Kosmos

 

1.

Nelson’s dwelling was more like a badger’s sett than a proper cabin. The dug-out was gouged into a hill with a semi-circular opening.  Two logs, charred to white ash on their round, upper surfaces, had been rolled away from the pit’s entry.  Evidently, Nelson dragged the logs across the entry to this grave, setting them afire at night so that flame would bar people and animals from creeping into his home.  

Hoyt peered into the dug-out and saw that Nelson had surfaced the inside of the hole with lathe and bits of old plank, salvaged, it seemed, from a defunct wagon.  The wagon’s wheels were stacked in the turf outside the cave.  A goat was cropping the grass on the slope over the dug-out and a twig and wattle wigwam held three dusty-looking hens.  In another smaller shelter, made from interlaced reeds and thorn branches, a rooster with little red eyes was scuffing at the earth.  Nelson had cut a tub-shaped hollow in the dirt in front of his house and a big, green snapping turtle was wallowing in the mud there, one of its hind-legs tethered by chain to a iron stake pounded into the sod.

Where was Nelson?

Hoyt hallooed.  Nelson called out.  He was concealed by a copse of willow trees along the stream, digging there for roots.  

Carrying a pail with his cuttings, Nelson pushed through the saplings and came up the hill toward Hoyt.

“You didn’t need to stop working,” Hoyt said.  “I would have come to you.”

“Finished for now,” Nelson said, glancing down at his half-full pail.

Hoyt told Nelson that he had bartered for the services of a surveyor, employing a Scotsman who lived among the Mormons.  The Scotsman had made plat for a future town in the vicinity of the Crow River’s west fork, a neat drawing complete with easements for streets, parcels set aside for schools and, even, an institution of higher learning, as well as spacious, well-ordered lots on which the habitations for a happy multitude could be built.  

Nelson asked Hoyt if he had the plat in hand.

“No, not for fear of having the work spoiled with smudges,” Hoyt replied.  He continued: “There is wanting only a name for this settlement of the future.”

The rooster in his cage of thorns crowed hoarsely.

“I’m opposed to bringing people here,” Nelson said.  “The air in towns is insalubrious – the wind is wont to stink of knacker’s yards and tanneries.”

“Progress,” Hoyt said.

“Not so,” Nelson replied.  “Nature is best where it is barren of men.”

“You were the first to venture into these parts,” Hoyt said.  “It was all wilderness when you arrived, a desolate place with of savages and howling wolves.”

“A paradise,” Nelson said.

“I had thought to consult you as to the name of the settlement,” Hoyt said.  

“It is a matter of indifference to me,” Nelson said.  “What is your idea?”

“Kosmos,” Hoyt said.

Nelson shook his head and said that it seemed a fanciful enough appellation for what was still simply prairie buckled up around small lakes and marshes.

“Not so in the future,” Hoyt replied.

Nelson invited Hoyt into his shelter to share a pipe with him.  

Hoyt said that he had other business to which he should attend and, thanking Nelson for his hospitality, walked down to where his mule was waiting patiently.  A small path, faintly impressed into the grass on the bank of the Crow River, followed the meanders of the stream across the treeless prairie.  Hoyt raised his hand in farewell and followed the stream until bank and badger sett were lost in the green distance.   

2.

“So does he veto the name?” Atkins asked Hoyt.  

Hoyt said that Nelson told him that the name of the city platted on the plain was of no interest to him.

“Did you ask him if he wanted the settlement to bear his name?” Atkins asked.  “After all, he was the first pioneer here, a brave fellow considering the Indian troubles.”

“Heavens no,” Hoyt replied.  “Nelson is a solitary man.”

Atkins was burning some brush in front of his small cabin.  The air smelled of ash and fire, but the smoke kept away the mosquitos rising in stinging clouds from the slough beneath the hill.  

“Everyone calls his stake, ‘Nelsontown’,” Atkins said.

“ ‘Town’?” Hoyt asked.  “I didn’t see any town.”

“Exactly,” Atkins replied.  “It’s called a ‘town,’ because there is no town.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Hoyt said.  

“Sometimes people name a thing for what it is not,” Atkins said.  

Hoyt just shook his head.

3.

The mule was balky and Hoyt walked most of the way to the Mormon settlement.  He led the beast at his side on a hemp halter.

The Saints had built several cabins close to the ground under the big oak trees on the lake shore.  The cabins had low walls smeared with clay with roofs sloping only very slightly to ridge-lines about six feet above the ground.  Tin pipes pierced the shingles, a thin curl of smoke hanging overhead.  A frame wall supported by braces stood apart from the log buildings.   Canvas lean-tos were tacked to the whitewashed wood wall, tent-flaps open in the mild weather with fabric propped up like awnings on poles whittled from tree limbs.  Children were hoeing weeds out of a garden and, under the turf banks of the lake, women were kneeling over laundry.

Hoyt expected the place to be full of women, the wives of the patriarchs, but he didn’t count that many females.  Perhaps, the harem was hiding somewhere, possibly in the green shadows of the brushy forest on the hillsides overlooking the lake.

Hoyt asked a man chopping wood about the settlement’s leader.  The man blinked and seemed confused by the question.  Some skins were posted like official warrants on the trunk of a tree that had been stripped to a thick, bare pole.  The skins looked to be otter and muskrat.

The man with the axe pointed along the edge of the water to where the pale clay banks parted and a creek glided downhill away from the bright, open expanse of the lake.  Reeds fringed the shore and some white water-birds with black stilt legs were fishing in the shallows.

The Mormons were working to build a grist mill and had blocked the outlet to the stream with a slick, oozing weir of irregularly chopped logs.  A pile of field stone made a cairn next to the dam.  The creek bed was full of mud and frogs were bouncing around in ponds where the water had once flowed.

Hoyt inquired after the head man.  An older fellow with a spade-shaped beard looked at Hoyt suspiciously.  This was Elder Dodge.  He signaled that it was time for noon rest and walked away from the dam to a shady arbor at the edge of woods.

Hoyt said that the plat that he had prepared with the help of the one of their men, a land surveyor, was complete and, now, ready to be filed at the County Seat, although it wasn’t yet clear what settlement would have the honor of being so designated.  Elder Dodge said that this was fine and that it was good that the blessings of civilization had come to this land and that, of course, many more Saints were already underway to travel to their settlement.  

“Some day,” Hoyt said, “this will all be city.  A great metropolis with broad streets and many fine buildings.”

“So it shall be,” Elder Dodge said.

“So there is the matter of the city’s name,” Hoyt said.

“What name?”

“I’m advising that I have named this city ‘Kosmos’,” Hoyt told him.

The Elder squinted. A woman came across the wet meadow and brought him a chipped ceramic bowl with hot stew in it.

“That’s not much of a name,” Elder Dodge said.

“Well, I would like your approval, in any event, because I want to file the plat, of course, and hope that there will be no objections from those already living on the land.”

“I object,” Elder Dodge said.  “ ‘Kosmos’ is not a Christian-sounding name.”

“It’s a very good name,” Hoyt said.  “We are hoping to attract a university with the finest faculty.  The name signifies harmony and beauty – it’s Greek, the language of the New Testament, the tongue of Jesus our lord and savior.”

“It seems like a heathen name,” Elder Dodge said. 

Hoyt nodded.  He asked mildly: “So what would you prefer?”

“Perhaps, ‘Beulah’ or ‘Shiloh’,” Elder Dodge replied.

“The late war has spoiled ‘Shiloh’,” Hoyt said.  “A shame, I think.  And ‘Beulah’ – I think there are other places bearing that name.”

“That might be,” Elder Dodge answered. “But, in any event, the name will have to be acceptable to us.  We are the majority in these parts.”

“For the time being,” Hoyt replied.  

“God willing,” Elder Dodge said.

“I don’t see many women around your settlement,” Hoyt said.

“We have plenty of women in this Stake.’

“I thought you kept several for each husband.  Of course, I don’t purport to any judgment on that subject.  But I think the sheriff perhaps...”

“Not so,” Elder Dodge said.  “You mistake us for Saints of Brigham Young’s persuasion.  We reject his doctrines as to marriage.”

“Is that so?”

“Indeed,” Elder Dodge said.  “We divided from the Nauvoo branch of the faith over that issue.  A matter of conscience. That’s why we’ve come to this place and not followed the emigration beyond the Missouri to the West.”

“I see,” Hoyt said.

“In any event, the sheriff is a scoundrel,” the Mormon said.  

They sat in silence for a few minutes.  A coyote called in the underbrush and the air at the encampment echoed with the sound of axes hacking wood.

“Call the city ‘Dominion’,” Elder Dodge recommended.  “For man shall have dominion over all the lands and the beasts of the air and the water and earth.”

“A worthy suggestion,” Hoyt said.  He tipped his hat to the Elder.

“Just remember,” Elder Dodge said.  “For the present we are the majority and will vote as a majority.”

“So there’s no dissent among the dissenters?” Hoyt asked.

“Not in this Zion,” Elder Dodge called to him.

4.

The cottonwood trees standing along the West Fork of the Crow were still green and, when the wind blew, showed the bellies of their leaves pale as an overturned frog, but on the hills, where the maples sheltered in the ravines, the leaves were amber and gold.  Some of the maple leaves had blown down across the open land to the tea-colored water running in the meandered stream and they made a little yellow armada on the current.

Atkins asked if Hoyt intended to take a census as to a name for the city platted for the land between Nelsontown and Mormon encampment on the lake.  

“I don’t think the Mormons should vote,” Hoyt said.  “They don’t follow the law of the land.”

“What do you mean?”

“Their marriage customs,” Hoyt said.  

“I thought that our neighbors rejected that doctrine,” Atkins said.  “At least, so it appears to me.” 

“I’m not so certain although I think they protest over-much.”

“I’ve seen nothing unseemly,” Atkins said.

Mr. Hoyt said: “Come unannounced, a-gallop, and you will see quite a scatter of quail fleeing the settlement for the forests.”

“Really?” Atkins asked.

“Yes, I’ve seen the lasses with my own eyes making for the bush.  They keep their harems concealed from strangers in the gloom of the woods.”

“I have my doubts,” Atkins said.  

   

He paused.  The sun was setting and the air grew cold.  Hoyt had been helping him stretch wire between fence-posts.  The wooden posts marched down the hillside to the edge of the river.  The stream would serve as a natural boundary to the land that Atkins was fencing.  

“So when will you file?”  

“At the first opportunity,” Hoyt said.  “Once I’ve filed the plat, I will travel down to St. Paul and discuss our city with the politicians there.  Soon, enough, I warrant, we’ll have the railroad knocking at our door.”

Atkins nodded his head.  

“The name will be an attraction,” Hoyt added.  “I’ll wait to travel when the ground is frozen and, then, make my way over the sloughs and streams on ice.  That’s the most expeditious way.”

Hoyt said that Baron Alexander von Humboldt’s book Cosmos published in five volumes was famous among learned men.  He told Atkins that the name for their city would attract the railroad as well as scholars and other well-educated people.  

“So why don’t you just call the town ‘Humboldt’?”  Atkins asked.

“There are already a number of places bearing that name,” Hoyt said. 

5.

Colonel Renville, distinguished for his service in the late War of the Rebellion, was the first grantee of all land in this part of the State.  It was known that he had government land patents signed by the President in his possession.  Colonel Renville had shown Hoyt these imposing documents, written on parchment in ornate chancery hand, when he first conveyed to him territory now platted as Kosmos.  The land patents were kept in a iron-braced seaman’s trunk that Colonel Renville had secured to his buckboard hitch wagon under a shroud of taut leather.  The trunk was the County Seat and contained all cadastral documents of record.  Renville regarded himself as the County’s sheriff and land commissioner.  It was said that he had acquired his land patents as an advantage of his military rank and in consideration of a grave wound that he had received during the siege of Vicksburg.  The colonel wasn’t interested in developing land and so he parted with his property on a reasonable basis – politics and the emoluments of elected office were his enthusiasms.  He had commanded men in battle and was desirous to retain his authority now in peace time.

Colonel Renville was peripatetic, always going up and down in the country.  He hauled the county seat in its nautical trunk with him during his travels.  Atkins told Hoyt that Colonel Renville was encamped at a place called Ottertail Lake, apparently fishing, hunting and managing some trap-lines that he had placed in a marsh nearby.  The commodity of beaver was much diminished in the territory, but Colonel Renville still took some animals from streams and ponds in the woods.  

Hoyt rolled his plat map into a tube and, then, covered the document in oil-cloth.  The map was about a yard square, cloth-backed with the markings made in blue ink on linen.  The different subdivisions in Kosmos were hand-colored in gray- green and light brown and pale pink tones.  The cadastral map was  a very fine thing to see, pleasant to the eye.  Hoyt carefully packed the plat in an osier strapped to the side of his mule and set forth to find Colonel Renville. 

Ottertail lake was a dozen miles away, across open prairie flowing with a half-dozen small streams that Hoyt had to ford.  Although it was late in the season, the weather was warm and the bright sun drew exhalations from the withered flowers and brown grass that made the afternoon smell like August.  A late efflorescence of mosquitos troubled Hoyt much during his march.  

The wind had blown some of the brown and yellow leaves from the trees surrounding the lake.  The water was low and glazed, stinking ribs of mud showed around the edges of the lake.  A couple of rude log cabins stood on an old Indian mound overlooking the shore.  The people living there were Swedes unable to converse in English, but, by gesture, they gave Hoyt to understand that Colonel Renville had departed a few days earlier.  One of the farmers pointed in the direction that Renville had gone and Hoyt thought that he saw the ruts of the iron-bound wheels of the buckboard transporting the County Seat, narrow grooves imprinted on the meadow.

Hoyt wasn’t about to chase after Colonel Renville, although he was anxious to file the plat and make official the organization of Kosmos.  It wasn’t clear to him that the Swedes knew exactly where Renville had gone and, so, Hoyt ate some roast turnips and bony smoked fish with the farmers and, then, set forth to return to his cabin.  Halfway home, his mule gingerly lowered herself onto the sod, turned her head away from Hoyt, and died.

6.

A week later, Hoyt learned from a traveling salesman, that Colonel Renville was lodging at Lake Lillian, nine miles to the southeast of the land platted as Kosmos.  The Colonel, in his capacity as sheriff, had taken some reprobate into custody and, then, escorted him to that village.  The salesman said that there was a half-empty granary sufficiently stout at that place to confine the criminal while Colonel Renville awaited the marshal said to be en route from the capitol.  Soon it would be cold, blizzard season, and it was thought best to extract the prisoner from his jail and move him to St. Paul before snow made travel difficult.  

The night before he left for Lake Lillian, Hoyt surveyed his plat by lamp light.  The small lots checkering the map were winsome, waiting to be assigned to settlers, and, with his finger, Hoyt traced the right-of-way granted to the railroad that he expected to attract to town.  He examined the boundaries set by bearing trees and witness corners and touched with the tip of his little finger the meander line in the survey of the West Fork of the Crow River, a stream soon to be arched over by many neat and well-made bridges.  It was unseasonably warm and the oil burning in his lamp made the air foul in his dwelling.  Hoyt carefully rolled the plat map into a tube and, then, covered it with oil cloth that he tied with a string.

A hard frost two nights earlier had killed all the mosquitos and biting flies and so, because the interior of his cabin was warm and airless, Hoyt took a bear-skin pelt to a grassy hillside and lay on his back surveying the great expanse of sky and stars above him.  The pelt had been prepared in haste by the hunters who had killed the bruin for the sweet meat of his hump and the fur smelled faintly of carrion.  The sky overhead was dense with stars, some of the familiar constellations disarranged it seemed, out of joint, probably because Hoyt hadn’t gazed into the heavens this late in the season.  Some patches of blackness drifted among the twinkling fields of stars; Hoyt knew these were clouds.

He imagined the city with a broad street that spanned the river.  This street was named Milky Way.  The roads crossing Milky Way were identified by the signs of the zodiac.  At Scorpio Street and Milky Way, a large lot was reserved for the University of Kosmos.  Hoyt imagined buildings made from pale, yellow slabs of limestone.  The buildings had arched windows with points at their tops so that they resembled Gothic cathedrals.  The commercial zone stretched along the railroad tracks and Hoyt thought of brick storefronts and warehouses of the kind that he had seen in St. Louis.  Just before, he fell asleep, Hoyt pictured a locomotive chugging into town.  The locomotive was made from translucent crystal and so he could see the flames banked at the center of the engine, a glowing red heart with its chambers linked to an intricate system of bronze and iron gears, rotors, regulators, rods tirelessly rising and falling, spinning flywheels, everything exposed within that carapace of clear quartz.  The vision made Hoyt glad and he fell asleep rejoicing.

7.

The next morning, Hoyt donned his boots and put the plat wrapped in oil-cloth in a cargo net that he slung over his shoulders.  The sun was just rising, painting the water meadows pink and yellow.  

For the first couple miles, Hoyt was sweating.  The air was humid and, after the brief blaze of early morning, black, congested clouds filled the sky.  The atmosphere felt charged, tingling with galvanism.  

The shortest way to Lake Lillian was the most difficult.  The village was a couple miles beyond a tumble of densely wooded hills that people called the Leaf Mountains.  The hilly landscape was intricate with bare crooked ridges above deep marshy hollows and narrow shards of spring-fed lakes.  Hoyt hunted in the hills every year and like to ramble among the heights and green shadowy potholes.  Sometimes, he encountered families of Metis there, half-breeds from the Selkirk and Pembina country.  They were friendly people and showed him the ravines where deer were abundant and fowl readily taken.  The Metis knew the streams and ponds as well and, sometimes, guided him to green lagoons where there were big fish with bony jaws full of teeth that could be netted in the shallows.  Hoyt felt a little lonely and one of his legs was sore so that he walked with a slight limp and he hoped he would meet a half-breed family encamped in the Leaf Hills, a place to sit with a friend on the turf and share a pipe, perhaps, and a bite of food.  

Hoyt rested on a big pinkish boulder next to the trail that rose steeply up a slope into the hills.  The boulder was still slightly warm from the earlier sunshine but the air was now cool and, sometimes, drops of cold rain dampened the trees and grass.  He thought that he should hasten and, so, started his ascent up the hillside on the dirt path.  It began to rain and, then, the rain became icy sleet.  The path was slick and Hoyt fell several times.  But he was glad he was under the trees and not exposed directly to the falling sleet that clicked and chattered against the bare boughs and trunks of the oak and maple.  By the time, he reached the top of the hill, the wind was howling and, now, the air was clouded with snow.  Hoyt increased his pace, but found that the gale sucked his breath away and made him unsteady on his feet.  Several times, he lost the path, now all white with snow and, therefore, no longer visible.  The falling snow covered the roots pushing through the earth underfoot and made them slick so that he fell again and again.  

Hoyt found that he couldn’t see where he was going.  Snow swirled around him.  Everything seemed to be happening very quickly, before he could adjust for the cold and the wind.  

The path, if it was one, forked and forked again.  Hoyt found himself in a savanna of trees that were shivering and twisting in the wind.  The snow was now knee-deep and hiking in the stuff sapped his strength.  After walking for a long time, but not seeming to make any progress against the wind, Hoyt found a big tree and sat down with his back against the trunk.  The tree arched over him and should have protected Hoyt from the gale, but the wind swept around the obstacle and made a vortex wobbling over his head where snow flakes and blown chips of ice spun in the air.  

Hoyt thought that he would have to deliver the plat map to Colonel Renville to be recorded the next day, when the winds were more temperate, and sun was again shining.  He tried to find some lucifers in his pockets but his fingers were numb and he dropped the matches so that they were hidden in the snow.  

After a while, he became very hot.  The warmth in his breast burned and glowed like the lava in Popocapetl, the Mexican volcano that Alexander von Humboldt had climbed during his adventures in Mexico.  Hoyt tore off his coat and, then, stripped down to his shirt.  When he decided that this was a mistake, Hoyt tried to lift his coat to cover him, but it seemed frozen to the ground.  Hoyt thought that he should remove the plat map from its oil cloth and spread the linen and cloth-backed document over his breast and, then, rest under that sheet.  He removed the cylinder from the cargo net and scrolled open the document, wrapping the oil cloth around his throat like a bandana.  The wind caught hold of the plat map and ripped it from his hands and, then, Hoyt saw the precious document spinning in the air before it vanished in the blizzard.