A HEAP OF STONES



“When I do speak to you I shall put the largest Buck-Horns on your head, that all the world may know I have spoken to you.”- Teedyuscung, King of the Delaware
    
    Charles Wilson Peale was a straggler at the tail end of the American Age of Enlightenment. Like his friend, NYC mayor Cadwallader D. Colden, he was a renaissance man. Honing his painting skills while fighting the British during the revolution, studying under the artist John Hesselius (Gustavus’ son), he founded the Philadelphia Museum and also had a keen interest in Natural History. In 1801, the same year that Mary Jennings Seward would give birth to a son, Colden sent word to Peale that a strange skeleton had been discovered down the turnpike from his grandfather’s estate. Oozing out of a wet bog on the Barber farm, just outside the village of Ward’s Bridge (Montgomery), giant, lime covered bones were making their way to daylight. Peale caught the next stage north.
     The Peale Dig unearthed a fully articulated skeleton of what everyone thought was a wooly mammoth. It turned out to be a separate species. C.W. Peale had discovered the world’s first complete mastodon skeleton, almost in my backyard. In the 1960’s, my uncle, “Colonel” Osterhout lived on Bailey Rd., right next to the Barber farm excavation site. We would play cowboys and Indians over mastodon bones still buried deep within the earth, clueless of the dig or the mastodon discovery. Nobody (no teacher, parent or minister) told us the story of the dig. What the hell was wrong with these people?
     Drive west along 17k, between Scott’s Corners and Valley Central High School, look right to Bailey Rd. between City Line Auto and Peter’s trailers, and you’ll see a blue and yellow NYS marker historicizing the 1801 Peale exhumation. The actual site is just a small chunk of woods and hay field……with a new Dollar General store right down the road. What’s this got to do with Henry G. Wisner or Jack Hodges? Absolutely nothing. If I digress from the story line to give you a sense of place, history, and authorship it’s purposeful. Follow me reader….. 
     My digressive nature is in no small part due to my wonderful, loving parents, my closest ancestors. They may not have told us of the mastodon but, they instilled a precious sense of self (no matter how askew) in all their kids growing up in Montgomery. My folks were always there for us with encouragement in our greatest glories and darkest hours, and if love and kind words did not suffice to raise the fog, they sent us a few bucks. I owe them so much…..not just money. We were given a great gift of support and unconditional love, no matter what our choices. I admit I may take advantage of that from time to time.
       These days I can’t get through the week without opening some creaky door, rummaging through a long forgotten, dusty trunk or running my fingers gingerly across a delicate old will in a clerk’s office, somewhere deep in the boonies. Sticking my nose into what’s really none of my business I can read of kin being kidnapped, hung, buying and selling slaves, or just milking the cows over morning coffee. Then I religiously follow them all day long as they try to escape, beating the law (or enforcing it), run livestock through Indian gardens or just try get out of picking beans, catching a nap under the shade tree. 
     When someone asks, “What are you working on?” I jump at the opportunity to ramble on about the French and Indian War, slavery, the prison system, or the Anti-Rent movement in New York State, then watch as they glaze over and find some excuse to back out of the room. But wait, wait….my family is different……let me tell you….. we were here all along and when we weren’t directly involved, we were close by. We fought on all sides of every issue. I’m starting not only to claim these aliens as mine, but care. God help me. What I’ve come to realize in this plunge into the past is that I’m far from alone in regard to my pronounced ancestral solipsism. To my beautiful and dear great, great, great….. nieces and nephews, if I could put the buckhorns on your little heads and pass down one piece of advice: don’t believe what the fools tell you. Educate yourselves. Trust your instincts. Be kind. Be gentle. Be suspicious. Be selfish. There’s a long history of interesting, self-absorbed, assholes buried under that heap of stones.

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