Riding with George: Sportsmanship & Chivalry in the Making of America's First President
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Riding with George: Sportsmanship & Chivalry in the Making of America's First President
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Overview
Author Philip G. Smucker, a fifth-great-grandnephew of George Washington, uses his background as a war correspondent, sports reporter, and amateur equestrian to weave an insightful tale based upon his own travels in the footsteps and hoofprints of Washington as a surveyor, sportsman, and field commander. As often as possible, he saddles up and charges off to see what Washington's woods, byways, and battlefields look like from atop a saddle. Riding with George is "boots-in-stirrups" storytelling that unspools Washington's rise to fame in a never-before-told yarn. It shows how a young Virginian's athleticism and Old World chivalry propelled him to become a model of right action and good manners for a fledgling nation.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781613736081 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2017 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
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Riding with George
Sportsmanship & Chivalry in the Making of America's First President
By Philip G. Smucker
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2017 Philip G. SmuckerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61373-608-1
CHAPTER 1
Passage into the Woods
George's first adventure deep into the Virginia wilderness began amid the now extinct sugar maples and rolling green hills where today's Route 50 sweeps down across the rushing Shenandoah River and over the Blue Ridge and where, on a clear day, even in the twenty-first century, you can see the opaque Alleghenies in the distance. It is here near Ashby's Gap, almost unmarked except for the sign of a modern-day canine kennel, that George, along with George William Fairfax — seven years his elder and the son of Col. William Fairfax — and a motley surveying team, set off to mark the natural landscape and carve out parcels of land on the new American frontier in March 1748. It is also here, a two-day horse ride from Ferry Farm, that I began to carefully retrace the footsteps and hoofprints of young George as he embarked upon his new surveying career and began to record his amusing insights into a new bound diary.
For my own rides through the Shenandoah, I saddled up with, among others, Sam Snapp and her husband, Wayne. The two were old Shenandoah stock, and Wayne still had the 1750 deed provided by Lord Thomas Fairfax, Sixth Baron of Cameron, whose hills and fields these once were. With Sam at my side, I took several rides through this fertile, lush valley, which is in some ways as pristine as it must have been in the eighteenth century. The forest was alive with birds, squirrels, deer, and families of black bear, and its floor was thick with decaying leaves, ferns, and broken branches. These are also the same winding trails that George traipsed, the steep hills and quiet hollows where the war cries of natives and white men on horseback once echoed.
Our rides on Virginia quarter horses began in the crisp air amid poplar clusters and beneath a steep hill marked by jagged limestone outcroppings. Sam, my soft-spoken guide with a broad smile and fancy cowgirl boots, literally grew up on a horse, like so many generations before her. "My brother rode a Thoroughbred, and I can remember racing against him through the woods," Sam told me over a cup of coffee in her barn at her Wagon Wheel Ranch on a windy January day. "My dad wouldn't drive us anywhere, so we had to get there on a horse. If we rode over to a friend's house, we would just put the horses in their barn for the day, or if we went for ice cream at the country store, we would just tie them to a fencepost. Pretty soon I learned to ride competitively. You blink your eyes and a quarter horse is gone. We breed them for hard work and running hard."
Sam was and is a fierce competitor, and when I met her, she had just won the national barrel racing championships held a year earlier in Washington, DC, which test the skill of rider and beast in a series of hairpin turns at short distances. Though I've ridden on three continents, including on the sands of the Sinai and in the Hindu Kush, I felt like a novice riding beside Sam. "When I take someone on a trail ride, I usually go out with a gelding — that's a neutered male — because they have an even keel and don't get overly excited at the sight of a snake or wild animal," she said as we trotted up a barren crest and peered over a caved-in log cabin southwest toward the sprawling Blue Ridge.
George had just turned sixteen years old as he crossed low mountains and the Shenandoah River in the headwaters of the Potomac River. There are no precise pictures of him at this young age, but early descriptions and later depictions show that he had a thick Roman proboscis beneath a wide brow anchored by wide-set, blue-gray eyes. His hair was auburn and tied back behind his muscular neck. George was excessively tall for his time — just a couple of inches taller than his father, Gus, and rather slender at 180 pounds. Yet he had wide hips, powerful legs, and long arms, and he carried himself well — by one subsequent account, as "straight as an Indian." Perched on the back of a horse, George was twice the man and athlete, probably sensing what Winston Churchill would write: that when you are on a horse, "you have the best seat you will ever have" in life.
Yet, apart from the careful sketches of the hills, tree lines, farming plots, and valleys he drew in his early teens, George still lacked the qualifications and formal education to begin work as a surveyor. Most of his survey team's members had field experience, but George was tolerated — likely coddled — because he had been chosen for the apprenticeship by Lord Fairfax and his powerful cousin Col. William Fairfax, whose daughter Anne his older half brother Lawrence had married.
Reading through George's diary entries on this first journey is a little like glancing over the raw script of a slapstick comedy set three centuries ago. His writing, while terse and stilted at times and also peppered with poor grammar, tells us much about his burning curiosity and how he viewed his own emerging role in a world that was entirely new to him. For a sixteen-year-old, he was acutely aware of his natural surroundings, and his early notes are marked by an adolescent exuberance that competes with a classic English deadpan.
On his first trail ride, George rode a saddled and surefooted horse alongside chief surveyor James Genn, followed by a train of pack mules loaded down with arms, rations, and corn for horses. Four nights in, George wrote, "I not being so good a woodsman as ye rest of my company striped myself very orderly and went into ye Bed as they called it when to my surprise I found it to be nothing but a little straw-matted together without sheets or anything else but only one thread bare blanket with double its weight in vermin." On a subsequent night, his bed under the stars "catch'd a fire," and a snoozing George was rescued when another in the surveying party woke up and extinguished the blaze. The incidents expose Washington's inexperience and surprise over the rough conditions, surely harsher than what he had faced as a child back at Ferry Farm.
George was not out of his own element for long, and after several days of camping in the open air, he landed in "a good feather bed with clean sheets." That night the survey party had what the equestrian wrote of as a "very agreeable regale," which included a "good dinner prepar'd for us Wine & Rum Punch in Plenty." The surveyors carried ample supplies of alcohol on their journey, and George was already enjoying social drink, which he would imbibe, distill, and serve his friends — within limits — all of his life, including as a soldier and commander. Though New England Puritans often considered this a vice, an occasional "agreeable regale" with plentiful supplies of alcohol was a ritual Virginia gentry enjoyed shamelessly on the frontier and in the manor house.
As days of steady rain overtook George's small caravan, the rising waters of the Potomac delayed the surveyors, and so they made a short detour to the "Fam'd Warm Springs," at present-day Berkeley Springs. The small West Virginia town had earlier been known as Bath, after the lively English town described comically centuries earlier by the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. I spent several days here on my own, riding around in the forest where George had surveyed plots. From the valleys, one looked up at steep cliffs above the warm springs. It was easy to imagine George young and lost in thoughts of his ensuing adventures as he waited for the high waters of the upper Potomac to recede. This lush valley at the foot of a small mountain had a reputation with white settlers and Native American Algonquin tribes for curing numerous ailments. I climbed the wooden stairs to the town's museum and discovered a recently removed road sign indicating that the springs could indeed cure everything from "infantile paralysis to rheumatism and diabetes." Judging from the run-down spa rooms, which looked oddly like stalls for hosing down livestock, and a minor trickle of tourists from Philadelphia and Washington, the magical powers of the waters were finally receding into the past.
* * *
As the rains subsided for George, the survey team proceeded over steep, small mountains to a point not far from present-day Paw Paw, West Virginia, where they crossed the Potomac in wooden canoes and, as George described it, "swam our horses over." Washington and the survey party made their way up the opposite side of the river to present-day Oldtown, Maryland, where they stayed for several nights in the well-fortified cabin of Thomas Cresap, a land agent for Maryland's Lord Baltimore. He'd been arrested in Pennsylvania a decade earlier on the charge of murder. As I glanced at the foundations of Cresap's home, overgrown with vines now, I wondered what relish George would have found in the stories of Cresap's fights with the law.
The survey party stopped nearby, meeting up with Native Americans, whose returning warriors clutched a prize. Excited and amused, Washington wrote what some historians have called one of the better accounts from this era of an Indian dance: "We were agreeably surpris'd at the sight of thirty odd Indians coming from war with only one scalp. We had some Liquor with us of which we gave them part — it elevating their spirits put them in the humour of dauncing of whom we had a war daunce. Their manner of Dauncing is as follows Viz. They clear a circle & make a great fire in the middle then seats themselves around it, the speaker makes a grand speech telling them in what manner they are to Daunce after he has finish'd the best dauncer jumps up as one awaked out of a sleep & runs & jumps about the ring in a most comical manner he is follow'd by the rest."
George's account of the performance, which runs on to include their music making, is laced with grammatical errors. George and young Fairfax gawked and laughed, but what they witnessed was a dance custom that often followed the conquest of a foe — in this case at least one. For me, it brought to mind the arrowheads and ancient stone hatchet heads that I unearthed as a youngster on a mound on the lawn of my own Virginia home. It also recalled the mock warfare rituals I'd seen enacted in the highlands of Asia.
George's youthful air of superiority did not stop him from getting to know the Virginia woodland natives. He was entertained in their company even as uncertainties lingered ahead. Back on the trail, he wrote, "with Indians all day," suggesting a complex, close relationship between the survey party and the tribesmen.
Though Englishmen in North America, including George, looked down their noses at these so-called savages, they shared a fair bit in common, whether they wanted to acknowledge it or not. For their part, the natives hunted for a living, waged incessant war, and tried to rise within their own ranks based on their prowess as warriors and hunters. Their customs included bloody rites of passage and were influenced by sacred beliefs that gave meaning to the trees, streams, and animals. They were required to prove themselves as competitors, and to do so, they wrestled, fought, and danced — ritual activities laced with deeper meaning.
These moments with the woodland Indians were new for George but not for earlier explorers. Englishmen and Spaniards elsewhere in the New World had already witnessed Native Americans painting their bodies and decorating their playing sticks before lacrosse games, an indigenous American sport. In 1763 one tribe in upper Michigan invited British soldiers to play a lacrosse match with them in a ruse that worked as well as a Trojan horse. The natives joyfully played the match, edging closer to the gates of Fort Mackinac, only to enter and commence a bloody battle that would end in a massacre of their foe.
Virginia's woodland native people already had their own sporting history with whites. Three decades before George launched his surveying career, Virginia governor Alexander Spotswood, whose business interests were responsible for helping to settle Fredericksburg, took several forays across present-day Virginia and into the Shenandoah. In a humorous gesture to the past, Spotswood founded the Knights of the Golden Horseshoe, which, in the name of expanding the Virginia frontier, amounted to something more akin to a drinking party of gentlemen and their porters gallivanting around the woods and pretending to be the knights of Sir Lancelot — or an eighteenth-century Monty Python version thereof. John Fontaine, the French Huguenot assigned to chronicle the journey, described one drinking regale as follows: "We drank [to] the King's health in champagne, the Princess' health in brandy, and the rest of the Royal family in claret." This constant toasting took place at each campsite along the route.
Fontaine's lucid account reads even today like a fraternal band of brothers run amok on the frontier. Spotswood, a descendant of King Robert II of Scotland, was born in British-run Tangier, Morocco, in 1676, and he had won plaudits in Williamsburg before his journey into the woods. He had dispatched a ship, the Ranger, to hunt down the infamous pirate Blackbeard, whose throat was cut and whose severed head was hung on the ship's bow. Spotswood had an adventurous and eccentric flair: on one of his early expeditions, he sponsored a sporting event for young Indian warriors, outside the gates of one his own wilderness forts. As Fontaine recounted, "The governor sent for all the young boys, and they brought with them their bows, and he got an axe which he stuck up and made them all shoot by turns at the eye of the axe, which was about 20 yards distance. The governor had looking glasses and knives, which were the prizes." He added, "They were very dexterous at this exercise and very often shot through the eye of the axe." Following this display of prowess, the natives then "danced all around endeavoring who could outdo the one the other in antic motions, and hideous cries."
Spotswood and his party likely did not understand — as sixteen-year-old George did not either — the significance of what they were observing, but they certainly were familiar with the sport of archery and knew that it had amused Englishmen for centuries. Even King Henry VIII had designated his own club of Round Table archers, named in honor of King Arthur. Accuracy with the bow was more than a mere sport for these young woodland warriors, however: in many cases it meant the difference between an honorable livelihood and poverty or brutal death. As an expert in the native Powhatan Indians of Virginia wrote, "The consequences of failure as a warrior were ignominy at best and horrible death at worst."
While I was on horseback with Sam in the woods, on several occasions we sprinted playfully toward herds of bounding whitetail deer, and I was reminded, as Spotswood's scribe had chronicled, that natives who stalked deer with their bows in the Shenandoah often did so by pretending to be deer themselves, disguised in "two deer skins sewed together" and mock antlers. Their bodies greased with bear oil, bows in hand, they crouched on all fours behind trees and rocks, licking themselves like deer in pretense if one glanced over. Spotswood would have been wise to keep a few of the native warriors at his side as he continued on into the Shenandoah. A few weeks later, when his gallants were attacked by several bears at the Mason Camp, named for his fellow traveler George Mason, the father of the author of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, they fought the animals off, but Fontaine wrote that some of "the dogs suffered in the engagement."
* * *
On a subsequent trip into the Shenandoah, young George openly praised the natives for their skills. But this time, he observed them as they stalked, and when possible, he also tested his own improving hunting abilities. Keeping exact score one day on his journey, George wrote that he shot at wild turkeys and "missed twice," adding the next day that he "killed two" wild turkeys. Each man in the Fairfax survey party cooked his take on spits, eating from wood chips for plates. Though the surveyors had packhorses with provisions, the team lived off the meat they hunted in the wild.
* * *
Washington was born at the right moment, both for his own sake and the sake of an unborn nation. He took his first breath in Virginia, whose residents aspired to mimic the pastimes of Great Britain. As a subject of the Crown living on the edge of a rapidly expanding empire, he began to engage in English games and pastimes, or their colonial equivalents, and like the native games he now witnessed in the Shenandoah, his own sports and games held real and symbolic meaning.
For centuries, sports and pastimes had helped to define British culture. In the sixteenth century, a century before any Washington arrived on the shores of Virginia, King Henry VIII's royal hunts through the English hills displayed a relevant microcosm of society, with kings, princes, and even princesses taking charge of steeds, riding across their own surveyed dominions while servants toiled in the stables and commoners looked on in awe or envy. Sports, believed to improve strength and character, also came with their own rules, defined and enforced by the upper classes to bolster their authority. The same Tudor dynasty also encouraged varied blood sports, including jousting and fencing, sponsored by the monarchs to stress their authority but also, and as crucially, the courage and martial skills of participants. In Britain, and across much of Europe, equestrian instruction was essential to the career of a young nobleman. Riding a horse well went hand in hand with fencing, dancing, and other displays of skill.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Riding with George by Philip G. Smucker. Copyright © 2017 Philip G. Smucker. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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Table of Contents
Contents
A Note on Sources,Preface,
Introduction: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of the Fox,
Part I: Englishman in America,
1 - Passage into the Woods,
2 - Born on an Empire's Edge,
3 - Mother, Manners, and Cockfights,
4 - Blood Sports in the Shenandoah,
5 - A Gentleman's Code,
6 - The Sorrows of Young George,
Part II: War Games and Folly,
7 - Mission for a Flawed Hero,
8 - Charms of War,
9 - Brave to a Fault,
10 - Cavalier in Love and War,
11 - Hog Wild in Winchester,
Part III: Gentleman Sportsman,
12 - En Garde!,
13 - Minuets and Other Gentler Conflicts,
14 - Augustan Man of Manners,
15 - In the Garden with Martha Washington,
16 - Good Masters and Petty Tyrants,
17 - Gentleman Rebel,
18 - Bowling with George,
Part IV: Clever Like a Fox,
19 - The World Is His Stage,
20 - Victory or Death,
21 - A Fine Fox Chase,
22 - Drama in the Valley of Death,
23 - Two Old-School Chevaliers,
Part V: Master of Manners,
24 - Leading the Revolution in Style,
25 - Southern Persuasions,
26 - Fear and Glory at the Races,
27 - L'Aristocrate Meets la Guillotine,
28 - A Sportsman for All Seasons,
Acknowledgments,
Index,