The Choir Invisible | Page 6

beautiful, awful wilderness, with a bountiful spring
bubbling up out of the turf, and a stream winding away through the
green, valley-bottom to the bright, shady Elkhorn: a glade that for ages
had been thronged by stately-headed elk and heavy-headed bison, and
therefore sought also by unreckoned generations of soft-footed, hard
eyed red hunters. Then had come the beginning of the end when one
summer day, toward sunset, a few tired, rugged backwoodsmen of the
Anglo-Saxon race, wandering fearless and far into the wilderness from
the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies, had made
their camp by the margin of the spring; and always afterwards, whether
by day or by night, they had dreamed of this as the land they must
conquer for their homes. Now they had conquered it already; and now
this was the town that had been built there, with its wide streets under
big trees of the primeval woods; with a long stretch of turf on one side

of the stream for a town common; with inns and taverns in the style of
those of country England or of Virginia in the reign of George the
Third; with shops displaying the costliest merchandise of Philadelphia;
with rude dwellings of logs now giving way to others of frame and of
brick; and, stretching away from the town toward the encompassing
wilderness, orderly gardens and orchards now pink with the blossom of
the peach, and fields of young maize and wheat and flax and hemp.
As the mighty stream of migration of the Anglo-Saxon race had burst
through the jagged channels of the Alleghanies and rushed onward to
the unknown, illimitable West, it was this little town that had received
one of the main streams, whence it flowed more gently dispersed over
the rich lands of the newly created State, or passed on to the Ohio and
the southern fringes of the Lakes. It was this that received also a vast
return current of the fearful, the disappointed, the weak, as they
recoiled from the awful frontier of backwood life and resought the
peaceful Atlantic seaboard--one of the defeated Anglo-Saxon armies of
civilization.
These two far-clashing tides of the aroused, migrating race--the one
flowing westward, the other ebbing eastward--John Gray found himself
noting with deep interest as he moved through the town that afternoon a
hundred years ago; and not less keenly the unlike groups and characters
thrown dramatically together upon this crowded stage of border history.
At one point his attention was arrested by the tearful voices of women
and the weeping of little children: a company of travellers with
pack-horses--one of the caravans across the desert of the Western
woods--was moving off to return by the Wilderness Road to the old
abandoned homes in Virginia and North Carolina. Farther on, his
passage was blocked by a joyous crowd that had gathered about another
caravan newly arrived--not one traveller having perished on the way.
Seated on the roots of an oak were a group of young
backwoodsmen--swarthy, lean, tall, wild and reckless of bearing--their
long rifles propped against the tree or held fondly across the knees; the
gray smoke of their pipes mingling with the gray of their jauntily worn
raccoon-skin caps; the rifts of yellow sunlight blending with the yellow

of their huntingshirts and tunics; their knives and powder-horns
fastened in the belts that girt in their gaunt waists: the heroic youthful
sinew of the old border folk. One among them, larger and handsomer
than the others, had pleased his fancy by donning more nearly the
Indian dress. His breech-clout was of dappled fawn-skin; his long thigh
boots of thin deer-hide were open at the hips, leaving exposed the clear
whiteness of his flesh; below the knees they were ornamented by a
scarlet fringe tipped with the hoofs of fawns and the spurs of the wild
turkey; and in his cap he wore the intertwined wings of the hawk and
the scarlet tanager.
Under another tree in front of a tavern bearing the sign of the Virginia
arms, a group of students of William and Mary, the new aristocrats of
the West, were singing, gambling, drinking; while at intervals one of
them, who had lying open before him a copy of Tom Paine's "Age of
Reason," pounded on the table and apostrophied the liberties of Man.
Once Gray paused beside a tall pole that had been planted at a street
corner and surmounted with a liberty cap. Two young men, each
wearing the tricolour cockade as he did, were standing, there engaged
in secret conversation. As he joined them, three other young
men--Federalists--sauntered past, wearing black cockades, with an
eagle button on the left side. The six men saluted coolly.
Many another group and solitary figure he saw to remind him of the
turbulent history