The Kingdom of Ohio (7 page)

He looks up, glancing between the burlap curtains to see heavy white snowflakes spiraling downward over the narrow streets. Turning back to the book in his lap, he traces the lines with his finger:
Some men by feigning words as dark as mine, make truth to spangle and its rays to shine
. The phrases like falling snow, slow and heavy with a cadence of their own. The strange vastness of these sentences beginning to make him realize—even more than the widow's old atlas—the scope and strangeness of the world.

 

 

 

 

A GRAY AFTERNOON in January, just beyond the turning of the year. Peter sits alone on the cobblestone walkway by the East River. This has become his habit in recent weeks: to sit and watch the water. He scrutinizes the muddy current and the smudged skyline of Brooklyn on the other shore, with its smokestacks, chimneys, and water towers, as if trying to make out some distant shape—

Something that the city is trying to tell him: a sense of hidden purpose, hidden meaning that waits for him around every turn, vanishing just as he arrives. . . .

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees a woman weaving unsteadily along the embankment. Suddenly she collapses to the ground. He turns away, hardened by now to sights like this. When he looks back a few minutes later, she is still lying motionless among the heaps of soot-stained snow. Seized by a random altruistic impulse, Peter climbs down from the ledge where he's sitting and cautiously crosses toward her, offering his hand. She is a young woman, he sees, her eyes fixed blankly on some object in the distance. Weakly, she takes his hand and he helps her to stand.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

“Nonce,” she murmurs, clutching his coat. “Thank God. You saved my life.”

“What?” Startled, he tries to disengage himself from her grasp. “You've got me mixed up with someone else. Name's Peter.”

She blinks, then shakes her head confusedly, releasing his arm.

“Are you all right?” he repeats. “You need help?”

“I—no—” she starts to turn but hesitates, passing a hand over her eyes.

He looks away, feeling suddenly awkward, following a pigeon's ascent as it wings upward over the waves.

“I—” she stumbles over the words. “Thank you for helping me.”

He looks at her more closely. She is wearing a dress that might once have been expensive, decorated with petticoats and other frilly things that Peter can't identify, but which is now so torn and bedraggled that it's hardly more than a collection of rags. Her face is pale and narrow, framed by a tangle of black curls. And she is beautiful, he realizes, feeling an odd lurch in his chest. Not so much any one thing about her, but something about how the pieces of her face work together. Still, at the same time he can see the need in her gaze, like that of every other beggar and con artist in New York.

“It's nothing,” he says, taking a step away. “I was just watching the river.”

She nods and glances around again nervously. “I wonder if—” She stops, and then, as if with an effort, starts again. “Though you do not know me, I have a favor to ask of you.”

He waits, poised to leave.

“Perhaps,” she ventures, “there is somewhere we could sit?”

“I—” Peter hesitates. He has never been one to fall for a pretty face: when he needs a woman's company, visiting a whore has always seemed easier than the entanglement of less clearly defined intimacies. But there's something strange about her, he thinks: she speaks like something out of a book, or a rich foreigner. And although his common sense warns against it, he finds himself nodding without exactly knowing why. “There's a German restaurant, the Kramler, not too far—”

Unexpectedly, her cheeks flush red and she looks down at the cobblestone walk. “I must be candid,” she murmurs. “At the moment I am without the means even for a glass of wine.”

Peter is unnerved more by her embarrassment than by the admission, which he's been expecting. But he's also relieved to discover what she's after: a small handout, the kind of thing that he is asked for a dozen times each day.

“That's all right.” He nods. “My pleasure, and all that.”

She nods, still not meeting his eyes. Remembering the few manners that he knows, Peter offers his arm—she takes it, and they start to walk.

As he feels the slight weight of her hand on his sleeve, and hears the clatter of horses' hooves and the foghorns of barges on the river, he experiences a jolt of something like déjà vu. And with this, the image comes to him of a vast machinery closing in around him. A system of invisible wheels and gears that, now started, will not cease or let him go until some final purpose has been achieved.

THE LOST KINGDOM

I HAVE TO SAY, I'M AMAZED AT HOW WELL THIS IS GOING. IT'S ALL falling into place more smoothly than I ever expected. Of course, I haven't reached the hard parts yet. But for the moment, the actual writing itself—the
story
part of this history—is surprisingly easy. It's just a matter of making everything sound like it came out of a book. And that, for once, is something I know how to handle, since during the last forty years I've felt more at home in literature than in life.

And funnily enough, I think the writing lifestyle suits me. I've almost abandoned the antiques store, opening it once or twice a week. Instead, I walk through the streets now, and in the evening (after watching a few episodes of
Dollars and Sense
or
Your Money or Your Wife!
) I sit at my typewriter, and type.

And telling the story is easy. It's just deciding which parts to include, finding a space to fit them all in, that gives me trouble.

For example, once upon a time there was a place called the Kingdom of Ohio. (Probably, I should have mentioned this sooner—but better late than never, I suppose.) The Kingdom of Ohio, sometimes called the Free Estate Latoledan, has become a fragment of forgotten minutia by now. In most history books it is less than a footnote, glossed over even among academics. But however improbable and ridiculous it may seem, the Kingdom existed. It was real.

The Kingdom of Ohio is documented and visible (with the help of a little squinting and imagination) in the notes, indirect references, and scraps I've assembled over the years. It is an untold chronicle that parallels the early history of America itself: and without understanding that story, I've come to believe, it is impossible to understand this one.

 

 

 

 

TO SUMMARIZE, the history of the Kingdom began in 1774, when the fledging Continental Congress of the United States was making plans for their impending war against England. To raise funds for this effort, representatives of the Congress decided to sell territory on the American frontier to wealthy Old World families. Ultimately, this scheme was short-lived (the objections of Peletiah Webster, a retired clergyman from Philadelphia, were typical when he argued that selling the land would “be like killing the goose that laid an egg every day, in order to tear out at once all that was in her belly”).
⁶
Before the plan was rescinded, however, a single transaction was completed: a minor member of the French nobility named Henri Latoledan purchased 30,000 acres “west and south of Lake Erye [
sic
] extending to the water's edge for a distanceof thirty-six Surveyor's Chain lengths,”
⁷
from one of the Continental Congress's secret agents in Europe.

A charcoal sketch that I found, drawn by the Jesuit parson Gide Baddaneau, seems to be the only surviving image of the ancestral Latoledan family castle in France. It depicts a long, low house in the Spanish style with tile roofs, an arched stucco colonnade, and wrought-iron balconies. Gazing at this drawing, it's easy to imagine chickens, dogs, and children wandering through the outer hallways beneath threadbare tapestries. Creeping vines pry at the window catches. Inside, the house is furnished with tables and cabinets simply and solidly constructed by local craftsmen, the gilt inlay of a few heirloom antiques burnished into near-invisibility by the passage of time. This is the world that Henri Latoledan and his family abandoned (almost before the ink on the land deed was dry) for one of the wildest and least understood places on Earth.

Although I've tried, the reasons for this departure are difficult for me to imagine. Perhaps Henri understood that winds of change were beginning to rise in France, which in a few years would sweep men like him toward Paris and the guillotine. Perhaps he chafed against the limited prospects available to an impoverished noble family in a forgotten corner of the rural countryside, far from the Sun King and Versailles. Or perhaps it was the spirit of adventure, pure and simple, that moved him.

Whatever the reason for the Latoledans' migration, the place where they arrived, and where the Kingdom of Ohio began, was a territory virtually unknown to European eyes. At the time, the Midwest region was

Possession of this uncharted territory was a morass of conflicting claims and insupportable titles. England had conquered “New France” and most of Acadia, a territory encompassing modern-day Canada as well as the area around the Great Lakes. At the same time, the Spanish court in Madrid claimed ownership of both Alta California and also “all lands . . . from the Arctic pole to the Antarctic pole . . . west and south from any of the islands commonly known as the Azores and Cape Verde,”
⁹
a hypothetical kingdom spanning virtually all of North America. In the midst of these chaotic and overlapping declarations of empire, practical control of the frontier belonged to the real occupants of the land: the Miami and Chippewa tribes, the Shawnee and the Eel People.

When, after a three-month voyage, Henri Latoledan and his family reached the land he had purchased, his first act was so outlandish as to almost defy explanation. In 1776, only weeks after the Declaration of Independence, he issued a document titled the “Latoledan Proclamation of Sovereignty,” in which he declared his patch of wilderness to be a separate nation, sending one copy to the British House of Lords and another to the Continental Congress.
¹⁰

Although in many ways Henri was an impulsive and perhaps even foolish man, it would be an injustice to ignore the breathtakingbravado in this act of envisioning his handful of ragged settlers as the beginnings of an empire. Still it may also have been a carefully calculated decision, as historical circumstances conspired to make such a gesture (just barely) possible.

Before the American Revolution, in both Canada and America, generous land grants allocated vast territories to wealthy European nobility, which these colonial patrons ruled in a quasifeudal fashion.
¹¹
These precedents for Henri's vision were reinforced by the timing of the Latoledan declaration, which placed the Continental Congress in a painful bind: if they contested Henri's right to self-government, how could they legitimately sever their own ties with England? Perhaps because of these complications, the Latoledan proclamation went unanswered—and therefore, effectively un-challenged.
¹²

One of the most surprising aspects of the Kingdom of Ohio is the simple fact that the settlement survived its first few, very hard, years. Similar early expeditions to the wild country around the Great Lakes, many of them larger and better equipped, failed due to disease, famine, or the attacks of Native American tribes.

No documentation remains to describe the earliest history of the Kingdom—but somehow, the Latoledan settlement persevered. According to family oral histories, Henri instituted a kind of communal feudalism: the settlers of the Kingdom were given tracts of land to farm and provided with the minimum necessities of life by the Latoledan family. In exchange for this support, one quarter of each family's harvest was tithed to the Latoledans.
¹³

Apart from clearing the woods to plant fields, and building cabins for themselves (activities which must have consumed nearly all of the settlers' energy), Henri directed the efforts of his colony into the construction of an outpost at the mouth of the Maumee River, which he named Toledo. During the years after the founding of his settlement, Henri commissioned the construction of the five buildings that formed the town: a church, a ballroom, a meeting hall, a general store, and the Latoledan family home.

Six years after the colony was established, Henri's son Mathieu married Héloise Chantilly, one of the maids who had accompanied the family from France.
¹⁴
That same year, David Latoledan—Mathieu's son, Henri's grandson—was born.

In March of 1784, Henri Latoledan was riding with his valet near the shores of Lake Erie when his horse spooked and threw him. Taking a bad fall, Henri was knocked unconscious: the valet carried him back to the family house, where he died, probably from internal injuries. He was forty-eight years old.

During his lifetime, Henri had (astonishingly) seen his dream of a kingdom in the American wilderness become a reality. From a struggling band of settlers, the Free Estate had grown into an established outpost on the frontier, trading goods with settlers along the Ohio and Maumee rivers as well as with local Native American tribes. Toledo was now a town marked on most maps of the region, comprising thirty houses, four stores, a church, a tavern, and a blacksmith. Cut off from the outside world, the town of Toledo and the Free Estate were (along with Fort Detroit) the cultural and mercantile capital of the western frontier.