FOREST 
AND 
STREAM 
267 
An Interrupted Excursion to Confluence 
A Little Earthly Paradise That Exists Somewhere Among the Mountains of Southwestern Pennsylvania 
By Benjamin Pullrod. 
* 
ONFLUENCE is a little village 
in the mountains of southwest¬ 
ern Pennsylvania, some twenty 
miles east 'Of Uniontown, 
where three streams come to¬ 
gether. These are fed by small 
runs, tumbling clear and cold 
down the neighboring ravines, 
or winding quietly through the valleys. For the 
most part these runs contain a very fair sprink¬ 
ling of speckled trout. At Confluence the 
stranger may pick up any desired number of un¬ 
occupied villagers to escort him over the country, 
especially if he should happen to carry a bit of 
the stuff that cheers in his creel. 
I had been there two Junes ago, and now it 
was another June, which meant another violent 
attack o'f spring fever, only to he allayed by a 
few days in the open. By chance lunching with 
my friend Dick, ordinarily a business man of 
considerable energy and application, to my as¬ 
tonishment I discovered in him a latent and 
somewhat timid germ of my own malady. By 
glowing descriptions of bosky wood and mountain 
brook, by hair-raising tales of huge, imaginary 
trout that broke rods and lines and even en¬ 
dangered lives, I nursed and fed this embryonic 
germ, until it became a vigorous, permeating 
thing that took hold of his whole system and 
overpowered him. Snatching the auspicious 
moment, I bound him then and there to join me 
the next Thursday morning, ready at seven 
o’clock to crank the machine and start away. 
I got everything ready. There was the tent, 
for we were going to camp. The real outdoor 
life in the woods for us. None of your tender¬ 
foot ideas of hotel or farm house. We would 
sleep in our own blankets and cook our own 
meals, wherever the spirit moved us. There 
were the provisions, the cooking utensils, the 
blankets, the fishing tackle, the extra clothing. 
It was eleven at night when we finally arrived 
at Uniontown, abandoned the car at the first 
garage, and sought the arms of Morpheus at the 
nearest hotel. 
We awoke refreshed, looked out of the window 
into a sunshiny spring morning, noted Union- 
town’s one lonely skyscraper towering out of the 
miscellany of two and three story buildings, and 
went down to breakfast. 
We embarked once more under a cloudless 
sky, over a more or less asphalted street. In the 
outskirts this asphalt changed to macadam, and 
presently we were climbing the four miles of 
spiral road up the Laurel Ridge. At the very 
top there squats the rambling, wide-verandahed 
bmlding known as the Summit House, and there 
we stopped to let our engine cool. 
. H he pleasant macarum shortly gave wav to a 
stony jolting, worn-out rock road that loosened 
our back teeth and caused the car to buck like 
a bronco. Dick tried to keep up a scattering 
conversation, but the fourth time that he bit his 
tongue he gave it up in disgust and maintained 
thereafter a sullen silence. However, this rough 
stietch did not last long, and presently we made 
out the good old macadam again away ahead on 
a hillside, and before long we were coasting 
easily down into Somerfield, where Carl Spring¬ 
er's tavern occupies the bottom of the V formed 
by the precipitous descent into the village and 
the steep climb out. You come in with both 
brakes set and a sickening dread that you are 
about to drop over the windshield. You go out 
leaning far forward to keep your center of 
gravity where it belongs, while you wonder how 
much of your baggage has rolled over the rear 
seat and gone avalanching back down to Carl’s 
place. 
But before we went out, we stopped at Spring¬ 
er’s to let our brakes cool and to eat our lunch. 
For the latter we went into the cafe, a step be¬ 
low the ground, which consisted of a long nar¬ 
row room 'divided lengthwise in the middle by 
an unpainted wooden bar, and with a stand-up 
lunch counter at one end. Behind the bar stood 
the dispenser of liquid refreshments in flannel 
shirt and overalls. I turned to a seamed and 
weatherbeaten old mountaineer at my elbow and 
remarked: 
“I hear Bill has taken out a license, and is 
making his white whiskey under the law.” 
He looked me over with a gleam of interest 
in his hard blue eyes. 
"I reckon that’s right, stranger. Know Bill?” 
‘‘I was up at his still two years ago with Jimmy 
Pence and Colonel Holburke,” I vouchsafed. 
“You don’t tell! Shake, pard! Why me and the 
Colonel has been visitin’ old Bill together for 
forty years. Yes sir, Bill has been makin’ his 
moonshine up in the mountin’ for more’n forty 
years, and now he’s took out a license.” 
So then we were friends, of course, and after 
a number of Bill’s narrow escapes from revenue 
officers had been recounted we told him we were 
bound for Confluence, and were going trout fish¬ 
ing up above Draketown, near Newton Tannen- 
baum’s farm. He nodded as each of these names 
was mentioned, and after studying a moment: 
“Why don’t you-all go over to Karl Miller’s 
for trout?” he suggested. 
“Who is Karl Miller, and where does he hang 
out?” 
‘Why, Karl Miller, the King of Unamis? Ain’t 
you-all never heard o’ him?” 
We confessed our ignorance. So he told us 
about King Karl of Unamis, and the natives in 
the room gathered close around to listen eagerly, 
and occasionally to contribute additional data. 
When he had finished and had traced the route 
to Unamis on a large scale county map that was 
the only decoration of the plastered walls, we 
left the tavern converted, and pointed the car 
for Unamis. 
Thus far we have taken the reader along with 
open frankness, describing our route so that a 
child could follow it; that is, if it were a very 
bright child, and had an experienced guide along. 
But now the time has come for caution. Unamis 
is not for the many. The way must not be made 
too easy. Emerson says of him who can do any 
one thing better than his neighbor that "the 
world will make a beaten path to his door.” 
Unamis can furnish better fishing, pleasanter 
surroundings than any of its neighbors that we 
know of. Above all it can furnish a host with¬ 
out a peer. Let the world make the beaten path. 
We do not propose to do it. However, perhaps 
it is safe to say that we left the pike at the 
small village of Addison, passed through a min¬ 
ing hamlet, and feeling our way over a road so 
rough and narrow, so walled in by the forest that 
to have met another vehicle would have been a 
calamity, we came out into the open, and there 
we looked down upon a charming valley, where 
a broad torrent of water curved between two 
thickly wooded thousand-foot hills, like a ribbon 
of silver chased with ripples and splashes of 
spray that flashed in the sun streaming down 
from the edge of a cloud. 
In the immediate foreground, a stone’s throw 
back from the road, there stood in a clearing to 
the left, a frame building, a story and a half 
high, fronted with a porch a step from the 
ground. Directly across the road two small cot¬ 
tages were perched on the first rise toward the 
right hand mountain. We descended into the 
valley and stopped the car opposite the first men¬ 
tioned building, which proved to be a country 
store. We got out and sauntered up the path. 
A cloud of smoke drifted out from the porch, 
and we made out a black cigar protruding be¬ 
tween a heavy mustache and a square cut beard. 
A pair of shaggy eyebrows thatched two twink¬ 
ling blue eyes that regarded us intently from 
under the shadow of a brown slouch hat. The 
figure stretched in the arm chair was thickset, 
with perhaps a leaning to corpulence. The feet 
were on the railing. We hailed it with: 
“Can you direct us to Karl Miller’s?” 
He bit the end off the cigar, rolled it a moment 
in his mouth, then spat it out. 
“They call me Karl Miller,” came the answer, 
and he took his cigar from his mouth. His lips 
parted, his mouth widened, his eyes narrowed 
to slits bracketed at the corners with little 
wrinkles—he smiled. 
Since leaving Springer’s tavern rain clouds had 
been gathering, and the sky was overcast, but 
when that smile played over his features, the 
clouds opened up, the sun came out, an oriole 
began to warble from an apple tree in the yard, 
a rooster on the path flapped his wings and 
