Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey Read Online Free PDF Page A

beyond reason.
    Having purchased the unimaginably large tract of land called the Louisiana Territory, Thomas Jefferson knew the first requirement for it was to establish dominion, and to do so Americans had to understand the territory and fix a military and economic presence in it. Lewis and Clark were to perform those functions in the northwest portion of the great purchase and on westward (when they crossed the Rockies at Lemhi Pass on the present-day Montana-Idaho border, they left the United States). For the southwest section — and beyond — Jefferson called upon a Scottish immigrant, William Dunbar, who asked assistance from another Scot, George Hunter.
    I’ve not done so, of course, but were I to stand on a downtown corner of Toledo or Boston or San Jose or any other city you might name and wait for
just one
passerby to tell me
just one
thing about the Dunbar-Hunter Expedition, I’d likely be standing there among the citizens weeks later. Such an unawareness, though, is not really their fault; rather it’s the result of historians themselves generally overlooking early explorations into the near Southwest, a situation slowly changing. For myself, I can’t profess to have known much about the two Scots until Q revealed my ignorance; in defense of all of us, I can only say, to find a copy of either explorer’s account was, until not long ago, difficult. Still, a copy of Hunter’s
Journal of an Excursion from Natchez on the Mississippi up the River Ouachita
had been sitting unread on my shelves for several years. The Dunbar-Hunter exploration — the “Forgotten Expedition” undertaken in 1804, exactly two centuries before our arrival in the mountains — seemed to me a useful hook to pull us toward the resident quoz of the Ouachita Valley.
    So there we were in the mountains. That morning we followed on a topographic map a narrow blue line, one we assumed to represent the nascent river, a streamlet through a pinched, forested declivity where U.S. Highway 59 keeps close to what we took for the infant Ouachita. It was but six or seven feet wide and narrowing rapidly as we ascended what was no longer a valley but more a broad cleavage in the mountains. As the creek neared the crest of the two-lane, its continuance at last became so indeterminable, we stopped so I could climb a small signal-tower along the tracks of the Kansas City Southern Railway paralleling both creek and blacktop. Oklahoma lay six miles west. I called down to Q we were running out of water. What was now scarcely more than a runnel disappeared under a tangle of wiry brush, and beyond were only seeps and dribbles. She said the map gave no name to the blue squiggles delineating creeklets.
    I climbed down and took a taste of the Ouachita without swallowing, and we crossed the road and headed toward a building, a general merchandise set among scraggly pines and still-leafless oaks. I said the name on the store, Rich Fountain, was probably a confirmation we were indeed at the headwaters. Q looked at me with something between compassion and amusement and said, “You might want to reread that sign.” I did: RICH MOUNTAIN SNACKS, CRAFTS, GROCERIES. My frequent wishful thinking sometimes allows Q to outsleuth me.
    Inside, the wooden place was older than its new facade suggested, and its happy clutter exhaled the classic scent of an old grocery, making me forget the question I came in with, not just because of the smell of food but also because the place was not quaint — it was simply genuine, a quality ever more uncommon these days along the American road.
    Q ordered up two cheese sandwiches, a MoonPie, and a couple of “sodas,” despite my earlier advisement that we were now in the land of
pop,
where
soda
could refer to a carbonated ice-cream drink, seltzer, a baking substance, or a bicarbonate of. She, who has her moments of sauciness, said, “That particular usage will never pass my lips.” This is what happens when one grows up near