On Trails (26 page)

From the very beginning, Europeans exploited Native wisdom,
Native kindness, and Native infrastructure. Across the continent, many of the easiest mountain passes were discovered only when Native American guides led white men there. Henry Schoolcraft located the source of the Mississippi due only to the guidance of an Ojibwa chief. Following his Native guides across Baja California, an explorer named James Ohio Pattie slept on the edge of their blankets at night so they could not sneak off without waking him. (If they had escaped, he wrote, “we should all undoubtedly have perished.”)

One of history's most striking examples of how Europeans relied on local wisdom was provided by a rather mysterious figure named John Lederer. Almost nothing is known about Lederer prior to his arrival in Jamestown in the 1660s, save the fact that he was a doctor from Hamburg. Though he spoke little English, he did speak fluent German, French, Italian, and Latin (the language in which he later recorded his travels). Obstinate and ambitious, he was prone to amassing huge debts and bitter enemies. It is unclear how such a figure convinced the governor of Virginia, William Berkeley, to appoint him to search for a passage through the Appalachian Mountains to the West. But by March 1669, perhaps less than a year or two after arriving in the New World, he had already embarked on his first expedition. He hired three Native American guides to lead him. The trip was arduous—along the way, he was almost swallowed by quicksand and feared his horses would be devoured by wolves—but five days later, his party reached the foothills of the “Apalataean mountains.” When Lederer first glimpsed the famous range, he could not decide whether they were mountains or clouds, until his guides fell to their knees in prostration and howled out a phrase meaning “God is nigh.” (Or so he claimed.) Reaching the range, he attempted to ride up to the top of the mountains on his horse, but the horse balked. Lederer's guides were clearly also unfamiliar with the region, because they next attempted to scale the mountain on foot, without
the aid of a trail, and soon became entangled in brush and brambles. The route was so steep in places that, when Lederer looked down, his head swam. Though they had set out at first light, it was nightfall again before Lederer and his companions finally summited. They camped amid the dark boulders. He awoke high on the mountain the following dawn and looked west, expecting to find the sparkling waters of the Indian Ocean. Instead, there was only a wall of yet taller mountains. Hoping to find some passage through the range, he wandered among those snowy peaks for six days, drinking from springs where the water tasted faintly of aluminum, his hands and feet growing numb in the thick, chill air, before he gave up and returned home.

On a second expedition in May 1670, Lederer planned a more ambitious assault, leaving with five Native American guides and twenty Englishmen under the command of one Major William Harris. Lederer had wised up during his previous expedition. The most important lesson he had learned was that one could not navigate the mountains without the help of local tribes, who knew the easiest routes through the mountains. He took care to bring along a store of trade goods to win their confidence: sturdy cloth, sharp-edged tools, dazzling trinkets, and strong liquor. He had also learned how to travel in comfort over the strange continent. At night, instead of sleeping on a bedroll, he slept in a hammock, which was “more cool and pleasant than any bed whatsoever.” He fed himself by hunting for deer, turkeys, pigeons, partridges, and pheasants; when he was nearing mountains where game would be scarce, he prepared a pile of smoked meat in advance. Instead of biscuits, he brought along dried corn meal (“i.e. Indian wheat”), which he seasoned with a pinch of salt. The Englishmen laughed at his odd food, until their biscuits turned moldy in the humid air. Then they tried to beg Lederer's corn meal from him, but—“being determined to go upon further discoveries”—he refused to share.

Two days after setting out, the party reached a village marked by a pyramid of stones. They asked the villagers for directions to the mountains. An old man obliged to describe the route for them, drawing a map in the dirt with his staff. He depicted two paths that meandered through the mountains, one north and the other south. However, Lederer's companions, slighting the old man's advice, decided to strike their own course, following their compasses due west. Reluctantly, Lederer tagged along. For the next nine days, the party exhausted their horses by riding over rough terrain and scaling craggy cliffs. Lederer compared their progress to that of a land crab, which, crawling up and over every plant in its path rather than circumventing them, covers less than two feet of ground after a day's hard labor. The expedition finally reached a river flowing north, which Major Harris (perhaps willfully) mistook to be an arm of the fabled “lake of Canada.” Having found this important landmark, Harris decided the party should return to Jamestown. Lederer disagreed, and an argument ensued. Harris's men, starved and exhausted, threatened Lederer with violence, but he staved them off with a letter from the governor granting him permission to push forward. Harris and his men turned back, leaving Lederer with a gun and a single guide, a Susquehannock named Jackzetavon. Harris returned to the colony and, according to Lederer, began to “report strange things in his own praise and my disparagement, presuming I would never appear to disprove him.”

Lederer and Jackzetavon pushed on, traveling from village to village, stopping frequently to ask the local chieftains for directions. The information Lederer gathered, much of it refracted through an unknown number of translations, often shimmers with the exotic air of a colonial fantasy, replete with human sacrifices and temples full of pearls. Some of the tribes he encountered were tall, warlike, and rich; others were lazy or effeminate. Some were governed by democracies, others by ruthless monarchies, while others still held everything in
common ownership (“except their wives,” Lederer primly added). In one village, Lederer watched a man step barefoot onto a bed of burning coals and stand, writhing, foam collecting on his lips, for a full hour, before leaping out, apparently uninjured. At times, Lederer was impressed by the Native peoples' resourcefulness—as when he witnessed the delicate process by which acorns were roasted and pressed to yield an amber-colored oil, which, sopped up with corn bread, provided “an extraordinary dainty.” Yet he was also horrified by what he perceived as the tribes' gleeful love of violence, as when a group of young warriors returned from a raid to proudly present their chief with “skins torn off the heads and faces of three young girls.”

Despite the Swiftian tone of his writing, in contrast to the other explorers of his age, Lederer comes across as relatively peaceable, respectful, and punctilious. His second expedition lasted for some thirty days, and he made it home safely. Shortly afterward, he set out on a third, failed expedition in which, after only six days, he was bitten on the shoulder by a deadly spider and only managed to survive thanks to a Native American man who sucked out the poison.

Back home in Maryland, Lederer compiled his notes into a narrative and drew a map showing the route of his journeys. For a time, his writings were dismissed as too fantastic to be believed, but scholars have since judged them to be surprisingly accurate, given the obvious technical limitations of the time. (One must keep in mind just how little white people then knew about the extent of the American continent. Many then believed the Indian Ocean lay only one or two hundred miles west of the eastern seashore, a theory Lederer roundly debunked.) Lederer's account included a wealth of information, including the location of two easily navigable passes over the mountains, both of which were confirmed by explorers in the following years. One of those passes was described for him by an unnamed group of Native Americans, the other he had seen while following Jackzetavon. It is possible they were the same two
paths the old man had drawn in the dirt, which Major Harris, in his arrogance, ignored.

The example set by Lederer and Harris was repeated almost everywhere that the colonists spread: those who ignored the advice of Native people and spurned their trails ended up tangled in brambles and mired in swamps, whereas those who co-opted Native wisdom moved smoothly. A century after Lederer, by following several well-known Native trails, the famed mountaineer Daniel Boone and a team of thirty-five loggers would cut a horse trail up and over the Appalachians through the Cumberland Gap, opening up the continent to westward colonial expansion.

+

Native guides were sometimes called “pathfinders,” a title that has a double meaning: in wild and remote areas, their job was indeed to locate obscure trails, but in more densely populated areas—which were at times so thickly webbed with trails that explorers described them as a “maze”—the pathfinder's job was to chart a course through that network. A scholar in North Carolina told me that he had recently read a history of Hillsborough that began with the vague, romantic-sounding claim that when Hillsborough was founded, the county was a “trackless wilderness.” “That's such bullshit!” he exclaimed. “The problem wasn't that it was trackless; it had
too many tracks.
That's why you needed a Native American guide—to tell you which one of these roads to use.”

In the absence of a trusty guide, the best alternative for navigating a path network is to use a system of signs. Long before the painted blazes that demarcate modern hiking paths, people were slashing blazes into tree trunks to mark their trails. Across the continent, tree trunks were also marked with bright paint, elaborate carvings, or sketches drawn using a mixture of bear fat and charcoal. Along snowshoe paths in northeastern Ontario, evergreen boughs were
inserted into the snow at regular intervals to serve as signposts. In many places—from Montana to Bolivia—stones were piled up into cairns, which served both a functional and a spiritual purpose. When I was herding sheep in the Navajo country, I often ran across large stone cairns, which I was told were used in prayers, but which also helped us herders find our way home.

Perhaps more common, but certainly more difficult to document, were the subtler trail signs indigenous people left in passing. For instance, the practice of using bent or broken twigs to mark trails and transmit messages is widespread. In his supremely ill-titled account of transcontinental exploration,
First Man West
, Alexander Mackenzie wrote that his Native guides marked the trail “by breaking the branches of trees as they passed.” Elephant hunters in Africa noted that it was customary to mark one's trail by blocking tributary trails with a stick laid across the offshoot, as if closing a gate. The Rauto tribe of Papua New Guinea have a word,
nakalang
, for the stick that bars an errant trail. In their language, the word is also used, poignantly, to signify death, which separates the divergent paths of the deceased from those of the living.

A few years ago, I went for a walk through the Bornean jungle with Henneson Bujang, a Penan tribesman, and his two sons. As we walked down faint footpaths, they showed me how to bend or break a twig to send a message to someone down the trail. Bujang estimated that he knew dozens of signals involving broken twigs for sending messages, which could be as specific as “Avoid this trail—there's a hornet's nest here,” or “You're taking too long, I'm hiking up ahead.” The author Thom Henley recorded a number of stick signs from the groups he visited: A four-pronged stick planted in the ground indicated a burial, whereas three sticks arranged upright, like a fan, marked a territorial claim. One particularly elaborate stick sign he found in the Melinau River drainage showed the richness of information that could be encoded in these signs:

A large leaf at the top showed that the stick had been left by the headman. Three small uprooted seedlings indicated that the site had once been occupied by three families. A folded leaf told that the group was hungry, in search of game. Knotted rattan gave the number of days anticipated in the journey and two small sticks equal in length and placed transversely on the sign stick suggested that there was something for all Penan to share. Sticks and shavings at the base identified the group and revealed the direction of the journey.

Life is a continual struggle to make sense of the world's complexity. Knowledge is hard won, and so both spoken language and writing are ways of fixing and transmitting it. Though we tend to imagine that there is a sharp dichotomy between oral cultures and those that have developed written language, as trail signs reveal, there is a vast array of media—twigs, cairns, drawings, maps—that blur the line between the two. But perhaps the simplest and yet most dissolvent of all sign systems, the ur-inscription that predated writing and even the spoken word, is the trail itself.

+

Henneson Bujang and Lamar Marshall had something in common. While Marshall was fighting clearcutting in Bankhead Forest in Alabama, Bujang and a handful of other Penan tribesmen began sabotaging logging companies' attempts to cut down the old-growth rainforest where they live. Against steep odds and immense pressure, both ultimately succeeded.

Though some truly nomadic, hunting-and-gathering members of the Penan still lived in the hinterlands of Borneo, the Bujangs had since settled into the comforts of Christianity, zinc roofs, and shotgun ownership. But they continued to doggedly oppose logging efforts (and refused considerable bribes) for reasons that were as much
coldly practical as they were culturally inherited: almost all their food still came from the jungle. Over the two days I spent with them, we ate wild bearded pig, mouse-deer, fish, small birds, ferns, local rice, green chilies, and cucumbers—all of it collected from within three miles of where we sat. The birds were hunted using a blowpipe, which Bujang wielded with a sniper's accuracy, hitting hornbills in treetops up to two hundred feet away. He also knew how to carve a bowl out of ironwood, weave a rattan basket, and build a bamboo shelter that would keep him both dry and elevated off the jungle floor. On our walks, he and his sons showed me which insects were edible, which leaves were antiseptic, which plants would cure a headache, and which giant ferns could be woven together to form an impromptu umbrella. “The earthworm can go hungry and the mouse-deer become lost in the forest, but never we Penan,” the Penan like to say.