From The Times-Register archives
From the 1938 centennial edition of The Times-Register
Francois Auguste, Vicomte de Chateaubriand, in the year 1791, passed along Virginia’s frontiers; did he, by any chance, cross the site of what is now the town of Salem?
This brilliant and egotistic French-man, writer of the widely read “Atala” and “Rene,” author of the “Genius of Christianity,” afterwards to become known as the father of the Romantic Movement in literature, was in 1791 but 23 years of age and as yet unknown to fame. He had to some extent participated in the opening events of the French Revolution, when his ardent and enthusiastic spirit led him to join an expedition to America to discover the Northwest passage. he landed at Baltimore and then visited Philadelphia, where he had an interview with Washington. From the Quaker City he is supposed to have journeyed to Niagara Falls and then to the present site of Pittsburgh, at which point he took a boat for the trip down the Ohio, the then “beautiful river” of the Indians.
It is apparent that Chateaubriand had now given up any idea of discovering the Northwest Passage. His journey seems to have been without objective. Certainly any positive notion of where he went and what he did has been lost in the passage of time. A few of the more prominent geographical features of the land he traversed are thought to be identified from what the New International Encyclopedia styles as “according to his own possibly inaccurate account.”
Chateaubriand was by no means a man of the meticulous, methodical type. It would have seemed unimportant to him to establish definitely where he went. In addition the country was new and places did not have the names which our geographies now assign to them. He was in a country largely unchartered.
In 1774 the battle of Point Pleasant had been fought, making all the territory of Virginia this side of the Ohio River safe from the Indians. In 1784 the State of Virginia had ceded to the government of the United States all of its interest in the territory northwest of the Ohio river. That river had become, at the time of Chateaubriand’s visit, not only the western boundary of the commonwealth, but the dividing line between the territory which was safe for “whites” and that which was unsafe.
Goes To Kentucky River
How far did Chateaubriand venture into the hostile territory of the Indians? One of the half-dozen rather meagre accounts which were examined stated that he succeeded in getting as far south as the mouth of the Kentucky river. This stream pours its waters into the Ohio some miles beyond the present site of Cincinnati. Whether or not Chateaubriand went down the Ohio as far as the Kentucky, the question of his itinerary back to the coast remains to be settled.
Simpson did not make his purchase of the land on which Salem now stands until 1802. In 1791 there was no town here; only a store and some farms. Nevertheless this was a well-known point at which three trails from the west converged. Whether the traveler came from the territory of the Kanawha and New rivers, whether he came from the valley of the Tug, or whether he followed from Cumberland Gap the courses of the Clinch and New rivers, eventually he came on east by descending either the Roanoke River or Catawba Creek. Chateaubriand had to reach the coast by some means. The flat bottomed boats by which travelers descended by Ohio could never be brought back up that mighty river. The trip back by canoe would have been laborious indeed and the traveler would, at Pittsburgh, still be confronted with the overland journey which he could have taken from the lower reaches of the Ohio.
These constitute our reasons for assuming as a probability that Chateaubriand, afterwards to be a world-renowned writer, once spent a night in a farmhouse in this immediate section of the Valley of Virginia.
Chateaubriand’s contribution to literature as a result of this American trip was “Les Natchez,” a romantic epic named for a tribe of Indians must have been slight, as his work pictures the Indian as a refined and noble barbarian.
But however greatly Chateaubriand may have misread the character of the Indian, he did not fail to see the beauties of nature in the country through which he was passing. In fact the main charm of most of Chateaubriand’s writings lies in the beautiful imagery, drawn from external nature, and more especially from nature as exemplified in the glowing scenery of the New World. Undoubtedly many of his word pictures were descriptive of scenes along the Ohio River; some may have been taken from the mountains of Virginia!
– Prepared by Lingjie Gu
