The True Account Read Online Free

Michelangelo, he did not believe he could bear to have another artistical relative. My uncle, in the meantime, had neatly inscribed on the map, “Private True Teague Kinneson’s Chart of the Interior of North America, Designating His Journey, by Land, from the Mouth of the Columbia to the United States. As attested to by True T. Kinneson, May 15, 1803.”

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    S O MATTERS RAN ALONG in our home for the next several weeks. At fifteen, I was reading changeable old Ovid’s lively Latin and, in the Greek, Thucydides, as well as my uncle’s favorite historical chronicler of all time, Herodotus, who wrote of giant crocodilos and flying lizards and other marvels stranger still. When I came to Xenophon’s
The March Upcountry,
we enacted his incredible trek through the land of the Persians and Medes by hiking up into Canada and back one sunny day. En route we encountered a great homed owl, which I later painted, life-size, presenting the picture to my mother.
    By then it had become apparent—my father’s concern about another artistical Kinneson notwithstanding—that I had a real flair for drawing and painting, particularly birds. I loved best their colors. The reddish brown thrasher with its long narrow tail, the indigo backs of our little northern bunting, the bright lemon plumage of the winter grosbeak against the snow. Indeed, there was no bird or animal that I did not find beautiful in its own way. For several months my mother fed an orphaned fox at the back door, a slinking young vixen that tolerated only her. I sketched this she-fox and many other animals as well—deer, beaver, and a bear that raided my uncle’s hemp garden and gourmandised on the ripening flower buds, then lolled on his back with his four black paws in the air like a big dog wishing to be scratched. But portraits of people were difficult. My best effort in this department was a group arrangement of my family seated in the farmhouse kitchen one winter evening. Here is my mother, Helen of Troy, baking her cartwheel cookies; my father slumps at the table with his hands pressed to his head, looking on as my yellow-eyed uncle, in full explorer’s regalia and belled stocking cap, works on his “Chart of the Interior of North America.” “And what, Mr. Mackenzie, say you to
this?
” he would say to himself as he inked in our route. What indeed!
    There was, at about this time, some talk between my parents of sending me down to Boston to study with Copley or Stuart, or perhaps to the great artist-scientist Charles Willson Peale in Philadelphia. But they had meager funds to underwrite such a venture; and who would then keep track of my uncle? Whose little ways and stays, I must say, seemed to grow ever more extravagant.
    Then came July 4 and the great news from Washington. “‘President Jefferson, in a single bold stroke,’” my father read to us from the
Washington Intelligencer
, “‘has more than doubled the land mass of our young nation by buying, from France, the territory called Louisiana, stretching from west of the Missouri River to the Rocky Mountains and north to Canada. Moreover,’” he continued, “‘trusted sources report that the president will soon appoint an expedition to go overland to the mountains and beyond, to discover the most practicable watercourse to the Ocean Pacific.’”
    My uncle, who, though listening to my father, had seen fit to thrust his ear trumpet close to the newspaper itself, was in a frenzy of anticipation. “Great Jehovah!” he cried. “Did you hear that, Ticonderoga? An overland expedition to the Ocean Pacific. I must lead that expedition. Having made the same tour backward, I can see no obstacle to completing it frontward.” He now put the trumpet to his mouth and, clapping the larger end to my father’s ear, he roared into it, “I’m going back to the Pacific, Charles, or I shall know the reason