ANNALS OF THE DEAR UNKNOWN - PART TWO, CHAPTER SIX

 

A Bantam Little Shadow

Diah had planted more than corn that spring.

Rachel, in a late November letter

to her sister, Thankful, back in Wallingford,

described her new life in Wyoming Valley—

the ample, well-built house and open hearth,

the Susquehanna River close at hand,

the flora and the fauna of the forest,

the children diligent and dutiful,

the first year’s meager yield of winter wheat.

Her dread at being pregnant once again.

But since she knew no eastbound travelers

to whom she could entrust her forthright letter,

and later, thinking it had seemed too boastful,

while at the same time fearing she might hurt

her sister who had given birth but once,

Rachel burned the letter, page by page,

one night while stirring the next day’s cornmeal pottage.

And as she stirred, she thought about the baby

due in three months’ time, whose birth, despite

her inner reservations, pleased her husband.

Diah called to mind the midwife’s warning

back in Connecticut, and knew the toll

that Walter’s birth had taken on his wife,

and yet he welcomed this eleventh child.

Humming to himself Saint David’s Tune,

he carved a rocking cradle out of oak

and pledged that, should the baby be a girl,

she’d take her mother’s name. And so it was,

that on the twenty-eighth of February,

baby Rachel came into the world.

The chapter title A Bantam Little Shadow comes from the poem “Song of the Egg” by Deborah Warren.

COMING SOON: PART TWO, CHAPTER SEVEN

ANNALS OF THE DEAR UNKNOWN - PART TWO, CHAPTER FIVE

 

 

 Corn Planting Moon

The Munson wagon was all set to go—
three yoke of oxen and a dairy cow,
feed, a water barrel and provisions
to last the journey and the summer months,
seeds of corn and wheat and flax, a hoe,
a shovel, scythe and rake, a spinning wheel,
a bucket, pots and pans, their clothes and linens
wrapped in Rachel’s heirloom coverlet.
They left the first of May in ’72.
A Friday. Diah knew, but let it pass.

Diah walked ahead with the nameless sumpter.
Rachel, Wil, and Stephen manned the wagon.
Daniel, Hannah, Ephraim and Irene
gently spurred the oxen with their goads.
Sarah, Obie and the baby, Walter,
wedged between the boxes and the bales.
The trip was uneventful till they ferried
across the Hudson River at Newburgh Bay,
when, fearing they would surely drown, the children
clung to each other, wailing in dismay.

 

They met up with the Tuttles one day later—
Rachel’s cousin Ichabod and his wife,
Eliza, five months pregnant with their first.
The Minisink, although not much improved
and barely wide enough for them to pass,
was even, high and dry, and more direct
than other paths that led through swamps and bogs.
So, when they made their camp upon Cobb’s Mountain,
the Munsons and the Tuttles slept beneath
the full Corn Planting Moon in perigee.

 

 

 Coming soon - PART TWO, CHAPTER SIX

ANNALS OF THE DEAR UNKNOWN - PART TWO, CHAPTER FOUR

Promis’d Joy

 
Other settlers shared in Diah’s joy
that day upon the summit of Cobb’s Mountain.
They, too, had left their families behind—
for now; but, confident hostilities
with angry Pennymites had been resolved
with Captain Ogden’s ousting, they believed
their future in the valley would be bright,
and that, come spring, the town would boast a school,
a Meeting House, impenetrable forts,
a grist mill, and a saw mill, and a name.

The emigrants divided into crews.
Diah, ox-strong, joined the logging team;
likewise Frank Phillips from Rhode Island. Soon
the two became fast friends, and Frank, who claimed
as yet no settling right, helped Diah clear
his lot and daub his hewn-log house. At night,
the tired men bunked down in the Pittstown fort
they called Fort Brown, exchanging tales of home,
though talk of their ambitious dreams eclipsed
all wistfulness for wives and honey cake.

 

As autumn turned to winter, Diah left,
but Frank stayed on. He manned the Munson right
against intruders, thieves and bogus claims.
In mid-December, Frank obtained the right
to settle in the valley, purchased land,
and built his house along the Lackawanna,
a few miles north of Diah’s. Unbeknownst
to these devoted men, their elder sons
would lead—when happiness reversed to sorrow—
their families from a valley set ablaze. 

NOTE: 

The title for the chapter Promis’d Joy comes from the poem “To a Mouse” by Robert Burns

 

            An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,

            For promis'd joy! 

 

Historical Note:  Pittstown Fort (originally spelled Pittstown and later becoming Pittston, Pennsylvania) was a aignificant colonial and Revolutionary war stockade. In historical military rosters and regional records, it is also frequently cross-referenced or identified as Fort Brown (or Brown's Fort/Blockhouse), which was erected on a local farm owned by the Brown family.

 

 Coming soon: PART TWO, CHAPTER FIVE

ANNALS OF THE DEAR UNKNOWN, PART TWO, CHAPTER THREE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Signal Tree

 
Diah Munson, forty years of age,
believed this was his chance—perhaps his last—
to grow his wealth, just as his father had,
with land. And though it lay three hundred miles
away, through virgin woods and wilderness
so thick with undergrowth as to obscure
at times the narrow path he had to take,
he set out on a bright October morning
in seventeen seventy-one, with heady dreams
of farmland on the Susquehanna’s banks.

Once Diah left Connecticut and crossed
the Hudson and the Delaware, he took
the Minisink, a path the ancient tribes
had trod for centuries. He made his bed
of hemlock boughs, and slept beneath the stars
or canopies of fragrant conifers,
lighting fires to keep the beasts at bay.
Along the trail, a dome-shaped birch bark hut,
long since abandoned by Lenape hunters,
provided shelter on the night it rained.

 

The Minisink, once it had passed Shohola,
had risen by degrees to such a height
that, after he had ridden fifteen days,
Diah reached the summit of Cobb’s Mountain,
its ridge-top heath so barren that it gave
an unobstructed view of wave on wave
of woodland tree-tops robed in autumn’s hues;
and towering above, the signal tree—
a lofty lopstick pine resplendent in
the final rays of the descending sun.

 

 

Coming soon: Part Two, Chapter Four

 

ANNALS OF THE DEAR UNKNOWN, PART TWO, CHAPTER TWO

 

 

 

 

 

A Darting Fear

 
Unlike her husband, Diah, who was short,
broad-shouldered, stout, and strong enough to hoist
a barrelful of cider over the rave
of any cart; whose thunderous voice bespoke
the confidence of a successful farmer,
Rachel’s strength lay in her fortitude.
Angular, with waist-length auburn hair
and deep-set hazel eyes, this quiet woman
admirably kept house, but kept her peace
where Munson business matters were concerned.

 

Reserved but cheerful, Rachel baked the bread,
churned the butter, spun the flax and wool,
and filled the featherbeds. She cooked and cleaned,
preserved the pickled beets and damson plums,
made soap and tallow candles, all the while
caring for her children, who were born
like clockwork every second year or so.
That is, till little Walter came along
feet-first. The midwife almost lost them both,
and warned against another pregnancy.

At sundown on the chill October day
when Diah Munson left his family,
before she said her prayers and went to bed,
Rachel, with her homemade bristle brush,
wrested from one hundred gentle strokes
one hundred images of harbored fears.
The whole town knew what Dyer’s scouting team
and Uncle Eph had met with years ago
in frontier forests, where not only wolves
and panthers stalked their unsuspecting prey.

NOTE:

The chapter titled A Darting Fear comes from the Emily Dickinson’s poem 87, part of a letter to Mary Haven, 1859.

ANNALS OF THE DEAR UNKNOWN, PART TWO , CHAPTER ONE

 Part Two : Wyoming
 

O it will be beautiful.
—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, from “At Last the New Arriving”

 

 

The Anchor

Wilmot Munson, sixteen years of age,
was short and stocky like his father, Diah.
Marked by the gap-toothed smile and dimpled chin
passed on from time to time to Munson sons,
Wil shared Diah’s energy and strength,
his keen blue eyes, his fiery red hair,
and most of all his eagerness to move
beyond the boundaries of Connecticut.
But unlike Diah, Wilmot’s voice and heart
were softer than his father’s ever were.

Born on a summer night when the moon was full,
this second child and second son was quick
to learn the skills reserved for boys and men.
But Rachel, in her wisdom, taught her Wil
not only how to cipher, read and write,
but also all the chief domestic arts—
cooking, sewing, gardening, how to cure
the common illnesses—and by example,
how to live an honorable life
of industry, humility and grace.

Barnabas, the eldest, was away
at Yale when Diah left the family
to clear his pitch in the Wyoming Valley.
Thus it was that Wil, as next in line,
was tasked to stay behind to care for Rachel
and his siblings. He assumed this role
with constancy, but not without a twinge
of wounded pride and smoldering resentment
he tried without success to hide from Rachel,
who knew his thoughts as though they were her own.

NOTE: 

The title of the chapter The Anchor comes from the quote by Sophocles: 

“Sons are the anchors of a mother’s life.” 

 

 STAY TUNED FOR PART TWO, CHAPTER TWO

ANNALS OF THE DEAR UNKNOWN: INTRODUCTION BY GEORGE ELLIOTT CLARKE

 

 

Before we continue with Part Two, I reprint below the short introduction to Annals of the Dear Unknown,  by George Elliott Clarke, 7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada, author of Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir (Knopf, 2021)

 

Raised in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, poet Catherine Chandler 

spelunks into, excavates, and recovers her Euro-American-settler 

genealogy, while examining the U.S. Revolutionary War and 

its disruptions of agricultural endeavour and frontier households, 

noting the economics of trade with Indigenous peoples and 

their sometimes violent disaffection with the offerings of settler-interlopers.

In Annals of the Dear Unknown, Chandler recognizes that 

“Uncertainty and ambiguity / must either be rejected or embraced, / 

leaving room for mystery and truths / more beautiful for having been imagined.”

The Richard Wilbur Award-winning bard presents her narrative 

verse in basically decasyllabic lines in trios of ten-line stanzas. 

Americans will hear Wilbur, here, but also Longfellow 

(Evangeline), while Canadian readers may be reminded of E.J. Pratt 

(Brébeuf and His Brethren). Whatever the echoes that one may 

recognize, this verse saga is original, rich with true incident, and 

even a kind of chronological preface to William Carlos Williams’ Paterson.

Enjoy here and now these Annals of the Dear Unknown.

—George Elliott Clarke, 7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada
Author, Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir (Knopf, 2021)

NOTE: The title of the book, Annals of the Dear Unknown, comes from Thomas Campbell’s poem, Gertrude of Wyoming; A Pennsylvanian Tale where, in one part, Gertrude is musing about her ancestors in Scotland, whom she had never met:

 

The sunrise drew her thoughts to Europe forth,
That thus apostrophized its viewless scene;
"Land of my father's love, my mother's birth!
The home of kindred I have never seen!
We know not other — oceans are between;—
Yet say! far friendly hearts from whence we came,
Of us does oft remembrance intervene?
My mother sure — my sire a thought may claim;—
But Gertrude is to you an unregarded name.

"And yet, lov'd England! when thy name I trace
In many a pilgrim's tale and poet's song,
How can I choose but wish for one embrace
Of them, the dear unknown, to whom belong
My mother's looks, — perhaps her likeness strong?

ANNALS OF THE DEAR UNKNOWN - PART ONE, CHAPTER FOUR

 

Colonel Dyer pitching his scheme to Connecticut landowners

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Certain Tract of Land       

 

 

A piece of paradise. Glib promises

of fertile plains and valleys so unlike

the rocky fields they farmed. Connecticut

was filled with eager, able-bodied men

whose fathers’ lands, bequeathed, could not suffice

once divvied up among their many sons.

And so, when Colonel Dyer pitched his scheme

one summer evening at the Meeting House,

two hundred fifty men subscribed at once,

and soon thereafter, some five hundred more. 

 

 

How can we possibly go wrong? they thought,

plunking down five dollars for the chance

to start anew along the Susquehanna.

Although it lay three hundred miles away,

and there were rumors that the land belonged

to Pennsylvania or the Iroquois,

they cast their lot with Dyer and his friends.

Joel Munson, skeptical, declined,

but passed along the word to nephew Diah,

who bought and held a half-share, biding time.

 

 

Following the birth of their tenth child,

when he’d disposed of almost everything

he owned in Farmington, one autumn morning

Diah packed a hatchet and an axe,

an adze, a saw, an auger, and a mallet,

his firelock, a tinderbox, some shot,

a butcher knife, a skillet and a spoon,

some cornmeal, bread and bacon, applejack,

a woolen blanket and his deed of sale.

Rachel watched him from the dooryard, silent.

 

 [END OF PART ONE]

 

 

ANNALS OF THE DEAR UNKNOWN - PART ONE, CHAPTER THREE

 

 

 

 

 Pattern on a 1771 woven coverlet, reprinted by permission of 

The National Museum of the American Coverlet, Bedford, Pennsylvania

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What Reason Weaves          

 

                                               

Diah was a superstitious man

who looked for signs and omens in his dreams,

the moon, and shooting stars. He’d not abide

a black cat in the barn. He counted crows,

and slept feet facing south. Contingent on

the farmland’s need—or not—for sun and rain,

he’d find and kill a snake and either hang

or drown it. Even as a little boy

he’d kept a lucky charm—a codfish bone—

and drew his stockings on, first left, then right.

 

 

His journeys rarely started on a Friday;

he never trimmed his finger-nails on Sunday;

and in accordance with the local lore,

he married on a Wednesday afternoon.

Thus Diah was alarmed when Rachel placed

the linsey-woolsey paneled coverlet

that had been passed on down from Granny Tuttle

and Rachel’s mother—both of whom had died

not long past forty—on their wedding bed.

He voiced his dread in no uncertain terms.

 

 

So Rachel put the coverlet away,

wrapped in calico, where it would lie

unseen, unused, but not unvisited.

For, in those rare and scattered unfilled hours,

she’d open up the cedar dowry chest,

remove the coverlet, and lose herself

in the embrace of its remembered scents

and in the white and sky-blue warp and weft

of other lives now absent from her own.

One day it would become a winding sheet.

NOTE: 

The chapter titled What Reason Weaves comes from the following poem:

 

            . . . Man's superior part

            Uncheck'd may rise, and climb from art to art;

            But when his own great work is but begun,

            What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone.

 

               ~Alexander Pope, from “An Essay on Man: Epistle II”

ANNALS OF THE DEAR UNKNOWN - PART ONE, CHAPTER TWO

 

AI-generated image based on my description

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Disposing of Their Children

 

In January, seventeen forty-six,

Nathan Tyler deeded to his neighbor,

Obadiah Munson, one hundred acres

in Wallingford, Connecticut. The pact

included Tyler’s house and barn, its mills,

and the tacit understanding Tyler’s daughter

Rachel, nine years old, would wed the younger

Obadiah ("Diah"), then fifteen,

when Rachel came of age. The two men closed

the deal with several tankards of hard cider.

 

 

And after seven years had passed, they wed.

When Barnabas, their first of twelve, was born,

Obadiah Senior, out of  “love, 

good will and natural affection,” gave 

his son the the house and sixty acres of

as well as all improvements made thereon,

the selfsame bartered tract. And thus began

the young man’s unremitting appetite

for land, an uneventful run of years

when gains outnumbered losses. Wallingford

was good. But Diah Munson needed more.

 

 

The years went by. They moved to Farmington,

where Rachel loved her plain and sturdy home,

her busy life, the brand-new Meeting House,

the blessings and the bounties of the farm,

but felt uneasy when she heard the men

and Wil, their teenaged son, discussing plans

to settle in that godforsaken place

where uncle Ephraim Tyler had outrun

Lenape warriors in ’63.

And all the trouble brewing ever since.

NOTE:        

The chapter titled The Disposing of Their Children 

comes from this “law”:

               God hath committed the care and power into the hands 

               of parents for the disposing of their children in marriage.

               ~Courtship and Marriage, Plymouth Colony Laws

 

ANNALS OF THE DEAR UNKNOWN: PART ONE, CHAPTER ONE ("at the big river flat")

 

 

 

 

Part One

 

Xwewamënk

 

 

 

Hushed the streams, and quiet

the rocks beside the streams.

The Lenape, like all of them, unspeaking.

The Spirit guardians whose masks hang on the posts, silent,

The four walls, hushed,

Silent the far quarters of the world.

 

~Daniel Hoffman, from Brotherly Love

 

   

“at the big river flat”   

 

 

Along the North Branch of the Susquehanna

within the folded Appalachian Mountains

lies a geological depression—

canoe-shaped Ridge and Valley Province.

Before it had a name, when blue-veined ice

receded some twelve thousand years ago,

nomadic hunter-gatherers arrived.

Yet all that one can ever know of them

is what can be divined from potsherds, bones,

tools and weapons carved from stone and wood.

 

 

In time, through woodlands dense with oak and birch,

hemlock, hawthorn, hickory, pine, and beech,

new men pursued the white-tailed deer and elk.

In spring, with cradleboards upon their backs,

their women broke the soil with deer-bone hoes,

planting seeds of maize and squash and beans.

The Lenape had described this blessed land—

dreamt up by Kishelamakank, and formed

by spirits, where a shad-filled river flowed

and waterfowl were plentiful— Xwewamënk.

 

 

Wyoming to the settlers from the east,

who claimed the Endless Mountains and the fields,

the forests and the sacred hunting grounds,

attempting to possess what can’t be owned,

waging war with brothers over deeds

and documents, until a greater cause

united them in an uneasy peace;

while farther north, Haudenosaunee chiefs

no longer of one mind, would one day mourn

their forfeiture of solidarity

 

ANNALS OF THE DEAR UNKNOWN: "NAMED PARTICIPANTS"

 

The grave of Wilmot Munson (1731-1845)

NAMED PARTICIPANTS (in order of appearance):

(for reference purposes as you read the story -- some only appear briefly

 - those in yellow are major characters)

 

There seems to be a requirement that the play must find its own finale, with participants tossed along impersonally to the end.[1]

 

 

Little Girl, author of this verse-tale, descendent of Diah Munson and Rachel Tyler Munson

Nathan Tyler, father of Rachel Tyler Munson

Obadiah Munson (Sr.) (1703-1773)

Rachel Tyler Munson (1736-1778), wife of Diah Munson and mother of their twelve children

Obadiah "Diah" Munson (Jr.)  (1731-1805), son of Obadiah Munson (Sr.) (1703-1773),  husband of Rachel Tyler Munson

Barnabas Munson (1754-1792), eldest child of Diah and Rachel

Uncle Eph, Rachel’s uncle Ephraim Tyler

Granny Thankful Doolittle Tuttle, Rachel Tyler Munson’s grandmother

Colonel Eliphalet Dyer, Representative of the Susquehannah [former spelling] Company of Connecticut

Joel Munson, Diah’s uncle

Wilmot Munson (Wil) (1755-1845) Diah and Rachel’s second child. The protagonist of the story.

Walter Munson (1771-1836), Diah and Rachel’s tenth child - Catherine Chandler's 4th great-grandfather

The twelve Munson children: Barnabas, Wilmot, Hannah, Stephen, Daniel, Ephraim, Irene, Sarah, Obadiah III, Walter, Rachel, Benoni

Captain Amos Ogden, Pennsylvanian settler, owner of a fortified blockhouse near Mill Creek

Francis West “Frank” Phillips, Wyoming Valley settler originally from Rhode Island, Diah’s friend

Private Ichabod Tuttle, Rachel’s cousin, settler in Westmoreland, killed in the Battle of Wyoming, 1778

Elizabeth “Eliza” Matthews Tuttle, Ichabod’s wife

Thankful Tyler Smith, Rachel Tyler Munson’s sister

Doctor William Hooker Smith, physician and minister, Westmoreland

Lucy Pierce, a girl from Kingstown

Patience Cooper Munson, Wil Munson’s wife

John Phillips, Wilmot Munson’s friend, son of Francis Phillips

Mary Chamberlain Phillips, John’s wife

Meschatamen, Lenape warrior. His Lenape name translates into English as “He who remembers”

Eton Jones, blacksmith at Fort Brown, one of the Pittstown stockades, friend of Diah Munson

Rebecca Jones, Eton Jones’s wife, wet-nurse to Benoni Munson, mother of Susannah Jones

Susannah Jones, Rebecca and Eton’s daughter

Ishmael Bennet (not Bennett), another local blacksmith

Nathan Jones, Eton Jones’s brother, Wyoming Valley settler

Nanny Dunn, local midwife

Benoni Munson (1778 - ?), youngest child of Obadiah Munson and Rachel Tyler Munson, renamed John Eton Jones

Dr. Lemuel Gustin, local physician

Dr. Joseph Sprague, one of the first physicians in the Wyoming Valley settlement

David Inman, Ichabod Tuttle’s friend

Sam Wares, proprietor of a tavern and inn at Shohola

Eunice Bradley, Diah Munson’s second wife

The Reverend Joshua Williams, pastor, First Church of Christ, Harwinton, Connecticut

John Eton Jones, Benoni Munson’s adoptive name (1778-unknown)

Gerhard Scholl, tailor, Rebecca Jones’s second husbanD

 

TOMORROW:  PART ONE, CHAPTER 1

---

[1] Myers, Charles E. A Connecticut Yankee in Penn’s Woods: the Life and Times of Thomas Bennet. Wilkes University Press, 1993, p. 205

 

 

ANNALS OF THE DEAR UNKNOWN: PROEM -- TAKING STOCK

 

Downtown Wilkes-Barre, PA, early 1950s

Proem

Their lives are part of my life’s inventory;

my role grows smaller when I glimpse the whole.

Today I pocketed a lump of coal.

These are the facts, but facts are not the story.

 

~David Mason, from Ludlow

 

       

Taking Stock 

 

 

By the middle of the twentieth century,

“King Coal” had been dethroned by natural gas

and oil. In a place tagged Diamond City,

daily life had lost much of its luster.

But to the sad eyes of a little girl,

taking in the glitz of movie house

marquees mirrored in the rain-slicked street

of Public Square that blustery April night,

her Trailways slowly rolling toward the station,

Wilkes-Barre spangled, scintillated, shone.

 

 

No one had told the little girl, back then,

that Yankee blood was coursing through her veins,

nor that the subject of the “Doodle” ditty

had anything at all to do with Rose,

the woman sitting stern and ramrod straight

in that old gilt-framed sepia photograph

hanging on an uncle’s parlor wall.

It was the present moment, nothing more―

a father far away with polio.

A North-End double-block. A soothing thumb.

 

 

That night, the little girl slept unaware

that over nine-score years had come and gone

since Rachel Tyler Munson was interred,

unmarked, along the Susquehanna’s banks,

her children fleeing for their lives; a time

when Eton Jones would chip the glistening rock

from local outcrops for his blacksmith forge,

long before the Knox Mine tragedy.

A time when rival passions for the land

burned like the hot blue flame of anthracite.

NOTE: The chapter titled Taking Stock comes from David Mason’s verse-novel, Ludlow.