The Whiskey Rebel

He did not look at me. “I ain’t never going to let an Indian live if it’s in my powers to kill it. I aim to be a great Indian killer, like Lou Wetzel. You ever hear of him? He’s killed more Indians than any man in the West.”

“Is that truly what you wish?” I asked, not knowing what else to say.

“Wishing don’t signify. ’Tis what I am. Now you know what I done you won’t be my friend no more, but there’s no helping it. Not now. You’ll see, though. The West changes you. It don’t let you be a Christian. I’m what the West made me, and you’ll be what it makes you.”

It was now near the end of the day’s travel, and soon he was occupied in the business of making camp. I left the poor boy and made my way back to Andrew, who asked nothing of what Phineas had told me, and I told him nothing. I told him nothing because I sat there lamenting the horror that was now our lives. We had traded what little we had in exchange for a passage to Hell, and I could not end the question that repeated itself in my own mind: What have I done? I would not have Andrew asking the question of himself.

As for Phineas, he was never again kind to me. In truth, he grew hostile, even predatory. He had regarded me before as a mother; now he joined with the other men in gazing at my body with hungry interest. He glared at me if I walked too slowly. If I stumbled, he pointed and laughed. I grew fearful of him and kept my distance. The men were fiends and I could hate them, but his youth made Phineas’s hardness far more frightening.

T en days later, days filled with tension and fear but no further incidents, we arrived in Pittsburgh, though only with the greatest of difficulty. We could not simply stroll into town, the way being made near impassable by great mountains of coal. Instead, for the last few miles, we were piled, beasts and all, upon a great flatboat that made its way down the Monongahela, propelled by burly men, muscled and bearded, mostly shirtless, who thrust great poles into the riverbed to force the lumbering conveyance forward.

The landscape was both rugged and beautiful, certainly sublime in its untamed majesty of undulating hills and thick forest. The city itself was another matter. Even before our flatboat docked, I could see that to call Pittsburgh a town would be like giving the name of feast to a moldy crust and a sliver of hard cheese rind. It was but a muddy clearing with the most uneven and haphazard log cabins, all stained with coal dust. There were no roads to speak of, but mud passageways that were, to the credit of the city founders, arranged with a Quaker regularity. The people looked more savage than civilized. The better sort wore rough homespun in cuts that were a mockery of fashions some five years past, though I looked with relief upon even the most outdated satin petticoat or laced waistcoat. Otherwise it was naught but buckskins and hunting shirts for the men, rough burlap gowns for the women. The men were all bearded and rugged, and a disproportionate number were missing an eye. The women, for their part, were often misshapen and hunched, with faces ravaged by weather, hands clenched and arthritic like demonic claws. It was the rare citizen who possessed even half his teeth, and all the people, like the buildings, were black with coal dust.

We trudged through the muddy streets of Pittsburgh, looking at the ramshackle houses in stu

Duer had arranged for us to lodge separately with different residents of the city for the night. In the morning we were to be led to our plots of land. Andrew and I were given a space on the floor-naught but dirt packed hard and smooth-of a miserable cabin, somewhat larger than most others but cramped and cold and smelling like a ta

The meal was served not with water or wine or tea but with liquor, a kind of western rum, of which I had never yet heard. The husband, the wife-even the children-drank it as though it were sweet nectar, but I could hardly manage a swallow. It tasted to me like poison set afire, but Andrew, perhaps savoring the distraction of something novel and unthreatening, sipped as though it were a prized claret. “How is it made?” he asked. “With what varieties? How is it aged?”

“Aged?” our host had asked.

“Yes,” said Andrew, who had some limited experience making wine in his youth. “Like wine, it is aged, is it not?”

Our host laughed. “’Tis aged from the time we put it into the jug to when we drink it. Don’t last that long. Around here, you see, there ain’t no money. Where would money come from? Ain’t no roads back east, and the damn Spanish won’t let us use the river. You want to buy something, you buy it with whiskey. You want to sell something, you get whiskey for it. This here is our money, friend, and ain’t no one can be bothered to turn money into prettier money. There’s nothing to be gained by doing so.”

But there was something to be gained. Andrew saw it-not yet clearly, but I believe an idea was already forming in his mind. He now knew how the locals did their business, and he already sensed there was opportunity for a man willing to do it a little differently. He had never in his life made his own whiskey, never even considered doing so. He was, nevertheless, already mulling over in his mind the things he would do that would, in the vicinity of the four counties, elevate his name from obscurity.

Ethan Saunders

Evening descended, and Cherry Street was full of middling people in their middling clothes going about their middling business, exchanging with each other their very, very middling sentiments. They stepped with manic precision, avoiding mud and filth and mounds of snow, piles of manure, clusters of animals-chickens, cows, goats, pigs-being driven here and there by angry-looking minders waving their sticks. They ignored the looming blackness of chimneys spewing soot. They bustled and bumbled and bumped about, returning home, attending to their evening meals, engaged in conversations so quotidian I could scarcely comprehend. When shall I mend this pillow? What thought you of that piece of ham? No, the other piece. Have you had a moment to speak to Harry about the crate of salt cod?

I do not condemn these creatures for living their own little lives and discussing the things in them, but the smallness of it pained me. Yes, I was brought low, but what of it? Had I not lived fully? Such a full life does not allow for the petty and trivial concerns of domesticity. That was the palliative I applied when I thought of how fate had robbed me of Cynthia all those years ago. Even then I understood that I would never have conversations with her about salt cod and pillows. Men who had lived as I had, with dirt and blood and death, were not made for the comforts of domestic quiet.