracts of eloquence with which he now and then swept away three generations of men on floods of poetic and religious feeling for his self- imposed task. Until far into the night he talked of his mission. God and one man were going to bring about that miracle, and feed the multitude in the wilderness with comfort and beauty.

At mill and store, and wherever people hailed one another on land and water high- way, the story was repeated. With surprising rapidity and accuracy of report it spread over the region and touched the imagination and so- cial conscience of all manner of men. Here was a thing to which the right thinking must lend a hand. So, even before he had started on his first journey, Johnny had become a matter of public pride and concern, a beloved figure about whom a legend had begun to grow.

But there was no one to see him off, and the world was stripped to the elements of bleak

weather, bare woods and leaden waters, on the dark winter morning when Johnny rode down to the ferry landing to meet the star- route post-rider. It had been urged upon him as safest to cover the first stage of the journey with the mail-carrier, who, in the last year, had been making the round trip once a week to the new settlement of a blacksmith shop and floating mill at Zanesville. Thence he could drop, from one cluster of cabins to another, down the Muskingum.

To have the longest planting season possible he was obliged to go out thus, ahead of the spring tide of migration, for the red maple often blossomed late in February at Marietta, and the Judas-tree in March. By traveling fast and working his way on the flatboats of home-seekers, and on the freight-pirogues that carried salt and gunpowder to the remotest clearings on the larger tributaries, he could put in seeds near most of the white settle- ments in Ohio. The red tribes still held the Northwest and, in winter, ranged their an- cient hunting-grounds in the eastern foot-hills within a day's ride out of Pittsburg.

During the summer, when no planting could be done, Johnny meant to search out scat-tered clearings along the smaller waterways and trails to the Indian border. In October and November he would put in what seeds he had left along the route of his return for a new supply. The winter months he must spend among the cider-mills, and late Feb- ruary must see him on the wilderness trail. Until there were orchards in the new West he might not see blossoming or fruiting apple- trees again.

There had been a thaw and then a freeze. Gales had swept the hilltops bare, but snow still lay in the forest and in shrinking patches in the hollows. Once across the Allegheny, where the ferry nosed its way through floating ice and muddy slush, the rough-shod horses picked their way over the iron ruts and around the shivering pools of the Great Trail.

The cutting of this military road through a hundred miles of unbroken woods, for a forced march of kilted Highlanders to the meadows of the Muskingum, was a wonder tale of the breaking of the power of Pontiac. Unused for thirty years and obliterated by new growth, it had been reopened, after Wayne's victory in 1794, by a peaceful army of home-seekers only five years before Johnny

began his mission. It was still, with the ex- ception of the larger waterways, the only way of travel in the forests west of Pittsburg of which eagles were aware.

To the mouth of Beaver Creek it defiled along the north bank of the river. There the Ohio dropped away to the south, while the road ran westward along the watershed. Travel over it was nearly all in one direction. Its only purpose was to cleave a way to the first navigable stream in the heart of a wil- derness that had engulfed forty thousand unreturning pioneers. There were no settle- ments or even isolated cabins along this road that was walled by wild flood and gigantic trees. No alien sound was heard by the travelers besides the occasional crack of the red man's rifle in the hills.

All day the horses scrambled up and down the rough ridges ; plunged into the black mold and dense thickets of tangled gullies; stum- bled around splintered and root-buttressed stumps; struggled across corduroyed bogs; raced trembling over thawing quicksands, 'and splashed through creeks that foamed and chuckled under the marble-white arches of leafless sycamores. Fording-places were un-certain, for after every freshet mud-bars shifted up or down stream. When one could not be found the crossing had to be made at a riffle, often with a precipitous approach, where the horses were in danger of pitching their riders headlong or of breaking their own legs.

At nightfall the travelers camped in one of those oases of the forest  a natural "opening " that sloped to a creek-bank and was girdled by tall trees. The horses were belled and turned loose to feed on the scant growth of grass and buffalo clover that had sprung up in the late thaw. Then, while the post-rider went hunting, Johnny built a fire of drift- wood and found a dry cache for the mail and seed bags in a hollow tree. It was a half- hour after the report of the gun before the man returned to camp with a brace of venison steaks and the freshly flayed skin of a buck.

"You killed a deer to make a meal for two men?" asked Johnny. He was willing to take what life he must to sustain his own, but he hated to see any living thing de- stroyed needlessly, or any useful thing wasted.

The mail-carrier laughed and slapped his thigh in huge enjoyment. "Say, Johnny,

didn't you know it was a public duty to make game scarce along this road? Travel will be safer when them thieving redskins are obliged to leave this neck of the woods. Yep, there'll be trouble, you bet. Indians al- ways fight before they move west." He lit his pipe and considered Johnny with affectionate concern. "See here, Johnny, you don't want to have anything to do with them red devils."

Johnny said nothing, but he could not eat of the venison. He caught a fish in the creek and baked a hoe-cake. Long after the other man slept he lay thinking how he and his mission were involved in the wrongs and hos- tilities that had imperiled life and work on every American frontier. And when he was awakened in the night by the snarling of wolves over the dead buck, this wild way over which he must journey year after year be- came a place of pitiless betrayal of peaceful things that asked only to go about their business unmolested. This year's leaves might well drift over him, and he and his dream of service to his generation lie slain and for- gotten on the leaf-mold, the ancient death- bed of the woods.

In the morning his horse was gone. Thebell and the shapeless prints of moccasined feet were found in the wet moss of that charm- ing glade, where the first venturesome robin hopped and chirped in the pale winter sun- shine. This was a calamity that he had not foreseen.

The mail-carrier was in one of those flaming rages of retaliation that, in white men and red, have started every border war. "It's murder to steal a man's horse in these woods. If it was mine I'd get it back if I had to fol- low the dirty thief to his village at Sandusky or Piqua and fill his copper-colored hide with buckshot."

"I have no quarrel with any man," said Johnny.

"O Lord!" He shrugged his shoulders in disgust. "The first time you get a shot from behind a tree you'll change your mind about that. Well, camp here. I'll be back in four days. We'll cache all the plunder but the mail, and you can ride double with me to Pittsburg and get another horse."

Johnny could not consider this. "My seeds would mildew if they were buried a week or so. And I haven't enough money to buy a horse."



"Then you'll have to wait for a caravan to pick you up. The first emigrants will be along in a couple of weeks."

"I must be in Marietta by that time. Good-by, and better luck to you."

"You talk like a fool!" The man leaped to the saddle angrily, mounted to the trail, and rode away. The United States mail could not be delayed; and he reflected that, with a horse-load of baggage, Johnny had no choice but to stay where he was. But a mile up the road he recalled the something in Johnny's look that had alarmed him, and came pounding back.

"Johnny, you've got to camp here. There are more Indians farther west. I didn't know there was a redskin near here, or I wouldn't 'a' killed that buck. I done you a bad turn."

Johnny looked up at him with a glow of warm feeling as he remembered the many stories of this man's bravery, resourcefulness and faithfulness to duty. In spite of storm and flood, accidents to horses, treachery of Indians and encounters with wild animals, he had always brought the mail-bag through.

"Then you'll do me a good turn and take my seeds to Zanesville. You know Isaac

Stadden, the German farmer who went out from Pittsburg last year. His clearing is near the mouth of the Licking River. Leave the saddle-bags with him, and tell him I will be there within a week to plant the first nursery in the Northwest Territory on his farm."

The man went white. "Why, good Heav- ens, Johnny, this road kills horses! There are wolf -packs, and the first band of Indians you met would strip you to your shirt and lose you in the woods."

"I'll get through somehow. Good -by!" There was in Johnny's look the pale exalta- tion of the fanatic who is not to be turned from his purpose. He smiled and waved his coonskin cap as long as the slowly departing rider was in view.

He had begun to make a drag-litter which he could pull, after the manner of an Indian pony, and use to raft his baggage across streams. But now, lightened of his seeds, he made up his tools, his food-pouch and his blanket into a compact bundle with the rope. Shouldering his gun and his pack, he climbed to the trail.

All day he toiled up innumerable ridges, and then ran down, for this foot-hill country

of the Alleghanies was a storm-furrowed and petrified ocean. The road that labored up to rocky crests and dropped into sodden wal- lows of troughs, was one upon which a sea- soned saddle-horse could not safely be driven more than thirty miles a day. Indians crossed it in many places, but they never traveled on it for any distance. They followed the easier grades of the old north and south hunting- trails that wound along the bluffs. Yet from late dawn until early dusk Johnny walked, with brief pauses for rest on hilltops. How many days he could keep up this pace he did not permit himself to think. His feet winged with purpose he had, as yet, little sense of fatigue.

But he went warily, for the way was one of pitfalls, and to a man alone and afoot the difficult miles were ambushed. In that co- lossal forest the rough-hewn road was but a rift, a crevice between cliffs of trees, and fifty yards on either side every columned vista ended in gloom. The crack of rifles became louder and more frequent. Stretches of soft earth showed the tracks of animals, large and small. The wayside was strewn with the skulls and scattered bones of horses and cat-tie which, having strayed or been injured, had been abandoned by hurrying emigrants. There were mounds with rude headboards. One had been torn open  a gash in the soft bosom of mother earth. Johnny stopped to draw a covering of soil into the trench and to say a prayer.

He was afraid of but two things  of being molested and delayed by man or beast, and of losing the trail. Once he slipped farther into a thicket than he had intended while a band of Indian hunters went by overhead, and in coming out again he lost his sense of direction. It was a half -hour before, through a maze of brush-grown glens, he found his way back to the road.

At night he made his camp in a little cave on a steep slope twenty feet below the trail. From the quantity of small bones in it and the vile smell, it was probably an old fox-den. He raked the refuse out, cut a hole for the escape of smoke, and sweetened the air with fire. As noiselessly as any foraging and de- fenseless animal he slipped about, catching a fish in a pool of the creek below, and setting loop -traps in a rabbit -run. When he had eaten his supper he put out the fire and spread

his blanket. On either side the entrance, which was concealed by bushes, he drove stout stakes and wove his rope across. Then he knotted a kerchief to the screen. As long as the faint moonlight penetrated the leafless web of the forest it would flutter there, a pale flame that would make prowling animals pause.

In spite of the pain in his bruised and swollen feet and legs, and such cramped quar- ters that he could not stretch at full length, Johnny fell, almost at once, into the sleep of exhaustion. It was toward morning, when the wind went down with the moon, that he woke with a start in darkness and silence and to the fetid breath of a wolf. At the hissing flash and acrid smoke of a little train of gun- powder that he fired with flint and steel, the creature fled, crashing through undergrowth. Overhead a panther screamed and leaped away across the tree-tops.

Johnny slept no more. For that night he was safe enough, but a cave w r as not always to be found. A fire in the open was a man's natural home in the woods, and a rifle his defense. But the glow of flames or the sound of a shot here might summon the Indians, and
them he must avoid until opportunity offered to commend himself. Now and then a white man  a trapper with a wild strain in him, a trader with a finer sense of fair play, or a mis- sionary with only the love of God and the brotherhood of man in his heart, did make his own terms of peace with them. He must do that, be able to join their bands of hunters for safe travel, be welcome in their camps, turn this peril into a protection, or see his mission perish.

Dawn came in as a diffused light, cold and gray. After an hour on the road Johnny was obliged to take shelter in the burned-out hol- low of an enormous tree, while a smother of soft snow blotted out the world. The storm died away to a drizzling rain that veiled the woods and mired the road. At every step his clogged feet slipped. At the bottom of every ravine ran a swollen creek where he had to put his pack, his gun and his clothing on his head and wade in icy water, sometimes plunging into sink-holes up to his shoulders.

It was mid-afternoon when he came to a broader stream that poured down a torrent of mud, melting snow and driftwood. He could not swim it with his baggage, and any

raft that he could build and man would be swept away. Up-stream he scrambled, along steep and crumbling banks, to where the channel narrowed so that the limbs of syca- mores were interlaced above a foaming riffle. Pulling his pack up into a tree, he swung it at the end of the rope like a pendulum and landed it on the farther bank. Then he leaped, caught a branch that broke under his weight, fell ten feet to another, and hung there until he could make his way to the ground. Through two miles of tangled bog he struggled back to the trail.

In rounding a bend half-way up the next long slope, he almost ran into a timber- wolf which was squatted on its haunches in the roadway, muzzle up, as if keeping some ghoulish watch. Gaunt from a hard winter, it held its ground and showed its fangs when Johnny struck it with a stone. He shot it as it opened its jaws to howl for the pack ; and he raced up the slip- pery rise in such haste to be beyond the range of the echoing report, that he stumbled over an Indian who had fallen on his face across the road.

In a moment he had turned the brave on his back, felt the faint heart-beat, shook andshouted him into semi - consciousness, and learned his first Shawnese word from the dry lips that begged for water.

"Courage, comrade!" Johnny knew that all Indians learned enough English to keep from being cheated in the fur -trading. He asked brief questions about this man's com- panions and the location of his camp, but the dazed savage only stared in a bewildered way, tried to draw his knife, and muttered unintelligibly.

Blood was trickling from a gunshot wound in a leg. Johnny cut the soaked legging away, washed the ragged furrow, and made ban- dages of the linsey shirt that he wore under his buckskins. Then he dragged the senseless giant to the shelter of the trees, bathed his scratched and mud-stained face, and covered him with his own blanket. He found no gun near, and hastily loaded his own that had been discharged.

Every consideration of prudence urged him to run, not to become involved in this obscure tragedy. No doubt this hunter would be missed, and men of his tribe might appear at any moment. The rain had ceased and night was coming on, sharp and still. He

stood on such an elevation, which dropped away so steeply that he could look out over

"courage, comrade!" but the dazed savage tried todraw his knifegray billows of tree-tops to purple banks of sunset.

There he built a great fire  a beacon that shone across the heaving ocean of woods. At intervals he fired his rifle to guide the searchers. Making a hasty meal of the parched corn and jerked venison in the In- dian's pouch, he hurried to gather fuel for the night. Then he cut two poles from sas- safras saplings, and a quantity of brush and slender grape-vines as flexible as ropes. These he spent the early hours of the night in weav- ing into a litter, so there would be no delay or discomfort in getting the wounded man to camp. It was near midnight when three Indians with pine-knot torches and bristling with weapons, slipped like apparitions out of the forest. Johnny stood up, unarmed, and met their dark looks with candor and sym- pathy.

"Your brother lives. He knew nothing when I found him here, but may be able to tell you about his mishap in the morning. I would not wake him now. He has lost much blood and is in a fevered sleep."

Johnny turned from them to test the strength of the litter. Without taking their

eyes from him, they went to look at the sleep- ing brave and to inspect the neat bandages. Then they drew their blankets about them and lay down by the fire. Johnny read a chapter in his Bible by the flare, said good night, and stretched himself beside the wound- ed man to share the covering. If this in- jured hunter could give no account of himself in the morning, or if he mistook Johnny for his assailant, there might be a swift reckon- ing. But he would not think of that. He was so exhausted by the day's march and the night's anxious watch that he was sound asleep in five minutes.

He woke with such stiff and aching limbs that the thought of the wild leagues that lay before him filled him with sick misgivings. The Indians already had their injured tribes- man on the litter and they had his story. He had shot himself accidentally when he slipped in the mud and tripped over washed- out roots, a mile back on the bluff trail, and had dragged himself to the road. They had found his gun where he had dropped it in the path, and the dead wolf on the slope. But for this white wayfarer the bones of this young warrior would have been stripped, andwolves did not wait until a helpless man was dead.

"All men should be brothers in these woods," said Johnny.

The Indians were silent, but they shared their food with him, and watched curiously as he hobbled about. They had been so taken up with their own trouble that they had not speculated on his presence there alone, in the heart of the wilderness. But now they noticed his lameness and his torn and mired boots, and one asked, bluntly:

"Where is your horse?"

"I had a horse." Johnny's level look was fearless, but it did not accuse them. It was, indeed, full of infinite understanding and compassion. "Let us say no more about that." He held out his hand in friendly parting and began to tie up his pack.

They made haste to say that they knewnothing about his horse, but they would keepa lookout for the thief. And word of how hehad stood by this wounded brave should goover every trail of the forest. No Shawneewould ever rob him again. And if he wouldfollow them to their camp they would see himsafe to his journey's end.



Johnny's heart leaped in his breast. "Will you lend me a pony and a guide to the Great Crossing, and a canoe to Marietta?"

"Come!" They took up the litter and turned into the bluff trail. Without an in- stant's hesitation Johnny shouldered his gun and his pack and followed these Ishmaels of the forest whose tribal name was a synonym for restless wandering, for ferocity and treach- ery. The foot-path worn deep in the soil, the undergrowth arching overhead, the narrow trace was no more than a human rabbit-run in the woods.

Two days later he was set afloat in a beau- tiful painted canoe on the winding current of the Muskingum. Paddling swiftly down to Zanesville, he left the mill, the stockade, and scattered cabins behind, after shouting to the blacksmith that he would return, and upon what errand. It was near sundown when he breasted the spring-flood sweep of the Licking.

The wild geese were coming north. Frogs piped in the swamps. Does were bringing their spotted fawns down to drink. The ice was all out, and streams were bank-full from melting snow. Sap was running, and squawswere boiling sugar in the maple groves. Miasmic vapors rose from the marshes. Up all the foot-hill valleys of the western slope spring was hurrying, as if on the wings of song. The black soil of the Ohio bottoms was warming for Johnny's seeds. The river, lying in the track of the sun, was a stream of glory when he beached his canoe, climbed the rail fence and ran across a clearing that was a mere window on the sky, to Isaac Stadden's cabin.