The Mississippi Flows Through Corn Land 133 



the full sweet taste of independence. They courted no man's 

 favor, felt no man's scorn, feared no man's competition. They 

 held their own lives in their own hands. While the fields 

 yielded they had bread and ham and pork and bacon and 

 chickens and eggs and milk. And while the river ran by their 

 gates they had a convenient market where a surplus of produce 

 could be bartered for other goods, or sold for cash. 



The man standing beside a little mound of luggage on the 

 flatboat that rounded a bend in the river on a summer morn- 

 ing in 1805 looked at those farmsteads and thought these 

 things. The sight of them seemed to lift a great load of weari- 

 ness from his soul. 



He was a little man, and elegant, even in his traveling 

 clothes. A man, one would say, more at home in a lady's draw- 

 ing room, or bowing in a minuet than on a battlefield or a 

 wilderness trail. Yet he had a reputation on these, too. 



"What a country!" he whispered. "What a chance for 

 wealth, for power, for a new life." 



His eye was quick to catch an otter crouching on the bank 

 to watch the boat before resuming its fishing, and quicker still 

 to see a white horse and its rider on the Marietta Trail. 



The rider was a woman young, for even at that distance 

 it was evident that the horse was spirited and that she matched 

 its spirit with her own. And the man felt sure beautiful. 

 Only a young woman serenely confident of her charms would 

 have worn that long, full-skirted habit of crimson velvet that 

 flowed along the horse's flank, and that broad-brimmed crim- 

 son velvet hat with the floating white plume. So attired, she 

 might have ridden straight out of the Bayeux tapestry onto 

 this American trail winding between the river and the ripen- 

 ing cornfields. So Romance, in the figure of Margaret Blenner- 

 hasset, and Tragedy, in the figure of "the man who shot Hamil- 

 ton," met and passed, and were destined to meet again in the 

 cornlands by the river. 



