Life has changed a lot in America, but how much?
by Stephanie Piper
I've been doing some research, and I have a news flash from the pages of local history.
Life in 18th-century Knoxville was tough.
Life in 18th-century Philadelphia was probably tough, too. But there at least you had the occasional doctor to pull you through smallpox, not to mention the off chance of bumping into Ben Franklin in some tree-shaded square.
Here in the Territory South of the Ohio, there were few such amenities. Here the staples of daily existence were work and danger, not necessarily in that order. Here were isolation, wild animals, and a large and not very happy Indian population.
Rummaging through dusty archives in the course of a recent project, I kept doing double takes. The Knoxville Gazette of 1794 reports on cabin burnings and massacres of nearby Cherokee in the matter-of-fact tone of a modern police blotter. Entire Indian villages wiped out, great swaths of forest and mountain and meadow simply marked off as "ours now" are all recorded as tersely and dispassionately as the weather. The return of a woman settler kidnapped by the Creeks and held for three years isn't breaking news; it's buried on page five, between lost and found notices and want ads.
I scanned the pages in wonder. Was there really so little drama associated with these events? Did people just stand there on the muddy track that was Gay Street and mutter, oh look, there's Anne Strong, back from captivity? Nowadays she'd be a media celebrity. Then, she was a small item on page five.
They were made of sterner stuff, these pioneers, or so we were taught. They wrested towns out of the wilderness and founded churches and colleges in between shooting wild turkeys and producing enormous families to work their rocky farms.
I study their portraits and try to read their faces, to fathom what lies behind the set of John Sevier's thin-lipped mouth, the almond-eyed gaze of John Crozier. Were they never disheartened, weary, overwhelmed by the pressure of daily existence? Was there such a thing as pioneer burnout? The Gazette is silent on the subject, as are the scant diaries that have come down to us.
The settlers' tombstones are more eloquent. Inscriptions speak of usefulness and fidelity to duty—pioneer watchwords. Reading them, I am reminded of my grandmother. She was born a century later, but cut from the same bolt of sturdy cloth. Orphaned at eight, she was making her own way in the world at 12, self-reliance a kind of instinct, independence her single treasure.
I asked her once why hardship had never made her bitter, and she answered that the struggle to survive, to keep herself fed and clothed and sheltered for another day kept her centered. Gratitude was the keystone. Hand-wringing was a luxury she simply could not afford.
Life was tough in 18th-century Knoxville, and in my grandmother's 19th-century New York, and one could argue that it is just as tough here, now, in post-September 11th America. I wonder, as I switch off the microfilm machine, what they would make of us, the Seviers and the Croziers and the Strongs. What would they say about terrorists and car bombings, Martha Stewart and Lacey Peterson?
"He did his duty and feared no man,"reads a grave in my favorite pioneer cemetery. The words, carved in stone, were clearly meant to last.
November 27, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 48
© 2003 Metro Pulse
| 
