Jacob Fowler is an unknown author whose work has never before been heralded beyond the private circles of his friends, relatives, and descendants. The editor of his Journal has therefore a man as well as a book to introduce to the public. Being responsible for the appearance of the latter in print, he will presently say something on that score. But first let us hear from Colonel R. T. Durrett, of Louisville, Ky., the owner of the manuscript now published, who will speak for its author:
Louisville, Ky., Dec. 4, 1897.
Dr. Elliott Coues, Washington, D. C.
I have your letter, My Dear Doctor, in which you request me to tell what I may know about the Journal you found among my manuscripts when you were my guest last year, and which you have determined to include in your admirable series of Western Americana. I am sorry to have to say that I do not know much of this manuscript or its author. The little I know, however, will be cheerfully contributed to an undertaking which is to place a Kentucky manuscript from my collection among the publications which, under your editorship, have added so much to our literature of discovery, exploration, and adventure.
The author of this Journal is Major Jacob Fowler. His name is not attached to the Journal, and does not appear on any of its pages in such a way as to indicate authorship. Yet it is well understood among his numerous descendants now living in Kentucky and other States that he is the author. I obtained the manuscript some years ago from Mrs. Ida Symmes Coates, daughter of the late Americus Symmes, now residing at her country seat near Louisville. Mrs. Coates is a great-granddaughter, on the maternal side, of Jacob Fowler. The manuscript descended to her in a direct line from her mother, Frances Scott, who was a granddaughter of Jacob Fowler, and who had obtained it in the same way from her mother, Abigail Fowler, the only daughter of Jacob Fowler. The manuscript has thus come down to us in a direct line, and is the unquestionable work of Major Jacob Fowler.
When Mrs. Coates gave me this manuscript she remarked that although her great-grandsire was a very well educated man, he wrote a very bad hand, and that I might be puzzled now and then in getting at his meaning. I found this to be true, and would not like to say that I succeeded in interpreting all of his modern hieroglyphics. When I placed the manuscript in your hands I felt sure that Lewis and Clark, Pike, and Henry and Thompson, as well as other explorers, had made you so familiar with the country gone over by Major Fowler, that you could with comparative ease master its chirographic difficulties. In this I was right; but I do remember how, with your constantly replenished pipe, you sat in my library, and smoked and puzzled over this manuscript. A distinguished host once assured his guest that the more raw turnips he ate, the more water he would drink, and that the more water he drank, the more turnips he would eat. With a touch of similarity, you smoked and read, and read and smoked, with manifest indications of successful or unsuccessful interpretations of the text, as your puffs were rapid or slow. It might be hard to say whether you smoked most or read most, but you finally mastered the manuscript; and whether you did so by smoking out the uninterpretable hieroglyphics, or got rid of them by other means, does not matter. While a cloud of smoke may not seem to be the best means of clearing up the obscurity of a manuscript, it is the known result here considered, if not the philosophy of its action.
Pioneers by the name of Fowler were early in Kentucky, and some of them were the owners of large bodies of land. In 1783, Alexander Fowler entered 10,000 acres on the Little Kentucky river; and in 1784, John Fowler, who was the first member of Congress from Ashland District, located 1536 acres on Brush creek and on the dividing ridge between Pitman’s creek and Robertson’s run. I do not know whether Jacob Fowler was of the family of these Fowlers, but he was certainly akin to them in so far as the love and ownership of lands were concerned. Besides other possessions, he owned 2000 acres of the site of the present city of Covington, Kenton Co., Ky. He was one of the pioneers of what afterward became the county of Kenton, before the city of Covington was incorporated. A census of the male inhabitants of this locality shows him to have been residing here in 1810, with his sons Edward and Benjamin. Had he been permitted to retain these Covington lands, he might have become a multi-millionaire. His kind heart, however, led him to become the indorser of those who made a clean sweep of his fine estate. A large double brick dwelling house, handsomely furnished, in the midst of ample grounds, planted with trees and shrubbery, flowers and blue-grass, went with his lands to pay the debts of others. Had he written his name as indorser as illegibly as he wrote the names of others in his Journal, there might have been some ground for what lawyers call the plea of non est factum, to clear him of liability. But such was not the case, and his security for others swept away his large estate.
Major Fowler was born in New York, in 1765, and came to Kentucky in early life, a fine specimen of physical manhood, fully equipped for the office and duties of a surveyor. His surveying instruments were the best of their day, and elicited no little envy from those who used the common Jacob’s staff and compass, and chain of the times. He had the reputation of being an accomplished surveyor, and did much in this line for the United States government. His surveying extended to the great plains and mountains of the far West, before civilization had reached these distant wilds. He was there when wild animals and wilder savages were the only tenants of the wilderness.
Major Fowler married the widow Esther Sanders, nÉe de Vie, of Newport, Ky. She was of French descent, and a lady of great beauty and accomplishments. She made his home one of happiness and hospitality. She sometimes accompanied him on his surveying expeditions and bore domestic charms to the tent in which they lived, as she did to the palatial mansion at home. She was a woman of fine business capacity, who, when her husband was not at home, attended to his affairs, and especially to his farm in the suburbs of Covington. Here fine stock and abundant crops owed much to her constant care and supervision. The grapes that grew on the place were made into wine and the apples into cider, in accordance with the knowledge she had inherited from her French ancestors. Her great-grandchildren of to-day tell of the life of the camp, when she was with her husband in his surveying expeditions. The tent floor was nicely carpeted; a comfortable bed invited repose after the toil of the day; dainty china, bright cut glass, and shining silverware, handsome enough to be preserved as family heirlooms by their descendants, were used on the camp table. It was something of Parisian life in the dreary wilderness.
Major Fowler died in Covington in the year 1850. His life as a surveyor and explorer in the West subjected him to many hardships, but a constitution naturally vigorous was preserved with care until he reached his eighty-sixth year. He has numerous descendants in Kentucky, Ohio, and other States, some of whom occupy high social positions. Mrs. Coates, to whom I am indebted for this manuscript Journal, is, in the paternal line, the granddaughter of Captain John Cleve Symmes, author of the “Theory of Concentric Spheres,” 12mo. Cincinnati, 1826, and great-grandniece of Hon. John Cleve Symmes, a member of Congress from New Jersey, who purchased of the United States government that vast body of land in the State of Ohio, lying on the north bank of the Ohio river between the two Miamis. With the knowledge and consent of her father, the late Americus Symmes, she gave me the manuscript in the belief that I would make some good use of it. After thinking for a time that I would place it among the Filson Club Publications, I changed my mind and turned it over to you to be published. I think this is the best use I could have made of the manuscript, and I shall now wait with impatience until I see your work published in the best style of Francis P. Harper, and read your ample notes and comments, which I doubt not will be after the inimitable manner of your Lewis and Clark, your Pike, and your Henry and Thompson.
Truly,
R. T. Durrett.
The MS. which I received from Colonel Durrett is entitled: “memorandom of the voige by land from fort Smith to the Rockey mountains”—and is the most like those mountains of any I have ever undertaken to overcome. My eminent friend does not exaggerate the difficulty of deciphering the characters which he aptly styles “hieroglyphics,” and which have hitherto kept this writing a sealed book. The text begins verso of the title, and ostensibly runs pp. 1-264, but pagination is once skipped and twice duplicated. The folios may be called of square note-paper size, nearly that of a small quarto book—8 × 6½ inches for pp. 1-180, but larger, nearly 9 × 7, for the rest. The ragged edges make exact measurements impracticable, Father Time’s paper-mill having turned out a deckel-edged product, so fashionable nowadays. The sheets, of four pages or two folios each, are gathered in 16-page packets, the outsides of which are now much soiled—indeed, the rough, unruled surfaces are all darkened with the dust of three-quarters of a century, and the ink is faded to match the same subdued monotone, except in places where it recedes to the vanishing point. The writing is upon both sides of the paper; and the whole effect, if it could be facsimiled, would be a bibliomaniac’s dream of delight.
At first sight, this manuscript appears illegible; no one can read it off-hand. Nevertheless, this writing proves readable upon sufficient study of the alphabetic characters which Fowler invented to suit himself, like that classic old Theban Cadmus, or his modern imitator, Cherokee Sequoiah. I managed to master it under the agreeable circumstances of my visit to Louisville, to which my host on that occasion has so pleasantly alluded in the letter printed above; and after that my secretary also proved herself equal to the task when she took the matter in hand to copy for the press. There are hardly a dozen words in which doubt attaches to a single letter, and probably not half as many have proven altogether illegible.
Fowler wrote a large sprawling hand, as may be judged by the fact that only 174 of these small open pages are required to print his 264 folios, with my 176 notes. He commonly conforms to the requirements of dotted i and crossed t, but otherwise strikes out for himself in the formation of letters. His most original invention is an r which would puzzle Œdipus, as it is always a careful n; most of his short-stroke characters look alike in their resemblance to bends of the Arkansaw river on a map, and his long strokes seem as if they had been struck by lightning. The incessant capitals are flourished elaborately, and not confined to initial letters. Fowler is also fond of capping little words, as if he thought they needed such help to hold up their heads with big ones, and equally apt to begin proper names, sentences, and paragraphs with lower-case letters. This style of composition appears on the printed page, which faithfully imitates every peculiarity of the original which can be set with an ordinary font of type. The syntax is the sort which has been happily called “dash dialect”—Fowler has no other punctuation than the dash, excepting a sporadic period here and there, usually misplaced, and an occasional stab at the paper which is neither one thing nor another, and may therefore be overlooked. His spelling speaks so well for itself in print that little need be said on that score. Its entire originality, its effusive spontaneity, its infinite variety, will charm the reader while it puzzles him, and make the modern manufacturer of Dialect despair of his most ingenious craft. Aside from sheer slips of the pen, by which Fowler often misses letters, as in writing “campe,” “caped,” “capped,” or “capted” for camped, there is a particular point to which I may call attention as the most characteristic—in fact, the diagnostic—feature of his composition. It is that habitual omission of final y which makes the definite article do duty for the third personal pronoun nominative; and when this is followed by a misspelled verb simulating a noun, some curious locutions result. Thus, “the Road” stands for they rode; “the Ware,” for they were; “the Cold,” for they could; “the Head,” for they had; “the Maid,” for they made—and so on, to the end of the book.
But it is needless to pursue this alluring theme; the reader may turn to the text which follows this feeble preface so strenuously, and see for himself with what a tour de force our ingenious author managed to evade what we now call good grammar. I have found more than one reason for transferring this curious copy to type with the utmost verbality, literality, and punctuality of which the compositor is capable. In the first place, it tickled my fancy so that I wished others to enjoy the same sensation—for is it not said that our joys are doubled by sharing them, as our sorrows are halved by the same process? Again, to prolong these pleasantries, I may say that I thought this would be a good way to show that awesome deference which I ought to feel for certain captious critics of former works with which my name is associated, whose green-eyed strabismus has seen me in the light of entirely too good an editor—that is to say, who have complimented me by their censure for making my authors too intelligible, too attractive, and altogether too readable, by the way I dressed them for the press.
So I determined to submit the pure text of Fowler’s Journal to the discernment of competent critics of literary wares, as well as to the lack of that quality in fussy fault-finders, and let everybody see how some manuscript looks when it is printed just as it is written. I do not vaunt this specimen as unique in any respect except the handwriting, a sample of which is reproduced. The article is much like others of Fowler’s times and circumstances; it is only a little off the average syntax and orthography of that period, with a few more capitals and dashes than were then usual. I know authors of our own day whose copy would turn out a good deal like Fowler’s if the printer did not fix it up for them. They are mostly the ones who damn instead of blessing the artists of the art preservative of arts. Few women, for example, can spell quite like the dictionaries; fewer still can punctuate properly; and fewest of all persons of either sex in the world are those authors, even among professional literarians, who would like or could afford to see themselves set up in print exactly as they write themselves down. There is said to be a day coming when the secrets of all hearts shall be revealed, the wicked shall tremble, and they shall say to the mountains, “fall on us”—or words to that effect. I cite the passage from early memory, not having the author in hand, and have not verified the quotation; but I will risk anything of that sort, provided the day never comes when the secrets of the printing office shall be revealed. I am at peace with my God, my neighbor, and myself; but—I am an author.
If we turn from the form to the substance of Fowler’s Journal, and ask to see the bill of lading, curious to know what useful or valuable information is contained in so singular a vehicle of conveyance, it may be confidently said that this “prairie schooner” is well freighted for a “voige” on the highway of Americana; for the cargo is a novel and notable contribution to our knowledge of early commercial venture and pioneering adventure in the Great West. It is simply a story of the trader and trapper, unsupported by the soldier, unimpeded by the priest, and in no danger from the politician. The scene is set in the wilderness; the time is when pack-animals are driven across the stage, before the first wheels rolled over the plains from the States to Santa FÉ; and the actors have very real parts to perform.
From the respective dates of Pursley, of Lalande, and of Pike, whose several travels were among the first if not the earliest overland from the United States to the Spanish settlements, on the part of American citizens—from the opening years of the century to the 1821-22 of Fowler—various parties were on the Arkansaw in what are now Kansas and Colorado. But the records of where they went or what they did? That is the question. Ezekiel Williams, James Workman, Samuel Spencer, sole and shadowy survivors of Coyner’s “Lost Trappers,” are only uneasy spirits flitting from the Missouri to Mexico and California in an apocryphal book, never materializing out of fable-land into historical environment. Wherever other American trappers or traders may have gone on the Arkansaw or even the Rio Grande in those days, and whatever they may have done, Fowler was first to forge another sound link in the chain which already reached from Pike to Long. The latter’s justly celebrated expedition came down the Arkansaw and the Canadian in 1820. Pike ascended the main river from its great bend to its sources in 1806, the same year that his lieutenant, Wilkinson, descended this stream from the point where he parted from his captain. For the lower reaches of the river we have Thomas Nuttall’s Journal of Travels into the Arkansa Territory, during the year 1819, and various other accounts. But I know of no record, earlier in date than Fowler’s, of continuous ascent of the river from Fort Smith to the present position of Pueblo in Colorado. He meandered the whole course of the Arkansaw between the points named, except his cut-off of a small portion by the Verdigris trail. One of his men, Lewis Dawson, who was killed by a grizzly bear at the mouth of the Purgatory—and who, let us hope, left that place for happier hunting-grounds—may not have been the first white American buried in Colorado soil; but the record of a prior funeral would be far to seek. Whose was the first habitable and inhabited house on the spot where Pueblo now stands? Fowler’s, probably; for Pike’s stockade was hardly a house, and Jim Beckwourth came twenty years after Fowler. The Taos Trail from Santa FÉ through the Sangre de Cristo Pass to the Arkansaw at Pueblo was well known to the Spaniards when Fowler’s party traversed it in the opposite direction; but we have no American itinerary of that passage at an earlier date than his. When Fowler ascended the Rio Grande to Hot Spring creek in the San Juan range, he followed a Spanish road; but never before had an American expedition been so near the sources of that great river Del Norte, and not till many years afterward did any such prolong Fowler’s traces upward. The greater part of Fowler’s homeward journey from Taos to Fort Osage will doubtless prove as novel to his readers as it was unexpected by his editor. South of the Arkansaw, his trail was neither by the way he had gone before, nor by either of those roads which were soon be established and become well known; for he came neither by the Cimarron nor the Raton route, but took a straighter course than either, between the two, over Chico Rico Mesa and thence along Two Butte creek to the Arkansaw on the Kansan-Coloradan border. Again, when Fowler left the Arkansaw to strike across Kansas, he did not take up the direct route which caravans were about to blaze as the Santa FÉ Trail from Missouri through Council Grove to Great Bend; but went a roundabout way, looping far south to heads of the Whitewater and Verdigris rivers before he crossed the Neosho to make for the Missouri below the mouth of the Kansas.
This bare outline of the way Fowler went in twice crossing the Plains, to and from the Rocky mountains, suffices to show that, taken as a whole, it was not only the first but also the last such itinerary of which we have any knowledge; for if this route has since been retraversed in its entirety, time has obliterated all sign of such an adventure.
Another point is to be scored in connection with Fowler’s unique performance. The date is a critical one in the history of the whole subject. That elusive “Red river” which Pike sought in vain in 1806 was only the year before Fowler found by Long to be the Canadian fork of the Arkansaw, instead of that separate tributary of the Mississippi which Long imagined he was descending till he reached its confluence with the same stream which the other detachment of his party followed down. Just at the time when Long had finished his exploration, and Fowler was leading his people home from their wide wandering, the Santa FÉ trade was taking definite shape. Like every other such enterprise, this one went through its tentative stages of hesitancy and disconcert, before its final organization as a regular industry; and if any year can be named as that of complete equipment for the business, it is that of 1822. Fowler was thus a factor in the beginnings of a commerce which grew by what it fed upon to the immense proportions it had acquired when it was checked by the troubles of 1846.
Whatever be deemed the merit or demerit of Fowler’s work as a whole, viewed in the light of a contribution to the history of Western adventure in connection with the fur trade, I can attest the coherency and consequence of the narrative now before us. The author tells a plain, straightforward story, and never fails to make it intelligible. He never loses the thread of his discourse, never tangles it into an irrelevant skein, and holds himself well in hand through all the asperities he experienced. He is a reasonable sort of a writer, if not a very ready one. I have had little trouble in trailing him from start to finish, for all that compass-points uncorrected for magnetic variation, and distances chained only in the sensations of a tired traveler, are not among the “constants of nature”—especially in the mountains; and I am satisfied that his route is laid down correctly in my notes. The sign is a little dim here and there, in some of the cross-country laps, but we never lose it. Fowler had the good eye for topography to be expected of a professional surveyor, and I only wish that some other persons whose peregrinations I have had occasion to follow had exercised powers of observation equal to those which Fowler displayed under arduous exigencies of trade and travel.
Thus far by way of introducing to the public the hitherto unknown author of a new contribution to Americana, which I hope may find that favor which I believe it deserves.
The task of copying Fowler’s Journal v. l. p. was intrusted to an expert, Mrs. Mary B. Anderson, to whom acknowledgments are due for the result. The copy was made in my absence from home last summer, during which the lady was left entirely to her own resources in making out the manuscript; and subsequent critical comparison of the transcription with the original served mainly to show its beauty as well as accuracy. The Index is also her careful handiwork.
E. C.
1726 N Street, Washington, D. C., January 1, 1898.
