The Choir Invisible

As the mighty stream of migration of the Anglo-Saxon race had burst through

the jagged channels of the Alleghanies and rushed onward to the unknown,

illimitable West, it was this little town that had received one of the main

streams, whence it flowed more gently dispersed over the rich lands of the

newly created State, or passed on to the Ohio and the southern fringes of

the Lakes. It was this that received also a vast return current of the

fearful, the disappointed, the weak, as they recoiled from the awful

frontier of backwood life and resought the peaceful Atlantic seaboard--one

of the defeated Anglo-Saxon armies of civilization.

These two far-clashing tides of the aroused, migrating race--the one flowing

westward, the other ebbing eastward--John Gray found himself noting with

deep interest as he moved through the town that afternoon a hundred years

ago; and not less keenly the unlike groups and characters thrown

dramatically together upon this crowded stage of border history.

At one point his attention was arrested by the tearful voices of women and

the weeping of little children: a company of travellers with

pack-horses--one of the caravans across the desert of the Western woods--was

moving off to return by the Wilderness Road to the old abandoned homes in

Virginia and North Carolina. Farther on, his passage was blocked by a joyous

crowd that had gathered about another caravan newly arrived--not one

traveller having perished on the way. Seated on the roots of an oak were a

group of young backwoodsmen--swarthy, lean, tall, wild and reckless of

bearing--their long rifles propped against the tree or held fondly across

the knees; the gray smoke of their pipes mingling with the gray of their

jauntily worn raccoon-skin caps; the rifts of yellow sunlight blending with

the yellow of their huntingshirts and tunics; their knives and powder-horns

fastened in the belts that girt in their gaunt waists: the heroic youthful

sinew of the old border folk. One among them, larger and handsomer than the

others, had pleased his fancy by donning more nearly the Indian dress. His

breech-clout was of dappled fawn-skin; his long thigh boots of thin

deer-hide were open at the hips, leaving exposed the clear whiteness of his

flesh; below the knees they were ornamented by a scarlet fringe tipped with

the hoofs of fawns and the spurs of the wild turkey; and in his cap he wore

the intertwined wings of the hawk and the scarlet tanager.

Under another tree in front of a tavern bearing the sign of the Virginia

arms, a group of students of William and Mary, the new aristocrats of the

West, were singing, gambling, drinking; while at intervals one of them, who

had lying open before him a copy of Tom Paine's "Age of Reason," pounded on

the table and apostrophied the liberties of Man. Once Gray paused beside a

tall pole that had been planted at a street corner and surmounted with a

liberty cap. Two young men, each wearing the tricolour cockade as he did,

were standing, there engaged in secret conversation. As he joined them,

three other young men--Federalists--sauntered past, wearing black cockades,

with an eagle button on the left side. The six men saluted coolly.