Final Rendezvous On Seven Mountains

DECEMBER 26—THE SEVEN MOUNTAINS

The Juniata River is to the south, the Susquehanna and West Branch of the Susquehanna to the east and north. The area is known locally as the Seven Mountains for the seven Appalachian ridges—Tuscarora, Shade, Jacks, Tussey, Nittany, White Deer and Bald Eagle—that run through it. The mountains rise in the west out of a great knot of Allegheny highlands and are separated by valleys through which flow small rivers and large streams that empty into the Susquehanna. Taken together, the highlands, ridges and valleys form a defiant fist of land 60 miles wide and twice as long.

These are old mountains; there were towering peaks here when the land that was to become the Cascades, Sierras and Tetons lay under water. What is left of them is 2,000-foot nubs, skeletons of mountains. Their gnarled flanks are cut by mean, traplike ravines, littered with sharp ledges, pitted with sinks, oozing seeps and highland bogs. They are covered with a thick growth of oak, laurel and greenbrier that is as hard to move through as mesquite. The climate may not be the best or worst, but it is among the most unpredictable. In the summer the Seven Mountains are a jungle. A man trying to bushwhack up a ridge will sweat like a horse in the humid, stifling air. But snow and gales can come as early as October, come suddenly in a howling blizzard that drops the temperature 50° below freezing and piles hip-deep drifts in the hollows. Within a week a cold, driving rain may have converted the snow to fog, mist and slides of mud.

On a topographic map of the Seven Mountains there are extensive areas crossed only by trails, showing few if any signs of permanent human habitation. The empty places are designated as state forest or game land. This is such hard country that no one has been able to take much pleasure or profit from it.

The blank places on the map are honest ones. Many Indian tribes and nations hunted and fought through this country, but none were able or wanted to stay long enough to establish sovereignty over it. Europeans tried to break the mountains for more than two centuries. Yet it is still wild. It was here, in this hard fist of land, that a group of European peasants became American frontiersmen.

What happened on the Seven Mountains in the 18th century is seldom mentioned in popular histories. It has now become a folk myth, in part because events of that time and place tend to contradict popular history. For example, we have the notion that our forebears landed on the Atlantic Coast and immediately commenced their long but always triumphant progress to the Pacific. By virtue of their superior technology, ingenuity and grit, they overwhelmed the continent and its inhabitants and lived easily and well off the land. All of which is untrue. For better than a century, a third of the time white men have been here, they huddled on the coastal plains, unable or unwilling to leave the sea and their lifeline to Europe. They did not have the skills nor, frankly, the stomach to cope with the interior wilderness. They were pathetically dependent upon Europe for tools, weapons, clothing and even food, for their books, politics, religion, physical and psychic security. They did not try to find their way in the woods; instead, they hired or blackmailed Indians into guiding and caring for them. For their part the Indians apparently distrusted the Atlantic colonists because of their tactics and inclinations, but they were not in awe of them as men. For the best part of a century and a half the Huron, Shawnee, Delaware, Cherokee and the Iroquois Confederation, assisted by a few French advisers, rather contemptuously kept the more numerous Atlantic colonists pinned to their harbors and penned up in their fortified towns.

One difficulty was that the first emigrant boats were overloaded with gentry or would-be gentry who because of their pretensions and inexperience were too soft and squeamish for hand-to-hand wrestling with the wilderness. There was an oversupply of second sons, failed royalists, bankrupt shopkeepers, essayists, poets and a great excess of divines. In short, far too many chiefs and, so to speak, far too few Indians. White Indians, or at least those who had the makings of white Indians—Scottish, Irish and German peasants—did not begin to arrive until early in the 18th century with the second wave of immigrants, second class. The majority of these foreigners headed for Pennsylvania. There in the colony and City of Brotherly Love they were welcomed coldly by the local nabobs. "Bold and indigent strangers," said a Pennsylvania official of these scraggly newcomers. At the time bold meant uncouth and indigent meant immoral. "White savages," sniffed a young Ben Franklin.

In general the newcomers had the choice of living on the coast and remaining what they had always been—clients, tenants, servants of the gentry—or moving west beyond the reach of surveyors, lawyers and bankers. Many of them opted for the wilderness. In the second quarter of the 18th century they arrived on what was then called the Middle Border, the valley of the Susquehanna, in which stood the Seven Mountains. On this border, against the fist, they beat themselves and were beaten bloody for the rest of the century. In those early years they were scalped, raped, burned and starved; they died of fever, gangrene and exposure; they went mad from pain, murdered each other, became alcoholics and suicides. Yet because they were desperate for land and independence they stayed and learned to do what they had to do: how and why to take a scalp, to follow a deer trail, to kill deer, to make and wear buckskin, to jerk venison, to travel a week on a pocketful of jerky and corn, to use a double-bitted ax, to pry out stumps, to split logs. Among other things, because they had to have them, they invented what in later times and more romantic circumstances were known as the Kentucky long rifle, the Conestoga wagon and the bowie knife. They trained in this hard country, and utilized all they had learned there to move on, taking the whole continent in another 75 years.

Not only were peculiar tools and skills developed on the Middle Border but also a set of uniquely American attitudes: The only good Indian is a dead Indian. Root hog or die. Fish or cut bait. That which is not useful is vicious. The frontier tools and tricks have long since become obsolete, but the ideas are still in everyday use. If one were looking for the source from which still flows the mainstream of American culture and character, he would be well advised to leave behind the coastal athenaeums and boxwood mazes, where Europe petered out, and search among the Seven Mountains, where America began.

DECEMBER 27—ON THE BUFFALO PATH