The author of this Journal is Major Jacob Fowler. His name is not attached to the Journal, and does not appear on any of its pages in such a way as to indicate authorship. Yet it is well understood among his numerous descendants now living in Kentucky and other States that he is the author. I obtained the manuscript some years ago from Mrs. Ida Symmes Coates, daughter of the late Americus Symmes, now residing at her country seat near Louisville. Mrs. Coates is a great-granddaughter, on the maternal side, of Jacob Fowler. The manuscript descended to her in a direct line from her mother, Frances Scott, who was a granddaughter of Jacob Fowler, and who had obtained it in the same way from her mother, Abigail Fowler, the only daughter of Jacob Fowler. The manuscript has thus come down to us in a direct line, and is the unquestionable work of Major Jacob Fowler.
When Mrs. Coates gave me this manuscript she remarked that although her great-grandsire was a very well educated man, he wrote a very bad hand, and that I might be puzzled now and then in getting at his meaning. I found this to be true, and would not like to say that I succeeded in interpreting all of his modern hieroglyphics. When I placed the manuscript in your hands I felt sure that Lewis and Clark, Pike, and Henry and Thompson, as well as other explorers, had made you so familiar with the country gone over by Major Fowler, that you could with comparative ease master its chirographic difficulties. In this I was right; but I do remember how, with your constantly replenished pipe, you sat in my library, and smoked and puzzled over this manuscript. A distinguished host once assured his guest that the more raw turnips he ate, the more water he would drink, and that the more water he drank, the more turnips he would eat. With a touch of similarity, you smoked and read, and read and smoked, with manifest indications of successful or unsuccessful interpretations of the text, as your puffs were rapid or slow. It might be hard to say whether you smoked most or read most, but you finally mastered the manuscript; and whether you did so by smoking out the uninterpretable hieroglyphics, or got rid of them by other means, does not matter. While a cloud of smoke may not seem to be the best means of clearing up the obscurity of a manuscript, it is the known result here considered, if not the philosophy of its action.
Pioneers by the name of Fowler were early in Kentucky, and some of them were the owners of large bodies of land. In 1783, Alexander Fowler entered 10,000 acres on the Little Kentucky river; and in 1784, John Fowler, who was the first member of Congress from Ashland District, located 1536 acres on Brush creek and on the dividing ridge between Pitman’s creek and Robertson’s run. I do not know whether Jacob Fowler was of the family of these Fowlers, but he was certainly akin to them in so far as the love and ownership of lands were concerned. Besides other possessions, he owned 2000 acres of the site of the present city of Covington, Kenton Co., Ky. He was one of the pioneers of what afterward became the county of Kenton, before the city of Covington was incorporated. A census of the male inhabitants of this locality shows him to have been residing here in 1810, with his sons Edward and Benjamin. Had he been permitted to retain these Covington lands, he might have become a multi-millionaire. His kind heart, however, led him to become the indorser of those who made a clean sweep of his fine estate. A large double brick dwelling house, handsomely furnished, in the midst of ample grounds, planted with trees and shrubbery, flowers and blue-grass, went with his lands to pay the debts of others. Had he written his name as indorser as illegibly as he wrote the names of others in his Journal, there might have been some ground for what lawyers call the plea of non est factum, to clear him of liability. But such was not the case, and his security for others swept away his large estate.
Major Fowler was born in New York, in 1765, and came to Kentucky in early life, a fine specimen of physical manhood, fully equipped for the office and duties of a surveyor. His surveying instruments were the best of their day, and elicited no little envy from those who used the common Jacob’s staff and compass, and chain of the times. He had the reputation of being an accomplished surveyor, and did much in this line for the United States government. His surveying extended to the great plains and mountains of the far West, before civilization had reached these distant wilds. He was there when wild animals and wilder savages were the only tenants of the wilderness.
Major Fowler married the widow Esther Sanders, née de Vie, of Newport, Ky. She was of French descent, and a lady of great beauty and accomplishments. She made his home one of happiness and hospitality. She sometimes accompanied him on his surveying expeditions and bore domestic charms to the tent in which they lived, as she did to the palatial mansion at home. She was a woman of fine business capacity, who, when her husband was not at home, attended to his affairs, and especially to his farm in the suburbs of Covington. Here fine stock and abundant crops owed much to her constant care and supervision. The grapes that grew on the place were made into wine and the apples into cider, in accordance with the knowledge she had inherited from her French ancestors. Her great-grandchildren of to-day tell of the life of the camp, when she was with her husband in his surveying expeditions. The tent floor was nicely carpeted; a comfortable bed invited repose after the toil of the day; dainty china, bright cut glass, and shining silverware, handsome enough to be preserved as family heirlooms by their descendants, were used on the camp table. It was something of Parisian life in the dreary wilderness.
Major Fowler died in Covington in the year 1850. His life as a surveyor and explorer in the West subjected him to many hardships, but a constitution naturally vigorous was preserved with care until he reached his eighty-sixth year. He has numerous descendants in Kentucky, Ohio, and other States, some of whom occupy high social positions. Mrs. Coates, to whom I am indebted for this manuscript Journal, is, in the paternal line, the granddaughter of Captain John Cleve Symmes, author of the “Theory of Concentric Spheres,” 12mo. Cincinnati, 1826, and great-grandniece of Hon. John Cleve Symmes, a member of Congress from New Jersey, who purchased of the United States government that vast body of land in the State of Ohio, lying on the north bank of the Ohio river between the two Miamis. With the knowledge and consent of her father, the late Americus Symmes, she gave me the manuscript in the belief that I would make some good use of it. After thinking for a time that I would place it among the Filson Club Publications, I changed my mind and turned it over to you to be published. I think this is the best use I could have made of the manuscript, and I shall now wait with impatience until I see your work published in the best style of Francis P. Harper, and read your ample notes and comments, which I doubt not will be after the inimitable manner of your Lewis and Clark, your Pike, and your Henry and Thompson.
Truly,
R. T. Durrett.
The MS. which I received from Colonel Durrett is entitled: “memorandom of the voige by land from fort Smith to the Rockey mountains”—and is the most like those mountains of any I have ever undertaken to overcome. My eminent friend does not exaggerate the difficulty of deciphering the characters which he aptly styles “hieroglyphics,” and which have hitherto kept this writing a sealed book. The text begins verso of the title, and ostensibly runs pp. 1-264, but pagination is once skipped and twice duplicated. The folios may be called of square note-paper size, nearly that of a small quarto book—8 × 6½ inches for pp. 1-180, but larger, nearly 9 × 7, for the rest. The ragged edges make exact measurements impracticable, Father Time’s paper-mill having turned out a deckel-edged product, so fashionable nowadays. The sheets, of four pages or two folios each, are gathered in 16-page packets, the outsides of which are now much soiled—indeed, the rough, unruled surfaces are all darkened with the dust of three-quarters of a century, and the ink is faded to match the same subdued monotone, except in places where it recedes to the vanishing point. The writing is upon both sides of the paper; and the whole effect, if it could be facsimiled, would be a bibliomaniac’s dream of delight.
At first sight, this manuscript appears illegible; no one can read it off-hand. Nevertheless, this writing proves readable upon sufficient study of the alphabetic characters which Fowler invented to suit himself, like that classic old Theban Cadmus, or his modern imitator, Cherokee Sequoiah. I managed to master it under the agreeable circumstances of my visit to Louisville, to which my host on that occasion has so pleasantly alluded in the letter printed above; and after that my secretary also proved herself equal to the task when she took the matter in hand to copy for the press. There are hardly a dozen words in which doubt attaches to a single letter, and probably not half as many have proven altogether illegible.