Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (17 page)

Lest I mislead you, I should say other buzz was higher on the brow, such as the one about the woman who kept urging somebody at the Schepis Museum, which happened to be right next to the Watermark, to come out to see Uncle Jack’s paintings. But because every town, especially in Louisiana, seemed to have an Uncle Jack — an Oncle Jacques — who paints or whittles, nobody listened until a few months previous to our arrival, when a museum associate finally went to look at the paintings. Uncle Jack proved to be Andrew Jackson Grayson, the “Audubon of the West,” who created a corpus of ornithological illustrations that expands to the Pacific slope and northern Mexico Audubon’s brilliant but topographically limited, grand catalog of birds. Grayson, a native of the lower Ouachita country, started his career as a shopkeeper in Columbia, Louisiana, before moving to St. Louis and then on again across Missouri where in 1846 he joined a wagon train that for some distance included the Donner party.

Soon after our departure for the end of the valley, an exhibition of Grayson’s bird prints went up at the museum, once a two-floor mercantile built in 1916 by an Italian-immigrant couple trained in the arts — he in architecture and she in music, her pianoforte once sending down to the street the only classical notes Columbians could then hear this side of Natchez or New Orleans. When Giovanni Schepis finished his building, still the most impressive along Main, he wanted to honor both his native land and his new one. The way to do it, he thought, was to make molds of river sand for casting in concrete a matching pair of life-size statues portraying two entrepreneurs. He hoisted atop his store Christopher Columbus and George Washington who for years beyond Giovanni’s have continued to look down the Ouachita.

A woman in the Watermark commented how odd it was their village history seemed to come out of four general merchandise stores: the very first structure in the hamlet, Grayson’s shop, the Schepis Museum, and the initial use of the oldest saloon on the Ouachita. She said, “But back then, more things happened in a store than in a church.” For a hamlet once on the fringe of forest and swamp, a community even today of only five-hundred souls, Columbia was made singular more by its arts than by its commerce. Where another town might have a feed supply, Columbia had a gallery displaying nineteenth-century treasures of American wildlife.

The local history gave perspective on words from the Reverend Timothy Flint, a New Englander who came into the lower Ouachita country in 1835; in his trip journal he wrote:

How rapidly the remotest frontier forests of our country are filling up with the current of the westward tide of emigration. Whenever after ploughing through the waters, we approached a high and arable spot — an island in the swamp — we found it already occupied with the cabin and the field of a squatter. It strikes one with surprise to see these deserts, so remote that one would almost imagine he could claim them by right of discovery, actually peopled. The western states are already comparatively populous. The tide having there found its level, continues to roll on, eddying, disparting, and forcing its secret currents into every nook and valley of the wilderness. The smoke of hearths arises, and man with his axe, gun, and human incitements to action is there. It is much to be regretted that so great a proportion of the emigrants are of the class of poor, vagrant, and worthless foreigners, the scum of despotic governments, unacquainted with our institutions, and unfit for them.

Looking for supper, Q and I moseyed down the valley several miles and crossed the Ouachita on the ferry at Duty (no charge to travel west, but to go east costs a dollar). Along the river we found Jim Bowie’s Relay Station, the name of more genuine history than the building. It sat with its back to the wooded hills overlooking the damp bottomland exuding water transfused into soil and vernal shrub, new leafage and boscage, sweetly rank, lush and teeming. After all the miles, at last we could breathe in, if not the Ouachita itself, then at least its expression.

A retired school principal, John Ed Bartmess, had built the place in the spirit of an earlier time, and he was methodically surrounding it with historic structures he hauled in or new ones built according to nineteenth-century lines. Inside he had covered the high ceiling with political yard signs that, while more colorful than a hornet nest, didn’t much seem to evoke tales and fabrications — a peculiarity, since American politics is mostly just that.

But, with John Ed’s fried catfish before us, who cared? And his hushpuppies. Across the country, what has happened in cafés to genuine french fries has happened in the South to café hushpuppies which, once frozen, also fit too readily into a box. But at the Relay Station, the freshly made fritters were cooked in a chile-laced cornmeal batter and served alongside a juglet of light Louisiana cane syrup. I mentioned to Bartmess something about his meals being food from another time; later, as Q and I reached the door to leave, he gave her a tin of his private-label syrup along with a pail full of stories that spilled out the front door onto the porch and on into the dark land of dewberries and possum hunts where, just beyond his words, flowed the Ouachita.

17

Connections and Continuums

C
ERTAINTY ON THIS MUTABLE PLANET
belongs to the doctrinaire in whose ranks I try to keep out of step, probabilist that I am, a lowly foot soldier following probabilities. It is probability that leads me to believe American Indians of sixteen-hundred years ago did not intend to assist materially the construction in A.D. 1935 of the Huey Long Bridge at Jonesville, Louisiana. Yet they did, and the story of how that happened, with its deplorable consequences for the current residents living at the mouth of the Ouachita, became apparent as we neared its terminus.

But those last miles began less ominously.

The east-side river road out of Columbia was a pleasant run allowing an occasional glimpse of the Ouachita where once the cotton boats headed south with a thousand or more ginned bales and returned northward with sugar and coffee and durable goods for the isolated hamlets. Even beyond mischief in the river, it was a trickish business, causing one captain to say in 1929, “A steamboat man always has two worries: One is, will I get all the freight I can handle this trip? The other is, will I get more freight than I can handle this trip?”

The Reverend Flint, on his tour a century earlier, wrote:

On the long bayous of our river, on each side of which the great cotton plantations spread like prairies, you may travel thirty miles amid continuous lines of plantations, and nowhere see what may fairly be called a single fruit garden. To make money through cotton is visibly the first and the absorbing idea. The maxim of life seems adopted from the epicurean motto quoted by St. Paul, though otherwise not severe students of the scriptures — 
let us make cotton and money, for to-morrow we die.

When Q and I had again crossed on the Duty ferry and were on the western shore, we found the way south bestrung with the opened, blanched-lavender blossoms of wisteria as if hung out for a parade to welcome somebody home. Although the drier piney upland was never far away, the pavement, keeping to the floodplain and the old territory of cane brakes, rode atop a berm raised from the marshy flats so level that even the back of a box turtle would have a discernible elevation.

At Harrisonburg, the highway again brushed the escarpment before leaving it behind once and for all. It was there Confederates built Fort Beauregard in a short-lived resistance designed to halt the advance of Union gunboats up-country. I’d like to give you a nugget or two about that campaign on the Ouachita, but the topic, as far as I know, like the river itself, has yet to find its historian.

Failing that, I do have for you, if you like tales of nineteenth-century crime and detection and are accepting of digression, another few sentences from the Reverend Flint, who (I say belatedly) gave in his journal one of the few, therefore important, early pictures of the lower Ouachita country:

A man with a considerable sum of money was known to have crossed the Ouachita. He mysteriously disappeared. Suspicions were excited. His horse’s footsteps were traced to the bank of the river. They were discovered on the opposite shore. Search was made for the horse, and at no great distance in the woods the animal was found saddled and feeding. Search was then made for the body of the rider below the point of crossing. It was soon discovered. The people of the vicinity, as usual, collected to the inquest. Said a knowing one, “Let each one of us in succession walk over the body, and when the murderer passes, he will stumble.” The trial was immediately adopted, and the people, with a good deal of solemnity, walked, one after one, over the body. One person was observed in making the transit to walk uncommonly erect and firm and when going over the body, to raise his feet higher than the rest. “There,” said the wizard inquisitor, “is the murderer.” He went further. “Let his feet be examined,” he added. He wore moccasins, and one of them was tied at the heel with a knot. At the point where the deceased had come to the river, it was a damp, soft clay. The footprint of a man was discovered there, who had worn a moccasin, that had impressed in the clay the visible indent of this knot. The suspected person was called upon to compare his footprint with those before him. Astounded, stupefied by such unlooked for evidence, he complied, and his foot exactly filled the impress, convincing everyone that he was the identical person who had followed the person whose body was before them to the point of the river where he had disappeared and below which his body was found. The man was arrested, tried, and, having confessed the murder, was executed.

On the south edge of Harrisonburg, in the shadow of the courthouse, the road entered a welter of waters, a wedding of them in many permutations that, in their natural state before hydroengineering, must once have looked from above like a prodigious entangling of giant serpents, a native symbol of rivers. In a way similar to the Mississippi twenty miles east, the Ouachita has been lopped and chopped as if it were in fact a snake daring to startle the gardener. The land there, if you can call it such, is rife with oxbows, bayous, bogues, diversion canals, drainage ditches, relict swamps and marshes, cypress bogs, moss-hung fens, lakes, catfish ponds, pools and puddles, a place squelchy and spongy, muddy and miry, and the home of a quadrillion creatures finding haven in the riverine-lacustrine realm lying under four and a half feet of yearly rainfall. This is the country where the Ouachita ends, or perhaps I should say vanishes.

For a couple of sentences, tolerant reader, allow me to anthropomorphize the river that had for so many days carried us not on its current but in its wide presence.

Unhappy the Ouachita must be to see its lengthy and serpentine descent — a drop, were it accomplished all at once, that would surpass a dozen stacked-up Niagara Falls — usurped by a pair of comparatively lengthless, conniving pretenders at the very place it should be crowned queen (to travel
atop
a river is to witness woman in all her moods and phases). Imagine you’ve been creeping forward in a royal queue six-hundred miles long; then, as you are at last within sight of the throne, your promised destination, an officially sanctioned interloper pushes in ahead of you and snatches the crown to pass it off to an infant without experience of statesmanship. That’s what happens to the Ouachita at Jonesville where the Tensas River (250 miles long) and the Little River (twenty miles), within a couple of hundred yards of each other, flow into the big river more than twice their combined length. The reconstituted waterway — its dismal name reflecting the injustice — is the Black River. (Whenever you read here “Black River,” translate in your mind that inaccurate tenebrousness to one of euphony and history: Ouachita. As for the Little River, I’ll call it by its older and more evocative Indian name, Catahoula, which one historian translated as “River of the Great Spirit.”)

To modify my anthropomorphic metaphor, the Ouachita is the lead runner in a marathon where a faker slips in a hundred yards from the line and sprints freshly to the finish. Is there no official to cry foul?

Someone will say, and correctly so, that for two-hundred-million years the river has been a mindless thing propelled by only the laws of gravity to reach its progenitor sea, so a two-hundred-year-old name tacked onto its tail matters not a whit.

It is the issue of mattering a whit that returns me to the topic I began with: Indians of A.D. 400 and the Huey Long Bridge of A.D. 1935.

All the way from the domino table in the Rich Mountain general store at the headwaters of the Ouachita, I’d been looking forward to having my curiosity rewarded by the discovery of whatever quoz lay at the end of the river. While it’s true I’d passed through Jonesville years earlier, I was then too callow and uninformed to recognize the outward facts of what was there, let alone any ramifications in them, so I did nothing but slow to the posted limit with not so much as a pause for a MoonPie.

Years later, but still before I knew of the Ouachita debouchment at Trinity — a cluster of houses across the Catahoula from Jonesville — I learned of the Troyville Mounds. And sometime afterward, I discovered Troyville was now Jonesville, the first of several poor decisions here, especially considering the new name appeared only in 1870 following a feud that, wrote a local historian, “ultimately cost the lives of at least five prominent citizens of the parish, and in a measure, put an end to two of the most cultured and outstanding families of that part of the state.” (Other voices speak of the woman who insisted on the change to Jonesville as being widely known for her cruelty to slaves.)

Were I granted a week vacation anywhere in the American past, it would be to one of the great, aboriginal earthworks at the zenith of its existence: Cahokia, Poverty Point, Etowah, Spiro, Serpent Mound, the Newark Octagon in Ohio; maybe even one of the effigy mounds of the Upper Mississippi Valley. Earthworks at the tail end of the Mississippi Valley go back at least seven-thousand years, a span conceived of by some Americans no more accurately than the duration of the Upper Carboniferous. But to consider
our place in our place
 — even a perception of the shallowness of human history — can wonderfully improve one’s planetary comportment. If a visitor could return with a digital slide show from one of those grand earthwork civilizations in full native use, our comprehension of America would be enriched beyond imagining, and history textbooks could begin with more than the misleadingly cursory nod to any past before the European incursion.