The Trees (novel)
Encyclopedia
The first novel of Conrad Richter
's trilogy The Awakening Land
, The Trees is set in the wilderness of central Ohio (c. 1795). The simple plot — composed of what are essentially episodes in the life of a pioneer family before the virgin hardwood forest was cut down — is told in a third person narration rich with folklore and suggestive of early backwoods speech. The central character is Sayward Luckett, the eldest daughter in a family who the narrator says “followed the woods as some families follow the sea.”
The novel begins with the Lucketts traveling the “trace” to Ohio from the backwoods of central Pennsylvania. Besides fifteen-year-old Sayward the family consists of her father Worth, a hunter; her consumptive mother Jary; her younger sisters Genny, Achsa, and Sulie; her only brother Wyitt, and Worth’s hunting dog, Sarge. As they travel Sayward recollects how in Pennsylvania Worth had predicted a "woods famine," claiming to have witnessed a frenzied migration of squirrels leaving the country. The children were enthusiastic about moving. Jary was reluctant, but realized a “woodsy” family like theirs could not survive if the game had left the country.
Now they were traveling by foot on the same path Worth had traveled with General Wayne’s 1794 campaign against the Indians. By day the interlocking branches of the giant hardwoods cast a gloomy green shade that depresses Jary. She suggests they take the path to the prairies next to the Great Lakes. But Worth, who has Monsey (Delaware) Indian blood, claims he could never "swap talk" with the foreign Indians there.
Near a dark spring cradled in the knees of a beech tree in an immense stand of hardwoods Worth builds a temporary shelter and gets down to the business of hunting and pegging skins and furs to the trees. Jary has seemingly lost the will to live; but when an autumn storm sweeps most of the leaves from the trees the bright sunlight revives her. She speaks sharply to Worth who stops hunting long enough to complete a one-room cabin chinked and floored with river clay, and temporarily roofed with bark.
In the coming year Worth makes acquaintance with local Indians who occasionally drop by. But Jary’s hospitality has its limits. When Worth tells her to use the last dust of their corn meal to make johnny cake for one visitor, she refuses and defiantly sits on the meal bag. When their guest is gone she and Worth argue about whether Indians are fit visitors or safe neighbors.
Later, when a Delaware Indian hunter stops by the cabin on a cold, wet evening, Jary allows him to sleep by the fire even though Worth is away. Sayward, however, is worried by stories of Indian violence she has heard and hides their axe for protection under the leaves they use for bedding. When Worth returns next day and needs the axe to cut firewood Sayward takes it out of the bed in front of their guest. But the Indian doesn’t take offense and even makes a joke about such a young girl taking an axe to bed against a warrior like himself.
Jary’s condition worsens and she begins coughing up blood. She craves wheat bread, which Sayward and Genny have only once tasted on a visit to Jary’s parents in Lancaster County, but which Jary believes will make her feel better. Worth has Sayward shave his beard for a three-day round trip to a mill to get flour. He returns quicker than Sayward expects by traveling at night through the woods. Sayward bakes the bread using the yeast given to Worth by the miller’s wife, and a recipe she got from her mother, but the fresh bread has no effect on Jary’s condition and she dies.
After Jary’s burial the Luckett children are startled by the sound of chopping in the woods. They venture toward the sound, Sayward in the lead with their axe, and discover a settler, Matthias Cottle and his young son putting up a cabin. Impressed with Sayward, Matthias comes to the Luckett cabin to ask for her hand, but a prideful Sayward refuses to marry the smallish Cottle who wants a strong woman to help him cut down the trees.
Trader George Roebuck is the next to settle close by, accompanied by a “woods runner” Jake Tench, and bond servant Will Beagle. Wyitt takes advantage of the nearness of Roebuck’s post to trade his small cache of furs for a hunting knife and while he’s there watches as Jake Tench skins a wolf alive and lets it run. Will Beagle develops an unrequited crush on Genny whose physical beauty is matched by a singing voice with which she renders ancient Scottish ballads.
More settlers find their way into the woods, and Achsa almost dies in an epidemic of fever that Worth blames on the foggy weather caused by the smoke of settlers burning the timber. John and Martha Covenhoven, an elderly childless couple from the “York State,” hire Wyitt and Sulie by the month to fetch their cows home, a chore that often takes them by a deserted cabin that Worth says has a lilac growing in front of the door sill. The Shawanees say the cabin belonged to Louie Scurrah, a “king’s man” in the Revolution who had been captured and raised by Indians. The lilac is said to have belonged to a “white-faced gal” who died after Louie brought her to the woods from Virginia.
One time, on their way home with the cows, Wyitt and Sulie encounter a man in tight-fitting buckskins blocking their path. He asks about their family, but they squeeze past him and hurry home with the news that Louie Scurrah is back. Worth vows to send him packing, but when Louie shows up asking Worth’s help with roofing his cabin he wins over most of the family with an easy-going manner and hunting tales. Genny becomes infatuated, and Louie encourages her, but Sayward sees through Louie’s wiles and Sulie bites her thumb at him, for which she is sent to the loft.
On another occasion Wyitt comes home with the cows by a different route from any they had taken before. Sulie travels in another direction and never makes it home. Mrs. Covenhoven spreads the alarm. In Worth’s absence the men gather and make a hasty and unsuccessful search. When Worth arrives home from digging ginseng roots he is surprised and disappointed Saward didn’t send for Louie although he was the best woodsman available. Together, Worth and Louie organize the search and find a play house in the woods with a piece of Sulie’s dress in it, and the tracks of some Indians on horseback.
Louie returns from the search after he and Worth had followed the Indians as far as they could; but Worth couldn’t bear coming back to a home without his favorite young one. Sayward — now head of her family — goes for a walk in the woods but discovers Louie and Genny lying together. She quietly but sternly suggests they get married, which arouses Achsa’s jealousy. Wild and dark-skinned because of her Monsey Indian heritage, she is a better match for Louie, Sayward imagines, than tender-hearted Genny. Nevertheless, Louie and Genny marry in the settlements on the Ohio River before returning to set up housekeeping in Louie’s cabin.
Later Achsa has Sayward try telling her fortune by swallowing a thimble of salt before bed time, telling Sayward that the man in her dream who gives her a drink will be the one she marries. That night Sayward dreams she’s in a stockade besieged by Indians. A “soldier” gives her a hollow “Joe Pye weed” with which to suck her fill from the run outside. When she looks at him she recognizes Portius Wheeler, a “Bay State” lawyer known locally as “the Solitary” because he lives alone, reciting Latin poetry to himself.
At an Independence Day celebration George Roebuck gives Sayward a message from her father asking her to write to him in the French settlements on the Mississippi. Sayward is perplexed because Worth should know she is illiterate. Meanwhile, Jake Tench plies Portius with liquor, and George Roebuck persuades him to make a speech. Sayward is stirred by his eloquent address, and considers asking him to write a letter for her, but decides not to.
Sayward also worries that Louie’s resentment over having to keep his wife’s family in meat has made life hard for Genny. Wyitt has said that when he last visited Ginny she tried to cover bruises on her legs. Sayward suspects Louie even more when she notices he only dances with Achsa at the celebration, and that he and Achsa disappear from the gathering at the same time and come back separately.
At home Sayward banishes Wyitt from the cabin because he won’t abide her putting lard on his hair to kill lice. He builds an open faced log shelter to live outdoors and accepts Louie’s gift of a rifle complete with a parchment scroll in German saying “who hunts with this gun will be lucky.” Louie, wanting to be free of responsibility for feeding the Lucketts, cautions Wyitt not to tell Sayward about the rifle until Wyitt brings home meat.
Wyitt excitedly shoots away all six of his rifle balls at squirrels before spotting a buck deer. He uses his knife to dig one of the wasted balls from a tree and reloads. He gets another shot at the deer but only stuns it. When he comes up to the deer it jumps up with him holding tight to its neck, dragging him on a wild ride through the woods, dashing him against trees. Wyitt arrives home bloody with deep cuts all over his body, but with venison slung in a deerskin over his rifle. Sayward washes Wyitt’s wounds, angry at Louie for almost getting her brother killed, and sad because she realizes her brother will be a hunter like their father.
Louie’s long absences make it necessary for Wyitt to provide Genny with meat. On one of his visits Wyitt sees a wind-blown ash tree leaning against the cabin. He chats with Genny about Achsa helping out with Sally Withers’ twin babies, and asks Genny if he can fetch in her firewood, but she declines. When Wyitt is gone Genny goes to bed but wakes, believing she hears a wolf or panther sniffing at the roof boards and trying to get down the chimney. Out of desperation Genny feeds the fire with her shelves and furniture to keep the animal from getting in the cabin. A week later Will Beagle brings the Lucketts word that Louie and Achsa were seen together on the path to the English Lakes. When Sayward sends Wyitt to check on Achsa at the Withers cabin, George Withers meets him on the trace and tells him she never came.
Sayward and Wyitt grimly set out for Louie’s to see about Genny and find a gaunt woman in the cabin hysterically repeating a ballad verse over and over. They can barely recognize their half-starved sister who, in her deranged state, does not know them. Genny falteringly tells about her ordeal, saying the trees hit her in the face when she tried to venture outside. As they take Genny home through the forest, cringing at imagined creatures crouching in the shadows, Sayward forms a bitter enmity for the trees, and a determination to see them down.
Sometime later, at the wedding of Linus and Dolly Greer, a couple who had been living together, Jake Tench hatches a scheme to liven up the proceedings by bringing in the Solitary, Portius Wheeler, and marrying him off to old maid Idy Tull. Although Idy claims she’ll not have him, Sayward is skeptical that Idy would turn down an educated lawyer from her home state of Massachusetts. When Jake arrives with Portius drunk and ragged in his beard and patched clothes, Sayward’s admiration and compassion for a man of such wasted potential causes her to impulsively declare she will have him if he is willing.
Portius gives his assent and the wedding party repairs to Sayward’s cabin. Squire Chew performs the ceremony to which Portius adds his own rhetorical flourishes. Afterward, the women steal to the loft and tuck Sayward into the wedding bed. However, when the men bring up the groom, Portius takes one look at Sayward and bolts out of the cabin door. Sayward hides her embarrassment and good naturedly invites the company to stay and have a wedding feast anyway. After everyone leaves Jake Tench leads a posse to track down the Solitary and drag him back to his wife, but when they bring in Portius, wet and filthy from the chase, Sayward stands up for him, saying he can leave if he wants. Portius agrees to stay, and after he bathes and Saward feeds him he invites her into bed with a quote from Shakespeare: “Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.”
That summer she and Portius attack the woods with axe and fire, leaving the biggest logs to dry through the fall. In March they invite the neighborhood to a log rolling and burning bee. In spite of the wind and cold, all come except Buckman Tull who claims to be ill and in need of his sister Idy’s nursing. Jake Tench arrives with a brandy keg, and when the Tulls’ hog comes nosing around the roasting meat Jake is tempted to butcher and roast it too. After the burning everyone leaves feeling fine.
Portius and Sayward plant corn in the clearing. And about the time the young blades push up through the earth Jake shows up asking Portius to defend him in a law suit brought by Buckman Tull alleging Jake had killed and skinned his boar. Portius agrees to take the case.
The book ends with Sayward reflecting on the emptiness of the cabin without her mother and father, Sulie and Achsa, and with Genny working by the year at the Covenhovens’ and Wyitt living in his lento. But Sayward looks forward with hope now that she has “a young one of her own on the way.”
THE TREES by Conrad Richter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940)
Conrad Richter
Conrad Michael Richter was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist whose lyrical work focuses on life along the American frontier.-Biography:...
's trilogy The Awakening Land
The Awakening Land
The Awakening Land is 1978 television miniseries based on Conrad Richter's trilogy of novels: The Trees; The Fields; and The Town...
, The Trees is set in the wilderness of central Ohio (c. 1795). The simple plot — composed of what are essentially episodes in the life of a pioneer family before the virgin hardwood forest was cut down — is told in a third person narration rich with folklore and suggestive of early backwoods speech. The central character is Sayward Luckett, the eldest daughter in a family who the narrator says “followed the woods as some families follow the sea.”
The novel begins with the Lucketts traveling the “trace” to Ohio from the backwoods of central Pennsylvania. Besides fifteen-year-old Sayward the family consists of her father Worth, a hunter; her consumptive mother Jary; her younger sisters Genny, Achsa, and Sulie; her only brother Wyitt, and Worth’s hunting dog, Sarge. As they travel Sayward recollects how in Pennsylvania Worth had predicted a "woods famine," claiming to have witnessed a frenzied migration of squirrels leaving the country. The children were enthusiastic about moving. Jary was reluctant, but realized a “woodsy” family like theirs could not survive if the game had left the country.
Now they were traveling by foot on the same path Worth had traveled with General Wayne’s 1794 campaign against the Indians. By day the interlocking branches of the giant hardwoods cast a gloomy green shade that depresses Jary. She suggests they take the path to the prairies next to the Great Lakes. But Worth, who has Monsey (Delaware) Indian blood, claims he could never "swap talk" with the foreign Indians there.
Near a dark spring cradled in the knees of a beech tree in an immense stand of hardwoods Worth builds a temporary shelter and gets down to the business of hunting and pegging skins and furs to the trees. Jary has seemingly lost the will to live; but when an autumn storm sweeps most of the leaves from the trees the bright sunlight revives her. She speaks sharply to Worth who stops hunting long enough to complete a one-room cabin chinked and floored with river clay, and temporarily roofed with bark.
In the coming year Worth makes acquaintance with local Indians who occasionally drop by. But Jary’s hospitality has its limits. When Worth tells her to use the last dust of their corn meal to make johnny cake for one visitor, she refuses and defiantly sits on the meal bag. When their guest is gone she and Worth argue about whether Indians are fit visitors or safe neighbors.
Later, when a Delaware Indian hunter stops by the cabin on a cold, wet evening, Jary allows him to sleep by the fire even though Worth is away. Sayward, however, is worried by stories of Indian violence she has heard and hides their axe for protection under the leaves they use for bedding. When Worth returns next day and needs the axe to cut firewood Sayward takes it out of the bed in front of their guest. But the Indian doesn’t take offense and even makes a joke about such a young girl taking an axe to bed against a warrior like himself.
Jary’s condition worsens and she begins coughing up blood. She craves wheat bread, which Sayward and Genny have only once tasted on a visit to Jary’s parents in Lancaster County, but which Jary believes will make her feel better. Worth has Sayward shave his beard for a three-day round trip to a mill to get flour. He returns quicker than Sayward expects by traveling at night through the woods. Sayward bakes the bread using the yeast given to Worth by the miller’s wife, and a recipe she got from her mother, but the fresh bread has no effect on Jary’s condition and she dies.
After Jary’s burial the Luckett children are startled by the sound of chopping in the woods. They venture toward the sound, Sayward in the lead with their axe, and discover a settler, Matthias Cottle and his young son putting up a cabin. Impressed with Sayward, Matthias comes to the Luckett cabin to ask for her hand, but a prideful Sayward refuses to marry the smallish Cottle who wants a strong woman to help him cut down the trees.
Trader George Roebuck is the next to settle close by, accompanied by a “woods runner” Jake Tench, and bond servant Will Beagle. Wyitt takes advantage of the nearness of Roebuck’s post to trade his small cache of furs for a hunting knife and while he’s there watches as Jake Tench skins a wolf alive and lets it run. Will Beagle develops an unrequited crush on Genny whose physical beauty is matched by a singing voice with which she renders ancient Scottish ballads.
More settlers find their way into the woods, and Achsa almost dies in an epidemic of fever that Worth blames on the foggy weather caused by the smoke of settlers burning the timber. John and Martha Covenhoven, an elderly childless couple from the “York State,” hire Wyitt and Sulie by the month to fetch their cows home, a chore that often takes them by a deserted cabin that Worth says has a lilac growing in front of the door sill. The Shawanees say the cabin belonged to Louie Scurrah, a “king’s man” in the Revolution who had been captured and raised by Indians. The lilac is said to have belonged to a “white-faced gal” who died after Louie brought her to the woods from Virginia.
One time, on their way home with the cows, Wyitt and Sulie encounter a man in tight-fitting buckskins blocking their path. He asks about their family, but they squeeze past him and hurry home with the news that Louie Scurrah is back. Worth vows to send him packing, but when Louie shows up asking Worth’s help with roofing his cabin he wins over most of the family with an easy-going manner and hunting tales. Genny becomes infatuated, and Louie encourages her, but Sayward sees through Louie’s wiles and Sulie bites her thumb at him, for which she is sent to the loft.
On another occasion Wyitt comes home with the cows by a different route from any they had taken before. Sulie travels in another direction and never makes it home. Mrs. Covenhoven spreads the alarm. In Worth’s absence the men gather and make a hasty and unsuccessful search. When Worth arrives home from digging ginseng roots he is surprised and disappointed Saward didn’t send for Louie although he was the best woodsman available. Together, Worth and Louie organize the search and find a play house in the woods with a piece of Sulie’s dress in it, and the tracks of some Indians on horseback.
Louie returns from the search after he and Worth had followed the Indians as far as they could; but Worth couldn’t bear coming back to a home without his favorite young one. Sayward — now head of her family — goes for a walk in the woods but discovers Louie and Genny lying together. She quietly but sternly suggests they get married, which arouses Achsa’s jealousy. Wild and dark-skinned because of her Monsey Indian heritage, she is a better match for Louie, Sayward imagines, than tender-hearted Genny. Nevertheless, Louie and Genny marry in the settlements on the Ohio River before returning to set up housekeeping in Louie’s cabin.
Later Achsa has Sayward try telling her fortune by swallowing a thimble of salt before bed time, telling Sayward that the man in her dream who gives her a drink will be the one she marries. That night Sayward dreams she’s in a stockade besieged by Indians. A “soldier” gives her a hollow “Joe Pye weed” with which to suck her fill from the run outside. When she looks at him she recognizes Portius Wheeler, a “Bay State” lawyer known locally as “the Solitary” because he lives alone, reciting Latin poetry to himself.
At an Independence Day celebration George Roebuck gives Sayward a message from her father asking her to write to him in the French settlements on the Mississippi. Sayward is perplexed because Worth should know she is illiterate. Meanwhile, Jake Tench plies Portius with liquor, and George Roebuck persuades him to make a speech. Sayward is stirred by his eloquent address, and considers asking him to write a letter for her, but decides not to.
Sayward also worries that Louie’s resentment over having to keep his wife’s family in meat has made life hard for Genny. Wyitt has said that when he last visited Ginny she tried to cover bruises on her legs. Sayward suspects Louie even more when she notices he only dances with Achsa at the celebration, and that he and Achsa disappear from the gathering at the same time and come back separately.
At home Sayward banishes Wyitt from the cabin because he won’t abide her putting lard on his hair to kill lice. He builds an open faced log shelter to live outdoors and accepts Louie’s gift of a rifle complete with a parchment scroll in German saying “who hunts with this gun will be lucky.” Louie, wanting to be free of responsibility for feeding the Lucketts, cautions Wyitt not to tell Sayward about the rifle until Wyitt brings home meat.
Wyitt excitedly shoots away all six of his rifle balls at squirrels before spotting a buck deer. He uses his knife to dig one of the wasted balls from a tree and reloads. He gets another shot at the deer but only stuns it. When he comes up to the deer it jumps up with him holding tight to its neck, dragging him on a wild ride through the woods, dashing him against trees. Wyitt arrives home bloody with deep cuts all over his body, but with venison slung in a deerskin over his rifle. Sayward washes Wyitt’s wounds, angry at Louie for almost getting her brother killed, and sad because she realizes her brother will be a hunter like their father.
Louie’s long absences make it necessary for Wyitt to provide Genny with meat. On one of his visits Wyitt sees a wind-blown ash tree leaning against the cabin. He chats with Genny about Achsa helping out with Sally Withers’ twin babies, and asks Genny if he can fetch in her firewood, but she declines. When Wyitt is gone Genny goes to bed but wakes, believing she hears a wolf or panther sniffing at the roof boards and trying to get down the chimney. Out of desperation Genny feeds the fire with her shelves and furniture to keep the animal from getting in the cabin. A week later Will Beagle brings the Lucketts word that Louie and Achsa were seen together on the path to the English Lakes. When Sayward sends Wyitt to check on Achsa at the Withers cabin, George Withers meets him on the trace and tells him she never came.
Sayward and Wyitt grimly set out for Louie’s to see about Genny and find a gaunt woman in the cabin hysterically repeating a ballad verse over and over. They can barely recognize their half-starved sister who, in her deranged state, does not know them. Genny falteringly tells about her ordeal, saying the trees hit her in the face when she tried to venture outside. As they take Genny home through the forest, cringing at imagined creatures crouching in the shadows, Sayward forms a bitter enmity for the trees, and a determination to see them down.
Sometime later, at the wedding of Linus and Dolly Greer, a couple who had been living together, Jake Tench hatches a scheme to liven up the proceedings by bringing in the Solitary, Portius Wheeler, and marrying him off to old maid Idy Tull. Although Idy claims she’ll not have him, Sayward is skeptical that Idy would turn down an educated lawyer from her home state of Massachusetts. When Jake arrives with Portius drunk and ragged in his beard and patched clothes, Sayward’s admiration and compassion for a man of such wasted potential causes her to impulsively declare she will have him if he is willing.
Portius gives his assent and the wedding party repairs to Sayward’s cabin. Squire Chew performs the ceremony to which Portius adds his own rhetorical flourishes. Afterward, the women steal to the loft and tuck Sayward into the wedding bed. However, when the men bring up the groom, Portius takes one look at Sayward and bolts out of the cabin door. Sayward hides her embarrassment and good naturedly invites the company to stay and have a wedding feast anyway. After everyone leaves Jake Tench leads a posse to track down the Solitary and drag him back to his wife, but when they bring in Portius, wet and filthy from the chase, Sayward stands up for him, saying he can leave if he wants. Portius agrees to stay, and after he bathes and Saward feeds him he invites her into bed with a quote from Shakespeare: “Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.”
That summer she and Portius attack the woods with axe and fire, leaving the biggest logs to dry through the fall. In March they invite the neighborhood to a log rolling and burning bee. In spite of the wind and cold, all come except Buckman Tull who claims to be ill and in need of his sister Idy’s nursing. Jake Tench arrives with a brandy keg, and when the Tulls’ hog comes nosing around the roasting meat Jake is tempted to butcher and roast it too. After the burning everyone leaves feeling fine.
Portius and Sayward plant corn in the clearing. And about the time the young blades push up through the earth Jake shows up asking Portius to defend him in a law suit brought by Buckman Tull alleging Jake had killed and skinned his boar. Portius agrees to take the case.
The book ends with Sayward reflecting on the emptiness of the cabin without her mother and father, Sulie and Achsa, and with Genny working by the year at the Covenhovens’ and Wyitt living in his lento. But Sayward looks forward with hope now that she has “a young one of her own on the way.”
THE TREES by Conrad Richter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940)
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- The TreesThe Trees (novel)The first novel of Conrad Richter's trilogy The Awakening Land, The Trees is set in the wilderness of central Ohio . The simple plot — composed of what are essentially episodes in the life of a pioneer family before the virgin hardwood forest was cut down — is told in a third person narration rich...
(1940) was followed by: - The FieldsThe Fields (novel)The Fields is a 1946 novel by Conrad Richter and the second work in his The Awakening Land trilogy. It continues the story of the characters Portius and Sayward Luckett Wheeler begun in the novel The Trees....
(1946); and - The Town (1950)
- The Trees