Daniel Sevier was born in 1782 in Worcester, Massachusetts, and drove freight wagons on the roads of central New England for twenty years. He married the midwife and vampire slayer Sally Faulkner Hale in 1802, when both of them were still in their teens, and they raised two children, Ida and Albert, in a household that lived half on the road and half at the hearth. He was not a hunter himself, but the Red Ledger's Massachusetts cousins counted him among their own, and his wagon was one of the most useful pieces of equipment the family owned. He died in 1821, at thirty-nine, of a winter cough that he never shook off.
Nothing in the Faulkner archive says who Daniel's parents were. The Seviers were one of the many families of the Worcester hills who lived by the road, and the name appears in the town's records as teamsters, tavern keepers and farmers. Worcester in his childhood was the shire town of a large, hilly county, a place of a few thousand people with a courthouse, a jail, three churches and a great many taverns. It stood at the junction of the main roads from Boston to Springfield and from Providence to New Hampshire, and it lived off the traffic. Wagons lumbered through at every hour, heavy with goods bound for the interior, and the town's blacksmiths, wheelwrights and innkeepers did a steady business. A boy who grew up there learned the road before he learned to read.
He learned to drive in the ordinary way, riding beside an uncle on a freight wagon at the age of ten and taking the reins on the flat stretches at twelve. By fifteen he had his own team, a pair of Suffolk Punch horses bought on credit, and a second-hand Conestoga-type wagon with a canvas tilt, and he was hauling rum, molasses, iron and dry goods from the Boston warehouses to the merchants of the interior and returning with cheese, pork, potash and flour. The work was hard and sometimes dangerous. A teamster on the New England roads had to deal with mud in spring, ice in winter, broken axles, sinking bridges, toll-gate disputes and highwaymen, and he had to be willing to sleep beside his load. Daniel was a wiry, cheerful, unflappable young man with a loud laugh and a gift for managing horses, and he did well.
He met Sally Faulkner Hale in 1801, in Northampton, where he had come to deliver a load of glass. She was eighteen, a midwife's apprentice, dark-eyed, long-legged and direct, and she was not interested in his jokes. He came back the following month with another load and a new joke, and she laughed. They were married in 1802, in the meeting house in Northampton, with a wedding supper at the tavern, which the bridegroom's friends, a dozen teamsters, turned into a two-day event. She was nineteen and he was twenty. The Faulkner cousins, who had views about marrying in, noted that he was cheerful, sober and steady, and approved.
Their first child, Ida Faulkner, was born in 1803 and lived until 1845. Their second, Albert Faulkner, was born in 1807 and lived until 1854. Neither was a slayer, though both grew up in a household that talked about the work at the table. Sally was already well known as a midwife, and Daniel, who was often away, accepted that her night calls were as real as his. He kept a spare pair of boots by the door for her, and he said that the best thing a teamster could do for a hunter's wife was to come home dry.
Sally's calling came in 1815, and Daniel became, without seeking it, a member of the Red Ledger's supply line. He learned to carry a long box under the wagon tilt marked as cutlery, to deliver a sealed parcel to a particular tavern on a particular night, and to take a passenger who paid in silver and did not speak. He learned to read a road for what had gone before. A teamster knows the wheel-ruts of his country the way a farmer knows his fields, and Daniel, who had driven the roads of central Massachusetts for twenty years, could tell from the marks of a coach in the mud whether it had stopped where it should not have done. More than once, his report of an odd track on the Brookfield road put his wife on the trail of a thing that she might otherwise have missed.
He worked on the wagon roads through the embargo years, when the trade stalled, and through the War of 1812, when the price of everything rose and the roads were full of soldiers. He carried flour to the army camps, salt fish to the valley and, on one occasion, a dismantled printing press to a Faulkner cousin in Salem. He was never a rich man, but he kept his horses sound, paid his debts and saved a little. In 1818 he bought a small house on the Worcester turnpike, with a yard and a barn, and moved his family into it.
The winter of 1820 was a hard one. He was caught in a blizzard in the hills above Petersham, with a load of iron, and spent two nights beside his horses in a drift before a farmer found him. He came home with a cough. It did not leave him. By the following winter it had settled on his chest, and in the last weeks of January 1821 he took to his bed. Sally, who had seen a great many lungs, nursed him herself. He died in February, aged thirty-nine, with his children around the bed and, at his request, the sound of a wagon outside the window, which a neighbour had been asked to drive slowly up and down the lane.
He is buried in the Worcester burying ground. Sally outlived him by thirty-four years.
Stories about his wagon were told in the Faulkner family for a generation. The best known concerned a night in 1816 when he was carrying a long box for his wife across the Quabbaug bridge and was stopped by a turnpike keeper who demanded to know what was in it. Daniel, without a flicker, said it was a coffin for a man who owed the keeper money, and invited him to open it. The keeper, who had never had a debtor die before he had paid, let him through and was said to have gone home to burn his account book. Daniel told that story at every Faulkner supper for the rest of his life, and never twice in quite the same way.
Daniel Sevier is remembered in the Faulkner line as the teamster husband of The Bitter Sentinel, the man who kept the wagon moving and the humour up. In the Slayerverse he stands for the road itself, for the carters, drivers and carriers without whom a scattered hunting family could never have kept in touch.
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