The Golden Horseshoe

You can follow this expedition by the empties. Late summer of seventeen sixteen, Alexander Spotswood, Governor of Virginia, rode out to see what was on the far side of the mountains, and a man named John Fontaine kept the journal. Gentlemen of the country came to join him. Two companies of rangers, six men and an officer each. And then one flat sentence. "Four Meherrin Indians also came." That's all of it. No names, and the journal never speaks of them again. The Meherrin Nation is still here, and keeps its own history. That part of it just isn't in Fontaine's book. They set out in style and came apart by degrees. Hornets got in among the horses. A thicket tore their clothes to rags. Two men went down with the measles and had to be left. On the fifth of September, with axemen clearing the way, they came to the top about one o'clock. Which gap, nobody can swear. Swift Run is the old belief, and the best the record gives you is maybe. They found a spring no bigger than a man's arm, and there they drank "King George's health, and all the Royal Family's." Then they tried the far side, and met what Fontaine called "such prodigious precipices, that we were obliged to return to the top again." The whole point of the ride, gone. And there in the woods were trees somebody had marked. "Formerly marked," Fontaine wrote, "I suppose, by the northern Indians." They followed those marks down to "a good, safe descent." So the Governor of Virginia came down off that mountain on somebody else's marks. The next day, at a river they named the Euphrates, he put a paper in a bottle and buried it, taking possession of the place for King George the First. Then came dinner. The King's health in champagne, and a volley. The Princess in Burgundy, and a volley. Claret for the rest of the Royal Family, and a volley. The Governor, another volley. After that it was Virginia red and white, two sorts of rum, Irish usquebaugh, cherry punch and cider. Fontaine lists water, too, and I'd like to know who asked. Now the lowlands of Virginia had so few stones that hardly anybody there shod a horse, and they'd had to lay in a great quantity of shoes for this trip. So back home, Spotswood gave each of his companions a golden horseshoe, some of them studded with stones like the heads of nails. Any gentleman who could prove he'd drunk the King's health on that mountain could wear one. Gentleman was the word. So raise one with me. Forget the King. Here's to whoever stood at that first tree with an axe, long before any of these fellows came along, and cut a mark for the next man down.