She shrugged, and picking up the accordion with a disgusted glance at Eve, she started to play and sing “Miss Bailey’s Ghost.” It became apparent at once that she both played and sang with an uncommon flair. “Now, you see here, Lilith! You know better than to play that one! Play something the boys can sing.”
She glanced at the three boys. “What songs do you know?”
“I can sing ‘Yankee Doodle,’ “ Colin suggested.
“’Yankee Doodle’!” Lilith stared at them scornfully, “Who wants to sing that?” “Their ma’s dead,” Harvey explained apologetically. “They ain’t had much schoolin’ in the social graces, but they are good boys, an’ strong.” “Go ahead, Lilith. Give them ‘A Home in the Meadow.’” Lilith looked at Eve again and shrugged, indicating her distaste for the whole idea, but she began to play and sing.
Prescott turned to his older daughter. “Eve!”
Reluctantly, Eve joined in, no more impressed with the three hulking, hovering Harvey boys than Lilith was. Coming closer, the boys began to follow the words of the song and, caught by the spirit of the thing, Zebulon himself started to sing in a deep, strong voice.
“Zeb!” Rebecca warned. “Mind you don’t drown them out!” Several people from nearby groups drifted over to join in. As the group grew in number, Lilith lost her reluctance and, stepping out from the others, began to lead the singing with zest.
They sang for pleasure, without self-consciousness, or even awareness that most of them sang badly, and their singing seemed to brighten the whole shore. Men straightened from their work to listen, and from a distance a deck hand on one of the river boats joined in. A half-drunken Irishman cut a few quick steps in time to the music, and for a brief time that somber shore echoed to the sound of their voices.
As the song ended, Lilith, captured by the mood of her own playing, swung into “The E-ri-e Canal,” and everyone within hearing joined in. But they had scarcely completed the first chorus when the despatcher’s voice boomed out, “Loadin’ for the Flyin’ Arrow! All a-boarrrd for the Flyin’ Arrow!” Zebulon picked up a heavy sack. “That’s us! Pick up an’ let’s go!” As they had moved closer on Sam’s suggestion, they were only a few steps from the gangway, and Lilith, waving a response to the shouted good-byes of several of the singers, struck up a lively march and led the passengers aboard the waiting canal boat.
The deck was crowded and Eve was pushed to the rail, where she turned her back on the boat and looked back at Albany. Her throat was tight, for the very act of boarding the boat seemed to have finally committed them to a course from which there could be no retreat.
From Albany, a person could walk home if need be, and in Albany they were still among their own kind of folks, but the mere act of stepping aboard had put an end to all that. It was an act so different from any she had ever taken, and it indicated how deeply they were now involved. Now they no longer had roots. They were adrift.
All around strangers crowded, easy-going, boisterous strangers, but at that moment even her own family looked strange. Eve had stepped into another world, and she was frightened.
Under lowering gray skies, the clouds swollen with impending rain, the Flying Arrow started to move. Out upon the canal bank, a man in a checked shirt drove the team along the towpath, hauling the boat.
Slowly, as the passengers found places for their boxes and bundles, the stir upon the decks settled down. From behind her, Eve could hear the mutter of voices and occasional laughter.
From the Hudson River at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo, a ditch four hundred and twenty-five miles long had been dug. The digging had been done by several thousand wild, bog-trotting Irishmen fresh from the old country, and they had been eight years in the digging.
Governor DeWitt Clinton had opened the canal in the fall of 1825, and it was a major step in opening the West to settlement. Within twenty years, Ohio leaped from thirteenth state in population to third, and the population of Michigan increased by sixty times. Four thousand boats plied the waters of the canal, and more than twenty thousand people lived upon its waters. The Irish had built the canal, and they set the pattern for much that followed. Life along the waterway was a continual brawl and a struggle. Men fought over drinks, over women, over space at the docks, over horses, over anything they could think of … often enough they fought for the sheer joy of fighting. Some of the Irish stayed with the canal, others moved west to build the railroads or to join the Indian-fighting army. Many an old-time army roster reads like a voter’s list from Belfast or Dublin. A time came when their sons and grandsons were no longer despised as “shanty” Irish, becoming political, social, and industrial leaders in fifty cities—respected, honored, and wealthy men.
A canalboat had a crew of three to four persons. A boy or man, working for seven to ten dollars a month, drove the team along the towpath to haul the boat. The steersman might earn as much as thirty dollars a month, which was good pay for the time. The captain often did his own steering; otherwise, he sat on deck smoking his pipe and shouting insults at the other boats. Sometimes the cook was the captain’s wife; more often she was one of the thousands of women who followed the canal, taking up with this boater or that, as jealous of her independence as any man on the ditch.
Of all shapes and sizes, and of every color, the boats moved up or down the canal, fighting or racing for cargo, all their actions accompanied by the shouting of men and the long-drawn-out sound of the horns—the horns of the boats along the Erie Canal.
The westward movement of which they were a part was more than a hundred years old, but only now had it gained the impetus that was to make it unique in the world’s history.
There had always been men who went west, who probed the wilderness; there had been trappers of fur and traders with the Indians who each season went a little further into the wilderness. Like the mountain men who went to the ultimate West, they were adventurers and hunters, and they were single men. They filtered through the mountains and down the Ohio, and finally to the Mississippi. Daniel Boone was such a man.
Then in 1803 Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase, and overnight the young nation became a land of far-reaching boundaries. And with this change came a change in the national psychology.
The Lewis and Clark expedition went west, exploring a route across the distant mountains and down to the Pacific; and when they returned, a few, like John Coulter, elected to remain in the West. After them came Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Bill Williams, Joe Walker … and Linus Rawlings. Boys from the farms walked away from their plows and headed west. St. Louis or Independence was the jumping-off place. Standing on the streets, the farm boys watched the keel-boats and canoes come down the Missouri from the Platte and the Yellowstone, and they watched the buckskin-clad men with the cool eyes come ashore, their leggings and breech-clouts leaving their bottoms exposed and brown as the buckskins they wore. Around the river-front taverns they consorted with river-front women, drank and shouted and told great yarns of the far-off mountains, the rushing streams of white water, and the fair Indian maidens. The farm boys listened and envied.
Some said it was fur that took them west, and some said it was gold or land; but in the last analysis it was simply the West that took them west. All the other things were easy excuses, obvious explanations for obvious questions. They went west for the wild, free life, the love of high adventure among the lonely peaks, and for the call of the open prairie where the long winds blew down a thousand miles of grassland.
They went by the Erie Canal, by the Wilderness Road, by the Natchez Trace, and strange names came back to awaken strange longings in the ears of listening men, names that made them restless and eager-eyed.
Men went west along the Overland Trail, the Santa Fe Trail, the Oregon Trail, the Hastings Cut-Off, the Applegate Road. And many of them left their blood upon the land, but where they died others followed and lived. Upon the plains they met the Indian, the greatest light cavalryman who ever lived and rode. The Indian lived for warfare and battle. He swept down upon the camps of the white men, and where he defeated them he looted and burned and tortured, returning to his villages laden with plunder. But still the white men came.