A descendant of America’s namesake, and a wild tale

How the son of a president, an Italian treasure seeker, a St. Lawrence County land baron are all connected to the house that is now the Remington Museum

By Tim Rowland

Amerigo Vespucci gave our great continent its name. So of course he has a connection to the North Country.

On a rainy weekend during mud season, Beth and I had a little time to explore this connection, by visiting the Frederic Remington Art Museum in Ogdensburg on the Canadian border. At an attractive riverside park, you can learn of the area’s rich history and watch the big freighters plying the waters of the St. Lawrence.

Our story involves Vespucci and his direct descendant, the alluring, raven-haired Signora Ameriga Vespucci. Both sailed to the New World looking for riches — Amerigo sought pearls, Ameriga, 300 years later, sought to have Congress grant her a valuable tract of land, a “little something for the effort” on the part of her famous relative.

Both failed, but Ameriga had a Plan B. She determined to latch onto a wealthy man of importance, one she found in John Van Buren, son of the president Martin, whom she accompanied on an antebellum tour of the American frontier.

Ameriga was no slouch, having dazzled courts and congresses half a world around. A British member of Parliament, James Silk Buckingham, wrote, “It is not too much to say of her, that there is no throne in Europe which she would not elevate by her wisdom: no court which she would not adorn by her manners; no family, that she would not delight by her conversation; no man …”

OK, we get the point. But for all that, her choice in men might have countered her other assets.

Her adventure with JVB was going well enough when the couple became snowed in at a tavern north of Fort Drum, where Van Buren found himself with lots of time on his hands, a lovely female companion, $5,000 in gold a client had entrusted him with in order to buy property, a deck of cards and a bottomless supply of hooch. What could go wrong?

This: Into the mix walked the debonaire George Parish, a great landowner from Ogdensburg, a wiley Scot who promptly won all but one of Van Buren’s gold coins at the poker table. Desperate, Van  Buren proposed one last Hail Mary in the form of a coin flip. Heads he’d get his money back, tails Parish would get the girl. Parish won, and — one rich American being pretty much the same as any other — Ameriga didn’t object.

At this point, serious “historians” who insist on “primary sources” and other complex documentation before they will get anywhere near the neighborhood of believing anything, are probably screaming that none of this ever happened.

Fair enough. But I submit to you that Ameriga Vespucci is such an undeniably spectacular, if shadowy, historical figure, a dazzling cross between Catherine the Great and Lucy Riccardo, that if the above story never took place, something even more bizarre almost certainly did.

Either way, it is an undeniable fact that Ameriga ended up at Parish’s opulent Ogdensburg mansion.

Today, the beautiful manse is home to the Frederic Remington Art Museum, having been the home of the great artist’s widow early in the last century. (Its collection includes the card table where the beautiful woman was allegedly lost/won.)

Remington’s work is generally associated with the American West, but as a native of Canton he cut his wilderness teeth at Cranberry Lake in the Adirondacks and camps in eastern Canada, both of which are represented in the museum’s fine collection.  

Remington was a burly, loquacious man out of the Teddy Roosevelt mold, and indeed the two men were both present in Cuba during the Spanish American War. T.R.’s assault on Kettle Hill is depicted in perhaps Remington’s most recognized work, Charge of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill.

Remington began his career as a magazine illustrator, but his breakthrough in the medium of bronze gave him the financial freedom to move into the circles of fine art. After a world of black and white, Remington grumbled that color gave him fits, but as his later work proved, he figured it out.

As for Ameriga, she was the quintessential bird in a gilded cage, shunned by the women of Ogdensburg as an Italian Jezebel, yet getting on well enough until George Parish essentially “bought out her contract“ with a suitable annuity and sent her back to Europe. 

She was, the papers said, sad to go, proving that it is better to have been won at a card game than not to have been won at all. Or something like that.