Samuel Bowen

Spouse of Hannah Cutler Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Samuel Bowen learned the Shenandoah the way other men learn a trade, by being carried down it in bad weather. He was born in 1764 at Winchester, Virginia, at the northern end of the Valley, where the Great Wagon Road ran past the stone courthouse and the taverns and the springs and turned south toward the Carolina backcountry. The family records give nothing of his parents, who are not named in the Proctor papers, and later Proctors who tried to trace them found only that he was raised by the town itself, running errands for wagoners, minding horses at the tavern yards and sleeping in whatever loft would have him. Winchester in his boyhood was a border town in fact if not in name. It sat on the edge of the Blue Ridge country, thick with Scots-Irish, German and English settlers, and it had been Colonel Washington's headquarters during the old French war and a prison for Hessian captives during the new one. The trade he took up was the river. The Shenandoah, with its two forks and its limestone shoals, was no easy stream, but the farmers of the Valley had wheat, flour, whiskey, iron and hemp to send downstream to the Potomac and from there toward the tidewater markets, and the men who moved it were boatmen. They poled long, flat, shallow-draft craft, gundalows and later the sharp-ended bateaux of the Potomac Company, through the rapids at Harpers Ferry and along the falls at Great Falls when the water was high enough, and hauled them back up the river by rope and pole when it was not. It was a hard, wet, dangerous business. A boatman lived on salt pork, cornbread and whiskey, slept under an upturned boat and could drown at any point along a course that ran for scores of miles. Samuel started as a lad who bailed, moved up to a bowman who read the water, and by his early twenties was working steadily as a hired boatman and had his eye on a boat of his own. He was a broad, dark, thickset man with forearms like hawsers, and he spoke little. What people remembered was his steadiness in bad water. He was not a brave man in any showy sense, but he had a cool head, and once on the flood of the spring of 1786 he brought a loaded boat through the narrows below Harpers Ferry with a broken sweep and a green crew and lost neither cargo nor man. That story followed him up and down the river for years. He was not a slayer, and in the Proctor accounts he is marked plainly as unaffiliated, a man from outside the houses who came to them by marriage, and who never claimed any relationship with the White Ledger beyond what his wife's family asked of him. He met Hannah Cutler Proctor at a landing on the Potomac in about 1787. She was born in 1769, and she was a laundress, one of the hardest-working trades open to a young woman in that place and period, standing all day at a tub with lye soap, a scrubbing board and a copper boiler, wringing, bleaching, starching and ironing for the families of the town and for the boatmen who put in at the landing. She was a Proctor by descent, of the Yorkist line that had settled along the Valley after coming down from Pennsylvania, and she carried her family's quiet habits of watchfulness and its plain, dry humour. Samuel's shirts came to her tub. She noticed that he brought them clean, and that he had a habit of standing at the edge of the yard while she worked, without saying anything, and it was a year before either of them said what they were thinking. They were married in 1788, in Winchester, in a plain ceremony before a minister of the Lutheran congregation with a few boatmen and Hannah's relatives as witnesses. She was nineteen. Samuel was twenty-four. The household they made was small and crowded and tolerably prosperous. They rented two rooms and a kitchen near the river, and Hannah took in washing while Samuel worked the boats, and between the two of them they saved enough by the mid-nineties to buy a share in a barge. Their first daughter, Deborah Proctor Bowen, was born in 1789, only a year after the wedding, and their second, Rebecca Bowen Proctor, in 1792. Their names tell the family's own story. The surname went through the daughters in the Proctor custom, and while Deborah kept her father's name with the Proctor as a middle one, Rebecca took the older name in front, and it was Rebecca who became the more closely tied to the ledger. Deborah lived until 1867, married in the Valley and was the family's chronicler of small events. Rebecca lived until 1857, and she is the one who married Hob Thorne in 1813, bringing the House of Thorne into the Proctor line. Samuel's dealings with the Proctors were peaceable and practical. He knew enough to keep his counsel, having been told by Hannah, in the early days of their marriage, what her people did in the hours that other people spent asleep. He did not ask questions, but he made himself useful. A boatman on the Shenandoah and the Potomac sees and hears things at every landing, and he carried word between families that did not want to use the post. He knew which taverns kept a cellar that was too cold for the season, which ferry crossings had a bad reputation after dark, and which strangers came off the Baltimore boats with a look that was wrong. He carried a Proctor hunter downriver in his boat on more than one occasion, with a rifle wrapped in a blanket and a story about a survey party, and he came to be regarded by the family with the affection given to a reliable and discreet cousin. There is no evidence that he was ever asked to hold a weapon. He would have done it, one of the Proctor women said, and it did not need saying. The Revolution was behind him by the time he had a household to worry about, but the country was not settled. In his forties, Samuel lived through the alarms of the Whiskey Rebellion in the neighbouring states, the quasi-war with France and the long tension over the embargo and impressment that came to a head in 1812. The War of 1812 changed the river. The British blockade of the Chesapeake in 1813 and 1814 choked the tidewater trade, the burning of Washington in August of 1814 sent refugees up the Potomac in every kind of craft, and the flour that had once gone to Alexandria and Georgetown sat in the mills of the Valley. Samuel was fifty by then, too old to be called into the militia but strong enough to take a boat of refugees and government stores up to Harpers Ferry, where the national armory still made muskets. He spent three months of that summer on the river and came home lean and quiet, and Hannah said he had aged five years. His last decade was a settled one. He gave up the long runs and worked for a merchant milling firm as a river master, supervising the loading of flour boats, and Hannah, whose hands were ruined with lye by fifty, gave up the tubs and lived on what her daughters brought. Hannah died in 1823. It was a blow, and Samuel did not properly recover from it. He went on working at the landing, a stooped and silent figure sitting at the boat rail with a pipe, and his daughters, who lived nearby, brought him his meals. In the summer of 1825 an outbreak that the Valley folk called the plague went through the river landings and the low streets of the towns, taking a great many of the poor and the aged in a few weeks, and it took Samuel Bowen in the autumn, at the age of sixty-one. Whatever physicians might have called it now, the word in the family accounts is simply the plague, and it is the word that the Bowens used. He is buried beside Hannah in the old burying ground at Winchester. In the family's memory he is the boatman who gave the Proctors of the Valley a road on the water, and who, having married into the White Ledger's line, honoured it by staying out of its way and by being there whenever he was needed. His name has a small place in the Slayerverse, that of an ordinary man from outside the old houses whose quiet loyalty made him one of the Proctor family's steadiest friends, and whose great-grandchildren still carried his name in the middle of their own.