Chapter 9: Arkansas Or Bust
"Lewy, Jesse, Jimmy, come see off your papaw!" So decrees Charity Reed to her grandsons by way of summoning the whole household to the front porch on a foggy All Hallow's Eve morning. It was fifty-three years to the day since a red-headed overmountain man had sat down to her dumb supper plate at the Green homestead in Albemarle. "Me and Jesse come too, papaw?" Lewis calls as he runs down the wooden stairs toward the loaded oxcart only to be collared by his mother Patsy, her other arm holding baby James. Benjamin was departing Cow Creek for the eight-hundred mile journey west accompanied by eldest son James, his wife Alicy, and their three children. Their path out of eastern Kentucky would take them on the Wilderness Road up to Louisville where they'd sell the oxcart and horse for passage on a steamboat bound for St. Louis. There they'd purchase a Conestoga wagon and team for the Southwest Trail across the Ozarks into the foothills of central...