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^1
THE FRENCH IN
THE HEART OF AMERICA
THE FRENCH IN
THE HEART OF AMERICA
BY
JOHN JINLEY
nt siAn or new you
NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
PREFACE
Most of what is here written was spoken many
months ago in the Amphitheatre Richelieu of the
Sorbonne, in Paris, 'and some of it in Lille, Nancy,
Dijon, Lyons, Grenoble, Montpellier, Toulouse, Bor-
deaux, Poitiers, Rennes, and Caen; and all of it was
in the American publisher's hands before the great
war came, effacing, with its nearer adventures, perils,
sufferings, and anxieties, the dim memories of the days
when the French pioneers were out in the Mississippi
Valley, "The Heart of America."
As it was spoken, the purpose was to freshen and
brighten for the French the memory of what some of
them had seemingly wished to forget and to visualize
to them the vigorous, hopeful, achieving life that is
passing before that background of Gallic venturing
and praying. It was planned also to publish the book
simultaneously in France; and, less than a week be-
fore the then undreamed-of war, the manuscript was
carried for that purpose to Paris and left for transla-
rion in the hands of Madame Boutroux, the wife of
the beloved and eminent £mile Boutroux, head of the
Fondation Thiers, and sister of the illustrious Henri
Poincare. But wounded soldiers soon came to fill the
chambers of the scholars there, and the wife and
mother has had to give all her thought to those who
have hazarded their all for the France that is.
PREFACE
: was my hope that what was spoken in Paris
jme day be read in America, and particularly
valley which the French evoked from the un-
that those who now live there might know
rhat a valorous background they are passing,
I can tell them less of it than they will learn
s Homeric Parkman, if they will but read his
il sfory.
rst debt is to him; but I must include with him
ho made their contributions to these pages as
them in Paris. The quotation-marks, diligent
hfiil as they have tried to be, have, I fear, not
all who have assisted, but my gratitude ex-
) every source of fact and to every guide of
along the way, from the St. Lawrence to the
Mexico, even if I have not in every instance
ir remembered his name,
thout Parkman's long labors I could not have
PREFACE vii
The title of this book (appearing iirst as the general
title for some of these chapters in Scribner's Magazine
in 1912) has a purely geographical connotation. But
I advise the reader, in these days of bitterness, to go
no further if he carry any hatred in his heart.
John Finley.
State Educatioh Building, Albakt, N. Y.
Wuhington's Birthda)', 1915.
CONTENTS
I. ItmODIKTION I
II. Froh Labrador to the Lakes 4
in. The Paths of the Gray Friars and Black Gowns 23
IV. From the Great Lakes to the Gulp .... 46
V. The River Colbert: A Course and Scene or
EupBE 70
VI. The Passing of New France and the Dream of
Its Revival 99
VII. The Peopuno op the Wilderness 126
VIII. The Parcbluno of the Domain 150
IX. In the Trails op the Coureurs de Bois . , . 174
X. In the Wake of the "GRiPnM" 196
XI. Western Cities That Hate Sprung prom
French Forts 316
XII. Western Towns and Cities That Have Sprung
PROM French Portage Paths 246
XIII. From La Salle to Lincoln 370
XIV. The Valley of the New Democracy .... 291
XV. Washington: The Union of the Eastern and
THE Western Waters 309
XVI. The Producers 329
CONTENTS
p*oe
"me Thought OF To-MoRROw 354
The Men OF Always" 371
HE Heart OF America 391
■
THE FRENCH IN
THE HEART OF AMERICA
1
"a series of letters to a friend in England," in
ending to shew the probable rise and grandeur
merican Empire";
ruck me as a natural object of enquiry to what a
icrease and elevation of magnitude and grandeur
iding empire of America might attain, when a
had thus suddenly risen from an uninhabited
the quantum of population necessary to govern
■late its own administration."
INTRODUCTION
I ADDRESS the reader as living in the land from
which the pioneers of France went out to America;
first, because I wrote these chapters in that land,
a few steps from the Seine; second, because I should
otherwise have to assume the familiarity of the reader
with much that I have gathered into these chapters,
though the reader may have forgotten or never known
it; and, third, because I wish the reader to look at
these new-world regions from without, and, standing
apart and aloof, to see the present restless life of these
valleys, especially of the Mississippi Valley, against
the background of Gallic adventure and pious endeavor
which is seen in richest color, highest charm, and truest
value at a distance.
But, while I must ask my readers in America to ex-
patriate themselves in their imaginations and to look
over into this valley as aliens, I wish them to know
that I write, thou^ myself in temporary exile, as a
son of the Mississippi Valley, as a geographical descen-
dant of France; that my commission is given me of my
love for the boundless stretch of prairie and plain
whose virgin sod I have broken with my plough; of
the lure of the waterways and roads where I have fol-
lowed the boats and the trails of French voyageurs
and coureurs de bois; and of the possessing interest of
2 THK FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
the epic story of the development of that most viriXe
democracy known to the world. The "Divine River» "
discovered by the French, ran near the place of my
birch. My county was that of "La Salle," a division of
the land of the Illinois, "the land of men." The Fort,
or the Rock, St. Louis, built by La Salle and Tonty,
was onty a few miles distant. A little farther, a town,
Marquette, stands near the place where the French
priest and e quette, ministered to the
Indians. L city keeps the name of
Joliet on th Is, though the brave ex-
plorer woul 'ecognize it as his own;
and below, ennepin Canal makes a
shorter cour pi River than that which
leads by th e's Fort Crevecoeur. It
is of such e these chapters were sug-
gested, and J love for it, rather than
by any profound scholarship, that they have been dic-
tated, I write not as a scholar— since most of my life
has been spent in action, not in study— but as an aca-
demic coureur de bois and of what I have known and
seen in the Valley of Democracy, the fairest and most
fruitful of the regions where France was pioneer in
America.
There should be written in further preface to all the
chapters which follow a paragraph from the beloved
historian to whom I am most indebted and of whom
I shall speak later at length. I first read its entranc-
ing sentences when a youth in college, a quarter of a
century ago, and I have never been free of its spell.
I would have it written not only in France but some-
where at the northern portals of the American con-
tinent, on the cliffs of the Saguenay, or on that Rock
INTRODUCTION 3
of Quebec which saw the first vessel of the French come
up the river and supported the last struggle for formal
dominion of a land which the French can never lose,
except by forgetting: "Again their ghostly camp-fires
seem to bum, and the fitful light is cast around on
lord and vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with
wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship
on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows
upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest
verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river,
lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling
with the sky. Such was the domain which France con-
quered for Civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in
the shade of its forests, priestly vestments in its dens
and fastnesses of ancient barbarism. Men steeped in
antique learning, pale with the close breath of the
cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives,
ruled savage hordes with a mild, parental sway, and
stood serene before the direst shapes of death. Men
of courtly nurture, heirs to the polish of a far-reaching
ancestry, here, with their dauntless hardihood, put to
shame the boldest sons of toil." ^
These are the regions we are to explore, and these
are the men with whom we are to begin the journey.
^ Parkman: '* Pioneers of France in the New Worid." New library edition.
Introduction, zii-xiiL
FROM L
THE LAKES
WE shall enter the valley of
the Mii i chapter. There is a
long St: ;arer valley of the St.
Lawrence that ir versed. Just before I
left America in i lew in a balloon from
St. Louis, the very centre of the Mississippi Valley, to
the Labrador gate of the St. Lawrence, the vestibule
valley, in a few hours, but it took the French pioneers
a whole century and more to make their way out to
where those aviators began their fiight. We have but
a few pages for a journey over a thousand miles of
stream and portage and a hundred years of time. I
must therefore leave most of the details of suffering
from the rigors of the north, starvation, and the Iro-
quois along the way to your memories, or to your
fresh reading of Parkman, Winsor, Fiske, and Thwaites
in English, or to Le Clercq, Lescarbot, Champlain,
Charlevoix, Sagard, and others in French.
The story of the exploration and settlement of
those valleys beyond the cod-banks of Newfoundland
begins not in the ports of Spam or Portugal, nor in
England, but in a little town on the coast of France,
standing on a rocky promontory thrust out into the
sea, only a few hours' ride from Fans, in the ancient
FROM LABRADOR TO THE LAKES 5
town of St. Malo, the "nursery of hardy mariners,"
the cradle of the spirit of the West.^
For a son of France was the first of Europeans, so
far as we certainly know, to penetrate beyond the tide-
water of those confronting coasts, the first to step over
the threshold of the unguessed continent, north, at any
rate, of Mexico. Columbus claimed at most but an
Asiatic peninsula, though he knew that he had found
only islands. The Cabots, in the service of England,
sailing along its mysterious shores, had touched but
the fringe of the wondrous garment. Ponce de Leon,
a Spaniard, had floundered a few leagues from the sea
in Florida searching for the fountain of youth. Nar-
vaez had found the wretched village of Appalache but
had been refused admission by the turbid Mississippi
and was carried out to an ocean grave by its fierce
current; Verrazano, an Italian in the employ of France,
living at Rouen, had entered the harbor of New York,
had enjoyed the primitive hospitality of what is now
a most fashionable seaside resort (Newport), had seen
the peaks of the White Mountains from his deck, and,
as he supposed, had looked upon the Indian Ocean, or
the Sea of Verrazano, which has shrunk to the Chesa-
peake Bay on our modem maps and now reaches not
a fiftieth part of the way to the other shore.
It was a true son of France who first had the per-
sistence of courage and the endurance of imagination
to enter the continent and see the gates close behind
him — ^Jacques Cartier, a master pilot of St. Malo,
commissioned of his own intrepid desire and of the
^ After reaching Paris on my first journey, the first place to which I made
a pilgrimage, even before the tombs of kings and emperors and the gal-
leries of art, was this gray-bastioned town of St. Malo.
1
FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
iinbition of King Francis I to bring fresh tJd-
the mysterious "square gulf," which other
len, Denys and Aubert, may have entered a
of a century earlier, and which it was hoped
Isclose a passage to the Indies.
s from St. Malo that Cartier set sail on the
1 to Cathay, as he imagined, one April day in
wo ships of sixty tons each.^ There is preserved
[alo what is thought to be a list of those who
he ship's papers subscribed under Cartier's
id. It is no such instrument as the "Com-
hich the men of the Mayflower signed as they
led the continent nearly a century later, but
e the less fateful.
utumn leaves had not yet fallen from the trees
any when the two ships that started out in
peared again in the harbor of St. Malo, carry-
dusky passengers from the New World as
FROM LABRADOR TO THE LAKES 7
northern way to India. On he sailed, with his two
dusky captives for pilots, seeing with regret the banks
of the river gradually draw together and hearing
unwelcome word of the freshening of its waters — on
past the "gorge of the gloomy Saguenay with its tower-
ing cliffs and sullen depths, depths which no sounding-
line can fathom, and heights at whose dizzy verge the
wheeling eagle seems a speck"; on past frowning
promontory and wild vineyards, to the foot of the
scarped cliff of Quebec, now "rich with heroic mem-
ories, then but the site of a nameless barbarism'';
thence, after parley with the Indian chief Donnacona
and his people, on through walls of autumn foliage and
frost-touched meadows to where the Lachine Rapids
mocked with unceasing laughter those who dreamed
of an easy way to China. There, entertained at the
Indian capital, he was led to the top of a hill, such as
Montmartre, from whose height he saw his Cathay
fade into a stretch of leafy desert bounded only by the
horizon and threaded by two narrow but hopeful
ribbons of water. There, hundreds of miles from the
sea, he stood, probably the only European, save for his
companions, inside the continent, between Mexico
and the Pole; for De Soto had not yet started for his
burial in the Mississippi; the fathers of the Pilgrim
Fathers were still in their cradles; Narvaez's men had
come a little way in shore and vanished; Cabe^a de
Vaca was making his almost incredible journey from
the Texas coast to the Pacific; Captain John Smith
was not yet bom; and Henry Hudson's name was to
remain obscure for three quarters of a century. Francis
I had sneeringly inquired of Charles V if he and the
King of Portugal had parcelled out the world between
1
FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
id asked to see the last will and testament of
iarch Adam. If King Francis had Been per-
to see it, he would have found a codicil for
written that day against the bull of Pope
er VI and against the hazy English claim of
>ots. For the river, "the greatest without
son," as Cartier reported later to his king,
known to have ever been seen," carried drain-
1 to a realm larger many times than all the
the Seine and the Rhone and the Loire, and
any times than the land of spices to which the
Lachine, "the greatest and swiftest fall of
lat any where hath beene scene," seemed now
1 the way.
lelaga" the Indians called their city— the
)f the river into which the sea had narrowed,
ind miles inland from the coasts of Labrador
at a few years before were the dim verge of the
FROM LABRADOR TO THE LAKES 9
monial at Notre-Dame, knelt upon this same ground
in 1642 before the hastily reared and decorated altar
while Father Vimont, standing in rich vestments, ad-
dressed them. "You are," he said, "a grain of mus-
tard-seed that shall rise and grow till its branches
overshadow the earth. You are few, but your work is
the work of God. His smile is on you and your chil-
dren shall fill the land. " ^ Parkman (from the same
French authority) finishes the picture of the memor-
able day: "The afternoon waned; the sun sank behind
the western forest, and twilight came on. Fireflies
were twinkling over the darkened meadow. They
caught them, tied them with threads into shining fes-
toons and hung them before the altar, where the Host
remained exposed. Then they pitched their tents,
lighted their bivouac fires, stationed their guards and
lay down to rest. Such was the birth-night of Mon-
treal"*
On the loth of September in 1910 two hundred
thousand people knelt in that same place before an out-
of-door altar, and the incandescent lights were the
fireflies of a less romantic and a more practical age.
^ Francis Dollier de Casson, "Histoire du Montreal," quoted in Park-
man'8 "Jesuits in North America/' p. 209, a free rendering of the original.
"Voyez-vous, messieurs, dit-il, ce que vous voyez n'est qu'un grain de
moutarde, mais il est jete par des mains si pieuses et animees de I'esprit
de la foi et de la religion que sans doute il faut que le ciele est de grands
desseins puisqu'il se sert de tels ouvriers, et je ne fais aucun doute que ce
petit grain ne produise un grand arbre, ne fasse un jour des merveilles, ne
soit multiplie et ne s'etende de toutes parts."
'Francois Dollier de Casson, "Histoire du Montreal," quoted in Park-
man's "Jesuits in North America," p. 209, a free rendering of the original.
"On avait point de lampes ardentes devant le St. Sacrement, mais on avait
certaines mouches brillantes qui y luisaient fort agreablement jour et nuit
etant suspendues par des filets d'une fafon admirable et belle, et toute
propre a honorer selon la rustidte de ce pays barbare, le plus adorable de
no6 mysteres."
E FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
neuve and Mademoiselle Mance would have
iraptured by such a scene, but it would have
/en greater satisfaction to the pilot of St. Malo
)uld have seen that commercial capital of the
ying beneath the mountain which still bears
ne he gave it, and stretching far beyond the
of the palisaded Hochelaga. It should please
to know that nearly two hundred thousand
keep the place of the footprint of the first
, Jacques Cartier. When a few weeks before
ling to France I was making my way by a trail
he side of Mount Royal through the trees —
which may have been there in Cartier's day —
s, one of as beautiful face as I have ever seen,
tear-stained, emerged from the bushes and
me, in a language which Jacques Cartier would
iderstood better than I, to show them the way
"rue St. Maurice," which I did, finding that
o be only a few paces from the place where
FROM LABRADOR TO THE LAKES ii
Cartier was obliged to leave in the Canadian river,
because so many of his men had died of scurvy and ex-
posure that he had not sufficient crew to man the three
ships home. And probably not a man would have been
left and not even the Grande Hermine would have
come back if a specific for scurvy had not been found
before the end of the winter — a decoction learned of
the Indians and made from the bark or leaves of a
tree so efficacious that if all the ^Moctors of Lorraine
and Montpellier had been there, with all the drugs of
Alexandria, they could not have done so much in a
year as the said tree did in six days; for it profited us
so much that all those who would use it recovered
health and soundness, thanks to God."
Cartier appears again in July, 1536, before the ram-
parts of St. Malo with two of his vessels. The savages
on the St. Charles were given the Petite Herminej^ its
nails being accepted in part requital for the tempo-
rary loss of their chief. Donnacona, whom Cartier kid-
napped.
A cross was left standing on the shores of the St.
Lawrence with the fleur-de-lis planted near it. Don-
nacona was presented to King Francis and baptized,
and with all his exiled companions save one was buried,
where I have not yet learned, but probably somewhere
* James Phinney Baxter, "A Memoir of Jacques Cartier," p. 2CX>, writes:
''The remains of this ship, the Petite Hermine, were discovered in 1843, in
the river St. Charles, at the mouth of the rivulet known as the Lairet.
These precious relics were found buried under five feet of mud, and were
divided into two portions, one of which was placed in the museum of the
Literary and Historical Society of Quebec, and destroyed by fire in 1854.
The other portion was sent to the museum at St. Malo, where it now re-
mains. For a particular account inde Le Canadien of August 25, and the
Quebec Gazette of August 30, 1843; 'Transactions of the Quebec Literary
and Historical Society for 1862'; and 'Picturesque Quebec,' Le Moine,
Montreal, 1862, pp. 484-7."
12 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
out on that headland of France nearest Stadacone, the
seat of his lost kingdom.
Cartier busied himself in St. Malo (or Limoilou) til!
called upon, in 1541, when peace was restored in France
to take the post of captain-general of a new expedition
under Sieur de R ' > "• . ^j- jsJorembega, Vice-
roy and Lieuten; Canada, Hochelaga,
Saguenay, Newfo Isle, Carpunt, Lab-
rador, the Great alaos,"' with a com-
mission of discoi t, and conversion of
the Indians, and ) ransack the prisons
for material with ' out these ambitious
and pious dcsignsj i king said, employing
"clemencj'' in doii_^ _ and meritorious work
toward some criminals and malefactors, that by this
they may recognize the Creator by rendering Him
thanks, and amending their lives." Again Cartier
(Roberval having failed to arrive in time) sets out;
again he passes the gloomy Saguenay and the cliff of
Quebec; again he leaves his companions to prepare
for the winter; again he ascends the river to explore
the rapids, still dreaming of the way to Asia; again
after a miserable winter he sails back to France, eluding
Roberval a year late, and carrying but a few worthless
quartz diamonds and a little sham gold. Then Rober-
val, the Lord of Norembega, reigns alone in his vast
and many-titled domain, for another season of snows
and famine, freely using the lash and gibbet to keep
' Baiter, "Mtmoir of Jacques Cartier," note, p. 40, writes; "Tliesc titles
are given on the authority of Charlevoix, 'Hisloirc dc !a Nouvdlc France,'
Paris, 1744, lome I, p. 32. Reference, however, to the letters patent of
January 15, 15+0, from which he professes to quote and which are still
preserved and can be identified as the Same which he says were to be found
in the Etal Ordinaire des Gucrrcs in the Chambre des Comptes at Parii,
docs not bear out his sutemcnt."
FROM LABRADOR TO THE LAKES 13
his penal colonists in subjection; and then, according
to some authorities, supported by the absence of
Cartier's name from the local records of St. Malo for
a few months, Cartier was sent out to bring the Lord
of Norembega home.
So Cartier's name passes from the pages of history,
even if it still appears again in the records of St. Malo,
and he spends the rest of his days on the rugged little
peninsula thrust out from France toward the west, as
it were a hand. A few miles out of St. Malo the Breton
tenants of the Cartier manor, Port Cartier, to-day
carry their cauliflower and carrots to market and
seemingly wonder at my curiosity in seeking Cartier's
birthplace rather than Chateaubriand's tomb. It
were far fltter that Cartier instead of Chateaubriand
should have been buried out on the "Plage" beyond
the ramparts, exiled for a part of every day by the sea,
for the amphibious Ufe of this master pilot, going in and
out of the harbor with the tide, had added to France
a thousand miles of coast and river, had opened the
door of the new world, beyond the banks of the
Baccalaos, to the imaginations of Europe, and unwit-
tingly showed the way not to Asia, but to a valley
with which Asia had nothing to compare.
For a half century after Cartier's home bringing of
Roberval — the very year that De Soto's men quitted
in misery the lower valley of the Mississippi — there is
no record of a sail upon the river St. Lawrence. Hoche-
laga became a waste, its tenants annihilated or scat-
tered, and Cartier's fort was all but obliterated. The
ambitious symbols of empire were alternately buried
in snows and bhstered by heat. France had too much
to think of at home. But still, as Parkman says, "the
ade of walrus tusks, and the Norman maic
furs brought by their brothers from tht
nticosti and Labrador.
Meanwhile in Brouage on the Bay of Bij
bom whose spirit, nourished of the tales <
3rld, is to make a permanent colony whe
id found and left a wilderness, and is to
ime foremost on the "bright roll of forest
-Samuel Champlain.
Once the sea, I am told, touched the
alls of Brouage. There are still to be see
Bt below the surface, rings to which mar
hermen moored their boats — they who usee
Brouage for salt with which to cure their
iiose stories of the Newfoundland cod-banl
the boy Champlain the desire for discover
eir fogs. The boys in the school of Hiers
mile away — ^in the Mairie where I went ti
e parish records — seemed to know hardly
at land which the Brouage boy of three
fore had lifted out of the fogs by his lifeloi
[ventures than did the boy Chamnlain wKt
FROM LABRADOR TO THE LAKES 15
that a citizen of the Mississippi Valley had made re-
cent pilgrimage to this spot.^
In the year of Champlain's birth the frightful colonial
tragedy in Florida was nearing its end. By the year 1603
he had, in Spanish employ, made a voyage of two years
in the West Indies, the unique illustrated journal* of
which in his own hand was for two centuries and more
in Dieppe, but has recently been acquired by a library
in the United States*— a journal most precious especially
in its prophecy of the Panama Canal:* "One might
judge, if the territory four leagues in extent, lying
between Panama and the river were cut thru, he could
pass from the south sea to that on the other side, and
thus shorten the route by more than fifteen hundred
leagues. From Panama to Magellan would constitute
an island, and from Panama to Newfoundland would
constitute another, so that the whole of America would
be in two islands."
He had also made one expedition to the St. Lawrence,
reaching the deserted Hochelaga, seeing the Lachine
Rapids, and getting vague reports of the unknown West.
He must have been back in Paris in time to see the
eleven survivors of La Roche's unsuccessful expedition
of 1590, who, having lived twelve years and more on
Sable Island, were rescued and brought before King
Henry IV, "standing like river gods" in their long
beards and clad in shaggy skins. During the next
^ For an interesting account of Brouage to-day, see '' Acadiensis," 4 : 326.
'"Brief Disoours des Choses plus remarquables que Sammucl Cham-
plain de Brouage, reconnues aux Indies Occidentalles au voiage qu*il en a
faict en iceUes en I'annec VIIIJ"XIX (1599) et en I'annee VJ*J (1601)
comme ensuite." Now in English translation by Hakluyt Society, 1859.
• The John Carter Brown Library at Providence, R. I.
* Several earlier Spanish suggestions for a canal had been made. See
M. F. Johnson, "Four Centuries of the Panama CanaL"
-_ ^wv^woaiiu lias ever read
chapters of that JEntid.
The best and the meanest of France \n
company that set out from Dieppe to be it:
men of highest condition and character, and ^
Catholic priests and Huguenot ministers, sc
artisans. There were theological discussions
to blows before the colonists were far at se
the historian, says the ''ship's atmosphen
musty with texts and as acrid with quibbles
a room at the Sorbonne." There was the ii
the wandering of Nicolas Aubry, "more skill
devious windings of the [Latin Quarter] thj
intricacies of the Acadian Forest," where he
for sixteen days and subsisted on berries .
fruits; there was the ravage of the relentless m
terre, scurvy, for which Cartier's specific coul
found though the woods were scoured; there
explorations of beaches and harbors and ish
rivers, including the future Massachusetts
Plymouth, and the accurate mapping of all t
now so familiar; there were the arrivals of
Jonasy once with temporal sunnlipc o^.^ — *
FROM LABRADOR TO THE LAKES 17
Rue aux Ours had in Paris and that, too, at a cheaper
rate ;' there was later the news of the death of Henry IV
heard from a fisherman of Newfoundland; and there
was, above all else except the "indomitable tenacity" of
Champlain, the unquenchable enthusiasm, lively fancy,
and good sense of Lescarbot, the verse-making advo-
cate from Paris.
There is so much of tragic suffering and gloom in
all this epic of the forests that one is tempted to spend
more time than one ought, perhaps, on that bit of
European clearing (the only spot, save one, as yet in
all the continent north of Florida and Mexico), in the
jolly companionship of that young poet-lawyer who had
doubtless sat under lecturers in Paris and who would
certainly have been quite as capable and entertaining
as any lecturers on the new world brought in these
later days from America to Paris, a man "who won the
good-will of all and spared himself naught," "who
daily invented something for the public good," and
who gave the strongest proof of what advantage "a
new settlement might derive from a mind cultivated
by study and induced by patriotism to use its knowl-
edge and reflections."
It cannot seem unworthy of the serious purpose of
this book to let the continent lie a few minutes longer
in its savage slumber, or, as the Jesuits thought it,
"blasted beneath the sceptre of hell," while we ac-
company Poutrincourt and Champlain, returning
wounded and weather-beaten from inspecting the
< "Though the epicure! of Parii often tell ui we hive no Rue tvx Oun
over there, ■■ a rule we made as good cheer as we could hare in thii iime
Rue aui Ourt and at leu cott." Leicarbot, "Champlain Society Publica-
tion," 7 : 343.
X nave just spoken, furnished by this s
poet's agricultural industry. We may
moment longer to hear ^us stateV appea
which, heeded by her, would have made I
name familiar in the homes of America in
known only to those who delve in librarie
"France, fair eye of the universe, nur
of letters and of arms, resource to the affii
stay to the Christian religion, Dear Moth'
children, our fathers and predecessors, have
masters of the sea. . . . They have with (
occupied Asia. . . . They have carried thi
the name of France to the east and souti
these are marks of your greatness, . . . bui
now enter again upon old paths, in so far at
been abandoned, and expand the bounds of
justice and humanity, by teaching these th
nations of New France. . . . Our ancient
the sea must be revived, we must ally th<
the west and convert those people to God
end of the world come. . . . You must ra3
ance in imitation of the course of the sun
dailv foVrlof ur- i--' ■ '
FROM LABRADOR TO THE LAKES 19
dren of the sea, which is, being interpreted, children
of the west." '
"Children of the west." His fervid appeal found as
little response then as doubtless it would find if made
to-day, and the children of the sea were interpreted
as the children of the south of Africa. The sons of
France have ever loved their homes. They have, except
the adventurous few, preferred to remain children of
the rivers and the sea of their fathers, and so it is
that few of Gallic blood were "spawned," to use Les-
carbot's metaphor, in that chill continent, though the
venturing or missionary spirit of such as Carcier and
Champlain, Poutrincourt and De Monts gave spawn
of such heroism and unselfish sacrifice as have made
millions in America whom we now call "children of
the west," geographical offspring of Brittany and Nor-
mandy and Picardy.
The lilies of France and the escutcheons of De
Moots and Poutrincourt, painted by Lescarbot for the
castle in the wilderness, faded; the sea which Lescarbot,
as Neptune, impersonated in the pageant of welcome,
and the English ships received back those who had
not been gathered into the cemetery on land; and the
first agricultural colony in the northern wilds lapsed
for a time at least into a fur traders' station or a place
of call for fishermen.
It was only by locating these points on Champlain's
map of Port Royal that I was able to find in 191 1 the
site of the ancient fort, garden, fish-pond, and cemetery.
The men unloading a schooner a few rods away seemed
not to know of Lescarbot or Poutrincourt or even
Champlain, but that was perhaps because they were
not accustomed to my tongue.
■Letcarbot, "Hiatoire de la Nouvelle France," 1618, pp. 15-IS.
nis dreams. At the foot of the gray n
he makes the beginning of a fort, whence
forth to trace the rivers to their soui
perchance, a northern route to the Indie:
path for the priests to the countless
bondage of Satan." Parkman speaks c
"^neas of a destined people," and he
called the "father of Canada." But I
rather as a Prometheus who, after his yez
defiance of elements and Indians, is to h:
plucked out day by day, chained to ths
rock — only that death instead of Here
came.
There is space for only the briefest n
exploits and endurances of the stout hear
frame of the man of whom any people
might well be proud. The founding of
rearing of the pile of wooden buildings
lower town now stretches along the river
cessful plot to kill Champlain before the
ished; the death of all of the twenty-eigl
eight before the coming of the first sprin
^l_ • • J ^ r t '*
FROM LABRADOR TO THE LAKES 21
the St. Lawrence; a wintet in France; the breaking
of ground for a post at Montreal; another visit to
France to find means for the rescue and sustenance of
his fading colony, make a depressing second chapter.
Then follows the journey up the Ottawa with the
young De Vignau, who had stirred Paris by claiming
that he had at last found the northwest passage to
the Pacific, when he had in fact spent the winter in an
Indian lodge not two hundred miles from Montreal; the
noble forgiveness of De Vignau by Champlain; his
crestfallen return and his going forth from France
again in 1615 with four Recollet friars (Franciscans of
the strict observance) of the convent of his birthplace
(Brouage) inflamed by him with holy zeal for the con-
tinent of savages. For a little these "apostolic mendi-
cants" in their gray robes girt with the white cord,
their feet naked or shod in wooden sandals, tarried
beneath the gray rock and then set forth east, north,
and west, soon (1626) to be followed and reinforced
by their brothers of stronger resources, the Jesuits, the
"black gowns," upon a mission whose story is as mar-
vellous as a "tale of chivalry or legends of lives of the
saints."
Meanwhile Champlain, exploring the regions to the
northwest, is the first of white men to look upon the
first of the Great Lakes — the "Mer Douce" (Lake
Huron) being discovered before the lakes to the south —
the first after the boy £tienne Brule and Friar Le
Caron: the latter having gone before him, celebrated
the first mass on Champlain's arrival the 12th of
August, 161 s, a day "marked with white in the friar's
calendar," and deserving to be marked with red in
the calendar of the west.
^E FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
re follow twenty restless years in which Cham-
etForts are divided between discovery and
:hening the little colony, and his occupations
;n holding his Indian allies who lived along the
rn pathway to the west, fighting their enemies
south, the Iroquois, restraining the jealousies
chants and priests, trade and missions, reconcil-
tholics and Huguenots, going nearly every year
nee in the interests of the colony, building and
ng, yielding for a time to the overpowering ships
English. The grizzled soldier and explorer, re-
and commissioned anew under the fostering and
jpport of Richelieu, struggled to the very end
life to make the feeble colony, which eighteen
after its founding "could scarcely be said to
tut in the founder's brain," not chiefly an agri-
il settlement but a spiritual centre from which
:erior was to be explored and the savage hordes
at the same time to heaven and to France—
CHAPTER III
THE PATHS OF THE GRAY FRIARS AND
BLACK GOWNS
IT was exactly a hundred years, according to
some authorities, after Jacques Cartier opened and
passed through the door of the St. Lawrence Valley
that another son of France, Jean Nicolet, again the
first of Europeans so far as is now certainly known,
looked over into the great valley of the Mississippi
from the north.
Champlain, dying beneath the Rock of Quebec, had
touched two of the Great Lakes twenty years before.
He never knew probably that another of those immense
inland seas lay between, though, as his last map in-
dicates, he had some word several years before his
death of a greater sea beyond, where now two mighty
lakes, the largest bodies of fresh water on the globe,
carry their sailless fleets and nourish the life of mil-
lions on their shores.
From the coureurs de bois, "runners of the woods,"
whom he, tied by the interests of his feeble colony to
the Rock, had sent out, enviously no doubt, upon
journeys of exploration and arbitration among the
Indians, and from the Gray Friars and Black Gowns
who, inflamed of his spirit, had gone forth through the
solitudes from Indian village to village, from suffer-
ing to suffering, reports had come which he must have
,»iiiv,ii maKes tnt
of his map is merciful of his ignorant
of his hopes. It admits no stream th
into one of the lakes or into the St.
it was made probably four years befoi
it is possible, indeed probable, that just
came upon him, he had heard throu
coureur de bois, Jean Nicolet, whom he
the year previous, of a river which tl
woods had descended so far that 'Sn thi
he would have reached what the Indi
"Great Water." ^ There is good reasc
pointment of this same coureur de bois
sioner and interpreter at Three Rivers
(as one wishes to think) that like Moses, C
through him a vision of the valley whi
might not enter, but which his compa
possess.
The historian Bancroft said of that
cape was turned, not a river entered, bi
the way." But the men of sandalled fe<
penetrated so far in 1635. It is an intei
to these spiritual pioneers, howp^ro^ -i-
GRAY FRIARS AND BLACK GOWNS 25
faloes and other untamed beasts> would doubtless never
have left his Indian habits and returned to civilization
if he could have lived without the sacraments of the
church.
This coureur de bois Nicolet presents a grotesque
appearance as he mounts the rims of the two valleys
where the two bowls touch each other, bowls so full
that in freshet the water sometimes overflows the
brim and makes one continuous valley. •
Nicolet would not be recognized for the Frenchman
that he was, as he appears yonder; for, having been
told that the men whom he was to meet were without
hair upon their faces and heads, and thinking himself
to be near the confines of China, he had attired him-
self as one about to be received at an Oriental court.
Accordingly, he stands upon the edge of the prairies in
a robe of Chinese damask embroidered with flowers and
birds — but with a pistol in each hand. Having suc-
ceeded in his mission to these barbarians (for such he
found them to be, wearing breech-clouts instead of
robes of silk), he was impelled or lured over into the
great valley, it is believed. He passed from the lake
on the border of Champlain's map^ up a river (the
Fox) that by and by became but a stream over which
one might jump. He portaged from this stream or
creek across a narrow strip of prairie, only a mile wide,
to the Wisconsin River, a tributary of the Mississippi.
The statement over which I have pondered, walking
along that river, that he might have reached the "great
water" in three more days, is intelligible only in this
interpretation of his course.
The next Europeans to look out over the edge of
■Ltke MichiguL.
_ ^^cuiiatciy somewhat
great "rivers that divide themselves in
in that valley, and no one can be certain
of that river "called the forked'' mei
"relation" of Radisson, which had "two
towards the west, the other towards th
as the travellers believed, ran toward M«
Then came the Hooded Faces, the 1
priests. To the four RecoUet friars who
brought out with him in 1615 from the c
native town (Brouage), Jamay, D'Olbea
and a lay brother, Du Plessis, others wei
there were not more than six in all for th(
tending from Acadia to where Champh
Caron in 161 5 in the vicinity of Lake H
experiences and ardor (not unlike those <
sionaries in other continents and in oui
have illustration in this extract from a 1
by Le Caron: "It would be difficult to
fatigue I have suffered, having been obi
my paddle in hand all day long and row
strength with the Indians. I have more
dred times walked in fh^ rA^r^^'^ —
GRAY FRIARS AND BLACK GOWNS 27
carried the canoe and my little ba^age, in order to
avoid the rapids and frightful waterfalls. I say nothing
of the painful fast which beset us, having only a little
sagamity, which is a kind of pulmentum composed of
water and the meal of Indian com, a small quantity
of which is dealt out to us morning and evening. Yet
I must avow that amid my pains I felt much consola-
tion. For alas ! when we see such a great number of
infidels, and nothing but a drop of water is needed to
make them children of God, one feels an ardor which I
cannot express to labor for their conversion and to
sacrifice for it one's repose and life."'
"Six months before the Pilgrims began their meet-
ing-house on the burial hjll at Plymouth," he and his
brother priests laid the comer-stone of "the earliest
church erected in French-America." It was a bitter
disappointment when, in 1629, he was carried away by
the English from his infant mission to spend his latter
days far from his savage converts, perhaps in his white-
washed cell in the convent of Brouage, and to admin-
ister before an altar where it was not necessary to have
neophytes wave green boughs to drive off the mos-
quitoes — those pestiferous insects from whose perse-
cutions a brother RecoUet said he suffered his "worst
martyrdom" in America. But more bitter chagrin
was in store for Le Caron, for when the French re-
turned to Quebec, in 1632, after the restoration under
the treaty, the Gray Apostles of the White Cord (who
had invited the Black Gowns to join them in their
missions years before and had so hospitably entertained
them when denied shelter elsewhere in Quebec) were
' Le Clercq, "Fint Estibliahment of the Faith in New France (Shel),"
1:9s.
'-y
0.0 X ai XW.J
wings of thought itself." Le Jeune
Dieppe, De Noue that at Rouen,
from Havre together to begin tht
people whose first representatives
vessel at Tadoussac with faces
black and red and yellow, as a [
maskers." One cannot well conjectu
undertaking than that of making
painted barbarians understand the
Trinity, for example, or the signific
Think of this gentle, holy father, Le
hovel beside one of these savages, wh
trying to learn, bribing his Indian tut
tobacco at every difficulty to make hii
or with half-frozen fingers writing his
cises, or making translations of prayei
of his prospective converts — and yoi
appreciate the beginnings of the tas!
men without the slightest question se
It was a life, once these men left t
of Notre Dame des Anges, that was w
GRAY FRIARS AND BLACK GOWNS 29
est social intercourse, that was beyond the prizes of
any earthly ambition, that was frequently in imminence
of torture and death, and that was usually in physical
discomfort if not in pain. Obscure and constant toil
for tender hands, solitude, suffering, privation, death —
these made up the portion of the messengers of the
faith who turned their faces toward the wilderness,
their steps into the gloom of the forests, pathless ex-
cept for the traces of the feet of savages and wild
beasts.
For it is twenty-five years after that memorable
day when Le Caron first said mass on the shores of
one of the Great Lakes (Champlain being present)
before the farthermost shore of the farthest lake is
reached by these patient and valorous pilgrims of
the west. The story of that heroic journey, of the
consecration of those forests and waters and clearings
by suffering and unselfish ministry, fills many volumes
(forty in the French edition and seventy-two in the
edition recently published in the United States, the
English translation being presented on the pages op-
posite the Latin or French originals). There is ma-
terial in them for many chapters of a new-world
**Odyssey." To these " Relations," as they were called,
we owe the great body of information we have con-
cerning New France, from 1603 in Acadia to the early
part of the eighteenth century in the Mississippi and
St. Lawrence Valleys; for they who wrote them were
not priests alone, they were at the same time explorers,
scientists, historical students, ethnologists (the first
and best-fitted students of the North American Indian),
physicians to the bodies as well as ministers to the
souls of those wild creatures.
-. ^*.v,oc iveiations
till possessed by Indians, or at best by 1
lalf-barbaric peoples who would stand :
.ouvre as the Goths stood before the tem
tatues of Rome.
The "Relations" of Jesuits are amon
irecious chronicles in America. With th
ory of the north — the valleys of the St. La
Sreat Lakes, and the Mississippi — be;
oureurs de bois may have anticipated th
ome solitary places, but they seldom ma
)oubtless, like Nicolet, they told their sto
iriests when they went back to the altars
lent, so that even their experiences have b
lost part preserved. But when we know u
listracting and discouraging conditions ever
^rote, we wonder, as Thwaites says, that
whatever has been preserved in writing. 1
Ions" were written by the fathers, he remi
ndian camps, the aboriginal insects buzzin;
ig about them, in the midst of a chaos of di
nmersed in scenes of squalor and degrada
ome by fatigue and imoronpr
en n^'~ —
GRAY FRIARS AND BLACK GOWNS 31
florid rhetoric; there is little self-glorification; no un-
necessary dwelling on the details of martyrdom; and
there is not a line to give suspicion "that one of this
loyal band flinched or hesitated."
"I know not," says one of these apostles' in an
epistle to the Romans (for this particular letter went
to Rome), "I know not whether your Paternity will
recognize the letter of a poor cripple, who formerly,
when in perfect health was well known to you. The
letter ts badly written, and quite soiled because in
addition to other inconveniences, he who writes it
has only one whole finger on his right hand; and it is
difficult to avoid staining the paper with the blood
which flows from his wounds, not yet healed: he uses
arquebus powder for ink, and the earth for a table."
This particular early American writer, besides having
his hand split and now one finger-nail or joint burned
off and now another, his hair and beard pulled out,
his flesh burned with live coals and red-hot stones,
was hung up by the feet, had food for dogs placed
upon his body that they might lacerate him as they
ate, hut finally escaped death itself through sale to
the Dutch.
Two other chroniclers of that life of which they were
a part, were two men of noble birth : the giant Brebeuf,
"the Ajax of the mission," a man of vigorous passions
tamed by religion (as Parkman says, "a dammed-up
torrent sluiced and guided to grind and saw and weave
for the good of man ") ; and in marked and strange con-
trast with htm, Charles Gamier, a young man of
thirty-three, of beardless face — laughed at by his
friends in Paris, we are told, because he was beardless
' Fr. FraoccKoGiMeppe Breuam, "Jesuit ReUtiont" (Thwaite«)> 39 : SS-
WW AN^cita iiii
by moonlight or the fire, when stret
on a bare rock by some savage catara
nook of the adjacent forest." Ther
ture of him in action, crouched in a
toiling at the paddle, hour after hou
week after week, behind the lank
shoulders and long, naked arms of his
panion. Still another simple ^'Relat
teaching the Huron children to chant
commandments under reward of be
prunes. In 1637, accused of having
Huron nation and having brought h
he was doomed to death; he wrote hi
to his superior, gave his farewell dinnei
taking that opportunity to preach a i
concerning the Trinity, heaven and \
fiends — ^the only real things to him —
upon his guests that he was spared to 1
often in peril, until the Iroquois (1649
the Hurons, found him with a broth<
baptism and absolution to the savage
last struggle this side of the Lakes a?air
GRAY FRIARS AND BLACK GOWNS 33
and finally tore out and ate his heart for supreme cour-
age. Such cannibalism seems poetically justifiable in
tribute to such unflinching constancy of devotion.
His brother priest, Lalemant, who was tortured to
death at the same time, had thought it no good omen
ten years before (1639) that no martyr's blood had yet
furnished seed for the church in that new soil, though
consoling himself with the thought that the daily life
amid abuse and threats, smoke, fleas, filth, and dogs
might be "accepted as a living martyrdom." There
was ample seed by now, and still more was soon to be
added, for very soon, the same year, the gentle Gamier
is to die the same death ministering to these same
Hurons, whose refugees, flying beyond two lakes to
escape from their murderous foes, are to lure the priests
on still farther westward till, even in their unmundane
thoughts, the great, mysterious river begins to flow
toward a longed-for sea.
It was by such a path of danger and suffering, a
path which threads gloomy forests, that the first
figures clad in black gowns came and peered over the
edge of the valley of this mysterious stream, even be-
fore Radisson and Groseilliers wandered in that wooded
and wet and fertile peninsula which, beginning at the
junction of three lakes, widens to include the whole
northwest of what is now the United States. You may
travel in a day and a night now up the Ottawa River,
above Lake Nipissing, around Huron to the point of
that peninsula, from Montreal, and if you go in the
season of the year in which I once made the journey
you will find this path (the path on which Champlain
came near losing his life, where Recollet and Jesuit,
coureur de hois and soldier toiled up hundreds of
34 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
portages) bordered as a garden path much of the way
by wild purplu flowers (that doubtless grew red in the
blood-soddin ground of the old Huron countrjO* with
here and thiri' patches of gold.
The first of these was Father Raymbault and with him
Father Isaac Jogues, who was later to knock with mu-
tilated hands for :suit college in Rennes.
Jogues was born as of as delicate mould
as Gamier, mode ut "so active that none
of the Indians c( i In running." In the
autumn of 1641 his companion at the
end of the pcnin le Lakes, their congre-
gation to the ni thousand having been
gathered for the ig the southern shore
of Lake Superior, tne lana 01 tne Cbippewns. Father
Raymbault died at Quebec from exposure and hardship
encountered here, the first of the Christian martyrs
on that field, and Jogues was soon after sent upon an
errand of greater peril. While on his wa}' from Quebec
to the new field (the old Huron station) with wme for
the eucharist, writing materials, and other spiritual and
temporal supplies, he was captured by the Iroquois
and with his companions subjected to such torture as
even Brebeuf was not to know. Journeying from the
place of his capture on the St. Lawrence to that of his
protracted torture he, first of white men, saw the Lake
Como of America which bears the name of "George,"
a king of England, instead of "Jogues," whom the holy
church may honor with canonization, but who should
rather be canonized by the hills and waters where he
suffered. His fingers were lacerated by the savages
before the journey was begun; up the Richelieu River
he went, suffermg from his wounds and "the clouds of
GRAY FRIARS AND BLACK GOWNS 35
mosquitoes." At the south end of Lake Champlain
this gentle son of France was again subjected to spe-
cial tortures for the gratification of another band of
Iroquois; his hands were mangled, his body burned and
beaten till he fell "drenched in blood." Where thou-
sands now land every summer at the head of Lake
George for pleasure he staggered forth under his por-
tage burden to the shores of the Mohawk, where again
the chief called the crowd to "caress" the Frenchmen
with knives and other instruments of torture, the chil-
dren imitating the barbarity of their elders. I should
not repeat such details of this horrible story here ex-
cept to give background to one moment's act in the
midst of it all, illustrative of the motive which was
back of this unexampled endurance. While he and his
companions were on the scaffold of torture, four Huron
prisoners were brought in and put beside the French-
men: whereupon Father Jogues began his ministry
anew, for when an ear of green com was thrown him
for food, discovering a few rain-drops clinging to the
husks, he secretly baptized two of his eleventh-hour
converts.
This was not the end, but after months of pain and
privation, which make one wonder at what a frail
body, fitted with a delicate organism, can endure, he
escaped by the aid of the Dutch at Fort Orange (now
the capital of the State of New York), whither the
Iroquois had gone to trade, and after six weeks in
hiding there, was sent to New Amsterdam — then a
"delapidated fort garrisoned by sixty soldiers" and a
village of only four or five hundred inhabitants, but
even at that time so cosmopolitan that, as one of
my friends who has recently revived a census of that
,TV7uia nil a nail in the Sorbonne.
If only Richelieu (who died in the
Jogues was exemplifying so faithfully
Him whose brother he called himself)
the Huguenot who wanted to go, to ft
priest into those wilds, instead of try
persuade those to go who would not, wh(
American visitors from that far inter
be speaking to-day in a tongue which I
he alive, could best understand.
The little father, who has always seei
old man, though he was then only t
carried back to England, suffering fron
pirates almost as much as from the Iro
last reached Rennes, where, after his idei
closed, the night was given to jubilation
giving, we are told. He was summoned t<
the queen '^ kissed his mutilated hands" a:
"People write romances for us — but was
romance like this, and it is all true ? " *
did him honor. But all this gave no s
his soul bent upon one task, and as soon a
the rpniipcf- /%ru!- i" •
GRAY FRIARS AND BLACK GOWNS 37
and knives of the Iroquois," to say mass once more, he
returned to the wilderness where within a few months
the martyrdom was complete and his head was dis-
played from the palisades of a Mohawk town.
So vanished the face of the first priest of France
from the edge of the great valley, he, too, as Raym-
bault, perhaps, hoping "to reach China across the
wilderness" but finding his path "diverted to heaven."
It was not until 1660 that another came into that
peninsula at whose point Jogues had preached, the
aged Menard, who after days among the tangled
swamps of northern Wisconsin was lost, and only his
cassock, breviary, and kettle were ever recovered. A
little later came Allouez and Dablon, and Druilletes
who had been entertained at Boston by Winslow and
Bradford and Dudley and John Eliot, and last of those
to be selected from the increasing number of that
brotherhood for mention, the young Pere Marquette,
"son of an old and honorable family at Laon," of
extraordinary talents as a linguist (having learned, as
Parkman tells us, to speak with ease six Indian lan-
guages) and in devotion the "counterpart of Gamier
and Jogues." When he first appears in the west it is
at the mission of Pointe de St. Esprit, near the very
western end of Lake Superior. There he heard, from
the Illinois who yearly visited his mission, of the great
river they had crossed on their way, and from the
Sioux, who lived upon its banks, "of its marvels."
His desire to follow its course would seem to have been
greater than his interest in the more spiritual ends of
his mission, for he disappointedly, it is intimated, fol-
lowed his little Huron flock suddenly driven back
toward the east by the Iroquois of the West — the
_ ... ».io juuinai, or ti
ception of the Holy Virgin, whon
invoked since I came to this cour
to obtain from God the favor of be
the Nations on the river Missisi
orders from Frontenac the goven
intendant, that Marquette should jc
quette — upon this voyage of disco
with Marquette^s desire for divin
quette quieted his morbid conscience
reproved his exploring ambitions, 1
the "happy necessity of exposing hi
vation of all the tribes upon that pa
especially, he adds, as if to silence ai
ing remonstrance, "the Illinois, wh
St. Esprit, had begged me very earn
Word of God among them."
So the learned son of Laon and th
the wagon-maker of Quebec set ou
their journey under the protectior
particular divinity, but provided bj
plies of smoked meat and Indian co
with a map of their nmr^^..^ -
GRAY FRIARS AND BLACK GOWNS 39
mission; and then up the Fox River, where Nicolet had
gone, in his love not of souls but of mere adventure.
What interests one who has lived in that region, is to
hear the first word of praise of the prairies extending
farther than the eye can see, interspersed with groves
or with lofty trees.^
I have spoken of the little river, dwindling into a
creek of perplexed channel before the trail is found
that ties the two great valleys together. One cannot
miss it now, for when I last passed over it it was being
paved, or macadamized, and a steam-roller was doing
in a few days what the moccasined or sandalled feet
of the first travellers there would not have accom-
plished in a thousand thousand years. I shall speak
later of what has grown upon this narrow isthmus
(now crossed not merely by trail and highway, but
by canal as well), but I now must hasten on where
the impatient priest and his sturdy, practical compan-
ion are leading, toward the Wisconsin.
Nicolet may have put his boat in this same Wiscon-
sin River, but if he did he did not go far below tl\f
portage. La Salle may even have walked over this
very path only a year or two before. But, after all, it
is only a question as to which son of France it was, for
we know of a certainty that on a day in June of 1673
Joliet and Marquette did let their canoes yield to
the current of this broad, tranquil stream after their
days of paddling up the "stream of the wild rice."
I have walked in the wide valley of the Wisconsin
River and have seen through the haze of an Indian
summer day the same dim bluffs that Marquette
looked upon, and by night the light of the same stars
*"J«nil Relatiou" CThwaitei), 59 : 103.
_ ^..•^Aw^o, LUC parRs and pleas
a prodigal nature; by thickets and mars
bare sand-bars; under the shadowing
whose tops looked down from afar the
some woody bluff. At night, the bivou
inverted on the bank, the flickering fire
bison-flesh or venison, the evening pipes
beneath the stars; and when in the mon
barked again, the mist hung on the rivei
veil, then melted before the sun, till the
and the languid woods basked breathless
glare."^
But to those first voyagers it had a c
which was not of stars or shadows or w
or companionable bivouac. It led to th
the unknown river, which in turn led to :
from that by which the French had come o
into America. They were travelling ovei
Champlain's map, away from Europe,
Canada, away from the Great Lakes. As
trail which led through the grass and re
the Fox, one might have come every leagu
from Havre or even from o n..— --^ '
GRAY FRIARS AND BLACK GOWNS 41
of a new sea, they knew not what sea — or, better, it was
the rim of a new world.
On the 17th of June they entered the Mississippi
with a joy which they could not express, Marquette
naming it, according to his vow, in honor of the Virgjn
Mary, Riviere de la Conception, and Joliet, with an
earthly diplomacy or gratitude, in honor of Frontenac,
"La Buade." For days they follow its mighty cur-
rent southward through the land of the buffalo, but
without sight for sixty leagues of a human being,
where now its banks are lined with farms, villages, and
towns. At last they come upon footprints of men, and
following them up from the river they enter a beauti-
ful prairie where a little way back from the river lay
three Indian villages. There, after peaceful cere-
monies and salutations, they, the first Frenchmen on
the farther bank, their fame having been carried west-
ward from the missions on the shores of the lakes, were
received.
"I thank thee," said the sachem of the Illinois,
addressing them; "I thank thee, Black Gown, and thee,
frenchman," addressing himself to Monsieur JoUyet,
"for having taken so much trouble to come to visit
us. Never has the earth been so beautiful, or the sun
so Bright, as to-day; Never has our river been so Calm,
or so clear of rocks, which your canoes have Removed
in passing; never has our tobacco tasted so good, or
our com appeared so fine, as We now see Them. Here
is my son, whom I give thee to Show thee my Heart.
1 beg thee to have pity on me, and on all my Nation,
It is thou who Knowest the great Spirit who has made
us alL It is thou who speakest to Him, and who
hearest his word. Beg Him to give me life and health.
vAiiai cartn, sprin
bright sun, a calm river free of n
tobacco, thriving corn, an acquaint;
Spirit — well might the old man who
man say: ''thou shalt enter all our
Indian eloquence is not of the
poor Indian speech indeed that is i
gifts. And so it was that the French
their journey laden with presents
hosts, and a slave to guide them,
procure peace wherever they went.
It is enough now, perhaps, to knoi
ers passed the mouth of the Illinois,
Ohio, and reached the mouth of the
thinking themselves near the gulf
they might fall into the hands of the
ventured too near the sea, and so be re
of their expedition, they turned their <
Instead, however, of following their
entered the Illinois River, known s
"Divine River." I borrow the ol
description of that particular vallej
two centuries before I fire*- *— '
GRAY FRIARS AND BLACK GOWNS 43
land, its prairies, woods, wild cattle, stag, deer, wild-
cats, bustards, swans, ducks, parrots, and even beaver;
its many little lakes and rivers."' Through this para-
dise of plenty they passed, up one of the branches
of the Illinois, till within a few miles of Lake Mich-
igan, where they portaged a thousand paces to a
creek that emptied into the lake of the Illinois. If
they were following that portage path and creek to-
day they would be led through that city which stands
next to Paris in population — the city of Chicago, in
the commonwealth that bears the name of the land
through which the French voyagers passed, "Il-
linois."
At the end of September, having been absent four
months, and having paddled their canoes over twenty-
five hundred miles, they reached Green Bay again.
There these two pioneers, companions forever in the
history of the new world, separated — Joliet to bear
the report of the discovery of the Riviere de Buade to
Count Frontenac, Marquette to continue his devotions
to his divinity and recruit his wasted strength, that he
might keep his promise to return to minister to the
Illinois, whom he speaks of as the most promising of
tribes, for "to say ' Illinois' is in their language to say
'the men.' "
By most unhappy fate Joliet's canoe was upset in
the Lachine Rapids, when almost within sight of Mon-
treal, and all his papers, including his precious map,
were lost in the foam. But several maps were made
under his direction or upon his data.
Marquette's map, showing nothing but their course
'B. F. French, "Historical Collectioiu of hmmmi," 4:51. "Jwuit
RekUou" (Thwaiiei), 59 : 161.
. ^. v..«L vdiiey nas
or idealize the faces of these pione
quent, visible memorial would be t
the hand of the priest Jacques Mai
de la Salle of the royal city of Rhe
Of his setting out again for the
purposed establishing a mission, o
winter, ill, in a hut on the Chicago )
brief visit to the Illinois, of his joui
his death by the way, and of the
that bore his bones up the lake to P(
all this I may not speak in this cha]
Here let me say only the word of t
to him out of his own time, as the f
tory came, being handed down frc
generation by word of mouth, till a p
should make them immortal. The st
I had known for many years from th
but not long ago I met one day an
some French blood of the far past in
of a Chippewa chief, a youth who
Parkman or Winsor but who knew t
quette better than I. fnr \y'^^ '
1 •
GRAY FRIARS AND BLACK GOWNS 45
missionary journey to the Illinois to prepare food for
htm, and of hearing the mourning among the Indians
when long after his death the report of his end reached
their lodges.
The grim story of the labors of the followers of
Loyola among the Indians has its beatific culmination
in the life of this zealot and explorer. Pestilence and
the Iroquois had ruined all the hopes of the Jesuits in
the east. Their savage flocks were scattered, annihi-
lated, driven farther in the fastnesses, or exiled upon
islands. The shepherds who vainly followed their
vanishing numbers found themselves out upon the
edge of a new Held. If the Iroquois east and west
could have been curbed, the Jesuits would have be-
come masters of that field and all the north. We shall,
thinking of that contingency, take varying views, be-
yond reconciliation, as to the place of the Iroquois
in American history; but we shall all agree, whatever
our religious and political predilection, men of Old
France and men of New France alike, in applauding
the sublime disinterestedness, fearless zeal, and un-
questioned devotion to something beyond the self,
which have consecrated all that valley of the Lakes and
have, in the person of Marquette, the son of Laon, made
first claim upon the life of the valley, whose great water
he helped to discover.
CHAPTER IV
S TO THE GULF
still in a convent in
wood-ranger and fur
'estern forests making
r Nicolas Perrot, who
;otten with many an-
been able — as few of
And Marquette was
FROM THE '
P6RE MARI
Rheims wh
trader was
friends for the Fi
would doubtless ',
other of his craft
them were —to re.
but on his way from France to Canada when Sieur
Perrot was ministering with beads and knives and
hatchets and weapons of iron to these stone-age men
on the southern shore of Superior, where the priest
was later to minister with baptismal water and mys-
terious emblems. It was Perrot, whom they would
often have worshipped as a god, who prepared the
way for the altars of the priests and the forts of the
captains; for back of the priests there were coming
the brilliantly clad figures of the king's representa-
tives. Once when Perrot was receiving such adoration,
be told the simple-minded worshippers that he was
"only a Frenchman, that the real Spirit who had made
all, had given the French the knowledge of iron and
the ability to handle it as if it were paste"; that out
of " pity for His creatures He had permitted the French
nation to settle in their country."' At another time he
■Emma H. Blair, "Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley,"
THE GREAT LAKES TO THE GULF 47
said: "I am the dawn of that light, which is beginning
to appear in your lands," and having learned by ex-
perience the true Indian eloquence, he proceeded in his
oration with most impressive pauses: "It is for these
young men I leave my gun, which they must regard
as the pledge of my esteem for their valor. They
must use it if they are attacked. It will also be more
satisfactory in hunting cattle and other animals than
are all the arrows that you use. To you who are old
men I leave my kettle (pause); I carry it everywhere
without fear of breaking it " (being of copper or iron
instead of clay). "You will cook in it meat that
your young men bring from the chase, and the food
which you offer to the Frenchmen who come to visit
you."' And so he went on, throwing iron awls to the
women to be used instead of their bone bodkins, iron
knives to take the place of pieces of stone in killing
beavers and cutting their meat, till he reached his per-
oration, which was punctuated with handfuls of round
beads for the adornment of their children and girls.
Do not think this a petty relation. It is a detail
in the story of an age of iron succeeding, in a single
generation, an age of stone. The splendor of the court
and age of Louis XIV was beginning to brighten the
sombreness of the northern primeval forests.
It is this ambassador Perrot, learned in the craft of
the woods rather than in that of the courts, more
effective in his forest diplomacy than an army with
banners, who soon after (1671) appears again on those
shores, summoning the nations to a convocation by
the side of that northern tumultuous strait, known
ever)rwhere now as the "Soo," then as the Sault Ste.
■Blair, "Indian Tribe* of the Upper NCiaiiwpin Valley," i ; 330, 331.
great savage audience). When th(
arrived from the west and the sout
mont de St. Lusson and his French
out the previous autumn from Quebec
in the Mantoulin Island, were ther
It is a picture for the Iliad. Coureur
had penetrated these regions, as we h:
was to take place the formal possessi
of a territory that was coming to
valuable in itself, even if no stream
the coasts that looked on Asia.
The scene is kept for us with much
On a beautiful June morning the
formed, the rapids probably fumishin,
for the stately march of soldier and ]
Lusson, four Jesuits led the proces
Allouez, whom we have already seen
Superior, Andre from the Mantou!
Druilletes; the last, familiar from \
Plymouth and Boston with the chara*
tan colonies and doubtless understar
else in that comoanv. the mt^nnn^ ♦.
THE GREAT LAKES TO THE GULF 49
bridges over streams, instead of traversing them in
ephemeral interest, or as paths to waters beyond; who
were working the iron of the bogs near by, instead of
hunting for the more precious ores or metals on remote
shores; who were sawing the trees into lumber for
permanent homes and shops, instead of adapting them-
selves to the more primitive life and barter in the woods;
who were getting riches from the cleared fields, instead
of from the backs of beavers in the sunless forests; who
were raising sheep and multiplying cattle, instead of
hunting deer and buffaloes; who were beginning to trade
with European ports not as mere voyageurs but as
thrifty merchants; who were vitally concerned about
their own salvation first, and then interested in the
fate of the savage; and who, above all, were learning
in town meetings to govern themselves, instead of
having all their daily living regulated from Versailles
or the Louvre. Druilletes, remembering New England
that day, must have wondered as to the future of this
unpeopled, uncultivated empire of New France, with-
out ploughs, without tame animals, without people,
even, which St. Lusson was proclaiming.^ Was its
name indeed to be written only in the water which
their canoes traversed ?
There were fifteen Frenchmen with St. Lusson,
among them the quiet, practical, unboastful Joliet,
trained for the priesthood, but turned trader and ex-
plorer, who had already been two years previous out
on the shores of Superior looking for copper. Mar-
quette was not with the priests but was ur^ng on the
reluctant Hurons and Ottawas who did not arrive
until after the ceremony.
> Ste Juttin Winior "Pageant of St Luwon," 1891.
50 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
The French were grouped about a cross on the top
of a knoll near the rapids, and the great throng of
savages, "many-tinted" and adorned in the mode of
the forest, sat or stood in wider circle. Father Dablon
sanctified a great wooden cross. It was raised to its
place while the inner circle sang Vexilla Regis. Close
\
ribed with the
, was erected, and the
ted whde a priest said
t. Lusson (a sword in
n the other") cried to
Lided his sentences, to
erstand, to the rapids
Jie forests which have
ui his voice, the words in
In English correspond:
to the cross a ]
royal arms, sent i
woods heard the
a prayer for the
one hand and "c
his French follow
the savages who
which would not
long forgotten the vmration;
French to which these words
"'In the name of the most high, most mighty and
most redoubtable monarch Louis, the XlVth of the
name, most ClirJstian King of France and Navarre,
we take possession of the said place of Ste Mary of the
Falls as well as of Lakes Huron and Superieur, the
Island of Caientoton and of all other Countries, rivers,
lakes and tributaries, contiguous and adjacent there-
unto, as well discovered as to be discovered, which are
bounded on the one side by the Northern and Western
Seas and on the other side by the South Sea, including
all Its length or breadth;' Raising at each of the said
three times a sod of earth whilst crj'ing Vive le Roy,
and making the whole of the assembly as well French
as Indians repeat the same; declaring to the aforesaid
Nations that henceforward as from this moment they
were dependent on his Majesty, subject to be con-
trolled by his laws and to follow his customs, promis-
THE GREAT LAKES TO THE GULF 51
ing them all protection and succor on his part against
the incursion or invasion of their enemies, declaring
unto all other Potentates, Princes and Sovereigns,
States and Republics, to them and their subjects, that
they cannot or ought not seize on, or settle in, any
places in said Country, except with the good pleasure
of his said most Christian Majesty and of him who will
govern the Country in his behalf, on pain of incurring
his hatred and the effects of his arms; and in order
that no one plead cause of ignorance, we have attached
to the back the Arms of France thus much of the
present our Minute of the taking possession."^
Then the priest Allouez (as reported by his brother
priest Dablon), after speaking of the signiBcance of
the cross they had just raised, told them of the great
temporal king of France, of him whom men came from
every quarter of the earth to admire, and by whom all
that was done to the world was decided.
"But look likewise at that other post, to which are
affixed the armorial bearings of the great Captain of
France whom we call King. He lives beyond the sea;
he is the Captain of the greatest Captains, and has
not his equal in the world. All the Captains you have
ever seen, or of whom you have ever heard, are mere
children compared with him. He is like a great tree,
and they, only like little plants that we tread under
foot in walking. You know about Onnontio, that
famous Captain of Quebec. You know and feel that
he is the terror of the Iroquois, and that his very
name makes them tremble, now that he has laid waste
their country and set fire to their Villages. Beyond
the sea there are ten thousand Onnontios like him,
'"Witconim Hiitoiical CoUectioni," II : 38,
_ ^«.<. •%^»A.M.A\J\^S IIKJ
men — or, at the very most, ten or
in France hold four or five hundred
as a thousand. Other men make 's
such vast numbers that, if drawn i
they would extend farther than fr
saquenk, although the distance exce
When he attacks, he is more terribh
the earth trembles, the air and the
by the discharge of his Cannon; '
seen amid his squadrons, all cover
of his foes, of whom he has slain
sword that he does not count the
rivers of blood which he sets flowin
oners of war does he lead away t
account of them, letting them go al
will, to show that he does not fear tl
dares make war upon him, all na
sea having most submissively sued fo
parts of the world people go to lister
to admire him, and he alone decide
the world. What shall I say of 1
count yourselves rich when von Vir
THE GREAT LAKES TO THE GULF 53
town there are warehouses containing enough hatchets
to cut down all your forests, kettles to cook all your
moose, and glass beads to fill all your cabins. His
house is longer than from here to the head of the
Sault" — that is, more than half a league — "and higher
than the tallest of your trees; and it contains more
families than the largest of your Villages can hold."^
This remarkable proclamation and this extraordi-
nary speech are to be found in the records. And the
historian would end the incident here. But one may at
least wonder what impressions of Louis the Great and
Paris and France these savages carried back to their
lodges to ponder over and talk about in the winter
nights; and one must wonder, too, what impression
the proclamation and pantomime of possession made
upon their primitive minds. Perrot translated the
proclamation for them, and asked them to repeat
"Long live the king I" but it must have been a free
translation that he made into their idioms; he must
have softened "vassals" to "children," and "king" to
"father," and made them understand that the laws
and customs of Versailles would not curb their freedom
of coiffure or attire, of chase or of leisure, on the shores
of Superior.
The speech of Allouez may seem full of hyperbole
to those who know, in history, the king, and, by sight,
the palace employed in the priest's similes; but if we
think of Louis XTV not in his person but as a repre-
sentative of the civilization of Europe that was as-
serting its first claim there in the wilderness, and give
to the word of the priest something of the import of
prophecy, the address becomes mild, indeed. Through
'"Jetuit Rdatkuu" (Thwaitu), SS '■ "'-"I-
54 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
those very rapids a single fleet of boats carries every
year enough iron ore to supply every man, woman, and
child in the United States (97,000,000) with a new iron
kettle every jear; another fleet bears enough to meet
the continent's, if not the world's, need of hatchets.
Trains laden with golden erain, more precious than
beads, trains th; rte the palace at Ver-
sailles or the 1a ss that narrow strait
every day. A ti ;aring the abbreviated
name of the rap lission, penetrates the
forests and swan: that savage congrega-
tion was gathere eat non-religious con-
vocation on the s Stem lakes where men
with the scholars. anne now march every
year with emblems of learning on their shoulders.
As to the proclamation, Parkman asks, what now
remains of the sovereignty it so pompously announced ?
"Now and then," he answers, "the accents of France
on the lips of some stragglmg boatman, or vagabond
half-breed — this and nothing more."
But again I would ask you to think of St. Lusson not
as proclaiming merely the sovereignty of Louis XIV
or of France, but as heralding the new civilization, for
if we are to appreciate the real significance of that
pageant and of France's mission, we must associate
with that day's ceremony, not merely the subsequent
wanderings of a few men of French birth or ancestry
in all those "countries, rivers, lakes and streams,"
"bounded on the one side by the seas of the north
and west and on the other by the South Sea," but all
that life to which they led the adventurous, perilous
way.
The Iroquois and disease had thinned the Indian
THE GREAT LAKES TO THE GULF 55
populations of the northeast, but here was a new and
a friendly menace to that stone-age barbarism whose
duslcy subjects found their way back to their haunts
by the stars, lighted their fires by their flint, and glut-
tonously feasted in plenty, or stoically fasted in famine.
For the French it was a challenge to "those coun-
tries, lakes and islands bounded by the seas." They
must now "make good the grandeur of their hopes."
And a brave beginning is soon to be made. This
highly colored scene becomes frontispiece of another
glorious chapter, in the midst of whose hardship one
will turn many a time to look with a sneer or smile,
or with pity, at the figures in court garments, burnished
armor, and "cleansed vestments," standing where the
east and the west and the far north and the south
meet.
From the shores of a seigniory on the St. Lawrence,
eight or nine miles from Montreal, just above those
hoarse-voiced, mocking rapids which had lured and
disappointed Cartier and Champlain and Maison-
neuve, and which were to get their lasting name of
derision from the disappointment of the man who
now (1668) stands there, Robert Rene Cavelier, Sieur
de la Salle, looks across the waters of Lake St. Louis
(into which the St. Lawrence for a little way widens)
to the "dim forests of Chateauguay and Beauhamois."
His thoughts look still farther, for they are out in that
valley of his imagination through which a river "must
needs flow," as he thinks, "into the 'Vermilion Sea' "
— the Gulf of California. The old possessing dream I
This young man (but twenty-five years of age) was
a scion of an old and rich family of Rouen. As a youth
he showed unusual traits of intellect and character and
, — j^ M. .j^ iiipuLiicLic nisi
pleasure had no part." At twent;
Rouen, and securing a seigniory, v
seen him, in the "most dangerous
he made clearing for the settlemen
the Seigniory of St. Sulpice (having i
seminary of St. Sulpice), but which \
as they named the rapids, "La Chi:
There tutored in the Indian langi
of imagination as he looked day af
west, his thoughts "made alliance
Lescarbot would have said, and dw
and empire.
It was ten years later that those
the mission and the trading-post on
where to-day candles bum before th
Marquette, saw a vessel equipped i^
as the ships with which Jacques Carti
Atlantic, come ploughing its way thi
had never before borne such burc
beating of oars or paddles. Its coi
de la Salle, now a noble and posses:
two hundred mile?? wpst of i-Vio*. ^^ -
THE GREAT LAKES TO THE GULF 57
mighty fleets that now stir those waters with their
commerce.
These ten years of disaster and disappointment, but
also of inflexible purpose and indomitable persistence,
must not be left to lie unremembered, though the re-
cital must be the briefest. In 1669, in company with
some Sutpitian priests and others, twenty-four in all,
he sets forth from his seigniory. Along the south shore
of Ontario they coast, stopping on the way to visit the
Senecas, La Salle, at least, hoping to find there a guide
to the headwaters of what is now known as the Ohio
River. Disappointed, he with them journeyed on
westward past the mouth of the Niagara River, hear-
ing but the sound of the mighty cataract. At the head
of Lake Ontario they have the astounding fortune
to meet Louis Joliet, who with a companion was re-
turning from Superior (two years before the pageant
of St. Lusson) and who had just discovered that great
inland lake between the two lakes, Ontario and Huron
(which had been shown on French maps as connected
by a river only). This lake, Erie, now the busiest
perhaps of all that great chain, had been avoided be-
cause of the hostility of the Iroquois, and so it was
that it was last to rise out of the geographic darkness
of that re^on. Even Joliet's Iroquois guide, although
well acquainted with the easier route, had not dared
to go to the Niagara outlet but had followed the
Grand River from its northern shores and then por-
taged to Lake Ontario.
The Sulpitian priests and their companions followed
to the west the newly found course, but La Salle, the
goal of whose thought was still the Ohio, feigning ill-
ness (as it is believed), received the sacrament from
'^••^a.aj
he coasted the unknown western shore
that he reached the site of Chicago; ;
saw the Mississippi two years at least I
and Joliet. What Parkman says in 1
after full and critical acquaintance i^
papers in Paris, is this: ^'La Salle disct
and in all probability the Illinois also;
covered the Mississippi has not been
the light of the evidence we have, is it 1
argues that in the minds of those wli
Montreal, La Salle's projects had faih
then that the mocking name was given
a name which, by the way, has been
some one remarks, ''by the passage a(
old possessions of the Canadian Pacif
new way to China.
I think we must admit, with his enen
and hostile authorities of this, despite ]
ments, that except for his increased kn
approaches and his acquaintance wit
the conditions of nature in that valley
pedition was a failure. It was his first
'1 1
THE GREAT LAKES TO THE GULF 59
Salle is in Paris, bearing a letter from Frontenac, in
which he is recommended to Minister Colbert as "the
most capable man I know to carry on every kind of
enterprise and discovery" and as having "the most
perfect knowledge of the state of the country,"' that
is, of the west. A letter I find was sent to Colbert
under the same or proximate date* acquainting Col-
bert with the discovery made by Jotiet. La Salle must
therefore have known of the Mississippi and its course,
even if he himself had not beheld it with his own eyes
or felt the impulse of its current.
He goes back to Canada possessed of a new and
valuable seigniory (having spent the proceeds of the
first in his unsuccessful venture) under charge to gar-
rison Fort Frontenac (on the north shore of Ontario)
and to gather about it a French colony. For two years
he labors there, bringing a hundred acres of sunlight
into the forests, building ships for the navigation of
the lake, and establishing a school under the direction
of the friars. He might have stayed there and become
rich "if he had preferred gain to glory" — there where
he had both solitude and power. "Feudal lord of
the forest around him, commander of a garrison raised
and paid by himself, founder of the mission and patron
of the church, he reigned the autocrat of his lonely
little empire." But this does not satisfy him. It is
but a step toward the greater empire still farther to
the west.
In 1677 he comes back again to Paris with a desire
not for land, but for authority to explore and open up
the western country, which he describes in a letter to
'Margry, "Dicouv«rte« et fubiiitemenu des Fran^ii," i : 117.
* WuMor datei letter November 14, 1674. Margry, November ii.
6o THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
Colbert. It is nearly all "so beautiful and fertile; so
free from forests and so full of meadows, brooks and
rivers; so abounding in fish, game, and venison that
one can find there in plenty, and with Httle trouble,
all that is needful for the support of powerful colonies.
The soil will produce anvthine that is raised in France."'
He says that cai out all winter, calls at-
tention to some 1 ught with him of cattle
whose wool is a1 d again expresses con-
fidence that col ecome prosperous, es-
pecially as they ;ased by the tractable
Indians, who v pt themselves to the
French way of lil ey taste the advantages
of French frienc s not fail to mention
the hostility of the iroquois and the threatened rivalry
of the English, who are begmning to covet that country
— all of which only animates him the more to action.
Lodged in Pans in an obscure street, Rue de la Truan-
dene, and attacked as a visionary or worse, he is yet
petitioning Louis XIV for the government of a realm
larger than the king's own, and holding conference with
Colbert.
In the early summer, after his winter of waiting
somewhere in the vicinity in which I have written this
chapter, a patent comes to him from the summer palace
at St.-Germain-en-Laye, which must have been to him
far more than his patent of nobility or title to any es-
tate in France:
"Louis, by the grace of God King of France and
Navarre, to our dear and well-beloved Robert Cavelier,
Sieur de la Salle, greeting. We have received with
favor the very humble petition made us in your name
'Parkman, "La Salic," p. 122. Margry, I ; 331.
THE GREAT LAKES TO THE GULF 6i
to permit you to undertake the discovery of the western
parts of New France; and we have the more willingly
consented to this proposal, since we have nothing more
at heart than the exploration of this country, through
which, to all appearances, a way may be found to
Mexico."' La Salle, accordingly, was permitted to
build forts at his own expense, to carry on certain
trade in buffalo-hides, and explore to his heart's con-
tent.
This lodger in Rue de la Truanderie now sets about
raising funds for his enterprise and, having succeeded
chiefly among his brothers and relations, he gathers
materials for two vessels, hires shipwrights, and starts
from Rochelle for his empire, his commission doubtless
bound to his body, taking with him as his lieutenant
Henri de Tonty — son of the inventor of the Tontine
form of life insurance who had come to France from
Naples — a most valuable and faithful associate and
possessed of an intrepid soul to match his own.
From Fort Frontenac, an outpost, La Salle's com-
pany pushes out to build a fort below Niagara Falls
near the mouth of the Niagara River, the key to the
four great lakes above, and to construct a vessel of
flfty tons above the Falls for the navigation of these
upper lakes. It is on this journey that the world makes
first acquaintance of that mendacious historian Friar
Hennepin, who, equipped with a portable altar, min-
istered to his companions and the savages along the
way and wrote the chronicles of the expedition. It is he
who has left us the first picture of Niagara Falls un-
profaned by tourists; of the buffalo, now extinct ex-
cept for a few scrawny specimens in parks, and of
' Vkiiou* treaslationi. Original in Margiy, i : 337,
62 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
St, Anthony Falls. After loss by wreck of a part of
the material intended for the vessel and repeated de-
lays, due to La Salle's creditors at Frontenac and the
Indians on his way, the vessel was at last completed,
launched with proper ceremonies, and started on her
maiden trip up tl ' ' 're sail was never seen
before.
It is this ship nporary haven in the
cove back of Poii i 1679 while La Salle,
"very finely dresi et cloak trimmed with
gold lace," knelt, ; about him, and again
heard mass where Marquette were doubt-
less even then ga e Jesuit altar. Thence
they pushed on tt vhere some of his ad-
vance agents had gathered peltries for his coming. The
Griffin, loaded with these, her first and precious cargo,
was sent back to satisfy his creditors, and La Salle
with fourteen men put forth in their canoes for the
land of his commission, of "buffalo-hides," and of
"the way toward Mexico."
I will "make the Griffin fly above the crows," La
Salle IS recorded to have said more than once in his
threat toward those of the Black Gowns who were
opposing his imperious plans, because they aimed at the
occupation, fortification, and settlement of what the
order still hoped to keep for itself. But the flight of
this aquatic gnflSn gave to La Salle no good omen of
triumph. The vessel never reached safe port, so far
as is known. Tonty searched all the east coast of Lake
Michigan for sight of her sail, but in vain. And those
whom in America we call "researchers"— those who
hunt through manuscripts in libraries — have not as
yet had word of her. Many have doubtless walked.
THE GREAT LAKES TO THE GULF 63
as I, the shores of that lake with thoughts of her, but
no one has found so much as a feather of her pinions.
Whether she foundered in a storm or was treacherously
sunk and her cargo stolen, no one will probably ever
know.
La Salle and his men in their heavily laden canoes
had a tempestuous voyage up the west shore of Lake
Michigan.' They passed the site of Chicago, deciding
upon another course (which persuades me that La
Salle must have been in that region before) and on
till they reached the mouth of the St. Joseph River,
where precious time was lost in waitmg for Tonty
and his party coming up the other shore. I take space
to speak in such detail of this voyage because it traces
another important route Into the valley.
About seventy miles up the stream there stands an
old cedar-tree bearing, as it is believed by antiqua-
rians, the blaze marks of the old French Broadaxes
and marking the beginning of another of those historic
portage paths over the valley's low rim. I have visited
this portage more than once, and when last there I
dug away the sand and soil about the trunk of the
tree till I could trace the scar left by the axe of the
French. It is only about two miles from this tree at
the bend of the St. Joseph to where a mere ditch in the
midst of the prairie, a tributary of the Illinois, soon
gathers enough eager water to carry a canoe toward the
Gulf of Mexico.
' It will illustrate what a change hai come over a bit of that ihore along
which he puied if I tell you that when I landed there one day from a later
lake Crifin, at a place called Milwaukee — in La Salic'* day but another
"nameless barbarism" — the first person whom I encountered chanced to
be reading a copy of the London SpecUtor — the ultimate symbol of civili-
zation tome would think it.
now named La Salle.
Early in January they passed
days beyond — the site of the secc
State of Illinois. There La Salle
suspicions of his alliance with tl
aged by the desertion of some of
the certainty that the Griffin \
question not only with its skins bi
for a vessel, which he purposed bu
sippi waters, stayed for the rest of
for shelter and protection a fort w
Crevecoeur, not to memorialize 1
ments as some hint, but, as we ai
historians, to celebrate the demoli
coeur in the Netherlands by Louis 5
had participated. The vessel for
bravely decides to build despite t
sawyers, who had fled to the em
and who, fortunately, did not reti
employment of the unskilled hand
self and some others of his men. 1
tlement in Illinois begins.
THE GREAT LAKES TO THE GULF 6$
We may not follow their tribulations and experiences,
but we have reason to believe that they reached the
upper waters of the Mississippi. There, taken by the
Sioux, they were in humiliating and even perilous cap-
tivity till rescued by the aid of Du Lhut. We almost
wish that the rumor that Hennepin had been hung
by his own waist-cord had been true, if only we could
have had his first book without the second.
On the next day La Salle, leaving Tonty in command,
set out amid the drifting ice of the river with four or
perhaps six' men and a guide for Fort Frontenac, to
replace at once the articles lost in the Griffin, else an-
other year would be spent in vain. Having walked
many, many miles along that particular river on those
prairies, I can appreciate, as perhaps some readers can-
not, what it means to enter upon a journey of a thou-
sand miles when the "ground is oozy" and patches of
snow lie about, and the ice is not strong enough to
bear one's weight but thick enough to hinder one's
progress. La Salle, moreover, was in constant danger
of Indians of various tribes. In a letter to a friend he
said that though he knew that they must suffer all
the time from hunger, sleep on the open ground, and
often without food, watch by night and march by
day, loaded with baggage, sometimes pushing through
thickets, sometimes wading whole days through marshes
where the water was waist-deep; still he was resolved
to go. Two of the men fell ill. A canoe was made for
them and the journey conrinued. Two men were sent
to Point St. Ignace to learn if any news had come of
the Griffin. At Niagara, where he learned of further
misfortune, he left the other two Frenchmen and the
..y ^txiKJ. LllC J
unconquerable mind held at i
iron/' And Fiske adds: *'We i
sustaining power of wide-ranginj
purpose enabled the scholar, re:
pass in endurance the Indian gu
ured to the hardships of the fore
how his petition to the king, if v
ney, would have described this
traction seems not to be less de
for he was setting forth again,
him that his Fort Crevecceur
most of his men deserting and th
the stores and goods they could r
All has to be begun again. I
left to him of all his capital. N
his own inflexible spirit and the
in the heart of the wilderness,
turns his hand to the giant task
when he reaches the Illinois a dre
crowning disaster. The Iroquois
east, had swept down the vallej
hyenas of the prairies. Ip^vtnnr
♦•/x*-
THE GREAT LAKES TO THE GULF 67
I fear to tire the reader with the monotony of the
mere rehearsal of difficulty and discouragement and
despairful circumstance which I feel it needful to pre^
sent in order to give faithful background to the story
of the valley. I have by no means told all: of continued
malevolence where there should have been help; of the
conspiracy of every possible untoward circumstance
to block his way. But the telling of so much will be
tolerated in the knowledge that, after all, his master
spirit did triumph over every ill and obstacle. With
Tonty, who, as he writes, is full of zeal, he confounded
his enemies at home, gathered the tribes of the west
into a confederacy against the Iroquois, as Champlain
had done in the east, gave up for the present the
building of the vessel, and in 1681, the river being
frozen, set out on sledges at Chicago portage and made
a prosperous journey down the Illinois to Fort Creve-
cceur. Re-embarking in his canoes, they paddled noise-
lessly past tenantless villages into the Mississippi.
He Went beyond the mouth of the Arkansas, reached
by Joliet and Marquette; he was entertained by the
Indians of whom Chateaubriand has written with
such charm in his "Atala"; and at last, in April, 1682,
fifteen years from the days that he looked longingly
from his seigniory above the Lachine Rapids, he found
the "brackish water changed to brine," the salt breath
of the sea touched his face, and the "broad bosom of
the great gulf opened on his sight — limitless, voice-
less, lonely as when bom of chaos, without a sail, with-
out a sign of life."
His French companions and his great company of
Indians about him, he repeated there, in the subtropi-
cal spring, the ceremony which ten years before had
all whom it may concern, have tak
in the name of his Majesty — posse
of Louisiana, the seas, harbors, p
straits, and all nations, peoples, pro
villages, mines, minerals, fisheries,
— from the mouth of the great ri\
wise called the Ohio, — as also alon
or Mississippi, and the rivers whi
selves thereinto, from its source be
sioux — as far as its mouth at the sea
and also to the mouth of the River
assurance we have had from the
countries, that we are the first £i
descended or ascended the river Co
None could have remembered i
lowers of De Soto, who cared not for
had found no gold there and asked
back to the sea, whence they had
dered. There were probably not
the white god who had a century
been buried in the river that his r
concealed. It was, indeed, a French
TT
THE GREAT LAKES TO THE GULF 69
water path from Belle Isle, Labrador, to the Gulf of
Mexico was open, with only short portages at La-
chine and Niagara and of a few paces where the Fox
all but touches the Wisconsin, the Chicago the Des
Plaines, or the St. Joseph the Kankakee. It took al-
most a century and a half to open that way, but every
league of it was pioneered by the French, and if not for
the French forever, is the credit the less theirs?
When the "weathered voyagers" that day on the
edge of the gulf planted the cross, inscribed the arms
of France upon a tree, buried a leaden plate of posses-
sion in the earth and sang to the skies "The banners of
heaven's king advance," La Salle in a loud voice read
the proclamation which I have in part repeated. Thus
"a feeble human voice, inaudible at half a mile,"* in
fact gave to France a river and a stupendous territory,
of which Parkman has made this description for the
title-deed: "The fertile plains of Texas, the vast basin
of the Mississippi, from its frozen springs to the sultry
borders of the gulf; from the wooded ridges of the
Alleghanies to the bare peaks of the Rocky Mountains
— a region of savannas and forests, sun-cracked deserts,
and grassy prairies, watered by a thousand rivers,
ranged by a thousand warlike tribes."' They gave it
to France. That, perhaps, the people of France almost
wish to forget. But it is better and more accurately
written: "On that day France, pioneer among nations,
gave this rich, wide region to the world."
■Parkman, "L« Salle," p. 308.
OF EMPIRE
A CHARACTERIZATION OF THE RIVE
TION AND CONTROL GAVE TO
AND THE LAND OF THE ILLINO
TO the red barbarian tribes,
says there were a thousaiK
passed through their valley
sippi," that is, the Great Water,
named it so under the compulsion o
they stood of some parts of it, a
knowledge of its length. They mi
pressed, especially they of the lowc
white man of to-day, by the "ovem
ing grandeur of the wonderful spirit
the sands, the lumping of the banks, t
ing of the channel and the send of t
No one tribe knew both its founta
its sources and its mouth. To tho
valley it came out of the mystery of t
and passed silently on, or, in places,
to the mysterv of the T.^n/I ^^ ^^-^ ^
THE RIVER COLBERT 71
tinge of the water in his particular bayou, or to measure
by changing hues, now the impulses of the Wisconsin
or of the Ohio, and now of the richer-silted blood of
the Rockies (as Mr. Raymond S. Spears, writing of
the river, has graphically described)/ yet as they
gazed with wonderment at these changes of color, they
must have had inward visions of hills of red, green,
and blue earth somewhere above their own lodges or
hunting-grounds, and must even have had at times
some tangible message of their brothers of the upper
waters, some fragments of their handiwork, such as a
broken canoe, an arrow-shaft. But the men of the
sources, up toward the "swamps of the nests of the
eagles," on the low watersheds, heard only vague re-
ports of the sea or gulf; even the Indians of Arkansas,
as we read in the account of the De Soto expedition,
could or would "^ve no account of the sea, and had
no word in their language, or idea or emblem, that could
make them comprehend a great expanse of salt water
like the ocean."
So the river was not the source or father of running
waters, but the great, awe-inspiring water. The French
were misled, as we have seen, when they first heard
Indian references to it, thinking it was what they were
longjng for — the western ocean, a great stretch of salt
water instead of another and a larger Seine. And when
they did discover that it was a river, their first concern
was not as to what lay along its course, but as to where
it led.
A prominent American historian, to whom we are
■ "The Mooda of the Misiiuippi," in Mamie Monthly, loi ; 37S-J81.
See «l»o hit "Ctrapiog on a Great River," New Yorlc, Harper, 191a, and
numennu maguine article*.
who sat thriftily by the Atlantic s
The English colonists were Strug
and theirs, not for the good or glor>
seas. They had no reason to look
rivers, so long as their valleys were
Shall they be praised the more tha
century venture beyond the source
The first French followers of the ri^
we have seen, devotees of a religio
of others, bearers of advancing bai
of France, and lovers of nature ani
if there were, as there were, avar
them, we must be careful not to blar
those whose avarice or excessive t
ically more beneficial to the world a
nity and the colony and to them
values and moral virtues, as express
of fields, mines, factories, church
obedience to the selectmen, are so (
that it is difficult to get just appr:
who endured everything, not for the
gain but for others* glory, and accc
THE RIVER COLBERT 73
in Venice in I5I3» it is thought by some that the delta
is traced with distinctness, as less distinctly in Waldsee-
miiller's map of 1507. Five years later (1518) on
Garay's map of Alvarez de Pineda's explorations, there
descends into the gulf a sourceless river, the Rio del
Espiritu Santo, which is thought by some to be the
same river that Marquette's map showed under the
name de la Conception, ending its course in the midst
of the continent; but it is more generally thought now
to be the Mobile River, and the Gulf del Espiritu Santo
to be the Bay of Mobile. Narvaez, as I have said,
tried a score of years after to enter the Mississippi,
but he was carried out to sea in his flimsy improvised
craft, byits resisting current. Cabe^a de Vaca may have
seen it again after he left Narvaez, but we have no
record in his narrative that distinguishes it from any
other river. Then came the accredited discoverer De
Soto, who found it but another obstacle in his gold-
seeking path toward the Ozarks and who found it
his grave on his harassed, disappointed journey back
toward Florida.
It was more than a hundred years after "it pleased
God that the flood should rise," as the chronicle has it,
and carry the brigantines built by De Soto's lieutenant,
Moscoso, with his emaciated followers "down the
Great River to the opening gulf," before another white
face looked upon this great water. It was in 1543
that Moscoso and his men disappeared, sped on their
voyage by the arrows of the aborigines. It was a June
day in 1673 that Marquette and Joliet, coming down
the Wisconsin from Green Bay, saw before them,
"avec une joye que je ne peux pas expliquer," the slow,
gentle-currented Mississippi; or, as Mark Twain has
« A
In 1682 La Salle followed it to
great gulf, possessing with emblems
indomitable spirit the lower read
whose upper waters had first bee
gentle Marquette and the practical J
glorious Hennepin. Between that
when it became a course of regulai
merce (again in Mark Twain's chi
sovereigns had occupied the throne c
ica had become an independent n;
and Louis XV had rotted — the Fren
gone down in the red tempest of the
Napoleon was a name that was begin
about/'* Of what befell in that p<
such figures and events, a later chapte
our thought is of the river itself, the
dred thousand affluents/' as one Y
it; the river which for a little time
valley of Louisiana and of the lUin
the great French minister "Colbert."
To the Spanish the river was a ha
to be gotten over. To the Tn/lto« :*•
THE RIVER COLBERT 75
barrier athwart the course, to be ferried or forded or
bridged, but not to be followed. To be sure, it was
(later) utilized by that empire, for a little while, as
a path of dominant, noisy commerce in haste to get
its products to market. And the keels of commerce
may come again to stir its waters. But the river will
never be to its later east-and-west migrants what it
was to the French, whose evangelists, both of empire
and of the soul, saw its significance, caught its spirit
into their veins, and (from the day when Marquette
and JoUet found their courage roused, and their labor
of rowing from morning till night sweetened by the
joy of their expedition) have possessed the river for
their own and will possess it, even though all the land
belongs to others, and the rivers are put to the uses of
millions to whom the beautiful speech of the French
is alien. Many a time in poling or paddling a boat in
its tributaries in years gone by, have I thought and said
to my companion: "How less inviting this stream
would be if the French with valiant, adventurous
spirit had not first passed over it!" And my com-
panion was generally one who was always "Tonty"
to me. It is still the river of Marquette and Joliet,
Nicolet, Groseilliers and Radisson, La Salle and Tonty,
Hennepin and Accau, Gray Gowns and Black Gowns,
Iberville and Bienville, St. Ange and Laclede; for
across every portage into the valley of that river, it
was the men of France, so far as we know, who passed,
first of Europeans, from Lake Erie up to Lake Chau-
tauqua; or across to Fort Le Bocuf and down French
Creek into the Alleghany and the Ohio (La Belle Ri-
viere); or up the Maumee and across to the Wabash
(the Appian Way); or from Lake Michigan up the St.
«.•« ** K.
though a smoke now hangs habi
trance as a curtain, I have for myj
aside to find the Divine River wa}
into the greatest valley of the e;
verted this Divine River to very
even changed its name, but it is h:
all other approaches to the Great 1
the portage Pere Jacques Marqui
winter on earth in sickness; down
De la Salle built his Fort St. Louis
in the midst of his prairies, and sti
Fort CrevecoBur. On no other a:
there braver and more stirring m<
adventure and sacrifice than move :
or bivouac on those banks. And so '.
imagination take that trail toward t
first see it glisten beneath the tall
stand at the portal of the Divine Ri
Its branches are reputed to have
time the names of saints, and it hac
itself. But these streams of the M
Seine, have none or few of the analn
THE RIVER COLBERT 77
mystery has fled entirely from the valley or has hidden
itself in the wilderness and "Bad lands." All is trans-
lated into the values of a matter-of-fact, pragmatic,
industrial occupation.
These are some of the pragmatic and other facts
concerning it which I have gathered from the explorers
and surveyors and lovers of this region, C%g' and
Austin* and Mark Twain* among them.
Its length lies wholly within the temperate zone.
In this respect it is more fortunately situated than the
more fertile-valleyed Amazon, since the climate here,
varied and sometimes inhospitable as it is, offers con-
ditions of human development there denied.
The main stream is two thousand five hundred and
three miles in length, or more truly four thousand one
hundred and ninety miles, if the Mississippi and Mis-
souri be taken; that is, many times the length of the
Seine. As Mark Twain, who is to be forever associated
with its history, has said, it is "the crookedest river" in
the world, travelling "one thousand three hundred miles
to cover the same ground that a crow would fly over
in six hundred and seventy-five." For a distance of
several hundred miles the Upper Mississippi is a mile
in width. Back in 1882 it was seventy miles or more*
wide when the flood was highest, and in 1912 sixty
miles wide. The volume of water discharged by it
into the sea is second only to the Amazon, and is greater
than that of all European rivers combined — Seine,
Rhine, Rhone, Po, Danube, and all the rest, omitting
' Ogg, F, A., "Opening of the MUaiuippi," New York, 1904-
*Auitin, 0. P., "Stepi in the Elzpxniion of our Ten'itoi7," New York,
1903.
*Mark Twiin, "Life on the MuaiHippi," varioui edition*.
* Mark Twain, "Life oa the MiuiMippi," p. 456.
.MK^v^AA* ClllVA
reach from Paris to Lake Super
chatka and Alaska — about three
around the globe.
The sediment carried to the sea
hundred million tons^ annually. .
would require daily for its remova
of fifty cars, each carrying fifty to
two square miles each year over a
feet deep. Mark Twain in "Life
is authority for the statement that
the Missouri is more wholesome
until it has settled, when it is no
the Ohio, for example. If you let
you will have three-fourths of an i
bottom. His advice is to keep it s
The area which it drains is rougl
quarter square miles, or two-fifths oi
That is, as one graphic historian 1
European terms, Germany, Austria
and Italy could be set down within
would still be some room to spare.
The river has the strenpi-h (fr^^
THE RIVER COLBERT 79
is in some places fifty feet, which shows that it has a
wider range of moodiness than even the Seine.
The rim dividing the Mississippi basin from that of
the Great Lakes is, as we have seen, low and narrow;
in some places, especially in wet seasons, the water-
shed is indistinguishable. The waters know not which
way to go. This fact furnishes the explanation of the
ease with which the French explorers penetrated the
valley from the north. A high mountain range kept
the English colonists out of it from the east. The
Spanish found no physical harriers at the south (ex*
cept the water, which gave the Frenchmen help), but»
as we have seen, on the other hand, they found no ade-
quate inducement.
The isotherm which touches the southern limits of
France passes midway between the source and mouth
of the river. In the northern half, it has the mean
annual temperature of France, England, and Germany;
in the southern half, of the Mediterranean coasts.
From the gulf into which it empties, a river (that is,
an ocean river, or current) runs through the ocean to
the western coasts of Europe; another runs out along
the northeastern coast of South America, and, still
another is in waiting at the western terminus of the
Panama Canal to assist the ships across the Pacific.
A fair regularity and reliability of rainfall have
made the rich soil of the valley tillable and productive
without irrigation, except in the far western stretches;
and these blessings are likely to continue, as one au-
thority puts it, "so long as the earth continues to
revolve toward the east and the present relationship
of ocean and continent continues."
Including Texas and Alabama (which lie between the
value of products, facilities for
general conditions of wealth and
sissippi Valley surpasses anythin,
World as well as the New." It pr<
world's cotton and oil; of com i
than all the rest of the world co
of the following (produced mainly
the United States leads in quantii
the earth: wheat, cattle, hogs, oatj
iron and steel, and other mineral [
Its valley supports an estimated
fifty millions, or over half that ol
States; and has an estimated main
from 200,000,000^ to 350,000,000,
seven times its present population,
with 'Muxurious carelessness." A j
or a forester in Normandy would
the extravagant, profligate use of it:
it is likely to have at least the 250,0
2100, and with intensive cultivati
support them, is allowed by estimat
ticians. Europe had 175,000,000 -
THE RIVER COLBERT 8i
The former has somewhat more than doubled its
population in the century since; America has increased
hers about twenty times, and the Mississippi Valley
several thousand times. It is not unreasonable to
expect the doubHng of the population of that valley in
another century and its quadrupling in two.
Let De Tocqueville make summary of those prideful
items in his description of the valley, embraced by
the equator-sloping half of the continent: "It is upon
the whole," he says, "the most magnificent dwelling-
place prepared by God for man's abode" — a "space
of 1.341,649 square miles — about six times that of
France" — ^watered by a river "which, like a god of
antiquity, dispenses both good and evil." *
And it was still another Frenchman who first gave
to the world an accurate description of the sources of
the river. On his own account, Nicollet, sometime
professor in the College Louis le Grand, set out in
1831 to explore the river from its mouth to the source.
He spent five years in these regions which he de-
scribed as "a grand empire possessing the grandest
natural limits on the earth." He then returned to a
little Catholic college in Baltimore as a teacher, but
the United States Government, hearing of his valuable
service, commissioned him to make another expedition
that would enable him to complete his map of the
region of the sources. What he then accomplished has
given him "distinct and conspicuous place among the
explorers of the Mississippi." His map shows myriad
lakes in the region of the sources (where the slightest
jar of earth might turn in other directions the water of
these brimming bowls), so many indeed, that there
'"Democracy b America," i : 32, 21, w. New York, 1S98.
WHICH maKes the watershed be
north and the rivers of the sou
them, gazing in silent raptui
stretch of plains.
How their magical influence
as that child of forest and pla
boy of Savoy, a professor in Pa
graphical report to tell: "It is
words the varied impressions i
these prairies produces. Theii
To look a prairie up or down, t(
dulations, to reach a small platea
call it, a prairie planche), movii
over alternate swells and depn
reach the vast, interminable \o\
itself in front — (be it for hours^
never tires; pleasurable and exhil
all the time felt; ennui is never
less there are moments when ex(
fresh water, and other privation
is a toil; but these drawbacks :
There are no concealed dangers—
THE RIVER COLBERT 83
clouds, the curious looming of objects between earth
and sky, taxing the ingenuity every moment to rectify
— all, everything, is calculated to excite the percep-
tions and keep alive the imagination. In the summer
season, especially, everything upon the prairies is
cheerful, graceful, and animated. The Indians, with
herds of deer, antelope and buifato, give life and motion
to them. It is then they should be visited; and I pity
the man whose soul could remain unmoved under such
a scene of excitement."^
It is a singular fortune that has made a son of
France, a century and a half after the discovery of this
mighty stream, the explorer and cartographer of its
sources, a fortune that has its partial explanation at
least in the lure of this stream for the Gallic heart.
Mrs. TroUope, a famous English traveller, found its
lower valley depressing, as has many another; "Un-
wonted to European tyes and mystically heavy is the
eternal gloom that seems to have settled upon that
repon. Whatever wind may blow, however bright
and burning the southern sun may blaze in the un-
clouded sky, the stream is forever turbid and forever
dark." Of the scene at its mouth, where La Salle and
his men had sung with such joy, she says: "Had Dante
seen it, he might have drawn images of another Bolgia
from its horrors."* But no French visitor, so far as I
know, has ever found it gloomy, even in flood or tem-
pest on its subtropical stretches; nor has he found
those level vastnesses desolate. A traveller, Paul
Fountain by name, and so of French origin, I suspect,
' Report toteoded to illustrate a map of the hydrograpbical basin of the
upper Mississippi River, Washington, 1843, 26th Cong., id Seu., Sen.
Doc. JJ7, p. JJ.
* "Domestic Maniten of the Americau," p. I.
know it and love it (no great tir
ever experiences real happiness
There is a longing and eager cra^
life. The vulgar cowboys and hur
unpoetical past all degree, never i
drunk. Their money gone, back
strength and more pelf for anot
chance they abandon the wild,
drink themselves to lunacy or d
babblings are of the glorious wilde
This is the too exuberant express
probably never had a hearth of his
it gives some intimation of the c
wer. Of the theoretical sixty mil-
lions of horse-power in the current of the Mississippi,
it is estimated that about six and a half millions can
«i
So, it is urged, the river woul
expense of its own conquest.^
And once that is done the riv
shortened, deepened, leveed, 2
liable carrier of commerce. It
to a respect for cities and g(
wharfs and mills. And the as
practical Joliet for the canaliza
be realized in the safe passage r
of stately, giant, ocean-sized v
Lakes to the gulf.
A hundred years ago (1809) 01
commissioned of Robert Fulton
steamboat) and others, was sent
the first steamboat to be launch
So confident was this young n
steamboat navigation of the Ohic
on his journey of inspection, he
along the way and arranged to 1
on the river bank against the tin
whose keels had not been laid an(
depended upon the approval 1
THE RIVER COLBERT 97
Roosevelt, in making provision for the coaling of ships
in the east long before the Spanish War was in sight.
I was on the Marquette-Joliet portage the very day
that this same nephew was predicting with Uke con-
fidence to the people of St. Louis that the Mississippi
would be deepened till from the lakes to the gulf it
should be a course for seagoing vessels. Champlain
suggested the Panama Canal three hundred years be-
fore its building. JoUet, in 1673, suggested the lakes-to-
thfr^ulf ship waterway,^ and by the three-hundredth
anniversary, perhaps, it will be completed.
I made a journey in 1911 that began at the first
settlements of the French in Nova Scotia, touched the
Bay of Chaleur and the lower St. Lawrence, and then
followed the French water paths all the way to the
mouth of the Mississippi, where the master of pilots,
a descendant of France, carried me out into the Gulf
of Mexico. Starting back before dawn in a little boat,
I saw, just as the sun was coming up over the swamps
where the river begins to divide, the hulk of a great
seagoing vessel against the morning sky. It seemed
then a gloomy apparition; but as I think of it now it
was rather the presage of the new commerce than the
ghost of that which has departed.
That the Valley of a Hundred Thousand Streams —
streams that together touch every community of any
size from the AUeghanies to the Rockies — streams
whose waters all find their way sooner or later into
the Mississippi — ^will ever give up battle till the great
water itself is conquered, no one who knows the de-
termined people in that valley will ever question.
The sixty million people will not be resisted perma-
' Margry, 1 : 168.
./^cii Its longing through ages") wi
to human ministry. The spirit (
will have become as patient, as tho
wild comfort or ambitions as that
dedicated it to the honor of the m
patient of men.
CHAPTER VI
THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE AND THE
DREAM OF ITS REVIVAL
THE readers who have through these chapters
been companions of Champlain, La Salle,
Joliet, Marquette, and others in the discovery
of the mighty rivers and the conquest of the mighty
vastnesses of the new world will have, if they con-
tinue, yet before them even harder and more dis-
heartening ventures, as La Salle himself had that
April day in 1682, when he turned from the column
which he had planted in sight of the Gulf of Mexico,
four thousand miles from the Cape of Labrador, and
began to drive his canoes up the river which he had
traced forever, if too tortuously, on the maps of the
earth.
During the chapter since we reached the shores of
that lonely sea without a sail, we have, covering in
prospect two centuries, contemplated the majesty of
that river of a hundred thousand affluents.
Now, as we turn our faces toward the lakes and
Canada again, a century of hardship confronts us. If
the readers endure it with me, as I have endured it
again and again, they will have added again to their
France and their United States memories more precious
than the titles to boundless prairies and trackless forests.
La Salle was not content with the discovery of the
and dishonesty of colonial officials,
colony was to be established along
the protection of Fort St. Louis oi
mately a chain of forts and coloni>
watercourse all the way from gulf
Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf
tained by revenues from the hides
buffalo then roaming the woods and
from one side of the valley to the c
would gather about these centres 1
tection; and in the midst of this wil
hold for France the empire that the
colunm at the mouth of the river clai
might fly about his fields, but the}
touch his rich crops. Griffins — flocks
— ^would fly above them.
That was the vision with which 1:
ward from the mouth of the great
out of which he might at once have
cept for the meat of alligators shot
Seized of a dangerous illness, he sc
Mackinaw to forward news of the disc
THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE loi
which I thought I discovered traces many years ago.
It was another Rock of Quebec, rising sheer a hundred
and twenty-five feet above the river in the midst of
the prairie. About it gathered under his protection
many tribes of Indians, in common dread of the Iro-
quois, in common hope, doubtless, of gain from com-
merce with the French. La Salle, in a report to be
found in the archives of the Marine in Paris, states
that his extemporized colony numbered four thousand
warriors, or twenty thousand souls.' It had come up
as Jonah's gourd and might as quickly wither, as the
village of the Illinois but a few years previous had
withered into desolation in a few hours before the hot
breath of the terrorizing fame of the Iroquois. From
his seigniorial aerie he sent messages to the governor
of Canada, no longer the friendly Frontenac but a
Pharaoh who knew not this Joseph, praying for co-
operation, saying that he could not leave his red allies
lest, if the Iroquois should strike in his absence, they
would think him in league with their dread enemies;
asking that his men who go down with hides in ex-
change for munitions be not retained as outlaws;
urging that it is for the advantage of his creditors (for
his losses had amounted to forty thousand crowns)
that they do not seize his goods — since the means of
meeting all his debts would then be destroyed — and
begging for more men with whom to make this colony
permanent and gather the more remote Indian tribes
around the sheltering Rock St. Louis.'
But it was not such prayers that reached Louis XIV,
who, on May lo, 1682, before La Salle's report of the
'Margrf, z : 36J. Parkman, "La Salle," pp. 317, jiS.
'Margry, 2 : 314. Parkmao, "La Salle," pp. 310-314.
_ ^^.^tuyjL 111 i^ueDec:
. . . [La Salle] has been bold enouj
telligence of a false discovery and t
turning to the colony to learn whai
him to do, he does not come near
the backwoods, five hundred leagues
of attracting the inhabitants to him
an imaginary kingdom for himself, I
the bankrupts and idlers of this coun
men who brought me news from him
him, and say not a word about retur
furs they have brought as if they wc
that he cannot hold his ground much
Meanwhile the king, the same kin{
before had said in La Salle's commiss
"nothing more at heart" than the ex]
country, writes to the governor of Ca
tainebleau: "I am convinced, as yoi
covery of the Sieur de la Salle is v
that such enterprises ought to be p
future."*
In his extremity, his supplies cut c
to Quebec desertiniy wiVV* *u^ — f'
THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE 103
ity, and in the spring of 1684 is again a lodger in Rue
de laTruanderie, a miserable little street in Paris where,
as I have said before, I have tried to locate the lodging
of the valiant soul who once dwelt upon the mysterious
rock near my boyhood home.
Thence this man of "solitary disposition," whose
life had been joined to savages, and who had for years
had "neither servants, clothes nor fare which did not
savor more of meanness than of ostentation," and who
was of such natural timidity that it took him a week
"to make up his mind to go to an audience" with
Monseigneur de Conti, is summoned to an interview
with the king himself.
La Salle's memorials, which recall by way of intro-
duction his five journeys of upward of five thousand
leagues, in great part on foot, through more than six
hundred leagues of unknown country among savages
and cannibals, and at the cost of one hundred and
fifty thousand francs, and which propose projects that
seem in some of their features quixotic and visionary,
received favorable consideration of the king and his
minister Colbert's son. La Salle's wilderness empire is
restored to him and he is granted four ships in which
to carry soldiers, mechanics, and laborers to establish
a fort and colony at the mouth of the Mississippi,
to open up all the interior of America from the south,
and incidentally to make war on the Spaniards (who
were claiming the gulf for their own), and to seize their
valuable mines.
The quarrellings of this expedition (due in part to
the divided command); the failure to find the mouth of
the Mississippi since, we are told. La Salle had been
unable in 1682 to determine its longitude; the landing
». TT tiv^ov^ UCLctllS C
here, a story whose tragic end w
La Salle by one of his own disaff
March, 1687, on the banks of the T
There is time, as we hasten on, foi
over the body of this "iron man," h
buzzards and wolves" of the wildei
sacrificed all, as Champlain, for Frai
"One of the greatest men of his age,
was nearest to him in all his labors sav(
out question one of the most rem
whose names live in history," writes
"personality is impressed in some respc
than that of any other upon the history
says another historian, Fiske.* "For
vast conceptions; for various know!
adaptation of his genius to untried ci
a sublime magnanimity, that resigned
of Heaven, and yet triumphed over aff
of purpose and unfaltering hope — thi
turer had no superior among his coi
Bancroft.' And further, in the estin
historian of the vallev. "fnr oil *u« -.
THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE 105
contempt of pain and hardship, he has never been sur-
passed."*
Let him who next to Tonty knew him better than
all the other chroniclers say a last word — one which
will justify the time that we have given to following
the fortunes and adversities of this spirit, unbroken to
the last: "He was a tower of adamant, against whose
impregnable front hardship and danger, the rage of
man and of the elements, the southern sun, the north-
em blast, fatigue, famine, disease, delay, disappoint-
ment and deferred hope, emptied their quivers in
vain. . . . Never under the impenetrable mail of
paladin or crusader beat a heart of more intrepid
mettle than within the stoic panoply that armed the
breast of La Salle. To estimate aright the marvels of
his patient fortitude, one must follow on his track
through the vast scene of his interminable joumey-
ings. . . . America owes him an enduring memory;
for in this masculine figure she sees the pioneer who
guided her to her richest heritage."'
France had deserved well of that valley had she
done nothing more than to set that rugged, fearless
figure in the heart of America, a perpetual foil to
effeminacy and submission to softening luxury, to the
arts that seek merely popularity, to drunkenness and
other vices which he combated even in that wilder-
ness, to sycophancy and demagogy — a perpetual ex-
ample of the "vir" and virtue in the noblest sense in
which mankind has defined them.
In the grand amphitheatre in the Sorbonne, I wit-
nessed one day in Paris a celebration of the conquests
'James K. Hosmer, "Short HUtoryof the Mugissippi Valley," p. 140.
■Parkman, "La Salle," p. 43a.
.i«\j CllUUll
severe ideals of manhood that are f
sess the men of that valley to wh
world.
There is a grave for which I wish*
in Rouen, the grave of the mother of
he wrote in 1684: "I hope ... to er
hence with all the pleasure that the
children can feel with so good a mo
always been."^ I wish I could have 1
but since I could not, I tried to let
stead — ^that there are millions who co
as the most "grateful of children" w
France's son was never permitted to 1
La Salle's dream of New France di
his last sight of his empire of Louisian
tury in which he was bom and died 1
out before the stirring of his life's visi
strengthened by appeal of the gallant ar
resulted in the offer by one who has
"Cid of Canada," Le Moyne d'Ibervi
the schemes of La Salle, and it was
that France must act at onrA r^^ t^--'
THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE 107
foundation to Louisiana. Sailing with their two ships
in 1699, they were caught in the "strong, muddy
current of fresh water," which La Salle had unluckily
passed without seeing. They entered this stream
and, after several days of exploration, had verification
of the identity of the river in a letter (or "speaking
bark," as the Indians called it), dated the 20th of April,
1685, which Tonty, years before, when making the
journey down the river in search of La Salle, had left
in the hands of an Indian chief to be delivered to La
Salle, or, as the chief called him, "the man who should
come up the river."
The fortunes which befell those of this colony, trying
to find a suitable site in that land of bushes and cane-
brakes, are not agreeable to follow. For thirteen years
the "paternal providence of Versailles" watched over
them, sending them marriageable women, soldiers,
priests, and nuns, but so little food that famine and
pestilence often came to their miserable stockades.
They were under injunction "to seek out pearl fish-
eries," "to catch bison-calves, tame them and take
their wool," and "to look for mines." What employ-
ment for the founders of an empire I'
One cannot resist the temptation to say again: If
only Louis XIV had had the good sense, unblinded of
pearls and gold and bigotry and some other things, to
let the industrious, skilled Huguenots, flying from
France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes,
< In one of the branchea of that liver at whoM mouth they lettled I mw
a *umnwr or two agc^ one of the men of that valley wadiog in iu water,
(till in tearch of pearla. A pearl worth a thousand dollan had once been
found near by, and so (in the lame hope that animated the mind of King
Louit XIV) man after man in that neighborhood bad abandoned hii fertile
farm to aearch for pearli, only to be reduced, as the poor settlers of early
Louitiana, to live upon the shell-Bsh in which the pearls refuted to grow.
— . .^ '» A A w»^^ V4 V^l tVy CO
to be allowed to settle in Louisiana
privilege of worship, such as is enjoy
answer came from Versailles to the ca
Versailles, where, amid scenes "whic
court could rival," the "greatest of
warriors, statesmen," were gathered ^
in the "Halls of Abundance, Venus, M
from Versailles to the half-starved liti
in exile by the gulf, far from abundant
in dread of Mars, and with no arts of
sound of the wind in the trees and the i
"Have I expelled heretics from Franc
they should set up a republic in Amer
One has reminded us that while Ibc
ing almost futile attempts with the h
port of his government to establish thi
mouth of the Mississippi, Peter the Gre2
to lay the foundations of St. Petersbur
ising a place — a barren, uncultivated is
a frozen swamp in winter and a heap of i
in the midst of pathless forests and
haunted by wolves and bears. Petpr t
THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE 109
that might soon have become the capital of as fruitful
a province as Peter the Great's; and the transforma-
tion would have been made, as in New England, with-
out any assistance from the king except perhaps for
defense.
It is due the memory of Iberville, often slandered
as was La Salle before him, not that the story of his
all but hopeless struggles should be repeated here but
that the object toward which he so valiantly struggled
should be clearly seen. He had read Father Membre's
account of the La Salle voyage of discovery and Joutel's
story of the last expedition. He had even had a con-
versation with La Salle, and had heard his own lips
describe the river; and he had known Tonty of the
Iron Hand, faithful to the last. Iberville had a mind
capable of entertaining the vision, and he had a spirit
capable of following it. He seems to have been for a
time after La Salle's death his only great-minded fol-
lower. He wrote on reaching Rochelle after his first
voyage that " if France does not immediately seize this
part of America, which is the most beautiful, and estab-
lish a colony strong enough to resist any which England
may have here, the English colonies (already consider-
able in Carolina) will so thrive that in less than a hun-
dred years they will be strong enough to seize all
America."'
But the answer from Versailles only hastened the
fulfilment of Iberville's prophecy. It is as a page torn
from a contemporaneous suburban villa prospectus
that speaks of one of those migratory settlements of
Iberville on the shores of the gulf as a "terrestrial
paradise," a "Pomona," or "The Fortunate Island."
'Maifry, L c, IV: 322.
three seedling pear-trees, three seedli
little plum-tree about three feet high
plums on it, a vine some thirty feet
bunches of grapes, some of them wit
and some partly ripe, about forty j
melons and a few pumpkins/'^
Bienville, the brother, also deserv
both in France and America — disn
exonerated, returning later to succeec
Cadillac and to lay the foundations
on the only dry spot he had found on
up the river, there to plant the sec
and melons and pumpkins of the gan
Island, that were to bring forth mil
they have not yet entirely crowded
and the palmetto, and the fleur-de-lis
wild and flowers brilliantly at certain 2
It was some time before this, howeve
nearing the end of his days, vexed witl
of his expensive and unproductive ven
the colony into the hands and enterp
lator, one Antoine Crozat, a French r
purse had been open to Louis for his w
n total ncMTlllritu^n n^ i-Um^ ,.,„^4. /
THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE in
"in the king's pay." Crozat, the king's deputy des[)ot,
finds no better fortune than the king, and soon (1717)
resigns his charter, to be succeeded in his anxieties
and privileges by that famous Scotch adventurer John
Law, who organized the Mississippi Company in order
to enjoy the varied monopohes assembled in its chaner
— monopohes which would make any inhabitant of
that trust-hating valley to-day fume in denouncing.
It was a tobacco trust, a coinage trust, a revenue trust,
a slave-holding trust, a mining trust, a trade trust
wrapped in one, with an unlimited license. It was,
moreover, a conscience trust, a speech trust, a reli^on
trust, a race trust. It was, in short, the ultimate,
sublimated expression of a monopolistic theory made
effective in a charter. Immigration, within these re-
strictions, was not likely to be voluntary and eager, as
was the case in New England, and, since the company
was under the one compulsion of providing a certain
number of colonists and slaves, immigration was forced.
Every conceivable sound economic and philosophical
principle was violated, and yet investors came from
all parts of Europe. "Crowds of crazed speculators
jostled and fought each other" before the offices of the
company in the Rue Quincampoix' from morning till
night to get their names inscribed among the stock-
holders, and, though five hundred thousand foreigners
were attracted to Paris by opportunities for speculation,
scarcely a colonist went willingly to the Eldorado of
the company, whose stock was capitalized in billions
and "whose ingots of gold were displayed in Paris shop-
windows." There were maps of that valley to be found
> A DOW disrepuUble (treet, or lo it Memed at I walked through it one
day in the duik.
The monopolistic venture fai
colonists whom the company entei
millions of pounds had been spent,
and there was little tangible to si*
thousand white settlers, many of
current to-day in the States,
citizens,'^ living in palisaded cal
settlement became a crown color
back to the king, but not to hinr
had been originally taken, for th
Louis XIV's name, kept in "Loui
but a fragment of that vast territor
been his forever. The little outca
on the steps of Versailles again, anc
to "paternalistic nursing,*' because
which it began at last to show sig
was at the cost of a half-century o
more millions of livres to the kin
company, of millions upon millions
bought the worthless stock of the Mi
and of ignominy and shame, that
began to have realization, whil^ /%»
THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE iij
Joliet, Champlain, and La Salle. Pierre Charles le
Sueur had ascended the Mississippi far toward its
source in search of copper and lead. Bernard de la
Harpe and Louis Juchereau, the Sieur de St. Denis,
explored the Red River and penetrated as far as the
Spanish settlement of St. Jean Baptiste on the Rio
Grande. Each might have a volume. The turbid Mis-
souri even (which Marquette and Joliet first saw head-
ing great trees down into the Mississippi) was not passed
by as impervious to the hardihood of undaunted, am-
phibious geographers such as La Harpe and Du Tisne.
Two brothers, Pierre and Paul Mallet, penetrated to
the old Spanish settlement at Santa Fe and may have
been the first of Frenchmen to see the farther bound-
ary of the valley, the Rocky Mountains. Whether
they did or not, it is certain that far to the northwest
two other brothers did reach that mighty range and
"discovered that part of it to which the name Rocky
Mountains properly belongs."
The brothers La Verendrye in 1735, two centuries
after Cartier, were still looking for a way to the western
sea (Mer de I'Ouest). With their father these sons
ventured their lives and gave their fortunes to the ex-
ploration of the northwest out beyond Lake Supe-
rior, out past the ranch where a century and a half
later President Roosevelt wrote the "Winning of the
West," out to or beyond the edge of what is now the
great Yellowstone National Park, anticipating by more
than sixty years the first stages of the famous Lewis
and Clark expedition. The snow covered the peaks of
the Big Horn Mountains, but the party probably
forced a way to the Wind River Range before they re-
luctantly turned back from the foot of the mountains,
ana torest to pass before it c
Verendrye brothers hoped to se
as Cartier, Champlain, Nicolet, ]
others did not find the way to
unappreciated, heroic efforts m:
pense stretched the line of Frei
across the valley from sea to n
pleting, as one historian has rep
as it seems to me rather a cross,
colunm reaching from the gulf t<
its transverse strip from the Big
Cape Breton. Or so it stood for
history, raised by unspeakable su
seen never to be forgotten.
Chevalier de la Verendrye, wl
white men, the snow-capped mo
poverty and neglect," and finally
wreck off the island of Cape Bretoi
east and west line of French pioi
extended in the life of one hardy
And as to the north and south
its foundations and strength incr
THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE 115
planted and Jesuit and Sulpician missions grew. The
Illinois country enjoyed a "boom," as we say in
America, even in those days, and became known for a
time as the Garden of New France; but only for a
time, for it was so easy to earn a livelihood there
that it was not long before the habitants reverted, un-
der temptation, to the preagricultural, hunting state
after giving a moment's prophecy of the stirring life
that was some day to make it the garden of the new
world, the busiest spot in the busy world.
There are glimpses here and there of gayety and
halcyon days that gjve brightness to the story so full
of tragedy. There was in the very heart of the valley
(near the site of St. Louis> where a great world's fair was
held a few years ago). Fort Chartres, mentioned above,
"the centre of life and fashion in the West" as well as
"a bulwark against Spain and a barrier to England."*
But in time the Indians, stirred by the English rivalry,
swarmed as well as mosquitoes about the place, and
there were battles, the echoes of which are still heard,
we are told, in the regions south of St. Louis even in
Our days. A young French ofiScer, the Chevalier
d'Artaguette, captured by the Chickasaws, was burned
at the stake. He and his kin were loved by all the
French and the song they used to sing of him is kept
in a negro melody whose "oft-repeated chorus" ran:
"In the days of D'Artaguette,
He I Hoi He I
It was the good old time.
The worid was led straight with a switch,
Hel Hoi He I
■ See Edward G. Maion, "Old Fort Ouitm," Ld hii "Chapter* froni II-
lifioi* Hutory," 1901.
\^anada, the Marquis de la Ga
home government in France n
colony of Illinois to perish — not
^'else Canada and Louisiana w(
urging, moreover, the value for
buffaloes, which roam the prairie
titudes, the readiness of the eart
the availability of the buffalo a
''If caught and attached to a pi
emor, who spoke truthfully but
of this wild animal, "it would move
to that of the domestic ox." I d
pealing this harnessing of the orig
the prairie to the uses of agricultu
of importance now. The buffalo
Even the ox and the Norman h
there, have been largely supplante(
force, electricity, which Franklin
the other side of the Alleghany M
time that this suggestion was beii
ister of Louis XV. It is known
king took thought of the little 111
THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE 117
distressed his Majesty, engaged in "throwing dice with
piles of Louis d'or before him" and princes about him.
This was in the early fifties, and the fort was hardly
transformed before the rifles of George Washington's
men were heard from the eastern barriers disputing
the claim of the French to the Ohio country. Ju-
monvtUe, who was slain among the rocks of the Laurel
Mountains, in the Alleghanies (killed in the opening
skirmish of the final struggle), had a young brother,
Neyon de Villiers, a captain in Chevalier de Macarty's
garrison at Fort Chartres; and eastward he hastened,
up the Ohio, to avenge his brother's death. "M. de
Wachenston" (as the name appears in French des-
patches) was driven back, and so the "Old French
War" in America began.
It was from this mid-continent fortress and its fer-
tile environs that help in arms and rations went to the
support of that final struggle along the mountains and
lakes, even as far as La Salle's old Fort Niagara, where
the valiant Aubry, at the head of his Illinois expedition,
fell covered with wounds and many of his men were
killed or taken prisoners. That was about all that
one in the interior of the valley heard of the battles of
the Seven Years' War out upon its edges.
What gives peculiar interest in this fortress to us
to-day is that it was for a little time the only place in
North America where the flag of the French was flying.
All New France had been ceded by the treaty of Paris
in 1763, but the little garrison of forty men still held
Fort Chartres. Pontiac and other friendly Indians
intercepted all approaching English forces till, in 1765
(two years after the treaty of Paris and the cession
of Canada and all the valley east of the Mississippi),
the fort and to put the red cross
of the fleur-de-lis. And so it
that the mighty struggle ended
Kfe of the great empire of Frar
actually went out.
The river, seemingly sentient,
have said, soon swept away th<
outside the fort; and when the 1
look upon this as their permanen
northwest — this fort, which Capt
ported to be the best-built fort i
hostile river rose one night, and
flood" tore away a bastion and a p
then moved its channel away, anc
inland.
The magazine still stands, or d
when I visited the site and found
the trees, bushes, and weeds — all t
the old French domain — and no
at the foot of a hill, lies, as I h:
of Prairie du Rocher, "a little j
transplanted to the Missiscinr.;'* .
THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE 119
whose story, as Parlunan says, in a sense demeaning
his own great contribution, "would have been a his-
tory, if faults of constitution and the bigotry and folly
of rulers had not dwarfed it to an episode." But if it
was an episode to the New Englander, or even to
Frenchmen at the distance in time at which I write,
it rises to the importance of history out in that region
of America, where a century of unexampled foitttude
needs rather an epic poet than a historian to give it
its place in the world's consciousness.
Indeed, historians of the United States to-day, as
well as statesmen of that rime, are in substantial
agreement in this: That the presence of the French on
all the colonial borders compelled a confederation of
the varying interests of the several English colonies,
kept them penned in between the mountains and the
sea until there had been developed some degree of
solidarity, some ability to act together; and then by
the sudden, if compulsory, withdrawal of the pressure
not only allowed their expansion but relieved them of
all need of help from England and so of dependence
upon her.
"We have caught them at last," said Louis XV's
minister, Choiseul, speaking of the treaty of Paris
in 1763.' Burke* prophesied that the removal of
France from North America would precipitate, as it
did, the division of the British Empire. And Richard
Henry Greene, the great English historian, dates the
foundation of the great independent republic of the
west (the United States) from the triumph of Wolfe
on the Heights of Abraham.
itM," 4 : 460.
u Two Great Men."
*wi Liiv. aLivn^c ui uciijamin rrankln
would probably have been made.
France, then, having borne the
with nature and the natives in that
vealed the riches of that valley to
consecrated its entire length and bre
and sacrifice, having possessed that
to the very eve of the birth of the
occupies it, and having helped by s
struggling colonies to their independe
through her monarchs or ministers ch
the new-world pioneers, who gave i
spirit and stuff of Frenchmen) a la
share of credit for the establishmen
which has its most vigorous life in tl
New France has passed and New
in their stead the new republic, n
nations under heaven, ties their lost
power which is immensely greater
the two could have been, greater th
been in the hands of either alone.
There was for a little time a drea
of New Kranrp nut K*»irrkn/4 «-U*» TV^!«.
THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE 121
upon, was abandoned to Spain, or rather thrust upon
Spain, already claiming it. France wanted to give it
to England in order that Florida might be saved to
Spain, her ally, but England did not hesitate as she did
in making choice between the eastern half of the valley
and Guadeloupe. She decUned. So with an apparent
magnanimity, which is greatly to be discounted when
we come to know how worthless even the people of
the United States, years later, considered this trans-
Mississippi country, France, "secretly tired of her
colony," finally induced Spain to accept it. The
Spanish monarch, as if making the best of a bad bar-
gain, took it with many excuses for his seemingly poor
judgment.
But though Louis's minister, Chotseul, chuckled out-
wardly over the embarrassment to England of his
compulsory cession of Canada, New France, Illinois,
and Louisiana (instead of Guadeloupe) and made a
show of magnanimity in thrusting the other half
of the Mississippi upon Spain, and though Turgot's
simile between colonies and ripe fruit was often re-
peated for justification and consolation, the loss of
these possessions was undoubtedly keenly felt and the
dream of their recovery cherished; at any rate, the re-
covery of that part which lay beyond the Mississippi.
But that possession had become more precious to
the sovereign of Spain, who refused the proffers that
France was able to make in the next thirty years.
The dream of repossession became fonder to the
French republic. Talleyrand, who had spent a year
in travel in the United States, urged the acquisition not
merely for France's own sake but to curb the ambitions
of the Americans, "whose conduct ever since the mo-
122 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
ment of their independence Is enough to prove this
truth: the Americans are devoured by pride, ambition^
and cupidity."
"There are," he said, "no other means of putting
an end to the ambition of the Americans than that of
shutting them up within the limits which nature seems
to have traced fi ipain is not in a con-
dition ro do this e. She cannot, there-
fore, hasten too ;age the aid of a pre-
ponderating powi it a small part of her
immense domains eserve the rest."
"Let the cour ede these districts to
France and from the power of America
is bounded by th it may suit the inter-
ests and the tranquillity oi rrance and Spain to assign
her. The French Repubhc . . . will be a wall of brass
forever impenetrable to the combined efforts of En-
gland and America."'
If in Napoleon's mind the dream was as sinister, as
regards the United States, it was not so for long. It
contemplated at first the occupation of Santo Domin-
go, the quelling of the insurrection there, then the seiz-
ure of Louisiana, already promised to France by Spain,
then the acquisition of Florida, the conversion of the
Gulf of Mexico into a French lake, and ultimately the
extension of the province of Louisiana to the Alle-
ghanies and, perhaps, even to the old borders of New
France along the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence.
But plague and slaughter met his armies in Santo Do-
mingo in the first step toward the realization of his vast
design, and the vision, in the shifting light of events
in Europe and on the shores of America as well, soon
'Quoted iQ Henry Adams's "Hislory of the United States," I : 357.
THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE 123
assumed other shape and color and at last disappeared
entirely, supplanted by the vision of a strengthened
American republic that would come to be a rival of
England. This was what came (in his own language)
instead of his dream of a New France beyond the
Mississippi, beyond the American republic:
" I know the full value of Louisiana, and I have been
desirous of repairing the fault of the French negotiator
who abandoned it in 1763. A few lines of a treaty have
restored it to me, and I have scarcely recovered it
when I must expect to lose it. But if it escapes from
me, it shall one day cost dearer to those who oblige
me to strip myself of it than to those to whom I wish
to deliver it. The English have successfully taken
from France, Canada, Cape Breton, Newfoundland,
Nova Scotia, and the richest portions of Asia. They
are engaged in exciting troubles in St. Domingo.
They shall not have the Mississippi which they covet.
Louisiana is nothing in comparison with their conquests
in all parts of the globe, and yet the jealousy they feel
at the restoration of this colony to the sovereignty of
France acquaints me with their wish to take posses-
sion of it, and it is thus that they will begin the war.
... I think of ceding it to the United States. I can
scarcely say that I cede it to them, for it is not yet in
our possession. If, however, I leave the least time to
our enemies, I shall only transmit an empty title to
those republicans whose friendship I seek. They only
ask of me one town in Louisiana, but I already consider
the colony as entirely lost, and it appears to me that
in the hands of this growing power, it will be more
useful to the policy and even to the commerce of
France than if I should attempt to keep it." '
' Marboii, "Hiitorj' of LouiituM," pp. 163-364.
1
IE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
Jnited States Commissioner came one day to
purchase New Orleans, and he went back to
with a deed to more than 800,000 square
the region which La Salle had claimed for
[V by virtue of the commission which he carried
■som from the Rue de la Truanderie more than
y before:
First Consul of the French Republic, desiring
:o the United States a strong proof of friend-
h hereby cede to the said United States, in the
the French Republic, forever and in full sov-
. the said territory, with all its rights and
lances, as fully and in the same manner as
ght have been acquired by the French Re-
Iream faded into something undefined but
relieving Napoleon and France of immediate
and promising more to humanity, we must
rian a colony administered at that distance
THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE
I2S
become the worst of her enemies. It was Napoleon,
whatever his motive, Napoleon in the name of the
French people, who gave the United States the possi-
bility of becoming a world-power.
CHAPTER VII
E PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS
s remind ourselves again, before the hordes of
jntiersmen and settlers come over the moun-
ins and up the lakes and down the rivers,
Tiost of the tangible memories of the inter-
, primeval western wilderness, that France
t from the unknown.
e drawn round the Louvre with the radius of
netres, enclosed the little patch of eanh from
:re evoked these millions of acres of untouched
id millions of acres of virgin plain and prairie,
ind watered by a hundred thousand streams.
THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS 127
toward the unknown; within that circle the priest
Olier, of St. Germain^ies-Pres, had his vision that led
to the founding of Montreal, whose consecration was
celebrated also within that same circumference at the
Cathedral of Notre Dame; within that circle La Salle
lodged in Rue de la Truanderie, awaiting his fateful
commission that should gjve him leave to make real
his dream of a wilderness empire; not a stone's throw
away from the Rue de la Truanderie ran the street
having its beginning or end in Rue aux Ours, Rue Quin-
campoix, in which the thousands jostled and fought
from morning till night for the purchase of stock in
that same wilderness empire; and it was finally within
that same circle that the wilderness dream, seen for a
moment again by Napoleon, grew into the vision of a
republic — a republic that might be found, as Napoleon
said, "too powerful for Europe in two or three cen-
turies," but in whose bosom dissensions, as he pro-
phesied, could be looked for in the future. A wilder-
ness, with a radius of nearly a thousand kilometres,
was evoked from the envisioning, praying, adventur-
ing, and enduring of a few Frenchmen, led by fewer
Frenchmen, who stood sooner or later all within the
narrow circle that sweeps around the Sorbonne, but
four kilometres in diameter.
I walked, in the afternoon of the last day of the
old year 1910, entirely around the old city of Paris
by way of its fortifications, in a circle three kilometres
longer of radius, within a few hours encompassing a
ground, rich in what it yields to-day in fruits of art,
literature, and science — of indefatigable, intellectual
industry and imagination — but richer than its inhabi-
tants know in what has grown upon the billion acres
128 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
which it lias lifted out of the ocean,' and given as a
soil where civilization could gather its forces from all
peoples and begin afresh on the problems of the in-
dividual and society.
It is a new view of Paris, I know. No historian of
the United States ^"- -- ^ I am aware, presented
it. Yet I think ii arted vision which en-
abled me> looliing Id fortifications, to see
Pans not merely of art and of a great
modern language e, as those who live
there see her, nor if gayety and frivolity,
as so many of my nen see her, but as the
parent of fruitful s a patron of pioneers,
as the divinity of s the godmother of a
frontier democracy.
It is to be remembered, too, let me say again, that,
while England held control of one half of the Missis-
sippi Valley for twenty years after 1763, and Spain of
the other half for twenty more, the occupation was
hardly more than nominal. Indeed, the English king,
George III, in 1763 forbade colonization— as Louis
XIV at one time had wished to prevent it — beyond the
Alleghany Mountains without his special permission,
and, moreover, it was hardly more than ten years after
the titular transfer to England that the colonists de-
clared themselves independent. As for the Spanish
sovereign, delaying five years in sending a representa-
tive to take over the government of his unprofitable
half of the wilderness, he had no need to make a decree
forbidding settlement. There were no eager settlers.
What virtually happened, therefore, was that the
' For it will be remembered that to geographers before Cartier this Mis-
sissippi Valley was but a sea. eveo as ages before it actually was.
THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS 129
pioneers of France gave the valley not to England, not
to Spain, not even to the American-English colonists,
but to the pioneers of the young republic, who, whatever
their origin, were without European nationality.
It may be said with approximate accuracy that, while
the British flag supplanted the French for a little on a
few scattered forts on the east side of the Mississippi
and the Spanish flag floated for a little while on the
other side of the river, the heart of America really
knew in turn, first, only the old Americans, the In-
dians; second, the French pioneers; and third, the new
Americans.
The valley heard, as I have said, hardly a sound of
the Seven Years' War, the "Old French War" as Park-
man called it. Only on its border was there the slight-
est bloodshed. All it knew was that the fleur-de-lis
flags no longer waved along its rivers and that after a
few years men came with axes and ploughs through the
passes in the mountains carrying an emblem that had
never grown in European fields — a new flag among
national banners. They were bearing, to be sure, a
constitution and institutions strange to France, but
only less strange to England, and perhaps no less
strange to other nations of Europe.
I emphasize this because our great debt to English
antecedents has obscured the fact that the great phys-
ical heritage between the mountains, consecrated of
Gallic spirit, came, in effect, directly from the hands
that won its first title, the French, into the hands of
American settlers, at the moment when a "separate
and individual people" were "springing into national
Ufe."
This territory was distinct from that of the British
I30 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
colonies up to the very time of the American Revolu-
tion. And when the Revolution was over and inde-
pendence was won, by the aid of France let it be re-
membered, the only settlements within the valley
were three little clusters of French gathered about the
forts once Frenr*- -' — ^— - few years nominally
English, and then J thousand inhabitants
at Detroit and 1 at Vincennes, on the
Wabash, and m tl 5 the Mississippi above
the Ohio.
How little the settlements was dis-
turbed is inrimat ccurred in one of the
Illinois villages — t Chartres. The ven-
erable and belov r, Louis St, Ange de
Belle Rive, had upon the hrst formal surrender as-
cended the Mississippi River and crossed to the Span-
ish territory, where the foundations of the city of St.
Louis were being laid, but the British officer in com-
mand at Fort Chartres dying suddenly, and there being
no one competent to succeed him, St. Ange returned
to his old post, restored order, and remained there
until another British officer could reach the fort. The
habitants were accustomed "to obey, without ques-
tion, the orders of their superiors. . . . (They) yielded
a passive obedience to the new rulers. . ■ . They re-
mained the owners, the tillers of the soil."' And one
of the last acts of the Continental Congress and the
first of the new Congress, under the Constitution, was
to provide for an enumeration of these French settlers
and for the allotment to them of lands in this valley
where they had been the sole owners.
Many of the French habitants were not of pure
•Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," l ; 38, Alleghany edition.
THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS 131
blood. The French seldom took women with them
into the wilderness. They were traders, trappers, and
soldiers. They married Indian wives, untrammelled,
as President Roosevelt says, "by the queer pride
which makes a man of English stock unwilling to make
a red-skinned woman his wife, though anxious enough
to make her his concubine."^
They were under ordinary circumstances good-
humored, kindly men, "always polite"' — in "agreeable
contrast" to most frontiersmen — religious, yet fond of
meriymaking, of music and dancing; and while, as
time went on, they came to borrow traits of their red
neighbors and even to forget the years and months
(reckoning time, as the Indians did, from the flood of
the river or the ripening of strawberries), still they
kept many valuable and amiable qualities, to be merged
eventually in the new life that soon swept over their
beautiful little villages. Of the coming of a strange,
new, strenuous life, a stray English or American fur
trader gave them occasional presentment, as it were,
the spray of the swelling, restless sea of human spirits,
beating against the mountain barriers and flung far
inland.
In the early part of the eighteenth century an
English governor of the colony of Virginia, Alexander
Spotswood, had led a band of horsemen known after-
ward as his "Knights of the Golden Horseshoe," with
great hilarity, "stimulated by abundance of wine,
champagne, rum," and other liquors, over the Blue
Ridge Mountains, a part of the Alleghany Range, to
the Shenandoah. He had talked menacingly of the
' Roosevelt, "Wianing of the West," I : 41.
' "flrtoiiing of the West," t : 4S.
132 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
French who held the valley beyond, had encouraged
the extension of English settlements to break the line
of French possessions, and had formed a short-lived
Virginia-Indian company to protect the frontier against
French and Indian incursions. This expedition was a
visible challt-nge. ^^'■-'- ' -- ry company he buried
a record of his " journey in one of the
bottles emptied e en "went back to tide-
water. That wa; is adventure; little or
nothing came of 1 except the extension of
the Virginia fron : Ridge Mountains.
Only tr^iders ai itured farther or even
so far during the , "our decades, and they
were a "set of 3 etches," or so a later
governor characterized them, though Parkman men-
tions some exceptions, and I wish to believe there
were more, since one of them, I find, carried my own
name far into that country on his trading and hunting
expeditions among and with the Indians.
Searching, a few years ago, the files of a paper pub-
lished early in the nineteenth century on the edge of
this wilderness, which was already calling itself the
Western World — a paper, one of the first of the myriad
white leaves into which the falling forests have been
converted and scattered thick enough to cover every
square foot of the valley — I happened upon this rec-
ord, surprised as if a bit of the transmontane sea
spray had touched my own face on the Mississippi;
"That delightful country" (Kentucky), it ran, "from
time immemorial had been the resort of wild beasts and
of men only less savage, when in the year 1767 it was
visited by John Finley and a few wandering white men
from the British colony of North Carolina, allured by
\
THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS 133
the love of hunting and the desire of barter with the
Indians. The distance of this country from populous
parts of the colonies, almost continuous wars, and the
claims of the French had prevented all attempts at ex-
ploration."
I seize upon this partly because, having succeeded
to the name of this hunter and trader, who entered the
valley just as St. Ange was yielding Fort Chartres to
the English and crossing the Mississippi, I am able to
show that my own ancestral sympathies while dwelling
on the frontiers were not with the French. But I
quote it chiefly because he was a typical forertmner,
a Brst frontiersman.
Like the coureur de bois Nicolas Perrot, of exactly
a century before, he was only the dawn of the light —
the light of another day, which was beginning to appear
in the valley. For it was he who led Daniel Boone to
the first exploring and settling of that wilderness south
of the Ohio, which, to quote further from the paper
called the WesUrn World,'' had a soil "more fat and
fertile than Egypt" — and was the place where "Pan,
if he ever existed, held dominion unmolested of Ceres
or Lucinia."
Such was the almost soundless beginning of what
soon developed into a mighty "processional," its rum-
blings of wagons and shoutings of drivers on land and
blowing of conches on the rivers increasing, accom-
panied by the sound of rushing waters, the cry of
frightened birds, and the thunders of crashing trees.
First came this silent hunter and fur trader, almost
as stealthy as the Indian in his movements; then the
> Wisitn World, pubUthed at Fraokfort, Ky., 1806-8, by John Wood and
Joteph M. Street.
134 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
pale, gaunt, slow-moving, half hunter, half farmer,
too indolent to disturb the wilderness from which he
got a me:igre living, planting his meagre crops among
the girdled trees of withered foliage, which he did not
take the trouble to cut down; then the backwoodsman,
sallow as his imme'l'^f" nrorlpcp^sor from the shade of
the forest, who v fiade a little clearing,
built a "shack," t lie into the grass that
had grown for eel :hed, and let his pigs
feed on the acorni re robust agriculturist
who aggressively the shadows of the
forest, phinted thi nth seeds of a magic
learned in the val and Asia, put up the
fences of individu le, and built his log
cabin, the wilderness castle, tne birthplace of the new
American; then the speculator and promoter (the
hunter and explorer of the urban occupation); and
finally in their wake the builders of mills and factories
and cities — ^drah, smoky, vainglorious, ill -smelling,
bad-architectured centres of economic activity, fringed
with unoccupied, unimproved, naked areas, plotted
and held for increment, earned only by risk and pri-
vation.
This processional, "this gradual and continuous
progress of the European race toward the Rocky
Mountains," says the vivid pen of De Tocqueville,
"has the solemnity of a providential event. It is like
a deluge of men, rising unabatedly and driven daily
onward by the hand of God."^
The story of this anabasis has been told in hundreds
and thousands of fragments — the anabasis that has
had no katabasis — the literal going up of a people, as
' "Democracy in America," cd. Oilman, l : 512.
THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS 135
we shall see, from primitive husbandry and handicraft
and a neighborly individualism, to another level, of
machine labor, of more comfortable living, and of
socialized aspiration.
De Quincey has gathered into an immortal story the
dramatic details of an exodus that had its beginning
and end just at the time when these half huntsmen,
half traders were creeping down from the farther
ridges of the Alleghanies into the wilderness, where the
little French settlements were clinging like clusters of
ripened grapes to a great vine — the story of the flight
of the Kalmuck Tartars from the banks of the Volga,
across the steppes of Europe and the deserts of Asia
to the frontiers of China — the story of the journey of
over a half million semi-barbarians, half of whom per-
ished by the way from cold or heat, from starvation or
thirst, or from the sabres and cannon of the savage
hosts pursuing them by day and night through the
endless stretches — the story of the translation of these
nomad herdsmen on the steppes of Russia through "in-
finite misery" into stable agriculturists beneath the
great wall of China.
If the myriad details of this new-world migration
could be summarized with like genius, we should have
a drama to put beside the exodus of Israel from Egypt
and their conquest of Canaan — a drama, less pictur-
esque and highly colored than that of the flight of the
Tartars — their Oriental costumes, their fierce horses,
their camels and tents, showing, unhidden of tree
against the snowy or sandy desert — but infinitely more
consequenrial in the history of the human race.
The Indians, hostile to this horde that built cabins
upon their hunting-grounds and devoured their forests,
136 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
were to the wilderness migrants, driven, not of the
hand of man but, as De Tocqueville says, "of the hand
of God" made manifest in some human instinct, some
desire of fteedom, some hatred of convention, some
hope of power or possession, what the Kirghese and
Bashkirs and Rus'* ~~ 'hose Asiatic migrants,
pursuing them da> e fiends for thousands
of miles. And th rings of the American
migrants from hi st, from the freezing
cold and the bla g, wilting heat, from
the fevers of rhe ids, from the ravages
of locust and gras inch-bug and drought,
from isolation froi idships, from want of
gentle nursing — ev y's improvident trav-
ellers did not endure more, nor the children of Israel,
to whose thirst the smitten rock yielded water, to whose
hunger the heavens ministered with manna and the
earth with quail, whose pursuing enemies were drowned
in the sea that closed over their pathway, and whose
confronting enemies in the land they entered to possess
were overcome by the aid of unseen armies that were
heard marching in the tops of the mulberry-trees, or
were seen by friendly vision assembling their chariots
in the skies above.
Here across the Mississippi Valley is an exodus ac-
complished not of a single night, as these two of which
I have just spoken, but extended through a hundred
years of home leavings and love privations. Here is
an anabasis of a century of privations, titanic labors,
frontier battles, endured countless times, till these
migrants of Europe and of the new-worid seaboard,
became, as children of the wilderness, a new people,
with qualities so distinctive as to lead the highest
THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS 137
authority* on the history of that valley to characterize
the west not as a geographic division of the United
States, but as a"formof society" with its own peculiar
flowering, developed, not as Farkman's magnificent
fleur-de-lis,* by cross-fertilization, nor by grafting, but
simply by the planting or sowing of Old World seeds
on new and free land, where the mountains kept off
the pollen of alien spirit, where the puritanical winds
of the New England coast were somewhat tempered
by the warmer winds from the south, where the waters
had some iron in them, but, most of all, where the soil
was practically as free as when it came from the hands
of the glaciers and the streams.
It is this distinctiveness of development, due to the
mountains' challenge to every man's spirit as he passed,
to the isolation which compelled him to work out his
own salvation, and to the constant struggle, largely
single-handed, with frontier forces — as well as the
uniqueness of background — that gave the west a char-
acter which identifies it to discerning minds quite as
much as its geographic boundaries. It is this fact
which makes the French pioneering preface to a civili-
zation different from anything that has developed else-
where in the United States, and not only different in
the past but now the dominant force in American
education, politics, and industry.
What that civilization would have been without the
adventurous French preface we can but vainly surmise.
What It is with that background, that preface, is in-
deed the "foremost chapter in the files of time." As
> Frederick J. Taiatr, "The Significance of the Miitituppi Valley in
Aro«riua Hiatory," in Proceedingt of the MueiHippi Valley ICitorical Ai-
iociation (1909-10), 3 : 159-184.
■ See Epilogue.
^^^E!^^^^B
138 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA H
Ambassador James Bryce has said: "What Europe is H
to Asia, what England is to the rest of Europe, what H
America is to England, that the western States are H
to the Atlantic States."' The French may dispute H
the implied claim of the second of these comparisons, ^M
but even th(.\- will have a satisfaction in admitting that ^|
their particular pa
d States is to the rest, ■
which was not tou
priests and explorers, ^M
what "Eurripf is t
here is my particular ^M
justification for a;
inations of the people H
of France to occu
lat to which the pref- H
ace has given then
H
Meanwhile, tha'
jeralded, as we have H
seen, just before
n, by huntsmen and ^|
traders, meagre by reason of Indian hostility and the
need of soldiers on the Atlantic side of the mountains
till independence had been won, became appreciable
at the end of the century and grew to an inundating
stream after the War of 1812 had made the Mississippi
secure to the new republic beyond all question.
"Old America," said an observing English traveller
in 1817, "seems to be breaking up and moving west-
ward. We are seldom out of sight, as we travel on this
grand track (the national turnpike through Pennsyl-
vania) towards the Ohio, of family groups behind and
before us. ... A small waggon so light that you
might almost carry it, yet strong enough to bear a
good load of bedding and utensils and provisions and
a swarm of young citizens, and to sustain marvellous
shocks in its passage over these rocky heights with
two small horses and sometimes a cow or two, comprises
their all; excepting a little store of hard earned cash
' "American Commonwcallh," 1913 cd., 2 : 692.
THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS 139
for the land-office of the district; where they may ob-
tain a title for as many acres as they possess half
dollars, being one-fourth of the purchase money. The
waggon has a tilt, or cover, made of a sheet, or perhaps
a blanket. The family are seen before, behind, or
within the vehicle, according to the road or the weather,
or perhaps the spirits of the party. ... A cart and
single horse, frequently affords the means of transfer,
sometimes a horse and pack saddle. Often the back
of the poor pilgrim bears all his effects, and his wife
follows, bare footed, bending under the hopes of the
family."' This is a detail of the exodus through the
most northern mountain pass.
Farther south the procession moved in heavy wagons
drawn by four or six horses. "Family groups, crowding
the roads and fords, marching toward the sunset," at
right angles to the courses of the migratoiy birds, not
mindful as they of seasons, "were typical of the over-
land migration" across Tennessee and Kentucky. The
poorer classes travelled on foot, as at the north, but
drew after them carts with all their household effects.'
Still farther south "the same type of occupation was
to be seen; the poorer classes of southern emigrants
cut out their clearings along the rivers that flowed to
the gulf and to the lower Mississippi,"' and later still
farther west Into what is now Texas.
The squatters whom I saw in my walk around the
city of Paris, inhabiting what was the military zone
with their portable houses, or in their dilapidated
shacks, had better shelter than they who first invaded
'Morria Birkbeck, "Note* on a Tour in America, 1817," pp. 34, 35.
' F. J. Turner, "Rise of the New Weat," p. 80.
' F. J. Turner, "Riac of the New West," p. 90,
140 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
the zone beyond the mountain walls that were the
natural western fortifications of the Atlantic colonies.
But though many of those western wilderness immi-
grants were "poor pilgrims" and for a time squatters
(as the immediately extramural population of Paris),
they were recruit*"' *''■"'" '■^■° nurdiest stock on the
Atlantic side of t s. Some went, to be
sure, who had fai place, but were ready
to make new ha: nted greater freedom
than the more hi and conventionalized
life within the for, d permit; some longed
for adventure; soi irtune or competency
perhaps impossibl ettlements; some had
only the inherited 'the nomad savage in
them, and kept ever moving on, making their nameless
graves out in the gloom of the forest or upon the silent
plains.
It was indeed a motley procession, the by-product
of the more or less conservative, sometimes politically
or religiously intolerant, aristocratic tide-water settle-
ments. Yet do not make the mistake of thinking
that it was slag or refuse humanity, such as camps in
the narrow zone around the gates of Paris. It is rather
like an industrial by-product that has needed some
slight change or adaptation to make it more valuable
to society than the original product upon which the
manufacturers had kept their attention fixed — or, at
any rate, to make the margin of profit in the whole
industry greater. Out of once discarded, seemingly
valueless matter have come our coal-tar products: sac-
charine many times sweeter than sugar, colors unknown
to the old dyers, perfumes as fragrant as those dis-
tilled from flowers, medicines potent to allay fevers.
THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS 141
Up in the woods of Canada last summer I found a
chemist trying to do with the wood waste what Remsen
and Perkin and others have done with coal waste, and
I cannot resist the suggestion of my metaphor that
there in the forest valleys beyond the AUeghanies the
elements and conditions were found to convert this
Atlantic by-product, unpromising outwajdly, into the
substance of a new and predous civilization.
This overmountain procession came chiefly up the
watercourses of the south and middle States. Prior
to 1830 the mass of pioneer colonists in most of the
Mississippi Valley had been contributed by the up-
country of the south. The dominant strain in those
earlier comers, as President Roosevelt reminds us,
was Scotch-Irish, a "race doubly-twisted in the mak-
ing, flung from island to island and toughened by
exile" — a race of frontiersmen than whom a "better
never appeared" — a race which was as "steel welded
into the iron of an axe." They form the kernel of the
"distinctively and intensely American stock who were
the pioneers of the axe and the rifle, succeeding the
French pioneers of the sword and the bateaux."
What I have just said of them, these Scotch-Irish,
is in quotation, for as I have already intimated, my own
ancestry is of that double-twisting; and since the time
when my Brst American ancestor settled as the first
permanent minister beyond the mountains, following
the paths of the French priests in their missions and
became a member of a presbytery extending from the
mountains to the setting sun, until my last collateral
ancestor living among the Indians helped survey the
range lines of new States and Anally marked the
boundaries of the last farms in the passes of the Rockies,
142 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
that ancestry has followed the frontier westward from
where Celoron planted the emblems of French posses-
sion along the Ohio to where Chevalier la Verendrye
looked upon the snowy and impassable peaks of the
Rockies.
The immigrants •■" * ■ — "*" that stock had, many
of them, :it once < e new land found the
foot-hills of mouni i Pennsylvania. Here
they settled, gradi their way southward
in the troughs of streams and making
finally a ''broad h i to south, a shield of
sinewy men thrusi :he people of the sea-
board and the red i wilderness," the same
men who declared t ndependence in North
Carolina before any others, even before the men of
Massachusetts. With this stock there went over the
mountain men of other origins, of course, English,
French Huguenots, Germans, Hollanders, Swedes; but
the Scotch-Irish were the core of the new life, which in
"iron surroundings" became strongly homogeneous —
"yet different from the rest of the world^even the
world of America, and infinitely more the world of
Europe."
In the north the great rivers lay across the tedious
paths that ran with the lines of latitude. And so it
was partly for physiographic reasons that the first far-
stretching expansions of the New England settlements
were not toward this great western wilderness but
northward along the narrower valleys. It was not until
the migration had filled the meagre limits and capac-
ities of these smaller valleys and had carried school-
houses and churches and town halls well up granite
hillsides, that the western exodus came, to leave those
THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS 143
hillside homes and institutional shelters as shells found
far from a receding sea, empty or habited by a new
species of immigrant.' Farms were abandoned for
the fertile fields of the far west, from which wheat can
be imported for less than the cost of raising it on the
sterile hills and in the short-summered valleys. New
England had once claimed a fraction of the great west,
as, indeed, had most of the other seaboard colonies.
But these claiips were surrendered to the general
government, as we shall see later, "for the common
good," and so her migrants had none other than that
instinct which follows lines of latitude to keep them
practically within the zone of her relinquished claims.
Over into New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania
her children overflowed till a map of these States in
1820, colored to show the origin and character of their
various communities, made practically all of western
New York, a part of New Jersey and the northern third
of Pennsylvania, an expanded New England. Mean-
while the hardiest joined the transmontane migration,
and in the decade after the opening of the Erie Canal
(1830-40) the whole northern edge of the valley takes
color of New England conquest.
So the first peopling was a mingling of the children
of the first stragglers with a raw savage continent;
men already schooled in adversity, already acquainted
with some of the frontier problems — civilization's most
highly individualized, least socialized material, the
wheat of the new world's first winnowing.
What is particularly to be observed is that men of
' In one of those tar noTthern valleyi which I know bett there wm «
school, before the ciodua, of lome aeventy pupili, gathered from the fann-
er*' families of the neighborhood. Now there are not a half-dazco pupil*,
and they are carried to a neighboring diitrict.
144 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
the north and the south, as far apart as Carolina and
Massachusetts, came together beyond the mountains
in the united building of commonwealths; for over
those mountains the rivers all ran toward the Missis-
sippi, which tied the interests of all together.
There was no nnrth-and-smirh line then. The men
of the valley were , "men of the western
world"; not yet i nationalists, that is,
as men of the U "Men of the western
waters" they also Ives, for they shunned
the uplands and streams by which or
along which they Co the wilderness and
from which they of the axe they were,
too, in that first i rer venturing far from
the trees that gave them both roof and fuel. It was
later, as we have seen, that the men of the plough
came where the men of the axe had cleared the way.
It Is interesting to notice that when these builders
of new States came to devise symbols for their official
seals, many of them took the plough, that implement
which we know was carried in the first Aryan migra-
tion into the plains of Europe, but some of them put a
rising sun on the horizon of their shields — the sign of
the consciousness of a new day.
The foundation, then, of the new societies was laid
in what might be called a concrete of character and
lineage — ^heterogeneous, but all of the neo-American
period and not of the paleo-European. Here came the
ancestors of Abraham Lincoln, among the axemen from
the South, and here the ancestors of General Grant,
among the builders of towns, from New England, both
born in cabins. And these instances are but sug-
gestive of the conglomerate that was to be as practi-
THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS 145
cable for building purposes (the co-efficient of spirit
being once determined) as any homogeneous, age-old
rock used in the structure of nations. It became
"homogeneous" not as bricks or stones built into a
wall by mortar or cement but as concrete, eternal as
the hills, needing not to be chiselled and split but
only to be moulded and "set" at just the right moment.
If this gjves any suggestion of want of permanence, of
liability of cracking, then the figure is not fortunate.
I mean only to suggest, by still another metaphor, that
out of the myriad rugged individualities, idiosyn-
crasies, and independences a new rock has been formed.
How distinctly western this first migration was you
may know from the fact that there was frequent talk
of secession from the Union by the seaboard common-
wealths in the early post-revolutionary days. There
were even, as we have seen, hopes and fears that a
Franco-American republic might grow out of that
solidarity and independent spirit that were ready to
forsake the government on the eastern side of the
mountains, which seemed to be heedless of western
needs. This tells us, who are conscious of the national
spirit which is now stronger, perhaps, in that valley
than in any other part of the Union, how strong the
western, the anti-nationalistic, spirit must have been
then.
But that was before the coming of the east-and-west
canal and the east-and-west railroads, which virtually
upheaved a new watershed and changed the whole
physiographic, social, and economic relationships of
the west. The old French river Colbert, the Eternal
River, was virtually cut into two great rivers, one of
which was to empty into the gulf (just as it did in
tion or depression of the surface c
a railroad or canal that bridges ra
climbs elevations, or a freight rati
into a new course, as suddenly rai
certainly removes watersheds as if
aculously lifted and carried into t
So there came to be not only
valleys, the one of the lake and pi
the other of the gulf plainsmen,
flying east and west by land and v
in the former different from the lai
warp. Two widely unlike industri:
gradually developed, and they, in
the mastery of lands beyond the
the nearer west — once a homogene
into two wests and all but disrupt
Then the direct European immi
lions coming from single states of
the neo-American settlements, bui
passing on, in mighty armies, to ]
farther west, along and beyond t
some Darts of the northwpQt to-.
THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS 147
France draw to it the children of all other nations. As
from Hagar exiled in the wilderness has a new race
sprung — has the wilderness been peopled.
In my boyhood the last division of that great exodus,
largely made up of migrants from the eastern half of
the valley, was still passing westward. One of the
banners which some of the wagons covered with can-
vas ("prairie-schooners," as they were called) used to
0y was "Pike's Peak or Bust," an Americanism in-
dicating the intention of the pilgrims to reach the
mountain at the western terminus of the great valley
or die in the attempt. Occasionally one came back
with the Inglorious substitute legend upon his wagon,
"Busted" — a laconic intimation of failure. But this
was the exception. The west kept, till it had made
them her own, most of those who ventured their all
for a home in the wilderness.
There were "two great commemorative monuments
that arose to mark the depth and permanence of the
awe" which possessed all who shared the calamities
or witnessed the results of the Tartar migration. One
was a "Romanang" — a "national commemoration,
with music rich and solemn," of all the souls who de-
parted to the rest of Paradise from the "afflictions of
the desert" — and the "other, more durable and more
commensurate to the scale of the calamity and to the
grandeur of the national exodus," "mighty columns of
granite and brass," where the exodus had ended in
the shadow of the Chinese wall. The inscription on
these columns reads:
By the Will of God,
Here, upon the Brink of these Deserts,
Which from this Point begin and stretch away
148 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
Pathless, treeless, waterless.
For thousands of miles, and along the margins of many
mighty Nations,
Rested from their labors and from great afflictions.
Under the shadow of the Chinese Wall,
And by the favor of Kien Long, God's Lieutenant upon
Karrh
The ancient CI Jemess — the Turgote
Flying befo he Grecian Czar,
Wandering Sheep ' away from the Celestial
E r i6r6,
But are now merci lin, after infinite sorrow.
Into the t ving Shepherd.
Hal t forever,
Hallowed be tut u<.j. u^j-tember 8, 1771 1
Amen.
There have been many expositions of the fruits of
the Mississippi Valley's agriculture and manufacture
and mining and thinking and teaching and preaching
and ministering, but there has been no general com-
memoration with "music rich and solemn"of those who
endured the "afflictions of the wilderness," though the
last of the pioneers will soon have departed to his rest,
for fourteen years ago it was officially declared that
there was no longer a frontier. But mighty columns
not of man's rearing stand upon the farther edge of
that western valley, columns of rock rich with gold
and silver and every other precious metal, surmounted,
some of them the year through, with capitals of snow
and lacking only the legend:
Here upon the Brink of the Plains
Which stretched away pathless, treeless, boundless,
THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS 149
Ended their century-long exodus
The New Children of the Wilderness,
Driven by the Hand of God
Westward and ever Westward
Till they have at last entered
Into the Full Heritage of those
Who, first of Pioneers,
Traced the rivers and lakes of this Valley
Between the eternal moimtains.
THE PARCELLING OF THE DOMAIN 151
of Louis XV upon Spain after sixty or seventy millions
of francs had been spent fruitlessly upon it by France,
recovered by Napoleon and sold to the United States
for one-fourth of the amount that was expended a
century later for the celebration of the purchase, was
regarded ac the time of the purchase, even by many
seacoast Americans, as useless, except as it secured
control of the mouth of the Mississippi. An Important
New York paper said editorially:
"... As to the unbounded region west of the
Mississippi, it is, with the exception of a very few set-
tlements of Spaniards and Frenchmen bordering on
the banks of the river, a wilderness through which
wander numerous tribes of Indians. And when we
consider the present extent of the United States, and
that not one-sixteenth part of its territory is yet under
occupation, the advantage of the acquisition, as it re-
lates CO actual settlement, appears too distant and
remote to strike the mind of a sober politician with
much force. This, therefore, can only rest in specu-
lation for many years, if not centuries to come, and
consequently will not perhaps be allowed very great
weight in the account by the majority of readers.
But it may be added, that should our own citizens,
more enterprizing than wise, become desirous of set-
tling this country, and emigrate thither, it must not
only be attended with all the injuries of a too widely
dispersed population, but, by adding to the great
weight of the western part of our territory, must
hasten the dismemberment of a large portion of our
country, or a dissolution of the government. On the
whole, we think it may with candor be said, that
whether the possession at this time of any territory
^E FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
the river Mississippi will be advantageous, is
extremely problematical. For ourselves, we
' much incUned to the opinion that, after all.
Island of N. Orleans by which the command
: navigation of the Mississippi is secured, that
} this interesting cession its greatest value,
render it in every view of immense benefit to
ntry. By this cession we hereafter shall hold
ur own grasp, what we have heretofore enjoyed
the uncertain tenure of a treaty, which might
;n at the pleasure of another, and (governed as
are) with perfect impunity. Provided there-
have not purchased it too dear, there is all the
or exultation which the friends of the adminis-
display, and which all Americans may be al-
j feel."'
)te this to show how far from appreciating
i generosity the easterners, and especially the
■ersonian Federalists in America, were at that
THE PARCELLING OF THE DOMAIN 153
tude of the amount. Weigh it and there will be four
hundred and thirty-three tons of solid silver. Load
it into wagons, and there will be eight hundred and
sixty-six of them. Place the wagons in a line, giving two
rods to each, and they will cover a distance of five
and one-third miles. Hire a laborer to shovel it into
the carts, and, though he load sixteen each day, he
will not finish the work in two months. Stack it up
dollar on dollar, and supposing nine to make an inch,
the pile will be more than three miles high. It would
load twenty-five sloops; it would pay an army of twenty-
five thousand men forty shillings a week each for
twenty-five years; it would, divided among the popu-
lation of the country, give three dollars for each man,
woman, and child. . . . Invest the principal as school
fund, and the interest will support, forever, eighteen
hundred free schools, all owning fifty scholars, and five
hundred dollars to each school."*
Napoleon had, indeed, made a good bargain for
France, selling a wilderness, which at best he could
not well have kept long, for a price which all the specie
currency in the poor young republic would not be ade-
quate to meet.
It was of this domain (a part of the claim of La Salle
for Louts XIV in 1682, divided between England and
Spain in 1763, made one again in 1803 by the will of
Napoleon, under the control of the United States,
added to by the purchase of Florida from Spain and
the acquisition of Texas, filling all the Great Valley) —
it was of this valley that, as late as the early fifties, a
member of Congress (afterward to become vice-presi-
dent of the United States, then President), Andrew
Johnson, although an earnest advocate of a libeial
■McMuter, "Hiitoiy of the People of the United Sutei," 3 : 6jo.
154 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
land polic}-, predicted that it would take "seven hun-
dred years to dispose of the public lands at the rate
we have been disposing of them."' Seven hundred
years — as lunf; as from the founding of Charlemagne's
new empire of the west to the discovery of the coasts
of a still newer et""'-" "^ '^~ ""tst.
But in two hun i the day that La Salle
so miserably peris ns of Texas, in exactly
one hundred yea ime when, under the
epoch-making "C le Northwest" (as it
has been called), )f the land began, and
in less than half n the year when An-
drew Johnson's se ear prophecy began to
run, practically th^ in had been surveyed
and sold or given by the nation to private or municipal
or corporate possession. It was the 24th of July, 16S7,
that La Salle died; it was July 27, 1787, that the first
great sale of a fragment of the domain was made; and
it was in 1887, approximately, that all the humanly
available domam was occupied by at least two persons
to a square mile; for in 1890 it was officiallj' declared
by the government of the United States that it had no
frontier. Not that the land was all sold, but all that
was immediately valuable.
As soon as the War of Independence was over, and
even during the struggle, the territories of several of
the Atlantic States (or colonies) expanded to the Mis-
sissippi. There was a quadrilateral, trans-AIleghany
Massachusetts, as indifferent to natural boundaries as
a "state of mind" (which Massachusetts has often
been defined to be), respectful only of Imaginary lines
of latitude and the Mississippi River, the Spanish
border. Little Connecticut multiplied its latitude by
' Speech on the Homestead bill, April 29, 1852.
THE PARCELLING OF THE DOMAIN 155
degrees of longitude till it reached in a thin but rich
slice from Pennsylvania also to the Mississippi. Vir-
ginia disputed these mountain-to-river claims of her
New England sisters, but held unquestioned still
larger territories to the north and south — and so on
from the sources of the river to Florida, South Carolina
even claiming a strip a few miles wide and four hundred
long. There was almost a duplication of the Atlantic
front on the Mississippi River. These statements will
not interest those who can have no particular acquain-
tance with the personalities of those several common-
wealths, quite as marked as are those of Normandy
and Brittany; but even without this knowledge it is
possible to appreciate the magnanimity and the wis-
dom which prompted those States, many with lar^e
and rich claims, to surrender all to the central govern-
ment, the Continental Congress, for the benefit of all
the States, landful and landless alike.'
' LANDS CEDED BY THE STATES TO THE UNITED STATES
NoRTOWEST or THE Ohio River tw*" tto-"
Ohio 39i9^
Indiana 33>809
Illinoii 5St4'4
Michigan 5^SI
Wisconsin 53>914
MioDMOU, east of the Mississippi River 3^,000
165,563
or 169,959,680 acres.
Virginia claimed this entire region.
New York claimed an indefinite amount.
Connecticut claimed about 15,600,000 acres and ceded all but ],]00,000.
Massachusetts claimed about 34,560,000 acres.
SOUTB OF EeHTUCKT
South Carolina ceded about 1,136,000 acres.
North Carolina ceded (nominally) 29,184,000 acret.
Georgia ceded 56,689,910 acres.
— Pajrwn J. Treat, "The National Land System, 1785-18M.'*
IE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
pas that even before the National Government
Jnized under a federal constitution in 1789, the
vond the western boundaries of the several
lout as far as the Mississippi, was held for the
|all. And later the same policy followed the
to the Rockies and beyond. Can one
1 greater or more fateful task than confronted
lig, inexperienced republic — to have the dis-
la billion acres of timber lands, grazing lands,
ps, ore lands, oil lands, coal lands, arid lands,
np lands for the good not only of the first
Jnd of those then living in the Atlantic States
I of the millions that should inhabit all that
In future generations as well — for the good of
I time?
nne-time bed of the Paleozoic sea between
I shores, raised in time above the ocean and
I of the mountains that through millions of
: gradually to be worn down by the natural
THE PARCELLING OF THE DOMAIN 157
These they rightly interpreted, according to the myth,
to be the stones of the earth, and so the valleys of the
ancient world became populous. Peopling per se was
not, however, the object or the first object of the act
under which the government, after the manner of
Deucalion, went across this new-world valley, casting
in stoneless areas clods of earth and tufts of virgin
sod before it and behind it. It was not people that the
government wanted. Indeed, it was afraid of people.
What it desired, the "common good," was the immedi-
ate payment of the debt incurred in the War of Inde-
pendence, and the only resource was land. The land
that the French had discovered, whose nominal transfer
to England Choiseul had said he had made to destroy
England's power in America, was now to meet a por-
tion at least of the expense of the brave struggle for the
winning of independence. France's practically un-
touched wilderness was now to supplement the succor
of French ships and arms and sympathy in the firm
founding of the new nation. The acres that France
under other fortunes might have divided among her
own descendants, children of the west, she gave to a
happier destiny than La Salle could have desired in
his wildest dreams as he traversed the streams that
watered those first-parcelled fields.
So, incidentally, the French pioneers before the
fact and the first settlers of the west after the fact
had their part, witting or unwitting, willing or unwill-
ing, written or unwritten, along with George Rogers
Clark and his men, who seized the British forts in that
territory during the Revolution (and thus gave standing
to the claim for its transfer), and along with the men
of the Atlantic colonies who sacrificed their fortunes
. ^^ %. ALXi
*v* 41IIJ wiicre in our history
tion of this particular contribution to th
of free institutions in America. But it
should be recorded and remembered ale
more tangible contributions. Every peri
of the French across that territory for \s
got not a franc, every purchase which So
New England or other settlers went out
was a march or a skirmish in the War of In
for all was turned to the confirming of the
tory of the American Revolution.
Those who have written of the land p
prescribed the conditions of sale have divi
tory roughly into two periods: the first, fi
1840, in which the fiscal considerations of
government were dominant; and the second
to the present time, when the social condit
within the territory itself or in the natioi
were given first consideration.
The statistical story of the first period,
accurate classification, would be about as
as a bulletin of real-estate transactions
would be to a nrnfpccnt- ^f -*-i '
THE PARCELLING OF THE DOMAIN 159
I am aware (let me say parenthetically) that cus-
toms duties might have a somewhat like interpreta-
tion under a higher imaginative power; but this pos-
sibiHty does not lessen to me the singularly spiritual
character of this series of transactions — of land sales,
or transmutations of lands, on the one hand, into the
maintenance of the fabric of a government by the
people, and, on the other, into the ruggedest, hardiest
species of men and women the world has known in
its new hemisphere.
Land-offices, as I have seen them described in the
newspapers of the early part of the nineteenth century,
gave no outward suggestion of being places of miracles
— sacred places. They were noisy, dirty, ephemeral
tabernacles of canvas or of boards in the wilderness^
carried westward till the day of permanent temples
should come. But like the Ark of the Covenant in the
history of Israel, they blessed those in whose fields
they rested on the way, even as the field and household
of Obed-edom the Gittite were blessed by the pres-
ence of the ark on its way up to Jerusalem in the days of
David.
The initial policy of the government was to sell in
as great tracts as possible (the very reverse of the
present conserving, anti-monopolistic policy, as we shall
see). Tlie first sale (1787) was of nearly a million acres,
for which an average of two-thirds of a dollar per acre
in securities worth nine or ten cents was received.
This sale, whatever may be said for it as a part of a
fiscal policy, was significant not only in opening up a
great tract (one thousand three hundred square miles)
but in the fact that the purchase and holding were
conditioned by certain provisions of a precious ordi-
i6o THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
nance — the last of importance of the old Continental
Congress— only less important than the Constitution,
which it preceded by two years — the "basis of law and
politics" in the northwest.
It, moreover, gave precedent for a policy of terri-
torial control by tbo cpntral wnv^mment that has been
effective even to me. Daniel Webster
said of it: "I d( ny single law of any
lawgiver, ancient is produced effects of
more distinct, r iting character."' It
forbade slavery a: irovision an important
influence on the I alley. But there was
another far-read iitive provision which
must be of special people of France even
to-day. Its preamble lies in this memorable passage:
"Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to
good government and the happiness of mankind, schools
and the means of education shall forever be encour-
aged." As to the specific means of encouraging religion,
morality, and knowledge, and so, ultimately, of pro-
moting good government and the happiness of man-
kind, it was proposed by the representative of the Ohio
Compan}', which stood ready to purchase a million
acres, that the government should give support both
to education and religion, as was done in New England,
and as follows: one lot in each township (that is, a
section one mile square in every tract six miles square)
to be reserved for the common schools, another for the
support of the ministry, and four whole townships, in
the whole tract, for the maintenance of a university.
Congress thought this too liberal, but finally, under
I First Speech on Foot's Resolution in "Writings and Speeches of Daniel
Webster," national edition, 5 : 163.
THE PARCELLING OF THE DOMAIN i6i
the stress of need of revenue which the high-minded,
reverend lobbyist. Reverend Menasseh Cutler, was
prepared through his company to furnish, acceded,
with a reduction only of the proposed appropriation to
the university. The provision specifically was: "Lot
number sixteen to be given perpetually by Congress
to the maintenance of schools, and lot number twenty-
nine to the purpose of religion in the said townships;
two townships near the center and of good land to be
also given by Congress for the support of a literary in-
stitution, to be applied to the intended object by the
legislature of the State."
A second great, tract was sold the same year under
similar conditions. This was the last occasion on which
provision for the support of religion was made by the
national Congress, and what came of this particular
grant I have not followed beyond the statement below.*
But the "section-sixteen" allotment for the aid of
public schools continued as a feature of all future grants
within the Northwest Territory, and also in all the new
States of the southwestern and trans-Mississippi ter-
ritory erected prior to 1850, from which time forward
two sections in each township (sixteen and thirty-six)
were granted for school purposes, besides specific grants
for higher education amounting to over a million acres.
A recent student* of this subject has traced this
policy of public aid to education back through New
' Id 1818 Ohio petitioned for pemiMJOD to >el] the landi merved for
religioui purpoaei, ind in iB]3 thi* vtM graoted. The proceed* of the lalei
were to be inveeted and uied for the support of religion, under the direction
of the legislature within the townships in which the reserves were located.
— Payaon J, Treat, "The National Land Syitem, 1785-1810."
' Joseph Shafer, "The Origin of the System of Land Grants for Educa-
tion." Bulletin of the Univenity of Wisconsin, No. 63. History Series,
Vol. 1, No. t, August, 1903.
i62 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
England, where colonies, in grants to companies or
townships^ made specific stipulations and reservations
for the support of schools and the ministry and where
townships voluntarily often made like disposition of sur-
plus wild lands; and through New England to England
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where, the
monasteries and < foundations being de-
stroyed and the i ng upon them perish-
ing, schools were i : kings, sometimes out
of sequestered c\ were established by
towns and count n to those chartered
under private pat mg was the new edu-
cational movcmer
In the Mississij i, or the greater part
of it — whatever the historical origin of the provisions
may be— from one-thirty-sixth to one-eighteenth of
the public land has been set apart to the education of
generation after generation till the end of the republic
- — or as Americans would be disposed to put it in
synonymous phrase, "till the end of time."
Acres vary in size, one of our eminent horticultur-
ists has reminded us, measured in terms of produc-
tivity. And the gifts to the various townships have
been by no means of the same size, measured in terms
of revenue for school purposes. "Number sixteen"
may sometimes have fallen in shallow soil or on stony
ground and "thirty-six" in swamp or alkali land.
The lottery of nature is as hard-hearted as the lotteries
of human devising; but the general provision has
put an obligation upon the other thirty-five or thirty-
four sections in every township that I suppose is seldom
evaded. The child's acres are practically never, I sus-
pect, less valuable than the richest and largest of those
THE PARCELLING OF THE DOMAIN 163
in the township about it, for the reason that the dif-
ference is made good by the local taxpayer. The child's
acre is, as a rule, then, as large as the largest, the most
productive acre. And roughly there are fifty thousand
of those little plots in that domain — fifty thousand
sections a mile square, thirty-two million acres reserved
from the beginning of time, theoretically at least, to
the end of time. As a matter of fact, they are not to
be distinguished objectively from other acres now;
they are to be distinguished only subjectively, that is,
as one thinks of what is grown year by year in the
schools, to which their proceeds, if not their products,
are given.
I quoted above an estimate made in 1S03 of what
might have been done with the fifteen million dollars,
paid to the French for Louisiana. One alternative sug-
gested was the permanent endowment of eighteen hun-
dred free schools, allowing five hundred dollars a year
per school and accommodating ninety thousand pupils.
The public-school allotment for that part of the valley
alone is fifteen million acres. Even at two dollars an
acre (a very low estimate), the endowment is twice
the total amount paid for Louisiana — and I am esti-
mating this school acreage at but one thirty-sixth in-
stead of one-eighteenth of the total acreage. There-
fore, France may, in a sense, be said to have given
these acres to the support of the "children of always"
— since these plots alone have probably yielded many
times the purchase price of the entire territory.
To be sure, these white plots, as I would have them
marked on a map of the valley, have in many States
been sold and occupied as the other plots, with only
this distinction, that the proceeds are inviolably set
^E FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
) this sacred use, as certain parts of animals
nder Mosaic law, reserved for public sacrifice.
trans-Mississippi State, Iowa, for example, of
grant of 1,013,614.21 acres' (less what the
■y rivers, the Mississippi and the Missouri, had
away in their voracious encroachments, and
at other natural agents had added), only zoo
nained unsold in 1911.
: view the policy from the year 1903 and from
St of a populous valley, in which land values
en from one dollar and twenty-five cents per
a hundred or two hundred dollars in most
irm tracts, and to thousands in urban centres,
but regret that these lands themselves had
1 held inviolate, and can but wish that only
itals had been devoted to the high uses to which
ion and State had consecrated these lands,
icy would have put in the heart of every town-
ommon field whose rental would have grown
THE PARCELUNG OF THE DOMAIN 165
the tangible symbol, and that the prayer is still made in
every township of that territory, where even a few chil-
dren live, is evidenced by the fact that every two
miles north and south, east and west of settled region
there stands a schoolhouse. I shall speak later of this
wide-spread provision, not only for universal elementary
education but also for secondary and higher educa-
tion, ordained of the people and for the people, to be
paid for by the people out of their common treasury.
But attention must here be called, in passing, to the
fact that the parcelling of the domain of Louis XIV
in the new world fixed irrevocably the public school
in the national consciousness and purpose and made it
the foundation of a purely democratic social system
and the nourisher of a more highly efficient democratic
political system.
On the Atlantic side of the mountains there was
bitter controversy between those who held that educa-
tion was necessary for the preservation of free institu-
tions and those who held that free education increased
taxation unduly; between those who desired and those
who regretted the breaking down of social barriers
which both claimed would ensue as a result of such
education; between those who regarded education as
a natural right and those who considered taxation for
such a purpose a violation of the rights of the in-
dividual; between those who saw in it a panacea for
poverty and distress and those who urged that it
would not benefit the masses; and, finally, between
those of one sect and race and those of another. But
in the trans-Alleghany country north of the Ohio, and
in all the territory west of the Mississippi (practically
coterminous, let me again remind you, with that region
where the French were pioneers within the present
i66 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
bounds of the United States) there was practically no
dissension, though the provision was meagre at the
start. Tlie public school had no more of the atmos-
phere or cliaracter of a charity, a "pauper" school
than the highway provided for out of the same grant,
where rich and p ' '- "''->Iute equality of right
and opportunity. pride of a people, the
expression of the he corner-stone of the
people's hope. I ree-fourths of the chil-
dren of the terrir :s have been surveyed
by the magic cha s first great parcelling
ordinance have h: if the public schools —
future Presidents States, justices, rail-
road and universi farmers, artisans, art-
ists, and poets alike.
So while it was desire for revenue that prompted
the early sales of the public domain in the Mississippi
Valley, the nation got in return not only means to help
pay its Revolution debt, but, incidentally, settlements
of highly individualistic, self-dependent, and inter-
dependent pioneers, gathered about one highly pater-
nalistic or maternalistic institution — the public school.
The credit for this has gone to New England and New
York, but the "white acres" came of the territory and
the riches of Nouvelle France.
You will not wish to follow in detail the ministra-
tions of the priests of the land-offices and the surveys
of the men of the magic chains, for it is a long and
tedious story that would fill thousands of pages, and
in the end only obscure the real significance of the
movement. Here is a summary of allotments made up
to 1904 of all the public domain, that of the Missis-
sippi Valley being somewhat more than half.'
' See Report of the Public Lands Commission, Washington, 1905.
THE PARCELLING OF THE DOMAIN 167
Private land claims, donations etc. (the first of acem
the tatter being made to the early French
settlers) 33,400,000
fFagon-road, canal, and river improvement
grants (provision for the narrow strips of
common that intersect each other at every
mile of the settled parts of the valley) 9,700,000
Railroad grantf for the subsidizing of the pri-
vate building of railways chieSy up and down
and across the valley 117,60(^000
Steamp4and grants (being tracts of wet or over-
flowed lands given to the various States for
reclamation) 65,700,000
School grants to States (those vdiich we have
been considering) 69,000,000
Other grants to States (largely for educational
purposes) 20,600,000
Military and naval land warranls 6l,000,o0O
Scrip issued for various purposes (chiefly in
view of service to the government) 9,300,000
Allotment to individual Indians 15,100,000
Mineral lands (under special entries) 1,700,000
HomesUad entries (that is, by settlers taking
claims under homestead aces of which I shall
speak later) 96,500,000
Timber-culture entries (final) 9,700,000
Timber and stone entries 7,600,000
Cash entries, including entries under the pr^
emption and other acts 276,600,000
Reservoir rights of toay 300,000
Forest reserves (tracts of forest land permanently
reserved from sale) 57,900,000
For national reclaiming purposes 39,911,000
Reserved for public purposes (public buildings,
forts, etc.) 6,700,000
Indian reservations 73,000,000
Entries pending 39,500,000
Unappropriated public land 841,872,377
Total {including Alaska) 1,852,683,377
i68 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
By June 30, 1912, homestead entries had increased
to 127,800,000 acres; timber and stone entries to
13,060,000 acrts; forest reserves to 187,400,000 acres,
and there was left 682,984,762 acres, more than half
of which was in Alaska; that is, of the billion and
a half of acres, ex' '"" -'" *' -'ia, over a bllhon have
been sold to prii ted in aid of private
enterprises, used mprovements, appro-
priated forever to : given to the support
of education.
The controlling e start, I repeat, was
revenue. But g: people, seeing great
tracts of land hel for speculation, seeing
the domain of fret ng Tvhile the pressure
of want was beginning to make itself felt east of the
mountains, as in Europe, and feeling concerned, as
some men of vision did, at the passing of the world's
great opportunity for the practical realization of man's
natural right to the land without disturbing the sys-
tem in force in older settled communities, the people
strove to effect the subordination of revenue to the
social good of the frontier and the country at large.
By the middle of the century this many-motived feel-
ing had expression in a party platform; that "the
public lands — belong to the people and should not be
sold to individuals nor granted to corporations, but
should be held as a sacred trust for the benefit of the
people and should be granted in limited quantities,
free of cost, to landless settlers."'
It was ten years before this doctrine became em-
bodied in law over the signature of Abraham Lincoln,
but the agitation for its enactment had been active for
'Free-Soil Democratic Platform, 1852, p. 11.
THE PARCELLING OF THE DOMAIN 169
thirty years, beginning with the cry of a poor printer
in New York City,' taught of French doctrine, who in
season and out kept asserting the equal right of man
to land. It was as a voice in the wilderness proclaim-
ing a plan of salvation to the already congested areas
on the seashore and, incidentally, a means of making
the wilderness blossom. He was not then a disciple
of Fourier (as many of his associates were and he him-
self had been originally), threatening vested privileges
of rights; he did not preach a communistic division of
property; he was an indlviduaHstic idealist and saw
in the opening of this wild, unoccupied land, not to
speculators or to alien purchasers, but to actual set-
tlers permitted to pre-empt in quarter-sections (one
hundred and sixty acres) and forbidden to alienate it,
a means of social regeneration that would not disturb
the titles to property already granted to individuals
by the State, and yet would bless all the property-
less, for there was enough free land for every landless
man who wanted it, and would be for decades if not
for centuries beyond their lives, or so he thought.*
A German economist has expressed the view that it
was only this movement, so inaugurated, that prevented
America from going into socialism. One of our fore-
most economists in America, in discussing this very
subject, begins with these observations:
"The French are a nation of philosophers. Starting
with the theory of the rights of man, they build up a
logical system, then a revolution, and the theory goes
into practice. Next a coup d'etat and an emperor.
' George Henry Evaoi.
'See J. R. CcunmoiM, "Documentary Hittoiy of Amrrican Indutcrial
Society," VII : 387-349.
I70 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
"The English are a nation without too much philos-
ophy or logic. They piece out their constitution at
the spot where it becomes tight. . . . They are prac-
tical . . . unlogical.
"The Americans are French in their logic and En-
glish in their use -' ' — '- '^'"ey announce the uni-
versal rights of n inact into Jaw enough
to augment the r :y."
The homesteao origin to the doctrine
of natural rights lendental glory faded
often into the lig lay during the discus-
sions but still enl actical and matter-of-
fact statute. Ec , both of eastern and
western motive, % under the banner of
its idealism, till finally it came to be an ensign not
only of free soil for the landless but of free soil for
the slaves. The "homestead" movement put an end
to slavery, even if within a half century it has ex-
hausted in its generosity the nation's domain of arable
land. The voice in the wilderness cried for a legalized
natural right that would not disturb vested rights, for
an individualism based on private property given with-
out cost, for equality by a limitation of that property
to one hundred and sixty acres, and finally for the
inalienability from sale or mortgage of that little plot
of earth. Thirty years later the natural right to un-
occupied land was recognized, individualistic society
was strengthened by the great increase in the number
of property holders, and inalienability was recognized
by the States; but the failure to reserve the free lands
to such actual settlers alone and to limit the amount
of the holding left the way open for railroad grants,
which alone have in two generations exceeded the
THE PARCELLING OF THE DOMAIN 171
homestead entries, and for the amassing of great
stretches by a few.
The logic of France, speaking through the voice of
that leader and other men such as Horace Greeley,
led the later exodus as certainly as her pioneers opened
the way for the Brst American settlers. And though
the logic was appUed in English fashion, yet it had a
notable part in making, as I have just said, the free
soil of the Mississippi Valley contribute to the freeing
of a whole people in slavery, inside and outside of the
valley. That logic learned in France would doubtless
have accomplished a conclusion needing less patch-
ing and opportunistic repair if the immediate interests
of those of the frontiers, those who wanted immediate
settlement and development, had not disturbed one
of the premises. At any rate, a great and perhaps the
last opportunity to carry such doctrines to their con-
clusions without overturning all social and industrial
insriturions has gone by. A half-billion acres of in-
alienable farms, all of the same size, trespassing upon
no ancient rights, interspersed with the white blocks
held for the education of the children of that free soil,
might have furnished an example for all time to be
followed or shunned — if, indeed, all acres had been
bom of the primeval sea and glaciers not only free but
equal in size. As it was, some acres were bom large
and some small, some fruitful and some barren, some
with gold in their mouths and some with only the
taste of alkali; and only an infinite wisdom could have
adjusted them to the unequal capacities of that army
of land lackers who declared themselves free and
equal, and who, with free-soil banners, advanced to
the territory where the squatters became sovereigns
and homesteads became castles.
172 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
President Andrew Johnson (who as a congressman,
in 1852, made the seven-hundred-year prophecy)
estimated that a homestead (of one hundred and sixty
acres) would increase every homesteader's purchasing
ability by one hundred dollars a year; and if (he
argued) the {^ove "d a 30-per-cent duty
it would be reim 1 years in the amount
of two hundred i, or ten dollars more
than the cost of ,. By such reckoning
he reached the coi le homesteaders would
defray the expen emment for a period
of four thousand and ninety-two years
— each homesteac : millions contributing
indirectly twL-nty-n four hundred dollars
in seven hundred years and all of them two hundred
and nineteen billion six hundred million dollars — a
scheme as ingenious, says one, as Fourier's "scheme to
pay off the national debt of France with a setting
hen."'
There are approximately nine million homes (or
homes, tenements, and flats) in that domain to-day,
and it is quite easily demonstrable that they not only
contribute to the support of government, directly and
indirectly, far more than the seemingly fantastic esti-
mates of Andrew Johnson suggested but also give to
the world a surplus of product undreamed of even in
1850. It is hardly likely that any system of parcelling
would have more rapidly developed this vast domain.
There is a question as to whether some more logical,
conserving, long-viewed policy might not have been
devised for the "common good" of the generations
THE PARCELLING OF THE DOMAIN 173
that are yet to occupy that valley with the generation
that is there and the three or four generations that
have already gone. It is that "common good" that is
now engaging the thought of our foremost economists,
natural scientists, and public men. Of that I shall
speak later.
Here we celebrate merely the fact that there are fifty
or sixty niillion geographical descendants of France
living in the midst of the valley at the mouth of whose
river La Salle took immediate possession for Louis
XIV, but prophetic possession for all the peoples that
might in any time find dwelling there.
CHAPTER IX
)UREURS DE BOIS
f the statesmen of the
r Thomas H. Benton,
It men of science lay
opographical engineers
ire unerring than the
wild animals — buffalo,
■h traverse the forest
IN THE TRAI]
"TT is a mista'
I Mis:iissippt
"to suppos
off a road. Thei
older than the s
mathematicians.
elk, deer, antelop_,
not by compass but by an instinct which leads them
always the right way — to the lowest passes in the
mountains, the shallowest fords in the rivers, the rich-
est pastures in the forests, the best salt springs, and the
shortest practicable lines between remote points. They
travel thousands of miles, have their annual migra-
tions backwards and forwards, and never miss the
best and shortest route. These are the first engineers
to lay out a road in a new country; the Indians fol-
low them, and hence a buffalo road becomes a war-
path. The first white hunters follow the same trails
in pursuing their game; and after that the buffalo
road becomes the wagon road of the white man, and
finally the macadamized road or railroad of the scien-
tific man."'
A hunter of wild sheep in the Rocky Mountains
following their trails wonders if they were made a
■ Speech on a bill for the construction of a highwaj' to the Pacific, De-
cember i6, 1850.
TRAILS OF THE CX)UREURS DE BOIS 175
year, five, or ten years ago, and is told by the scientist
at his side that they may have been sixteen thousand
years old, so long have these first engineers been at
work. In some places of Europe, I am told, their fel-
low engineers, longer in the practice of their profession,
have actually worn paths in the rocks by their cush-
ioned feet.
It is a mistake, therefore, we are reminded, to sup-
pose that the forests and plains of the Mississippi
Valley were trackless. They were coursed by many
paths. If you have by chance read Chateaubriand's
"Atala," you will have a rather different notion of the
American forests, especially of the Mississippi Valley.
"On the western side of the Mississippi," he wrote,
'* the waves of verdure on the limitless plains (savannas)
appear as they recede to rise gradually into the azure
sky"; but on the eastern half of the valley, "trees of
every form, of every color, and of every perfume
throng and grow together, stretching up into the air
to heights that weary the eye to follow. Wild vines
. . . intertwine each other at the feet of these trees,
escalade their trunks and creep along to the extremity
of their branches, stretching from the maple to the
tulip-tree, from the tulip-tree to the hollyhock, and
thus forming thousands of grottos, arches and porticos.
Often, in their wanderings from tree to tree, these
creepers cross the arm of a river, over which they throw
a bridge of flowers. . . . A multitude of animals spread
about life and enchantment. From the extremities of
the avenues may be seen bears, intoxicated with the
grape, staggering upon the branches of the elm-trees;
caribous bathe in the lake; black squirrels play among
the thick foliage; mocking-birds, and Virginian pigeons
176 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
not bigger than sparrows, fly down upon the turf, red-
dened with strawberries; green parrots with yellow
heads, purple woodpeckers, cardinals red as fire, clamber
up to the very tops of the cypress-trees; humming-birds
sparkle upon the jessamine of the Ploridas; and bird-
catching serpent" ^'••"^ ^^H" >;i<spended to the domes
of the woods, v ig about like creepers
themselves. ... is sound and motion.
, . . When a bi to animate these soli-
tudes, to swing tl idies, to confound these
masses of white, id pink, to mix all the
colors and to c( murmurs, there issue
such sounds fron. f the forests, and such
things pass before it I should in vain en-
deavor to describe them to those who have never
visited these primitive fields of nature." And when
Rene and Atala were escaping through those forests
they "advanced with difficulty under a vault of smilax,
amidst vines, indigo-plants, bean-trees, and creeping-
ivy that entangled our feet like nets. . . . Bell ser-
pents were hissing in every direction, and wolves,
bears, carcajous and young tigers, come to hide them-
selves in these retreats, made them resound with their
roarings."'
A trackless, howling wilderness, indeed, if we are to
accept this as an accurate description of scenes which,
as I have intimated, it is now suspected that Chateau-
briand's imagination visited, unaccompanied of his
body. But a recent indigenous writer on the valley
and its roads — having in mind, to be sure, the forests
a little farther north than those in which Atala and
Rene wandered — assures us that they were neither
' Chateaubriand, "Atala," trans. Harry, pp. 2, 3, 19.
TRAILS OF THE CX)UREURS DE BOIS 177
"pathless" nor "howling." He writes that in 1775
(eighteen years before the first white settlement in
the State of Ohio) there were probably as many paths
within the bounds of that State on which a man could
travel on horseback at the rate of five miles an hour as
there are railways in that State to-day. And the
bufFalo paths were — some of them, at any rate — roads
so wide that several wagons might have been driven
abreast on them — as wide as the double-track railroads.
So the Indian farther west had his highways prepared
for him by the instincts of these primitive engineers
that knew nothing of trigonometry or the sextant or
the places of the stars.^
Nor did these first makers of roads howl or bellow
their way over them. On this same authority (Hul-
bert) I am able to assure you that the forest paths
were noiseless "traces," as they were originally called,
in the midst of silences disturbed only by the wind and
the falling waters. Wolves did sometimes howl in the
forests or out upon the plains, but it was only in hunger
and in accentuation of the usual silence. Neither they
nor the bears growled or howled, except when they
came into collision with each other, or starvation.
And there were not even birds to give cheer to the
gloom of these black forests, whose tree tops were
knitted together by vines, but had no undergrowth,
since the sun could not reach the ground. "The birds
of the forest came only with the white man." There
were parrots in Kentucky, and there were in Ohio
pigeons and birds of prey, eagles and buzzards, but
the birds we know to-day and the bees were later im-
migrants from lands that remembered Aristophanes or
' Hultwrt, "Hiitoric Highway)," voi. I, pt. II.
178 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
the hills of Hymettus, or that knew Shelley's skylark
or Keats's nightingale or Rostand's tamer fowls or
Maeterlinck's bees.
Even if we allow to the forests Chateaubriand's
color in summer and the clamor in times of terror —
color and chimor which onlv a keen eye and ear would
have seen nnd he : longer think of them
as pathless, if inh ; ancient pathmakers,
the bufFala, deer, iturally, when the In-
dian came, deper s upon wild game, he
followed these p: made and frequented
by the beasts — tl I, to water, to salt, to
other habitats wi' seasons. The buffalo
roads and the dei e his vocational trails
— the streets of his livelihood. And as his enemy was
likely to find him by following these traces, they
became not only the paths of peace but the paths of
war. When the red man trespassed upon the peaceful
trails of his enemy, he was, in an American idiom, "on
the war-path,"
Then in time the European trader went in friendly
search of the Indian by these same paths, and they
became the avenues of petty commerce. As street
venders m Pans, so these forest traders or runners went
up and down these sheltered paths, as dark in summer
as the narrowest streets, only they went silently, though
they were often heard as distinctly in the breaking of
twigs or in their muffled tread by the alert ears of the
Indians as the musical voices of these venders are
heard in the city. And the places where these traders
put down their cheap trinkets before their dusky
patrons grew into trading-posts, prophetic of future
cities and towns.
TRAILS OF THE COUREURS DE BOIS 179
Such were the paths by which the runners of the
woods, the French coureurs de Bois, first emerged —
after following the watercourses — upon the western
forest glades and the edges of the prairies and as-
tonished the aboriginal human owners of those wild
highways that had known only the soft feet of the
wolf and fox and bear, the hoofs of the buffalo and
deer, and the bare feet or the moccasins of the In-
dians (the "silent shoes," as I have seen such foot-
gear advertised in Boulevard St. Germain).
It has been said by a chemist of some repute that
man came, in his evolution, out of the sea; that he
has in his veins certain elements — potassium, calcium,
magnesium, sodium — In the same ratio in which they
appeared in the water of the Pre-Camhrian ocean.
Whether this be true or not, one stage of human de-
velopment carries marks of the forest, and from that
period "having nothing but forest knowledge, forest
dreams, forest fancies, forest faith," as an American
writer has said, man emerges upon the plains of his-
tory.
So, though the French civilization still smells and
sounds of the sea, and followed the streams that kept
its first men in touch with it, it had finally, in its pio-
neering, to take to the trails and the forests. And
these runners of the woods were the amphibious am-
bassadors from this kingdom of the sea to the kingdom
of the land. They were, as ^tienne Brule of Cham-
plain's time, the pioneers of pioneers who, often in
unrecorded advance of priest and explorer, pushed their
adventurous traffic tn French guns and hatchets,
French beads and cloth, French tobacco and brandy,
dll they knew and were known to the aboriginal habi-
i8o THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
tants, "from where the stunted Esquimaux burrowed
in their snow caves to where the Comanches scoured
the plains of the south with their banditti cavalry."
They were a lawless lot whom this mission, not only
between water and land but also between civilization
and barbarism, "sooiled for civilization." But they
must not be jud in their vibrations be-
tween the two ! e which they bridged,
making periodic ) charitable priests in
one, of the sins t le other, which, unfor-
given, might hav entirely away from the
church and into
The names of i )ureurs de bois are for-
gotten by history er particular about the
character of those whom it remembers — other than
those in kingly or other high places). But they who
have followed immediately in the trails of these men
of the verges have written these names, or some of
them, in places where they are more widely read than
if cherished by history even. Etienne Brule^who, as
interpreter, led Le Caron out upon the first western
mission — after following trails and waters for hundreds
of miles back of the English settlements, where the
timid colonists had not dared to venture, suffered the
martyrdom of fire, and is remembered in a tempestu-
ous stream in the west and perhaps in an Indian tribe.
The name of Jean Nicolet of Cherbourg (the ambassador
to the Winnebagoes, from the record of whose pic-
turesque advent in the "Jesuit Relations'* the annals
of the west really began) has been given to a path
now grown into one of the most populous streets along
the whole course of the Mississippi River — in Min-
neapolis.
TRAILS OF THE OOUREURS DE BOIS i8i
And Du Lhut, the cousin of Tonty, a native of Lyons
— a man of "persistent hardihood, not sutpassed per-
haps even by La Salle," says Parkman, "continually
in the forest, in the Indian towns, or in the remote
wilderness outposts planted by himself, exploring,
trading, fighting, ruling lawless savages, and whites
scarcely less ungovernable,"' and crossing the ocean
for interviews with the colonial minister, "amid the
splendid vanities of Versailles" — he is remembered for
all time in that city, built up against the far shores
of Lake Superior, bearing his name, Duluth, the city
that has taken the place of London in the list of the
world's great harbors. Macaulay's vision of the New
Zealander standing amid the ruins of London and
overlooking the mastless Thames seems to have some
realization in the succeeding of a city, founded in the
path of a wood runner, out on the borders of civiliza-
tion, to one of London's disrinctions among the cities
of the world.
"This class of men is not exrinct," said Parkman
twenty or thirty years ago; "in the cheerless ^Ids be-
yond the northern lakes, or among the solitudes of
the distant west they may still be found, unchanged in
life and character since the day when Louis the Great
claimed sovereignty over the desert empire."
But their mission, if any survive till now, is past.
The paths, surveyed of the beasts and opened by these
pioneers to the feet of priests, explorers, and traders,
have let in the influences that in rime destroyed all
these forest lovers braved the solitude for. The
trace has become the railroad, and the smell of the
gasolene motor is even on the once wild Oregon trail;
' Pukmui, "La StUe," p. 374.
i82 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
for, in general, it has been said of the forest part of
the valley, "where there is a railway today there was
a path a century and a quarter ago" (and that means
longer ago) ; and it may be added that where there was
a French trading-post, or fort, or portage, there is a
city tod:iy, not b""-"""- "•" •■^'' attraction of the popu-
lations of those pi -ospecting railroad, but
because of their ay advantage, learned
even by the buft II paths have evolved
into railroads, bu s have followed prac-
tically all of these —paths of the coureurs
de bois, instincti' for mountain passes,
the low portages :o valley, the shortest
ways and the easit
One of America's greatest railroad presidents has
noted this significant difference between the railroads
of Europe and those of America, or at any rate of the
Mississippi Valley. In Europe they "took the place
of the pack-animal, the stage-coach, the goods-van that
crowded all the highways between populous centers,"
whereas in the Mississippi Valley and beyond they
succeeded the pioneer and pathfinder. The railroad
outran the settler and "beckoned him on," just as the
coureur de bois outran the slower-going migrant and
beckoned him on to ever new frontiers. The buffalo,
the coureur de bois, the engineer in turn. The rail-
road, the more modern coureur de bois and coureur
de planche, has not served the new-world society
merely as a connecting-link between communities al-
ready developed. It has been the "creator of cities."^
Out on those prairies beyond the forests I have seen
this general statement of Mr. Hill's illustrated. Down
'James J. Hill, "Highways of Progitss," pp. IJS, 236.
TRAILS OF THE OOUREURS DE BOIS 183
from Lake Michigan the first railroad crept toward
the Mississippi along the Des Plaines and then the
Illinois, where La Salle had seen from his canoe great
herds of buifalo "trampling by in ponderous columns
or filing in long lines morning, noon, and night." That
railroad was a path, not to any particular city but to
the water, a path from water to water, a long portage
from the lake to the Mississippi and back again.
One day, within my memory, a new path was marked
by stakes that led away from that river, off across the
prairie, to an uninhabited place which the first en-
gineers had not known — a place of fire, the fields of
coal, of which the practical Joliet had found signs on
his memorable journey. And so one and another
road crossed that prairie (on which I can even now
clearly see the first engine standing in the prairie-
grass), making toward the places of fire, of wood, of
grain, of meat, of gold, of iron, of lead, till the whole
prairie was a network of these paths — and now the
"transportation machine" (as Mr. Hill calls it) has
grown to two hundred and fifty-four thousand seven
hundred and thirty-two miles (in 191 1), or about 40
per cent of the world mileage, of which one hundred
and forty thousand miles are within the Mississippi
Valley, carrying with them wherever they go the
telegraph and telephone wires, building villages, towns,
and cities — still bringing the fashions of Paris, as did
Perrot, in the paths of the buffalo.
When the surveyors crossed that prairie, treeless
Kccept for the woods along the Aramoni River (just
back of the Rock St. Louis) and along the Illinois
River at the other edge, the wild animals and the In-
dians had disappeared westward, the prairie ground
i84 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
was broken and planted in patches; fences had begun
to appear on the silent stretches; houses stood four
to a section, with a one-room schoolhouse every two
miles and churches at long intervals. After the
construction train ploughed its slow way across that
same prairie, in '"-' ~~''' —'---1 by the surveyors, a
place was marked le farmers upon whose
land it promised ted each to give it the
name of his wife. La Salle of his king;
but one day a wo ting the unsentimental
corporation, with lailed a strip of board
to a post, with the ni," let us say, painted
upon it. Woode! )res, elevators, black-
smith, harness, ai shops, and the dwell-
ings of those who did the work of the little town>
gathered about; in time some of the pioneer settlers
leaving their farms to the care of children or tenants
moved into the town; the primitive stores were rebuilt
in brick; houses of pretentious architecture crowded
out of the best sites the first dwellings; and in twenty
or thirty years it had become a village of several hun-
dred people: retired farmers or their widows, men of
the younger generation living on the income of their
farms without more than nominal occupation, and
those who buy the produce and minister to the wants
of this little community. Most of the villagers and
most of the farmers in all the country about have the
telephone in their houses and can talk as much as they
please with their neighbors at a very small yearly
charge. They also keep track of the grain and stock
markets by telephone, have their daily metropolitan
paper, a county paper, monthly magazines (of which
they are the best readers), perhaps a piano or an organ,
TRAILS OF THE COUREURS DE BOIS 185
more likely, now, a phonograph, v^ich reproduces, if
they choose, what is heard in Paris or in concerts or
the grand opera; reproductions of pieces of statuary
or paintings in the Louvre; and either a fast driving
horse or an automobile. They are often within easy
reach of a city by train, and the wives or daughters
know the fashions of Paris and begin to follow the
modes as quickly as local talent can make the adap-
tations and transformations.
Aramoni is not an imaginary much less a Utopian
village. There are thousands of "Aramonis" where the
railroads have gone, drawing all the physical conve-
niences and social conventions after them, where once
coureurs de bois followed the buffaloes.
Mr. Hill, whom I have just quoted above, has said:
"Next after the Christian rehgion and the public school
the railroad has been the largest single contributing
factor to the welfare and happiness of the people of
that valley."'
The first great service of the railroads to the re-
public, as such, was to make it possible that the people
of a territory three thousand miles wide, crossed by
two mountain ranges, should be bound into one re-
public. The waters to the east of the Alleghanies ran
toward the Atlantic, the waters west of the Rockies
ran toward the Pacific, and the waters between the
mountains ran to the Gulf of Mexico. If the great
east-and-west railroads had not been built and some
of the waters of the Lakes had not been made to run
down the Mohawk Valley into the Hudson it is more
than probable that there would have been a secession
of the men who called themselves the "men of the
■James J. Hill, "Higbwajnof Progmt," pp. 336, 337.
l86 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
western waters," a secession of the west from the
east, rather than of the south from the north. If the
men of this valley had continued men of the "west-
em waters" there would probahly have been at least
three republics in North America and perhaps as
many as in South * '"
When Josiah | aus son of Massachu-
setts, said for tht ist in the halls of Con-
gress, "You hav( ' to throw the rights
and liberties and his people into hotch-
pot with the wild Missouri, nor with the
mixed though moi race of Anglo-Hispano-
Gallo-Americans, ■ he sands in the mouth
of the Mibsissippi, alizing the men whose
interests followed the rivers to another tide-water
than that of Boston and New York harbors. The
railroads made a real prophecy of his fear that these
men of the western rivers would some day be "man-
aging the concerns of a seaboard fifteen hundred miles
from their residences, and having a preponderance in
the councils," Into which, as he contended, " they should
never have been admitted."*
He was thinking and speaking rather of the south-
west than of the northwest, but it was the east-and-
west lines of railroad that prevented the vital interest
of that northern valley from flowing with the water
along parallels of longitude to where the gulf cur-
rents would catch its commerce, instead of over the
mountains along the sterner parallels of latitude and in
straighter course to Europe.
The force of gravity, the temptation of the tropics,
' Speech on the bill to admit Orleans Territory Into the Union. AnnaU of
Congress, nth Cong., jd Sess., 1810-11, pp. 514-543.
TRAILS OF THE COUREURS DE BOIS 187
the indifference of the east, the freedom from eastern
and puritanical restraints, were all on the side of a "re*
public of the western waters" and against that larger,
continent-wide nationalism which now has its most
ardent support in that valley through which the iron
shuttles fly from sea to sea, weaving the waters as
strands of color into a unified pattern of sublimer im-
port.
It looks now as if the north-and-south lines were
to be strengthened the world over, as the occupied and
exploited north temperate zone reaches north toward
the frigid zone, now grown warmer by the very open-
ing of the lands to the sun and the long burning of
coal, and south toward the tropics, now made more
habitable by the new knowledge of tropical medicine,
and even across the tropics to the sister temperate zone
of the southern hemisphere.' In the Mississippi Valley,
the gulf ports, fed of river and railroad, are increas-
ingly busy, partly, to be sure, because they look toward
the east-and-west path through Panama, but partly,
too, because they lie between the two temperate zones,
which must inevitably be brought nearer to each other.
We cannot imagine two permanently dissociated or dis-
tantly associated temperate civilizations on this globe,
which is becoming smaller every day.
It was inevitable, perhaps, and happily inevitable,
that the east-and-west lines should be well established
before the temperate zone should venture into tropic
lotus-lands again, and perhaps it was inevitable that
> I have been told by one who hai been atudyiog conditiooi in the great
DonhiKat fields of Canada that it ia now pouible to grow cropa there that
couid not have been grown before the country wai opened and cultivated
to the KHith of them, ao much longer have the frott* been delayed in the
autumn.
1
:E FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
should eventually, even without the help of
nd steel, attach itself to the east — even by
of water.
ngton had hardly put off his uniform, after the
1783, when he was planning for a western
his diary on the third day of that trip of six
and eighty miles shows that his one object
obtain information of the nearest and best
ication between the eastern and the western
One of the kings of France said, when his
was made king of Spain, "There are no Ion-
Pyrenees," and Washington, when he saw the
iblic forming, said, in efFect, "There must be
hanies." He expected a canal to erase the
IS, but the railroad accomplished this gigantic
1 but slight aid of water,
s the railroad tied the Mississippi Valley to
ntic coast, so in time, aided of a government
every reason to be grateful, it reached across
TRAILS OF THE COUREURS DE BOIS 189
and the judicial) have at one time been filled by men
of the western waters. I am anticipating a fact that
belongs to a later theme, but there is no single fact that
can better illustrate the political service of the paths
over which we are to-day travelling.
On the economic consequences we need not now
dwell. They have had too frequent and sufficiently
conspicuous illustration in every foreign mind that
knows anything whatever of that valley to make it
necessary to insist in this cursory view upon their
great contribution to physical comfort. It is, how-
ever, begun to be felt that in the rapid development
and exploitation of the resources of that valley (made
possible only by the railroads) the future has not been
enough in our minds. It was said a few years ago
that there was not money enough in the world to lay
track to take the traffic that the Mississippi Basin
offered. The valley wanted to get everything to mar-
ket in one generation, indifferent to the fate of those
who should come after — the passes through the moun-
tains being choked by cars carrying to the coasts crops
from increasing acreage of declining productivity or
the products of swiftly disappearing forests or the out-
put of mines that must soon be exhausted.
Perhaps the railroads are not to be blamed for this
decrease in productivity — a passing phase of our agri-
cultural life, as recent crop reports show. They are
very loudly blamed that they do not carry these prod-
ucts fast enough or cheaply enough, though, accord-
ing to a recent authority, their rates are less on the
average than the cost of the French water traffic.
Nevertheless, their wheels alone have made possible
that phenomenal draining of the riches of the land to
I90 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
the coasts and other shores, assisting the waters that
carry a half-billion tons of soil into the gulf every year.
Perhaps this hurried, panting development has been
for the good of all time, but until recently there has
been little or no thought of that "all time" (as we
observed in the po" ' '■' ■ arcelling).
Practical!}' the v country has tied itself
to a wheel, and so ^ liappiness and welfare
may be, come of oi eel. This territory is
capable of self-sup still its independent
spirit, bred of the ved before the day of
wheels; it is respo als that stop its rest-
less movement — as ' Ixion when Orpheus
played; but none tne less is il an eager, restless, un-
quiet life, driven as a wheel, driven by the same hand
that urged it into the valley.
No one asks — or few ask — if the wheel brings good
or ill. The only concern is that it shall run as quickly
and safely as is humanly and mechanically possible
and shall not discriminate between one shipper and
another, one community and another, one consumer
and another. That is the railroad problem. The
wheel has removed watersheds at pleasure, created
cities and fortunes by its presence or its taking thought.
But under the new policy of the government it is not
likely that there will ever again be such ruthless dis-
turbance of nature, or such wild, profuse creation.
Democracy, beginning in that valley, is seeking now a
perfect impersonal transportation machine.
But such a machine will drain quite as effectively
the country districts. The census returns for 1910
show, for example, that in one prosperous agricultural
State, Missouri, just west of the Mississippi, while the
TRAILS OF THE COUREURS DE BOIS 191
State as a whole showed an increase of 187,000 in ten
years, there was a net decrease of 84,000 in the rural
districts. A partial explanation of the latter statistic
is the moving on of farmers to still newer lands; an-
other, the decline in the size of families; but it is at-
tributable chieSy to the Brst statistic, the drift to the
city — and to this the wheels contribute more than any
other influence, carrying, as they do, the glamour or
the opportunity of the city life daily before the eyes of
the country boy.
To be sure, these same wheels are lessening, to some
extent, the congestion of the great centres of popula-
tion, and lightening their shadows by extending them
— spreading them^but none the less are the shadows
spreading faster from the coming of the country to the
city than of the suburbanizing of the city.
This movement is not peculiar to the Mississippi
Valley, but it is more rapid there, perhaps, than in any
other great area.
Let me give you an illustration of that demlgrating
influence. Two years ago I invited several leaders of
great transportation and educational interests in New
York to meet one of their number who, beginning life
as a telegraph operator out beyond the Mississippi,
was at the head of one of the two greatest railroads in
the east. Of the guests, one, the president of another
important railroad, was once a farm boy, then a freight
brakeman in that same western State; another, the
president of one of the longest railroads, was the son
of a stone-mason out in that valley; another, the head
of the Interborough system of New York, also a prairie-
bom boy; another, president of the greatest southern
railroad, was born at the mouth of the Mississippi;
IE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
another, one of the wealthiest men in the
?as at one time a messenger boy and tele-
perator just over the mountains on the site
Duquesne. Only one man of the company of
wenty men, assembled without thought of
lad been born in New York. AH had come
: country or from across the water, and most
from the great Mississippi Valley. I speak
'hile discussing tlie railroad, because it is their
rough the valley of the French that have made
lomenon possible.
; spoken of what the wheel has done in making
lanence of one republic of such an area a pos-
Nothing save a loose, heterogeneous confeder-
uld have been practicable without its unifying
It is only fair to those who made such gloomy
es in the early days to say that they had no
>n of what steam was destined to do. When
i-'ulton, the inventor of the steamboat, early in
TRAILS OF THE OOUREURS DE BOIS 193
tion cityward — a movement as wide as European civ-
ilization — but intensified there, where the inhabitants
have not been tied through generations of inheritance
or historic associations to particular fields, where primo-
geniture has no observance, and where the traditions
are of the wilderness and the visions are ever of a
promised land beyond. The dty is on every boy's
horizon. Its glow is in every prairie sky at twilight.
When a boy on those silent plains I had my Horace
and my Euripides in the field. The unattainable
eternal cities lent their charm and glory to the valley
whose childhood horizon I had not crossed. But now
no country boy thinks of the ancient or the medixvaL
It is the nearer city and clvilizauon that impress the
imagination^ The valedictorian of a class, graduat-
ing as I entered college, told me a few months ago
that he was building a trolley-line in Rome, and that,
after all, Falemian wine, of which we who had never
tasted wine out in that vtneless region thought as some
drink of the gods, was very bitter.
I have hinted at what the wheel has done, in what it
carries, to make all look ahke and think ahke and act
aUke, but there is one supreme service that must have
mention. In that country when travel was slow we
had a representative government. But while we still
have the same form, the wheel has made possible, and
so necessary, a more democratic government. When a
representative was weeks in reaching the capital he
acted on his own responsibility in larger measure than
now, when his constituency can reach him every morn-
ing. The valley is reached every day, just as the
people in a pure democracy were reached by the an-
cient stentor. The people are reserving to themselves
E FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
i more of the function of their one-time rep-
ves, in such measures as the referendum
ative intimate, and are trying to secure more
representation in such systems as the direct
and proportional representation suggest; but
are possible only through the aid of the wheel
ifhat it has brought. If the improvement of
:y is to come through more democracy, as
nk, then the railroad is an essential agent of
progress as well as of economic exploitation
al homogeneity. I am not discussmg this
It simply showing how dependent upon this
agent is the machinery of democracy,
ver, mobility is almost an essential quaHty
irit of democracy, the free way to the farthest
the open road to the highest position and
When the atom becomes practically fixed by
onment, reposeful and stable, stratification
We may or we may not have then something
TRAILS OF THE COUREURS DE BOIS 195
noon I walked over that Brst and most famous of the
French portages, but not content with that, I walked
on into the night along the Wisconsin, that I might
see the river as the explorers saw it. However, at mid-
night I took a palace car, with such conveniences as
even Louis the Great did not have at Versailles, and
woke well up the Mississippi. I spent the day at
another great State university and at dusk set off by
the actual trails of the French coureurs de bois (only
by wheels instead of on foot), first through the woods
and along rivers, above Green Bay to the "Soo," then
above Lake Huron and the Nipissing and down the
Ottawa River, where I saw the second day break, and
then on past La Salle's seigniory of St. Sulpice, around
Cartier's mountain into Montreal, and thence to the
Rock of Quebec.
It is a common, unimaginative metaphor in the
United States to call the en^ne which leads the mighty
trains across the country the iron horse; but it is de-
serving of a nobler figure. It is the iron coureur de
bois, still leading Europe into America, and America
into a newer America.
CR\PTER X
be lower St. Lawrence VaBer, amoog the
iKh Canadians, wiiere France is best remejn-
rd and where the sbui-in life is not disturbed
mt events or changii^ ojovcntions or evanes-
tiioDS, I am told there are traces in their lan-
f the sea life cpf their aiKestors on tht coasts
r approaches a farmhouse on horseback he
1 not to "Jigjit" or to "dismount" bat to
lark," and he is invited not to "tie" his borse
"moor" it- It is as if they were still oiTng
IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN" 197
" Paddte your own canoe." Yet even in the space of
one or two generations of agricultural Ufe that, too, is
disappearing, supplanted by a synonymous phrase,
borrowed of fields that have entirely forgotten the
primitive days, when men travelled only by water and
lived near the streams: "Hoe your own row."
The first sound of the overmountain migrarion of
which I spoke above was of the stealthy step of the
hunter, yet back of that for a century was the scarcely
audible plash of the paddle and the answering swirl
of the water. But as in overmountain migradon the
noisy wheel soon followed the foot, so in the other the
noiseless sail followed the swishing paddle.
The city of Paris bears a sailing ship upon her shield,
though she sits a hundred miles or more from the sea.
Whatever the significance of that symbol has been
to the people of France, it has a peculiar appropriate-
ness (probably never realized before) in the fact that
the iron, cordage, and anchors for the first vessel
which sailed upon the inland waters of the new world
were carried out from France to the first shipyard,
beyond the mountains, in the midst of the forest, above
the mighty Falls of Niagara.
Jason of Thessaly, sailing for the Golden Fleece in
Colchis, and braving the fiery breath of the dragon,
did not undertake a more perilous or more difficult
labor than he who bore from the banks of the Seine
the equipment of a vessel in which to bring back to
France, as he hoped, the fieece of the forest and the
plain.
We are accustomed to call those who crossed the
plains and the Rocky Mountains for the gold-fields of
California nearly two centuries later (in 1849) the
[E FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
tx; but the first American Argonauts went
ance, and they built their Jrgo on what is
.e Erie, on the edge of the Field of the Bulls,
lace, grown into a beautiful city, which now
e very name of the wild bull, the "buffalo,"
lin sound of the roaring of the dragon that had
:d all earUer explorers. So accurately do the
f the story of Jason's adventure become real-
lay! Champlain and others had heard only
;ance the thunder of the great cataract that
le day to become not only as docile as the
mder Jason's taming but as useful as a million
d bulls.
lie gathered his ship-carpenters and his ship
; between his journeys to Rouen (the place of
i) and elsewhere for the means of purchase.
re the winter had come in Normandy his mes-
were out amid the snows and naked forests of
n winters in continuance of that voyage toward
IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN" 199
the stomach, but nevertheless I listened attentively.
... I could have passed whole days and nights in
this way without eating."'
Along the way up the St. Lawrence he stopped to
minister to the habitants — too few and too poor to
support a priest — saying mass, exhorting, and baptiz-
ing. Early in November he arrived at the mission of
Fort Frontenac, which he had two or three years be-
fore helped to establish in the witds. Soon La Salle's
lieutenants. La Motte and Tonty, appeared with most
of the men, and while some were despatched in canoes
to Lake Michigan to gather the buffalo-hides and
beaver-skins against the coming of the ship, whose
keel had not yet been laid, the rest (La Motte, Henne-
pin, and sixteen men) embarked for the Niagara River,
by which the upper lakes empty into Lake Ontario
and the St. Lawrence. After a tempestuous voyage
up and across the take they reached this river, whose
torrent fury, gathered of "four inland oceans," stopped
even the canoes. Then, led of the priest, they toiled
up the cliffs called the "Three Mountains," because, I
suppose, of the three terraces. (Having climbed up
the face of the cliffs in winter, with a heavy camera
for my portable altar, and having broken the great
icicles formed by the trickling stream over one of the
terraces, in order to make my way across a narrow
ledge to the top of the precipice, I am able to know
what the journey must have meant to those first
European travellers.) Once upon the upper plateau,
they marched through the wintry forest and at length,
in "solitude unprofaned as yet by the pettiness of
■ParkmaD, "La Salle," p. 133. Hennepin, "A New Ducovery of a
Large Countty in America," ed. TliwBitet, i : 30.
1
E FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
liey beheld the "imperial cataract "—the
■ of water," as the Indians called it— or, as
1 described it, that "vast and prodigious
af water which falls down after a surprising
: astonishing manner, insomuch that the uni-
■s not afford its parallel, those of Italy and
nd being but sorry patterns." To this priest,
1, we owe the first description and picture of
probably now more familiar to the world
other natural feature of this continent. He
iwhat magnified the height of these falls,
: five hundred feet in the edition of 1683, and
to six hundred in 1697; but they are impres-
igh to acquit him of intentional falsification
erful enough to run virtually all the manu-
plants in the United States, if they could be
within its easy reach.
i, less than 9 per cent of the water that over-
n the four upper Great Lakes into the lower
IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN" 201
power.' What the conversion of the strength of this
Titan (for ages entirely wasted and for a century after
Hennepin only a scenic wonder) means, or may mean,
to industry in the future is intimated in some statistics,
furnished by a recent writer on the Great Lakes, show-
ing the relative cost per month of a certain unit of
power in a number of representative American cities.'
Boston ^37-SO
Philadelphia 839.25
New York 699-37
Chicago 629.43
Cleveland SS9-SO
Pittsburgh 419.62 '
Buffalo 184.91
Niagara Falls I44-I7
These figures are more significant as one contem-
plates the diminishing supply of coal in coming cen-
turies, if not decades. According to the estimate of a
reliable authority the available and accessible coal sup-
• "Under a tfeaty between the United St»tei and the Britiah Govern-
meoc oaly about 15 per cent of the theoretical honepower of Niagara Fall*
can be developed. The eacimate of the mioimum amouot of power that
CRD be developed on the Niagara River above and including the Falli i*
S,8oo,ooo h.p,, and the ataumed maximum ia 6,500,000 h.p. The treaty,
therefore, limiti present potuble minimum development on both iid«* of
the Falls to 1,450,000 h.p. Under the treaty only five-fourteenth* of the
power made available thereby belongs to the United Statea, its share being
reduced by the diversion of water from Lake Michigan into the Drainage
Canal at Chicago. There ia thus left at Niagara Falls only about 518,000
h.p. that can at present be developed on the American side." About one-
half of this total is now developed. — United States Commissioner of Corpo-
tationa. Report on water-power development in the United States. 1911.
* "Assuming the maximum power used to be one hundred hone-power,
the number of working hours a day to be ten, and the 'load factor,' or
average power actually used, to be seventy-five per cent of the total one
hundred, the cost per month b the cities named is as [above]." — Curwood,
"Hie Great Lakes," p. 135.
^^^M
E FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
e United States will be exhausted at the pres-
of exploitatiMi by the year 2027, and the
pply by the year 205a.
[atistics intimate the advantage possessed, per-
ond any other site in .America, by the strip
on which La Salle's men, from the banks of
:, and Hennepin, the priest from Calais, that
■s night in 167S encamped, building their
fires amid the snows, three miles above the
d so opening to the Wew of the wxarid a nat-
ce of power and wealth more valuable than
■- coal-fields or rich mines of gold or silver,
but a great waterfall to La Salle and Tonty
mepin — an impeding, noisy, hostile object,
the half-mutinous, quarrelsome worknoen
Flemings, Italians) it was a demon, no doubt,
;ry breath froze their beards mto icicles. It
ealit3', potenrially the most beneficent single,
■ force bounded by any ooe horizon of sky,
■
IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN" 203
is a stone erected by the local historical society to
mark the spot. When I saw the bronze tablet the
inscription was almost illegible, covered, as it was, with
ice and the snow that was at that very hour falling
upon it.
There, began the felling and hewing of trees that were
to touch the farther shores of Michigan. The supplies
brought out from Paris had been lost by the wreck of
La Salle's smaller vessel on the way up Ontario, but
enough was saved, or brought by La Salle on his re-
turn from Fort Frontenac, to gjve this sixty-ton vessel
full equipment, for in the spring she was launched.
The "friar pronounced his blessing on her; the as-
sembled company sang Te Deum; cannon were fired;
and French and Indians . . . shouted and yelped in
chorus as she glided into Niagara." She carried five
cannon and on her prow was carved such a "portentous
monster" as doubtless is to be found among the gro-
tesques of Notre Dame — a griffin (that is, a beast with
the body of a lion and the head, beak, and pinions of
a bird), in honor of the armorial bearings of Count
Frontenac.
Through spring and half the summer the vessel lay
moored beyond reach of the Indians but near enougji
so that Hennepin "could preach on Sundays from the
deck to the men encamped along the bank." When
La Salle, who had been obliged by disasters to go back
to Fort Frontenac during the building of the ship,
again appeared above the falls in midsummer, the
Gri^n was warped up into the placid lake, and on the
7th of August anchor was lifted and the fateful voyage
was begun.
There was (as when the ^rgo, the "first bold vessel,
IE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
le seas") no Orpheus standing "high on the
ind "raising his entrancing strain." Nor did
; of proud Thessalians or of "transported demi-
tand round to cheer them off. The naked In-
heir hands over their mouths in wonderment
ing, "Gannorom! Gannorom !" alone saw the
)at move out over the waters without oar or
)r towing rope. For music there was only the
n again, sung by raw, unpractised voices, such
Tiight hear among the boatmen of the Seine,
ot such music, at any rate, as that of Orpheus,
e plain men grow "heroes at the sound."
ss no one felt himself a hero. The only in-
i of any consciousness of a high mission comes
ennepin, who, when the Griffin, some days
is ploughing peacefully through the straits that
le Mer Douce— "verdant prairies, dotted with
nd bordered with lofty forests" on either side,
jf deer and flocks of swans and wild turkeys"
IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN" 205
honor of the day on which your company reached it —
has become masculine in tribute to an American gen-
eral. If your later praying to that patron of seamen,
St. Anthony of Padua, had not availed to save you
from the peril of the storm and you had gone to death
in unsalted water, you could hardly have been more
completely forgotten. One has spoken now and then
lightly of the vow made by your commander, La Salle,
to build a grateful chapel to St. Anthony if your lives
were saved during that storm, forgetting that so long
as the Mississippi runs to the sea there will be a chapel
to St. Anthony (St. Anthony's Falls) in which grati-
tude will be continually chanted through ages for the
preservation of the ship and its crew to find haven in
quiet waters behind Point St. Ignace.
It was there, at St. Ignace that we have seen La
Salle, in scarlet, kneeling before the altar, where Mar-
quette's bones were doubtless by that time gathered
by his devoted savage followers, and it was thence that
they passed on to an island in Green Bay, the goal of
their journey.
From that far port the first cargo carried of sails
was sent out, bound for the shore on which the Griffin's
timbers had been hewn. That it never reached harbor
of that calm shelter, or any other, we know; but that
loss, once the path was traced in the waters, is hardly
of consequence save as it helped further to illustrate
the indomitable spirit of La Salle and his companions.
What good came to Thessaly or Greece of the yellow
peltry that Jason brought back is not even kept in
myth or fable. The mere adventure was the all.
They did not even think of its worth. The goatskin
was valueless except as a proof or token, and the
IE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
go, though the greatest ship known to the
■ths of Greece, and though dedicated, we are
Veptune at the end of the voyage, became the
)f no such mightj' fleet as did the Griffin. The
le Greek ships and commanders in the Iliad
t a pygmy analogy. And if you were to go to
to-day, near the site of that first shipyard (a
:her away from the falls), you would know that
tssoTS of La Salle in new Griffins had actually
back the golden fleece — the priceless fleece,
; of the plains if not of the forests. Day after
»old is hung against the sky as the grain is
im the ships into elevators which can store at
twenty-three million bushels of wheat,
lasts of the lakes up which the Griffin led the
vay are three thousand three hundred and
ve miles in length, or, including those of the
:e, Frontenac, which was also first touched of
:eels, over four thousand miles. The statistics
IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN" 207
ports upon those shores as in France to-day — between
thirty-five and forty millions.
The lakes have a tonnage equal to one-third of the
total tonnage of North America,"
They have made possible a saving in cost of trans-
portation (and so of production) of several hundred
million dollars in a single year.*
Only ninety million dollars have been spent by the
government for their improvement in the whole his-
tory of their occupauon, above Niagara Falls,' while
France in that time has spent for harbors and water-
ways alone seven hundred and fifty million dollars.*
They have been privately developed.
Six times as much freight passes over these lakes
as through the Suez Canal in a year.^
Three thousand five hundred vessels and more than
twenty-five thousand men are required to move the
hundred million tons of freight which every year would
fill a train encircling the globe.'
If one were to stand on the shore of that "charming
strait," between Erie and Huron, the Detroit River
(which Hennepin so covetously describes, wishing to
make settlement there, until La Salle reminded him
of his " professed passion for exploring a new country "),
one would now see a vessel passing one way or the
■Curwood, "The Great Liket," p. 4. "In 1913 the total tonnage of the
Great LiLea waa 2,940,000 ton*, of the United Sutei 7,887,000 ton*."— Re-
port United Statca Comrauaion of Navigation.
• Curwood, "The Great Lakei," p. 4.
' Curwood, "The Great Lakea," p. 9.
'"Four hundred and iky million doUara of thit total hat been for the
Improvement and mainieDance of the waterwaya." — Report of National
Waterwaya Commisuon, p. 507.
• Curwood, "The Great Lakea," p. 6.
• Curwood, "The Great Lakea," pp. 3j, a6, and Report of Umted Sute*
Commiaakm of Navigation, 1913.
iE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
'eiy twelve minutes, on the average, day and
iring the eight months of open navigation.
ire they small sailing vessels of a few tons'
but great sailless, steam-propelled hulks,
from five to ten thousand tons.
is no fleet of graceful galleons — half bird, half
the Criffin was— that have followed in her
what Hennepin called "the vast and unknown
which even the savages knew not the end."
ive, in the evolution of nautical zoology, lost
ngs, and feathers, and now like a shoal of wet
wny and black, their powerful heads and long
cks just visible above the blue water, they
the western Mediterranean from spring to
hips of the lion brood are, some of them, five
undred feet in length, and carry eleven thou-
is of cargo. I have seen the skeleton of one of
3n-boned beasts, and I have been told that
IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN" 209
iron ore, forty-seven million four hundred and thirty-
five thousand seven hundred and seventy-one tons in
1912' from the shores of Superior, where Joliet had
made search for copper mines, where Father Allouez
— in the midst of reports of baptisms and masses —
tells of nuggets and rocks of the precious metal, and
where has grown up in a few years the "second greatest
freight-shipping port on earth" — a port that bears the
name of that famous French coureur de bois, Du Lhut.
Forty-seven millions of tons, and there are still a bil-
lion and a half in sight on those shores, which have al-
ready given to the ships hundreds of millions of their
dark treasure.
After the ore, lumber, one billion one hundred and
sixty-five million feet* in one year (1911); a waning
amount from the vanishing forests that once completely
encircled these lakes. Alexander Pope, whose "Ode
on St. CeciUa's Day" I have quoted (and would there
were a Homer, Pope, or Kipling to sing this true
legend), speaks of Argo seeing "her kindred trees
descend from Pelion to the Main " — from the mountain
to the sea, where Jason's boat was launched. So, with
the departure of the Griffin from her Green Bay Island,
might a prophetic poet have seen her masts beckoning
all the kindred trees to the water, in which one hun-
dred and sixty billion feet of pine have descended from
the forests of Michigan alone,* and that is but one of
the circling States. And there is this singular fact to
be added, that nearly a third of the annual cargo goes
to the "Tonawandas,"* the "greatest lumber towns"
' "Mineral Induitry," II : 4SS-
* Monthly Summary of Internal Commerce of the United State*, Decem-
* Curwood, "The Great Laket," p. 57.
* Curwood, "The Great Lakei," p. 54.
^^H
li^^^^B
1
IE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
rorld that have grown up practically on the
e of the shipyard at the mouth of Cayuga
little way above the falls.
ifter the ore and lumber, grain — the fleece of
s, immensely more valuable than that of the
one hundred and fifty million bushels in one
1 eleven million barrels of flour — a fortnight's
pply for the entire world.'
fter ore and lumber and grain, fuel and other
jcessities of life.
asual relation between the pioneer building
ney of the Griffin and these statistics cannot,
I, be established, but what no inspired human
r could have divined, or even the wildest
g of La Salle have imagined, is as sequential
listory that has been made to trace all new-
evelopment in the wake of the caravels of
IS. The storms of nature and the jealousies
n breasts thwarted La Salle's immediate am-
1
■
IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN" 2ll
these French mariners who, first of Europeans, trusted
themselves to sails and west winds on those uncharted
seas.
But this is not the all of the tragic story. The Griffin.
earned in her the prophecies of other than lalte ves-
sels. She had in her hold on that fateful trip the
cordage and iron for the pioneer of the river ships.
So when she went down she spoke to the waters that
engulfed her the two dreams of her builder and com-
mander: one dream the navigation of the lakes and
the other the coursing of the western rivers.
The Spanish council which decreed long ago that
"if it had pleased God that . . . rivers should have
been navigable, He would not have wanted human as-
sistance to make them such " would be horrified by the
sacrilege that has been committed and is being con-
templated by the followers of the men of the Griffin.
They have made a canal around the Falls (which
Hennepin first saw breathing a cloud of mist over the
great abyss) — a canal that, supplemented by other
canals along the St. Lawrence River, allows vessels of
fourteen-foot draugjit to go from Lake Erie to Montreal
and so on to the sea. If this achievement were put
into the poetry of legend it would show the outwitting
of the dragon.
They have deepened the straits where the Griffin
had to wait for favorable breezes and soundings to pass
from Erie to Huron — the Symplegades (clashing rocks)
of the new-world voyage.
They have made canals on either side of the Sault
Ste. Marie — the rapids of the St. Mary's River, by
the side of which St. Lusson took formal possession of
all that northern empire and Father Allouez made his
1
^E FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
linary address — canals through which sixty-two
tons passed in 1910 toward the east and south.
have made and deepened harbors all the way
[he shores till ships two hundred times the size
Wiffin can ride in them.
iiis is not all. The symbols of La Salle's vision
in the lakes memories of the days when their
an through the Mississippi Valley to the gulf
:ry course which La Salle's unborn Griffin was
the continent tilted a little to the east and in
ng poured the water of the upper lakes over
gara edge into the St. Lawrence, that same
topped the overflow down into the Mississippi
Gulf of Mexico at the other end of the lakes,
iight was the tilting that the water still sweeps
places, when the lakes are high, and sometimes
rries light boats across.
:e engineers have, in effect, been undoing with
IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN" 213
those, on the one side, who wish to maintain the gran-
deur of Niagara much as it was when Hennepin first
pictured it, and with them those who for utilitarian
reasons do not wish its thunderous volume diminished,
except, perhaps, for their local uses, and those also who
fear disaster to their harbors and canals all around
the lakes, deepened at great expense, if water is led
away toward the Mississippi; and, on the other side,
the public health of millions at the western end of the
lakes and the commercial hopes of other millions in
the Mississippi Valley waiting for the Griffins of the
lakes to come with more generous prices for their
produce and bring to their doors what the rest of the
world has now to send to them by the more expensive
railroad.
Some day, perhaps, the great upper lake, Superior,
will be made a reservoir where enough water will be
impounded in wet seasons for a steady and more gen-
erous supply during the dry seasons; in which event
there will be water enough to keep Niagara in peren-
nial beauty and power, to fill all the present and pros-
pective harbors and canals to their desired depths
and float even larger fleets of Griffins, and, at the
same time, have enough left to make the Mississippi,
as the Frenchman who first saw it visualized it, and as
President Roosevelt, two centuries later, expressed it,
"a loop of the sea."*
But another amicable battle is on — a battle of the
eastern levels — ^between the men of the old French
valley to the north (t. e., the St. Lawrence) and the
men of the old Iroquois valleys to the south, of the
Mohawk and the Hudson. In 1850 a canal was built
'Herbert Quick, " American Inkttd Waterway*," New York, 1909.
IE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
latter from above the Falls to the navigable
and with high ceremony a cask of the water
Erie was emptied into New York harbor as
of the wedding of lake and ocean. Then
built her Welland Canal around Niagara and
ioals along the St. Lawrence and channels in
Lawrence past the Lachine Rapids to Mon-
id even made the way from there to the sea
hat the growing ocean vessels might come to
Kelaga. Now New York has begun deepening
and almost useless Erie Canal from seven and
to twelve feet, and to take barges one hundred
' feet long and twenty-five feet beam, with a
of ten feet, and Canada is contemplating still
hannels that will let the ocean steamers into
jrt of the Great Lakes. She is even thinking
al that will follow the path of Champlain, up
[wa and across the old portage to Lake Nipis-
thence by the French River into Lake Huron;
IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN" 215
across the ocean to European ports, brought a thou-
sand miles nearer.
This is but the merest intimation of the prophetic
service of the water pioneers. And when the prophecy
of these pioneers, as interpreted in terms of steam
and locks and dams unlmown to them, is fulfilled, it is
not beyond thinking that a captain of a seagoing ves-
sel of ten or twenty thousand tons from Havre or
Cherbourg may some day be calling in deep voice (as
last summer in a room on the twenty-ninth floor of a
Chicago "sky-scraper" I heard a local descendant of
the Grijffin screeching) for the lifting of the bridges that
will open the way to the Mississippi, the heart of
America.
Hl^l
BIB
CHAPTER XI
IN CITIES THAT HAVE SPRUNG FROM '■
FRENCH FORTS
a strange and varied crop that has grown
1 the leaden plates with French inscriptions,
ted by St. Lusson, La Salle, and Celoron by
d rivers in that western country. The myth-
' of the sowing of Cadmus in the Boeotian field
rather tame by comparison with a true relation
has actually occurred within the memory of a
rations in a valley as wild when Celoron trav-
; course of La Belle Riviere (the name given
'rench to the Ohio, which was known to the
as the "River of the Whitecaps") with his
■
WESTERN CITIES 217
St. Joseph, and still other cities whose names have
never Been heard by the people of France — even as
Phcenicia, in the wanderings of her adventurous son,
Cadmus, became the mother of Thebes and the god-
mother of Greek culture and of European literature.
Palamedes and Simonides added some letters to the
alphabet brought, according to tradition, by Cadmus
to Greece, and Cadmus suffered the doom of those who
sow dragon's teeth, as France has suffered, but still is
his name kept in the memory of every school child;
and so should be remembered those who planted the
lead plates and sowed the teeth that sprang into the
"Spartoi" of a new civilization.
Of the sowing of St. Lusson at the "Soo" and La
Salle at New Orleans we have spoken. Long later
(1749)1 (^^ ^^^t ^^ whom we have record after La
Salle, another French sower went forth to sow along
the rivers close to the foot of the Alleghany Mountains
— Celoron de Bienville, Chevalier de St. Louis. It is
of his sowing that the main cities have sprung, for he
planted a plate of "repossession" at the entrance of
every important branch of the Ohio and fastened
upon trees sheets of "white iron" bearing the arms of
France. Chief among them is Pittsburgh, which stands
on the carboniferous site of Fort Duquesne like the prow
of a vessel headed westward, a place which Celoron
is believed to have had in mind when he wrote in his
journal, "the finest place on La Belle Riviere" — what
was then a wedge of wild black land lodged between
two converging streams that drained all the slope of
the northern Alleghanies being now the foundation
of the world's capital of a sterner metal than lead —
scarred with fires and smothered with smoke from
IE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
maces, two of which alone, it has been esti-
y some one, have poured forth enough molten
he last thirty years to cover with steel plates
thick a road fifty feet wide stretching from
ghany edge of the valley not merely to the
f the Ohio but on to the other mountain bor-
'se all dreams of a way to the western sea
led.
bis highway of plates across the empire of New
!;ives but suggestion of the meagerest fraction
uitage of the planting of the leaden plates or
ing of the arms of France upon the trees along
1 — forty pounds of iron, it has been estimated
graphic statistician, for every man, woman,
i on the globe to-day,' and I do not know how
n. And, in a sense, all from a small box or
plates made of lead — six, eight, or more in
eleven inches long, seven mches wide, and one
WESTERN CITIES 219
lands on both sides to the sources of the aforesaid
streams, as the preceding Kings of France enjoyed it,
or ought to have enjoyed it, and which they have
upheld by force of arms and by treaties, notably by
those of Ryswick, Utrecht, and Aix la Chapelle."
And with these plates (to be buried at the con-
fluences of the important rivers along the way) were
carried sheets of tin — of white iron — on which the
arms of France had been stamped, to be nailed to trees
above the places of the plates.
"As the Kings of France enjoyed it, or ought to
have enjoyed it " — what a blight of regret was in the
very seed that in its flower of to-day makes one wish
for some delicate beauty or subtle fragrance that is
not there, because the Kings of France did not let
France enjoy it.
One can but pause here again, as I have paused
many, many times in the preparation of these chapters,
to ask what would have been the result if France had
but chosen as Portia's successful suitor in Shake-
speare's "Merchant of Venice" when he was confronted
with the caskets of gold, silver, and lead — had but
chosen "to owe and hazard all for lead," instead of
deciding as did the Prince of Morocco, the other
suitor, that "a golden mind stoops not to shows of
dross" — if France had hazarded all for the holding
and settling of those regions whose worth was sym-
bolized in those unpromising pieces of lead planted
in the fertile soil of Louisiana, Michigan, and Ohio
along the watercourses, rather than in the caskets of
gold and silver sought among the mountains — if
Louis XV, throwing dice at Versailles in the valley of
the Seine, as Parkman describes him, with his piles of
^1
tfl-^^^^H
E FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
r before him, and the princes and princesses,
d duchesses and courtiers about him, had but
the advice of Marquis de la Galissonniere, the
:ked governor-general of Canada, who fur-
eloron with his leaden seeds and appointed the
the sowing^f Louis XV had but answered
dian governor's prayer and sent French peas-
;re the plates were buried, or had even let
wanted to flee to that valley, as they would
1 by tens of thousands, preferring the hard-
1 privations of the pioneer to the galleys, the
1, or the gallows — then "Versailles" in that
■ the Ohio would not be merely what it is, a
township in a city that bears the name of a
tatesman,
soldiers had been sent !" Parkman, approach-
reat valley in imagination with Celeron, from
h, exclaims, "the most momentous and far-
question ever brought to issue on this con-
■
WESTERN CITIES 221
the vast territories of the West,"' could they after all
have done more for the world than those who, in effect,
sacrificed their lives on glorious western battle-fields
for the United States ?
A little way back I spoke of the first expedition
looking toward that valley from the Atlantic side of
the Alleghanies — the expedition of the "Knights of
the Golden Horseshoe" — and of its vain threats. In
1748 a company of still wider horizon was formed in
Virginia, George Washington's father being a mem-
ber of it. It was known as the Ohio Land Company
and derived its transmontane rights through George
II from John Cabot, an Italian under English com-
mission, who may have set foot neariy two centuries
before somewhere on the coast of North America be-
low Labrador, and from a very expansive interpreta-
tion of a treaty with the Indians at Lancaster, Pa., in
1744, the trans-AlIeghany Indians protesting, however,
not less firmly than the French, that the lands pur-
chased by the English under that treaty extended no
farther toward the sunset than the laurel hills on the
western edge of the Alleghanies.
News of this Virginia corporate enterprise was
willingly carried, it is surmised, by jealous Pennsyl-
vanians and hostile French, till it reached Montreal,
and so it was that Celoron was despatched with his
little company to bury "Monuments of the Renewal
of Possession " by France.
It was a significant and rather solemn, but most
picturesque, processional that this chevalier of St.
Louis led from Montreal through one thousand two
hundred leagues of journey by water and land to the
' ParkmaD, "Montcalm and Wolfe," p. 41.
E FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
f the Miami River and back. There are no
songs in this prelude such as were heard
: crests of the Blue Ridge when Spotswood's
1 came up from the other side. It has to me
isphere and movement of some Greek tragedy,
me writer likens it to medieval mummery,
it is only a knowledge of its import and the
makes it sombre and grave despite the beau-
ing to this prelude which one may read to-day
rench archives. So full of portent and color
t I wonder no one has woven its incidents,
they are, into French literature or into that
Lachine on the r 5th of June," begins Celoron's
now in the Departement de la Marine, in
vith a detachment formed of a captain, eight
I officers, six cadets, an armorer, twenty men
oops, one hundred and eighty Canadians, and
WESTERN CITIES 223
But the expedition then was often stopped by
savages who ran away to avoid the excessive speech-
making and lecturing of these old-world orators, con-
ferenciersi and the ears and eyes of the auditors who
did not run away were opened by strings of want-
pum, though they were often too little moved by the
love of their father Ononuo and his concern lest the
English should make themselves masters and the In-
dians their victims.
There is in a Paris library a map of this expedi-
tion made by the hand of Pere Bonnecamps, who signs
himself " Jesmtte Mathematiciant." He kept a diary',
also preserved in Paris, in which there has crept some
of the sombreness of that narrow, dark valley (now
filled with oil-derricks) surrounded by mountains some-
times so high as to let them see the sun only from nine
or ten o'clock in the morning till two or three in the
afternoon. And across the mountains one may hear
even to-day the despairful, yet appealing, voice of
Celoron, speaking for the great Onontio: "My chil-
dren," he says, "since I have been at war with the
English I have learned that that nation has seduced
you; and, not content with corrupting your hearts,
they have profited by my absence from the country to
invade the land which does not belong to them and
which is mine. ... I will give you the aid you should
expect from a good father. ... I will furnish you
traders in abundance if you wish them. I will send
here oflScers if that please you — to give you good spirit,
so that you will only work in good affairs. . . . Follow
'Translation in "Jesuit Relatiou," ed. ThwaitM, vol. 69. "Account of
the voyage on the Beautiful River nude in 174Q under the direction of
Moniieur de Celoron."
[E FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
:e. Then the sky will always be beautiful and
:r your villages."'
father," said the spokesman for the savages
er council, "we pray you have pity on us; we
g men who cannot reply as the old men could;
I have said to us has opened our eyes [received
ifen us spirit, we see that you only work with
lirs. . . . [The great Onontio in Paris is play-
le while in Paris with the louis d'or.] Examine,
er, the situation in which we are. If thou
he English to rerire, who give us necessaries,
:cia!Iy the smith who mends our guns and
, we would be without help and exposed to
nger and of misery in the Belle Riviere. Have
LIS, my fathctt thou canst not at present give
ecessaries. Leave us at least for this winter,
St till we go hunting, the smith and some one
help us. We promise thee that in the spring
WESTERN CITIES 225
had come and built upon its site Fort Duquesne —
the defense of the mountain gate to the great valley —
here with a few hundred men on the edge of a hostile
wilderness to make Beginning of that mighty struggle
which was to end, as we know, on the river by which
Cartter and Champlain had made their way into the
continent.
It is a fact, remarkable to us now, that the Brst
to bring a challenge from behind the mountains to
that brave and isolate garrison sitting in Fort Duquesne
at the junction of the water paths, was Washington
("Sir Washington," as one chronicler has written it),
not Washington the American but Washington the
English subject, major in the colonial milttta, envoy
of an English governor of Virginia, Dinwiddie, who,
having acquired a controlling interest in the Ohio
Company, became especially active in planning to seat
a hundred families on that transmontane estate of a
half-million acres and so to win title to it.
"So complicated [were] the political interests of [that]
time that a shot fired in America [was] the signal for
setting all Europe together by the ears," wrote Vol-
taire,* and "it was not a cannon-shot" that gave the
signal but, as Parkman said, "a volley from the hunt-
ing pieces of a few backwoodsmen, commanded by a
Virginia youth, George Washington."'
We must stop for a moment to look at this lithe
young English colonist, twenty-one years of age,
standing on the nearest edge of the French explora-
rions and claims and the farthest verge of English ad-
'Voluire, "The French io America" in hi* "Short Studies in En^iih
and American Subjects," p. 149.
< Parknun, "Montcalm and Wolfe," i : J.
WESTERN CITIES 227
I have often wondered at the miracle which raised
from one bit of ground the corn and the pumpkin, and
from another the vine and filled its fruit with wine.
The one-eyed veteran, Legardeur de St. Pierre, the
commander of Fort Le Bceuf, asked Washington, in
rich diplomatic sarcasm, to descend to the particular-
ization of facts, and the lithe figure disappeared behind
the snows of the mountains only to come again across
the mountains in the springtime with sterner que»-
rioning. There was then no talk of Cabot or La Sall^
of Indian purchase or crown property. Jumonville
may have come out from Duquesne for peaceable
speech, but Washington misunderstood or would not
listen. A flash of flint fire, a fresh bit of lead planted
in the hill of laurel, a splash of blood on the rock, and
the war for the west was begun.
What actually happened out on the slope of that
hill will never be accurately known; but, though Wash-
ington was only twenty-two years old then, "full of
military ardor" and "vehement," he could not have
been guilty of wilful firing on men of peaceful intent.
It doubtless seemed but an insignificant skirmish
when Washington attacked Jumonville near Pittsburgh,
and it ts now remembered by only a line or two in our
histories and the little cairn of stones "far up among
the mountain fogs near the headwaters of the Yough-
iogheny River," which marks the grave of Jumonville.
Washington, the major of colonial militia in the Al-
leghany Mountains, the scout of a land company, has
been entirely forgotten in Washington, the father of a
nation; but Jumonville, the French ensign with no
land-scrip, fighting certainly as unselfishly and with
as high purpose, is not forgotten in any later achieve-
^E FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
rhat skirmish ended all for him. But let it be
ered even now that he was a representative of
standing almost alone, at the confluence of all
srs for hundreds of miles on the other slope of
^ghanies, in defense of what other men of
Kad won hy their hardihood,
rd a great audience at the Academy applaud
fe endurance of French priests and soldiers in
iome day I hope these unrenowned men who
d as much for France in America will be as
remembered. There is a short street in Pitts-
hat bears Jumonville's name— a short street
IS from the river into a larger street with the
one of his seven brothers, De Villiers, Coulon
srs, who hastened from Montreal, while an-
other hastened from the Illinois to avenge his
he cairn on the hillside has grown to no high
;nt. Mr. Hulbert, who has written with filial
WESTERN CITIES 229
forts by water. Quebec, Frontenac, Niagara, Presque
Isle, the Rock St. Louis, St. Joseph, Chartres, and
many others stood by river or lake. But the going
was often slow. Celoron (v^ose name is often spelled
Celeron but would seem not to deserve that spelling)
was fifty-three days in making his water Journey from
Montreal to the site of Pittsburgh. But a Celoron of
to-day may see the light of the Bartholdi statue in
New York harbor at ten o'clock by night and yet pass
Braddock's field in the morning (before the time that
Bonnecamp said the sun came up in the narrow valley
of the Belle Riviere), and have breakfast at the Du-
quesne Club in time for a city day's work. It was
about as far from Paris to Marsdiles in 1750 as it is
to-day from Paris to Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh is the front door of the valley of La
Salle, as we now know the valley, and the most im-
portant door; for the tonnage that enters and leaves
it by rail and water (177,071,238 tons in 1912 for the
Pittsburgh district) exceeds the tonnage of the five other
greatest cities of the world > and is twice the combined
tonnage of both coasts of the United States to and
from foreign ports — which is probably due to the fact
that so much of its traffic is not in silks and furs
but in iron and coal. And the multitudes of human
beings that pass through it are comparable in number
with the migrant tonnage and inanimate cargoes; for
Pittsburgh is "the antithesis of a mediaeval town";
"it is all motion;" "it is a flow, not a tank." The
mountains, once impenetrable barriers that had to be
gone about, have been levelled, and in the levelling
1 R. B. Naylor, iddnu before the Ohio Vallef Hiitoriul AttocUtioD
(quoted in Hulbert, "Ohio River,** pp. 365-6).
WESTERN CITIES 231
that it was not to a place of torment but to the halls
of the swarth gods of creation, those great, dim,
shadowy sheds that stretch along the river's edge.
Into these, men of France, has your Fort Duquesne
grown — mile on mile of flame-belching buildings, with
a garrison as great as the population of all New France
in the day of Duquesne.
The new-worid epic will find some of its color and
incident there — an epic in which we have already heard
the men of France nailing the sheets of "white iron"
against the trees of the valley of La Belle Riviere. And
as I saw the white-hot sheets of iron issuing from those
crunching rollers, driven by the power of seven thou-
sand horses, I felt that the youth with the stamping
iron should have put a fleur-de-lis upon each with all
his other cabalistic markings, for who of us can know
that any metal would ever have flowed white from the
furnaces in that valley if the white-metal signs of
Louis XV had not first been carried into it 7
In each of these halls there pass in orderly succes-
sion cars with varied cargoes; red ore from the far-
away hills beyond Superior, limestone fragments from
some near-by hill, and scrap of earlier burning. These,
one by one, are seized by a great arm of iron, thrust
out from a huge moving structure that looks like a
battering-ram and is operated by a young man about
whom the lightnings play as he moves; and, one by one,
they are cast into the furnaces that are heated to a
temperature of a thousand degrees or more. There
the red earth is freed of its "devils," as the great
ironmaster has named the sulphur and phosphorus —
freed of its devils as the red child was freed of his sins
by the touch of holy water from the fingers of Allouez
IE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
hose very forests from which the red ore was
d comes forth purified, to be cast into flam-
ts, to be again heated and then crushed and
, and sawed and pierced for the better service
; course of a few minutes one sees a few iron
of ore that was a month before lying in the
;yond Superior transformed into a girder for
, a steel rail, a bit of armor-plate, a beam for
taper— and all in utter human silence, with
1 pushing and pulling of a few levers, the ac-
lovelling by a few hands, the deliberate testing
7 pairs of experienced eyes.
is the new Fort Duquesne that is holding the
the confluence of the rivers and trails just
the AUeghanies, and this is the ammunition
lich that begrimed but strong-faced garrison
the vallev to-day, supports the city on the
n^iill^n^h^onTOlut^jhmu^n^
WESTERN CITIES 233
is easily mined, and elevated above the rivers, much of
it comes down to Pittsburgh by gravity. There are
twenty-nine billion tons of it, good for steam, gas or
coke. Then there are vast stores of otl [seven million
five hundred thousand gallons annually] natural gas
[of which two hundred and fifty million feet are con-
sumed daily], sand, shale, clay and stone, with which
to give Pittsburgh and the tributary country the lead
of the world in iron and steel, glass, electrical ma-
chinery, street-cars, tin plate, air-brakes and fire-
brick."*
And to all this natural bounty the national gov-
ernment has added that of the tariff and of millions
spent in river improvements, while Europe has con-
tributed raw labor already fed to the strength of oxen
and often already developed to highest skill. It was a
young chemist trained in Europe who conducted me
through the mills, explaining all the processes in a
perfect idiomatic speech, though of broken accent.
The white-hot steel ingot swinging beneath a smoky
sky is a sign of the contribuuon of France througji
Pittsburgh to civilization, not merely the material
but the human contribution. The ingot, a great
block of white-hot steel, is the sign of her labor, which
has assembled the scattered elements of the valley
and, in the fierce heat of natural and unfed fires, has
compounded them into a new metal that is some-
thing more than iron, more valuable than gold. But
it is only another sign, too, of forces that have as-
sembled from all parts of the earth, men represented
in the varied cargoes that are poured by a seemingly
'J. R. Common*. "W*ge Eaniert of Rtuburg," m Sitney, Mirch 6,
1909, at : 1051-64.
HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
pnt hand into those furnaces — red-blooded
I with them slag that has gone through the
■Ider civilizations.
■let me say again, is being made a new metal;
ine can doubt. It Is not merely a melting and
Iping of old coin with a new superscription, a
Tereignty — a composite face instead of a per-
Eness — it is the making, as I have said in other
Tons and metaphors, of a new race.
lad an instinct of human character, such as
ptive sense of the fibre and tension of steel
I by the man who watches the boiling in the
I and who, from time to time, puts aside his
Iglasses and looks at the texture of a typical
p metal, or who stands at the emptying of the
the ladle and directs the addition of
r magnesium to bring his output to the right
■ncy, I could tell you what strains and stresses
would stand. As it is, I can
WESTERN CITIES 235
that dim canyon — Servians, Croatians, Ruthenians,
Lithuanians, Slovaks, with Italians, Poles, and Rus-
sian Jews."' It is from Slavs and mixed people of the
old European midland, says one, "where the suc-
cessive waves of broad-headed and fair-haired peoples
gathered force and swept westward to become Celt
and Saxon, and Swiss and Scandinavian and Teuton,"
the old European midland with its "racial and religious
loves and hates seared deep, that the new immigration
is coming to Pittsburgh to work out civilization under
tense conditions" — not with that purpose, to be sure,
but with that certain result. The conscious purposes
have been expressed in the tangible ingots, the wages
they have offered them in their hot hands, and the
proBts. The civilization has been incidental.
There is developing, however, an effort in the midst
of this "dynamic individualism" to make both the new
and the old immigration work out "civilization."
This individualism was prodigal, profligate, at first.
But it has learned thrift; it by and by came to bum its
gas over and over; it made the purifying substances
go on in a continued round of service; it became more
mindful of human muscles and bones and eyes and
ears; it took the latest advice of experts, but for steel's
sake, not civilization's.
Mr. Carnegie, when a manufacturer there, found
90 per cent of pure iron in the refuse of his competitor,
it is said. This he bought under long contract and
worked over in his own mills. His neighbor's waste
became a part of his fortune. And the result of that
■P. Roberts, "The New ntuburg," in Ckarititt and the Commonj,
January 1, 1909, 21 : 533. Sw alio J. A. Fltcfa, "The Steel Worken,"
New York, 1910.
HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
nent and thrift is now furnishing an analogue |
conscious utilization of other waste — waste of '
rapacity of the steel-worker for happiness and
;ss,
Ilamegie has indeed led the way in the estab-
t of libraries, art galleries, museums, institutes
ling and research out of what were but waste
, as some millionaires spend their profits. All
tings upon the hills are by-products of the steel-
awn in the ravine. In every luminous ingot
in the mills that were his, there is something
the pension of a university professor out in
, something for an artist in New York or Paris,
ng for an astronomer on the top of Mount
something for the teacher in the school upon
1, something for every library established by
: is now making itself felt, however, is a desire
the wage element in the ingot as thriftily, as
WESTERN CITIES 237
report made to a city-plan committee of a Pittsburgh
commission will indicate:
"A third undeveloped asset in the Pittsburgh water-
front is its value for recreation and as an element of
dvic comeliness and self-respect. One of the deplorable
consequences of the short-sighted and wasteful com-
mercialism of the later nineteenth century lay in its
disregard of what might have been the xsthetic by-
products of economic improvement; in the false impres-
sion spread abroad that economical and useful things
were normally ugly; and in the vicious idea which fol-
lowed, that beauty and the higher pleasures of civilized
life were to be sought only in things otherwise useless.
Thus the pursuit of beauty was confounded with ex-
travagance.
"Among the most significant illustrations of the fal-
lacy of such ideas are the comeliness and the incidental
recreation value which attach to many of the com-
mercial water fronts of European river ports, and it is
along such lines that Pittsburgh still has opportunity
for redeeming the sordid aspect of its business centre.
"Wherever in the world, as an incident of the high-
ways and wharves along its river banks, a city has pro-
vided opportunity for the people to walk and sit under
pleasant conditions, where they can watch the water
and the life upon it, where they can enjoy the breadth
of outlook and the sight of the open sky and the op-
posite bank and the reflections in the stream, the result
has added to the comeliness of the city itself, the
health and happiness of the people, and their loyalty
and local pride. This has been true in the case of a
bare paved promenade, running along like an elevated
railroad over the sheds and tracks and derricks of a
busy ocean port, as at Antwerp, in the case of a tree-
'HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
sidewalk along a commercial street with the
uays below it, as at Paris and Lyons and hun-
jf lesser cities; and in the case of a broad em-
ent garden won from the mud banks by dredging
ing, as at London."
id great difficulty in finding a bookstore in
irgh. Some day that ideahstic condition which
the Seine so dear to thousands who know its
nood, and so dear both to the wise and the igno-
lay obtain on La Belle Riviere.
is but one item of a planning for the future of
ty which thinks not merely of its beautifying
the pleasure of its people in their leisure, but of
Jitions which affect the health, convenience, edu-
and general welfare of the whole district — that
once called the "black country," of which Pitts-
was the "dingy capital" — one of the regions
the French were pioneers,
ve spoken of this as the "taking thought" of a
WESTERN CITIES 239
No such thorough and systematic study of existing
city conditions has been made anywhere else in Amer-
ica. It is quite as scientific as the scholarly studies of
buried cities, only immensely more complex and dif-
ficult. Knowing itself and possessed of an uncon-
querable spirit, it seems likely now that Pittsburgh
will win back the beautiful site which Celeron remarked
when he passed down La Belle Riviere — a site which
even "Florence might covet" — and will make it a
city that will deserve to keep always the other part
of the name of the sower of the leaden plates — Bien-
ville.
A pillar of cloud stands over the city by day and a
pillar of fire by night. They have together shown the
way out of the wilderness. It now remains to be seen
whether the highest things of men's longing will have
realization, in giving that "dynamic individualibm" a
social ideal with distinct, practicable working plans.
Pittsburgh stands on the edge of the valley of the
new democracy. It has put its plates along every
path. There is hardly a village of any size from the
Alleghanies to the Rockies that it has not laid some
claim to by its strips of steel. There is hardly a stream
of any size that it has not claimed by a bridge. It
has, indeed, the spirit of Celoron, in other body, still
planting monuments of France's renewal of possession^
wherever the steel rails and girders and plates from the
Pittsburgh mills have been carried. And Pittsburgh
is but one of the renewed cities which encompass the
eastern half of the valley where once stretched the
chain of French forts futile in defense but powerful
in prophecy.
When we see the American city, even through the
HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
Walt Whitman, that poet of democracy, it
1 desperate hope that is left her: "Are there,
men here in the city," he asks, "worthy the
Are there athletes? Are there perfect women
:h the generous material luxuriance ? Is there
iding atmosphere of beautiful manners ? Are
rops of fine youths and majestic old persons ?
Te arts worthy freedom and a rich people? Is
great moral and religious civilization— the only
ition of a great materia! one? Confess that
re eyes, using the moral microscope upon hu-
, a sort of dry and fiat Sahara appears, these
rowded with petty grotesques, malformations,
ms, playing meaningless antics. Confess that
here, in shop, street, church, theatre, barroom,
chair, are pervading flippancy and vulgarity,
ining, infidelity — ^everywhere the youth puny,
nt, foppish, prematurely ripe — everywhere an
lal libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female.
WESTERN ariES 241
those same grotesques, malformations, and meaningless
antics, that flippancy and vulgarity and cunning, that
foppishness and premature ripeness, that painted, bad-
complexioned, bad-mannered, shallow-beautied hu-
manity; but touching, as I have had opportunity to
touch, three of the great agencies of its aspirations —
its philanthropies, its literature, and its schools — I
know that no body of five million people, whether
huddled in tenements or scattered over plain and moun-
tain and along rivers and seas, has with more serious
or sacrificing purpose aspired, though constantly dis-
turbed in its prayers, its operations, by people of every
tongue, nearly a million strong, who are emptied at her
port every year from Europe and Asia, besides the
hundreds of thousands who come up from the country.
There are public schools, for example, in certain parts
of that city where there is not a child of American
parentage. There is one, in particular, which I visit
frequently and which I call the "oasis" in the desert
of humanity (Walt Whitman's Sahara), where two or
three thousand children are gathered, literally from
the plains of Russia, the valleys of Italy, and other
parts of Europe — for these were their ancestral homes,
though they come immediately from the swarming
streets and dimly lighted, ill-smelling tenements of
New York — and there, aspiring under the hopeful
teaching of the city, I have heard them, boys and girls
together, sing, with all the joy and cleanliness of
shepherd children, of a leading in green pastures and
by still waters.
But to come back to the cities in the valley of Nou-
velle France, there is no note of else than hope there.
Mistakes, disappointments, crudities, infidelities?
1
^Bd
^^■[
HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
ut the mistakes, disappointments, crudities,
of youth — youth of strong passions and love
but of a masterful will that a generous nature
much encouraged and aided as to obscure its
ons.
V rods from the Carnegie Library and Museum
and Concert Hall in Pittsburgh is a baseball
here a million people or more come in the course
season to see trained men play an out-of-door
and if it chanced that the President of the
States were visiting the city, he might be seen
ccompanied by his secretary of state or the
nt of a great university). In Chicago I found
ale city, young and old, united in its interest in
ults of the "game" of the day before or the
ts of the next. When games are played for the
lampionship pennant the city virtually takes a
that is the spirit of youth in those overgrown.
1
■
WESTERN ariES 243
of Fort Pitt, filling a space a few yards square. What
claim has the past as against the needs of industry in
the present ? That was the attitude of that grimy in-
dividualism bom in "barefoot square" or in "slab
alley," in the land of smoke and fiame and "rusty
rivers."
And the future? Well, the voice of the French
priest and of those ministers of his own and other
faiths that have followed in his footsteps is sull heard
there ciying of the worid to come.
Several years ago on my way into that valley, on
one of those fast trains that tie the east and west to-
gether, we came shrieking, thundering down the moun-
tain slopes in the dusk of the day, past Jumonville's
grave, past Braddock's field, past miles on miles of
glowing coke-ovens, past acres upon acres of factories
with their thousands of lighted windows, past flaming
towers and chimneys into the midst of the modem
babel, the tops of whose buildings were hidden in smoke,
when suddenly, above the noise and clangor of whistles
and wheels, I heard the rich, deep voice of a cathedral
bell telling that the priest was still at the side of the
explorer and trader and the iron coureur de bois.
It is not, however, of the celestial but of the terres-
trial future that I am permitted to speak.
For, as I intimated, these young cities of the west,
only a half-century old as cities — children by the side
of Paris, London, Rome — are beginning seriously to
take thought of the morrow, not simply of multiplying
their numbers nor of sending their multitudes back
to the country but of giving them prospect and
promise of a better, more comfortable, more whole-
some life, capable of a higher individual and collective
WESTERN CITIES 24S
to be sure, let down ultimately from the skies, with
walls of precious stones — and no zone for Kipling's
"Tomlinsons" about it — with gates whose octroi
officials teep out whatever makes an abomination or
a lie, but which are open to the east and west, the
north and south, that the kings of earth may bring
their glory and honor into it — a city whose streets are
clean and smooth — a city that has flowing through it
a river of pure water, on whose banks grow trees whose
leaves are for the healing of the narions.
The obvious thing to do, since, good or bad, the
country is emptying its population into the ciries,
since we cannot go back through the gates of Eden
into the garden paradise of Genesis, is to go toward the
city of the Apocalypses, not, to be sure, as the Oriental
mind of John saw it, paved and walled with precious
stones and gold, but made as beautiful as the Occidental
taste and architectural skill will permit, as comfortable
as Occidental standards demand, and as sanitary as the
mortal desire for immortality can with finite wisdom
make it.
I was speaking some time ago of a painting I once
saw, in illustration of the death of Eve, which repre-
sented her as on a journey in her haggard old age,
accompanied by Cain (whose son built the first city
in a wilderness), and as pausing in the journey on a
height of ground, pointing toward a little cluster of
trees in the distance, and saying to her son: "There
was Paradise." But paradise is not to be realized by
the masses of men in the return of man to the forests.
The healing trees and the river are to be carried to the
city.
WESTERN TOWNS 247
than those across watersheds, and the most common
were those that led around waterfalls or impassable
rapids, such as Champlain and the Jesuits followed on
their journeys up the Ottawa to the Nipissing. It
was of such portages that Father Brebeuf wrote — ^port-
age paths passing almost continually by torrents, by
precipices, and by places that were horrible in every
way. In less than five days they made more than
thirty-five portages, some of which were three leagues
long. This means that on these occasions the traveller
had to carry on his shoulders his canoe and all his
baggage, with so little food that he was continually
hungry and almost without strength and vigor.^ An-
other priest tells of a portage occupying an entire day,
during which he climbed mountains and pierced forests
and carried, the while, his chapel and his little store
of provisions.
Of whatever variety, however, these portage paths
were frequently burying-grounds. Sometimes altars
were erected beside them. They were often places of
encampments, of assemblies, and more often of am-
buscades. So it came about, too, that they were made
the places of minor forts or gave occasion for forts
farther on the way. In those precivilized Panama
days, the neutrality of the isthmian paths could not
be assured, and so they were fortified.
Celoron tells of the mending of boats at the end
of his Chautauqua portages, and that statement, with
other like incidents, has led one authority to picture
the birches — those beautiful white and golden trees
of the sombre northern woods that gave their cloaks
to the travellers who asked and shivered till they grew
» "Jciuit Rclttiont" CThwaitet), 8 : 75-77.
■
H— ^^HB
HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
-stripped of their bark where those paths came
) the streams. He has even imagined primi-
penter shops and ovens and huts on these paths
he voyageurs must stop for repairs, food, and
le precursors of garage, road-house, and hotel,
m maps in the Bibliotheque Nationale names
ge paths have been found which assure us that
iEcult ways were not without charm to those
avellers, as they have been to many a wan-
nce; for there was Portage des Roses, where
1 rose brightened the way; and Portage de la
e, where the water sang constantly its song in
tude. Then there were Portage de la Roche
Portage des Chenes, Portage des Perches,
Talon, and Portage des Recollets, named in
of experiences of men whom the voyageurs
to recall or to honor, just as the French give
■ streets such names as "Rue des Fleurs,"
^ard des Capucincs."'
■
WESTERN TOWNS 249
River into the Wisconsin River, if he got so far on his
way to Muscovy — the path to which Father Dablon
said the way was as through a paradise, but was as
hard as the way to heaven^ — the path which the
coureurs de bois Radisson and Groseilliers doubtless
followed; the path which La Salle may have found in
those two years of mysterious absence in the valley;
the path Marquette and Joliet and hundreds after
them certainly took on their way from Montreal to
the Mississippi or from the Mississippi back to Mon-
treal. You would not know this narrow strip — ^not a
mile wide — to be a watershed dividing the continent,
the north from the south; you would not know it for
the threshold to the Mississippi Valley. The plain
which the path crosses seems to the eye as level as a
table. Undoubtedly before the tipping of the bed of
the lakes the water flowed over this path. Indeed,
La Salle in one of his letters refers to the portaging
here of canoes past an ''oak grove and across a flooded
meadow." The tree of which he speaks, with two
canoes clumsily drawn upon it by the savages, to mark
the beginning of the portage at the Wisconsin, has
gone, but a monument of red granite now stands there
with the names of Marquette and Joliet upon it. At
the other end of the now macadamized " path " there
is a little red bridge that leads across the Fox to where
a portage fort grew later into an important trading-
post; but now there is no trace of those monuments of
war and trade. There is a farmhouse on their site whose
tenants are in fear only of drought and early frosts.
^"Ifthecountiy . . . somewhat resembles an earthly paradise tn beauty,
the way leading to it may be said to bear some likeness to the one depicted
by our Lord as leading to Heaven." — ^"Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 55 :
191.
HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
lal crosses this little isthmus and once it inter-
the east and west, the arctic plains with the
ic cane fields; but it has given over its work
railroads, having served, however, I have no
to water the roots of the beautiful town that
he generic name of all those places where
were borne between waters. "Wauona," the
called it, more euphoniously, but with the
ijnificance as "Portage"— in the State that has
lie name of the river that carried the burdens
the Mississippi — ^Wisconsin. This town has
rept modestly into our western literature as
!ship Village."' Except that it has a more
setting than most towns of the plains^ven of
Drthern plains with their restful undulations —
s a brighter, cleaner aspect^since a light-
brick is used instead of the red so much in
jhere wood is forbidden by the fire laws — it
jical western town — the next size larger than
WESTERN TOWNS 251
fessorship of American history at Harvard University,
a literal son of the portage, who has rediscovered the
west to the world. And recently all the valley, and
other valleys, too, have been reading the stories of
this place of portage (called, as I have said, "Friend-
ship Village"), written by a young woman whose win-
dows look out from her home upon the Wisconsin
River not many paces from Marquette's place of env
barkation — a true daughter of the portage.
The French, who have gjven the new continent this
portage path out of Europe into the very heart of
America, should read with some gratification of the
more intimate life that dwells there back of and in
the midst of the bustling, tireless, noisy industry of
the valley.
"The long Caledonian hills" [the same which La
Salle describes], "the four rhythmic spans of the
bridge" [a bridge of iron, not of vines and flowers such
as Chateaubriand describes], "the nearer river, the is-
land where the Brst birds build — these teach our win-
dows the quiet and the opportunity of the home town,
its kindly brooding companionship, its doors to an
efficiency as intimate as that of fairy fingers."^ And
this is but one of thousands of "home towns" in that
great basin, towns with Daphne streets and Queen
Anne houses, and gloomy court-houses and austere
churches and miniature libraries, towns that taper off
into suburban shanties, towns that have in these new
bottles, of varied and pretentious shapes, the best
wine of that western world.
The author of "Friendship Village" has vision of
the more beautiful towns into which these towns will
* "Friendtbip Wlage," p. vii, autbor** note.
WESTERN TOWNS 253
Marquette had tried to instruct in the mystery of the
faith. And it was well worn by adventurous and pious
feet in the century that followed.
What traffic in temporal and spiritual things was
here carried over, is intimated by relics of that cen-
tury found in the fields not far away, where for many
years a French mission house stood with enough of a
military garrison to invite for it the name "Fort St.
Joseph." In the room of the Northern Indiana His-
torical Society at this portage there are to be seen
some of these relics, sifted from the dirt and sand:
crucifixes, knives, awls, beads — ^which I am told are
clearly the loot of ancient Roman cities, traded to the
Indians for hides — iron rings, nails, and hinges — these
with flint arrow-heads and axes, relics of the first mu-
nitions of the stone and iron ages out on the edges of
civilization.
This portage path between the rivers is now ob-
literated by railroads, paved streets, furrows, graves,
factories, and dwellings; but down by the St. Joseph
River there stands a withered cedar, perhaps several
hundred years old, which bears scars that are believed
to be the blaze marks of the broad-bladed axes of the
French explorers — made to indicate the place where
the portage out of the river began, the place which La
Salle missed when lost in the forest but afterward
found, where Father Gabriel made several crosses, as
Hennepin records, on the trees — perhaps these very
marks — and where La Salle left letters for the gui-
dance over the prairie of those "who were to come in
the vessel " — thinking of the captain of the Griffin who
was ordered to follow him to the Illinois on his return.
It is only a little more than a league from this land-
HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
he bend of the river (which has given the name
Bend" to the town) across the "large prairie"
vet meadows in whose ooze the tortuous Kan-
liver became navigable, in La Salle's day, a
1 paces from its source, and increased so rapidly
ne that, as he says in a letter, "in a short time
nes as broad and deep as the Marne"^the
which he knew in his boyhood and for which
: his iron heart must have longed,
evoix walked across those unchanged fields of
ph a half century (1674-1720) after La Salle,
kman made the same journey nearly a century
larlevoix, finding there what he called "a dirty
wn." To-day a clean, industrious, eager city
fifty-three thousand, with a world horizon, as
a provincial pride, throws its shadow in the
lorning across the path. Through its out-
tried years ago to trace this portage path and
th my companion (who was always the "Tonty"
WESTERN TOWNS 255
In La Salle's packs, carried over that portage, were
blacksmith's tools — forge, bellows, anvil, iron for nails
— and carpenter's and joiner's tools. One might easily
believe that they were left there — such have been the
products of that portage strip, two or three mites wide.
First, there has grown there the largest wagon
factory in the world. The path of the pack and the
burden has here produced as its peculiar contribution
to civilization that which is to carry burdens, instead
of the backs of men, the world round.
Second, here stands the worid's largest plough fac-
tory — a place from which ploughs are sent to every
arable valley that civilization has conquered and made
to feel its hunger.
Third, here spreading its acres, or arpents, of build-
ings across the high ground between the two rivers, is
the largest factory in the world for the making of cer-
tain parts of the sewing-machine; in every community
of any size in the world it has an agency.
And here, last of all, besides more than a hundred
minor industries, is what is, to my great surprise, said
to be the largest toy factory in the world.
The gift of wagons for the bearing and easing of
men's burdens; the gift of the steel plough that has
lifted man from the primitive subsistence of the hoe;
the gift of the shuttle which has released woman from
the tyranny of the needle; the gift of toys to the chil-
dren of all races; has not this portage prairie, this
meadow of St. Joseph, had some element mixed with
its loam and clay from the spirit of those Gallic
precursors of American energy, something that has
given this industry a wider venture, if not peculiar
expression? At any rate, its gifts to its time have
HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
r beyond common, of the tangible at least; and
lie intangible, the day that I last spent on this
: an art league was being formed to foster an
: in art and bring the best examples available
t were, but a little time ago, dreary meadows
vered with snow and strewn with skulls and
jf the buffalo. The most modem schools are
leveloped and maintained by the public, and
iversity of Notre Dame and the College of St.
look across the river to this portage field and
might have passed this portage so difficult to
, as La Salle did, and yet have found another
1 the lower Mississippi, with a short portage
lis same stream to the Wabash River. A still
way than any of these, and doubtless known to
le from his first years of wanderings in the
end of the Mississippi Valley, led from the west
Lake Erie up the Maumee and then by portage
WESTERN TOWNS 257
prairie from which are pendent, on the one side, all the
silver streams of the Mississippi Valley and, on the
other side, all the Great Lakes and all the rivers that
flow into them.
This remaining path is the tenuous trail through the
fields of wild onions that led from the river or creek
called Chicago (the Garlic River — Riviere de TAil)
into a stream that still bears a French name but of a
pronunciation which a Parisian would not accept —
the Des Plaines. This path, too, traversed a marsh
and flat prairie so level that in freshet the water ran
both ways and was once in the bed of a river that ran
from the lake to the gulf. But it has been hallowed
beyond all others of these trails, for it was beside this
portage that Marquette suffered through a winter, de-
tained there by a serious sickness when on his way to
minister to the Illinois Indians a hundred miles below.
His hut was the first European habitation upon its
site — the site of the future city o( Chicago.
In a book-shop not a league from where that hut
stood I found a volume valued at its weight in gold^
giving the account of the journey in which Mar-
quette had passed up this portage on the way to Green
Bay after the discovery of the upper Mississippi with
Joliet. It tells in its closing paragraphs of the rich
prairies just beyond this portage, but it recites with
greater satisfaction the baptizing of a dying child
brought to the side of his canoe as he was setting out
for the mission house. "Had all this voyage,*' he said,
"caused but the salvation of a single soul I should
' Thevenot, " Rccueil de Voyages," with 2 folding maps and 14 plates,
complete. Crown 8vo, white pigskin. Paris 1682. G>ntains Marquette's
and Joliet's Discoveries in North America, etc. For an account of the vari-
ous editions, see "Jesuit Relations," 59 : 294-9.
HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
1! my fatigue well repaid, and this I have reason
k. For, when I -was returning, I passed by the
; of Peoria, where I was three days announcing
:h, in all their cabins, after which, as we were
jng, they brought me on the water's edge a
hild which I baptized a little before it expired,
admirable providence, for the salvation of an
It soul."'
was in 1673. It was more than a year before
n entered the Chicago River, wishing to keep
mise to minister to the Illinois savages and
to do and suffer everything for so glorious an
iking." In the "Jesuit Relations"^ the story
e winter days at the Chicago portage has been
>r all time. All through January his illness
him to stay in the portage cabin, but early in
ry he "commenced Novena (Neufuaine) with a
t which Pierre and Jacques [his companions],
everything they can to relieve me, received com-
WESTERN TOWNS 259
the hundreds of thousands there in that great city
have had any consciousness of the background of
French heroism and suffering and prevision in front
of which they were passing daily, but I found that the
policemen and the watchmen on the railroad near the
river knew at least of the great black cross which
stands by that drab and sluggish water, placed there
in memory of Marquette and Joliet. The bit of high
ground where the hut stood is now surrounded by great
looming sheds and factories, which were entirely ten-
antless when I found my way through a long unlighted
and unpaved street in the direction of the river. The
cross stood, in a little patch of white, black as the
father's cowl, against the night with its crescent moon.
I could not make out the inscription on the river side
of the monument and, seeing a signal-lantern tied to a
scow moored to the bank near by, I untied it and by
its light was able to read the tribute of the city to the
memory of the priest and the explorer "who first of
known white men had passed that way," having trav-
elled, as it recites, "two thousand five hundred miles
in canoes in one hundred and twenty days." The
bronze plate bears a special tribute to the foresight
of Joliet, but it commemorates first of all the dwelling
of the frail body and valorous soul of Father Marquette,
the first European within the bounds of the city of
Chicago. I wish there might be written on Missis-
sippi maps, in that space that is shown between the
Chicago and the Des Plaines, or the "Divine River,"
as it was sometimes called, the words: "Portage St.
Jacques." That were a fitter canonization than to
put his name among the names of cities, steamboats
on the lake, or tobaccos, as is our custom in America.
HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
crescent moon dropped behind the shadows
)w line the portage "like a sombre forest," But
ily a few steps through the darkness back into
It and noise of the city of more than two million
of the black loam of this dark portage path
hy marshes, in the field of wild onions, the
of the world's great cities has sprung and spread
promise that exceeds any other on the face of the
though within the life of men still living it was
tretch of lake shore, a marshy plain with a path
s miniature river or creek toward the crescent
etropolis was doubtless predestined on or near
y site of Chicago by natural conditions and the
g of the lands to the northwest; but Louis
was its first prophet. The inscription on the
at the foot of the black cross recites that in
y this site Joliet recommended it for its natural
WESTERN TOWNS 261
to the Gulf of Mexico." The monument to him stands
by the canal that has been cut through not merely a
league but many leagues (thirty-eight miles) and lets
the waters of Michigan flow southward to the Illinois.
Of this site Joliet is quoted as saying, **The place
at which we entered the lake is a harbor, very con-
venient for receiving vessels and sheltering them from
the wind;"^ and of the prairies back of the harbor:
"At first when we were told of these treeless lands I
imagined that it was a country ravaged by fire, where
the soil was so poor that it could produce nothing.
But we certainly observed the contrary, and no better
soil can be found, either for com, for vines, or for any
fruit whatever. ... A settler would not there spend
ten years in cutting down and burning the trees; on
the very day of his arrival he could put his plough
into the ground, and if he had no oxen from France,
he could use those of this country, or even the animals
possessed by the western savages, on which they ride,
as we do on horses. After sowing grain of all kinds,
he might devote himself especially to planting the
vine, and grafting fruit-trees, to dressing ox-hides,
wherewith to make shoes; and with the wool of these
oxen he could make cloth, much finer than most of
that which we bring from France. Thus he could
easily find in the country his food and clothing, and
nothing would be wanting except salt; but, as he could
make provision for it, it would not be difficult to
remedy that inconvenience."* If Marquette was the
first martyr of the Illinois, Joliet was the first prophet
of that great city of the Illinois.
» "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 58 : 107.
• "Jesuit Relations " (Thwaites), 58 : 107-9.
HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
t he could not foresee was that Lake Michigan
nake the Chicago of to-day not so much by giv-
, waterway to the markets of the east and Eu-
i by standing as an obstacle in the way of a
z path to the sea from the northwest fields
compelling those fertile lands to send all their
around the southern end of Lake Michigan,
erestimated the economic importance, to be
f the buffalo. But if domesticated cattle be
ated for the wild species, he again showed re-
)le prevision of the future of a city which has
1 a world fame by reason of its cattle-market —
k-yards."
ago is a city without a past, save for that glow
;nture which is almost as hazy as the myths or
that lie back of Europe. It is just eighty-one
ince it came into existence as a town,^ and but
-eight voters voted for the first board of trustees
town; its population was variously estimated
WESTERN TOWNS 263
common council and obliged to serve or pay certain
fines. Every male resident over twenty-one was
obliged to worlc three days each year on the streets
and alleys or pay one dollar for each day. Fire war-
dens had no compensation except release from jury or
military service. There was at first meagre school
provision,* no public sanitary provision, no consider-
able public service of any sort. It was a neighborly
but unsocialized place, where the individual had little
restraint save of his own limitations and his personal
love of his neighbors. What social functions the city
performed were self-protective and not self-improving
in motive. For example, fire might not be carried in
the street except in a fire-proof vessel.' The aboriginal
frog croaked on the very site of the place where grand
opera is now sung.
The city's development was largely left to the hap-
hazard, unrestrained, but whole-souled, big-hearted,
self-confident individualism, such as has been potent
in Pittsburgh. The restrictions were mainly those of
the prohibitory Mosaic commandments. And so this
city, increasing its population by a half-million in each
of the last three decades, has come to stand next
to Paris in population and first of all great American
cities in the constructive activity of its civic con-
sciousness and urban imagination. The city is still
smoke-enwrapped (when the wind does not blow from
the lake); its streets run out into prairie dust and mud;
I The money derived from the ule oi Kbool lindi in 183} «rai diitributed
among the exiiting private schools «rhich thus bectme free common Kbool*.
Le*i thin {40,000 WM received for Undt now worth much more than tioo,
'S. E. Sparling, "Municipai Hiitoiy and Preaent Organization of the
City of Chicago," Univenity of WiKontin BuUetin, No. 23, 1S9B.
HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
bor, of which Joliet spoke in praise, merits
:he disparagement of La Salle; there are offend-
;lls and sights everywhere. But in the midst
1 and over it all is moving now, as a healing
in troubled waters, a spirit of democratic
on. What Louis XIV or Napoleon I or Na-
III, king and emperors, planned and did, com-
the co-operation of a people in making the
Paris more beautiful, more habitable, that a
of millions out upon the prairies of Illinois are
ng to do out of their own desire and common
1.
of interest that the sovereign of France who
r empire of those great stretches of plain, gave
i "those vast reaches of avenue and boulevard
:o-day are the crowning features of the most
j1 of cities." But it must quicken France's in-
urther to know that this first systematic plan-
WESTERN TOWNS 265
population of thirteen million two hundred and fifty
thousand souls in 1952;* and the great railroad builder,
James J. Hill, has estimated that "when the Pacific
coast shall have a population of twenty millions, Chi-
cago will be the largest city in the world."
The specific plans for its improvement have been
developed by a small body of public-spirited citizens,
but they are simply that great urban democracy think-
ing and speaking, trying to express itself. It has de-
veloped with less interference or compulsion on the
part of the State than any other great city of America,
and now it is moving voluntarily to the noblest as well
as the most practical of improvements.
Under like leading it built the "White City," the
ephemeral city of the World's Fair, in the celebration
of the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of
America, and that splendid achievement of the black,
unkempt city back of it gave first hint, in the co-opera-
tion that made this possible, of what a community
could do and at the same time gathered to it the
teaching of the older cities of the earth from their long
striving for the city beautiful.
The city provides its own water-supply, it lights
its streets, it has recently acquired control of its
street-car lines, and every passenger is notified as a
shareholder that 55 per cent of the profits comes into
the city treasury. And now under this inspiration
and yet of its own will it has begun a transformation
of itself into the likeness of what it dreamed in those
evanescent buildings and courts and columns and
statues and frescoes out by the opalescent waters of
1 Bion J. Arnold, "Report of the Engineering and Operating Featurei of
the Chicago Truuporution Problem," pp. 95, 96.
1
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HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
It saw the reflection of that "White City" in
e and then the image of its own workaday
nd it has not forgotten what manner of city it
:mber again that what is and what is promised
me in a lifetime. Walking in the streets of that
\y one morning a few years ago, as the trains
iptying the throngs who sleep outside along the
i out on the prairie, into the canyons made by
auildings, I found myself immediately behind a
jid man, a civil engineer, who was bom before
1 had a hundred inhabitants. He was much
lan the city whose buildings now reach out
om the lake (one of its streets thirty-two miles
id thirty and forty stories into the air. One
1 years ago it was the French wilderness im-
Eighty years ago most of its citizens bore
names. The portage path has literally yielded
st of streets.
1
■
WESTERN TOWNS 267
stands apart from all other cities in that "her people
are really on earth to make money"; that, magnificent
as she is in many ways, chiefly in distances, she is "too
busy money-making to attend to civic improvements"
or to have a "keen affection for worthier things."
I have gone a hundred times in and out of tliat
dirty, unkempt city, swept only by the winds, one would
think, and I know its worst, its physical, moral,
political worst. But if the people there have wor-
shipped the golden calf in their wilderness, they have
now drunk of the dust of their first image, and I should
be disposed to say that nowhere among American
cities is there a keener affection for worthier things
showing itself.
Again I shall have to admit that this "affection"
is not the spontaneous expression of the entire demo*
cratic community. As in Pittsburgh, a comparatively
few men have voluntarily, and at their own expense,
undertaken to study not only the conditions that make
for better and cheaper travel, more profitable com-
mercial intercourse and greater productiveness, but
for a more wholesome and a higher spiritual existence.
And again it is so with the hope that the great self-
governing community will out of its desire and treasury
bring about these conditions.
These few men and women, possessed both by a love
of that still uncouth city and an ideal objectively
learned in the days when the "White City" stood be-
tween it and the lakes, have already spent a half-
million francs in study and in making plans — in ad-
dition to all the months and years of volunteer, unpaid
service.
The principal items of this great scheme are:
HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
le improvement of the lake front.
le creation of a system of highways outside the
le improvement of railway terminals and the
ment of a complete traction system for both
and passengers.
16 acquisition of an outer park system and of
y circuits.
le systematic arrangement of the streets and
1 within the city, m order to faciHtate the move-
) and from the business districts.
le development of centres of intellectual life
civic administration, so related as to give co-
and unity to the city.
ere not hope for democracy if in the places of
test strain and stress, In the midst of its fiercest
s, there is a deliberate, affectionate, intelligent
toward cities that have been revealed not in
ptic vision but in the long-studied plans of
WESTERN TOWNS
269
of one who had met his death on the edge of the por-
tage — a sword with an inscription showing that it
probably belonged to an early French voyageur.
And so again in these relics but newly brought to
light I Bnd new words to remind ourselves that the
roots of that mighty, virile, healthiest, most aspiring
of America's great ciues are entwined about the sym-
bols of French adventure and empire in the west —
the sword and the boat> and doubtless there was a
crucifix not far away.
FROM LA SALLE TO LINCOLN 271
It was along this latter liver — the Illinois — as we
know, that La Salle and his men, in midwinter of 1682,
dragged on the ice their canoes, baggage, and disabled
companions from the Chicago River, all the way to the
site of Fort Crevecoeur, where they found open water,
and thence in their canoes made their way past the
mouth of the Sangamon (which first appears on the
maps of the new world in 1683, just after La Salle's
journey, as the River Emicouen) and on into the Mis-
sissippi. We recall their "adventurous progress" and
the unveiling to their eyes more and more of the vast
new world, where the warm and drowsy air and hazy
sunlight succeeded the frosty breath of the north. We
see them floating down the winding water path. We
see the red children of the sun — the Indian sun-wor-
shippers — clothed in white cloaks, receiving the white
heralds of Europe; we hear the weather-beaten voy-
ageurs chant on the shores of the gulf solemn, exulting
songs learned in church and cloister of France; we
hear the faint voice of their leader crying his claim to
all the great valley from the mouth of the river to its
source beyond the country of the Nadouesioux — the
voice not of a human throat alone but of a vision in
the wilderness. We discern after long years the
sounds of its realization. We see the iridescence of the
John Law bubble shining over the turbid waters of
that river for a moment. We see the raising and lower-
ing of flags of various colors. We hear Napoleon's rep-
resentative saying: "May the inhabitants of this valley
and a Frenchman never meet upon any spot of the
globe without feeling brothers I" We see the general
who is later to embody the west's crude democratic
ideals, Andrew Jackson, victorious in the last struggle
HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
pendence from Europe. We see the red wor-
s of the sun in their white cloaks crossing the
vanishing toward its setting; and we see the
hadows of men, the negro slaves, creeping out
la after the white heralds of Europe in America,
and hearing all this, we have seen and heard
imations of the glory of France in the new
the birth of a world-power, the United States,
incy of a new democracy, the disappearance of
iriginal Indian, the menace of the black shadow
id made a nation half slave and half free, and
phecy of the triumphant coming of the new-age
:rs and poets, the men of the Land of the Western
out of this light and shade gathered by the
of Waters— the Mississippi — along its banks,
lere comes silently one day in 183 1, the lank,
awkward figure of Abraham Lincoln, then a
man of twenty-two, guiding a flatboat laden
FROM LA SALLE TO LINCOLN 273
He was not a "Yankee," as one writing me in Paris
characterized the men of that valley. This awkward
landsman on water was bom in a cabin in the Ken-
tucky wilderness, a house replaced by one of unhewn
timber, without door or floor or window, probably not
better than the meanest of the gypsy houses just out-
side the fortifications of Paris. He accompanied his
restless, migratory father from one squatter home to
another until he settled in Illinois, where the timber-
land and prairie meet, near the Sangamon, and there
built another cabin, made rails to fence ten acres of
land — ^which gave him the sobriquet the "rail-split-
ter" — "broke" the ground, and raised a crop of com
on it the first year. You may remember that Joliet
made report of such a possibility there.
Lincoln's origin you will recognize as typical of that
frontier, except that the character which asserted
itself in the son, if there is transmission of acquired
character, seems to have come from the mother and
the nurturing of his stepmother rather than from the
shiftless, paternal pioneer who gave the wilderness
environment and soil to the nurturing of this stock
and was as little patemalistic as the govemment.
Perhaps this ne'er-do-well father is to be classed as
one of those rough coureurs de bois who, in his am-
bassadorship from his ancestors to their frontier pos-
terity, forgot the conventions and manners of the an-
cestral life in the temptations of the open country to a
man without a slave. When he started down the Ohio
into Indiana with his family, his carpenter's tools, his
household goods, and a considerable quantity of
whiskey, he was going to treat, not as the coureurs de
bois, with the Indians, the savage men of the forests;
rHE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
s going to treat with the savage forces of nature
elves. And one must, as I have said of Nicolet
errot and Du Lhuf, judge charitably these men
nade the reconciliations of the edges of things,
made the paths to western cities; he, to a west-
aracter; that only need be remembered.
tain trees depend for the spread of their kind on
equipped with spiral wings that when they fall
nay reach the ground outside the shadow of the
: tree and so have a chance to grow into wide-
ling trees. Thomas Lincoln, the father of Abra-
was as the spirals that carried the precious seed
it could have free air and an unshadowed soil
w in.
1 there the tuition of the experiences that made
n kin and so made a natural democracy possible
He had little teaching of the formal sort.
onths or a year in a log schoolhouse probably
red its duration. He had the sterner discipline
FROM LA SALLE TO LINCOLN 275
ship and that faith were at the bottom of his democracy
— not merely patient love of his neighbors but faith
in their ultimate judgments — democracy that made him
a nationalist and a world humanist.
But in the making of Lincoln there were more than
the usual disciplines. He had also the tuition of the
"solemn solitude," as Bancroft says. He sought the
fellowships of the past — of that "invisible multitude
of the spirits of yesterday." He read every book that
he could get within fifty miles, it is said. But what is
more certain is that he read thoroughly and "inwardly
digested" a few books. He knew the Bible, Shake-
speare, and Bums, ^sop's "Fables," Bunyan's "Pil-
grim's Progress," and "Robinson Crusoe." He read a
history of the United States and a life of Washington,
and he learned by heart the statutes of the State of In-
diana. Moreover, he studied without guidance algebra
and geometry. It is said that later in life, when his
political career was beginning, he continued his studies
even more seriously and attempted to master a foreign
language.
So he had companionship of the patriarchs and
prophets and poets of Israel. And it was the experi-
ence of many another prairie boy that he knew inti-
mately these Asiatic heroes of history before he con-
sciously heard of modem or contemporary heroes. I
knew of Joshua before I was aware of Napoleon, and I
remember carving upon a primitive arch of triumph —
which was only the stoop at the roadside, but the most,
conspicuous public place accessible to my knife — the
name of one of the cities taken in the conquest of
Canaan, an instinct of hero-worship — so splendidly il-
lustrated in French art and monuments.
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
coin the youth had not only those ancient com-
iships but the intimate counsel of the greatest
chers of democracy. He knew, too, the homely
m of Greece as well as he knew the treasured
!s of his own people handed on from generation to
ition. He was as familiar with the larger-hori-
gossip and philosophies of Shakespeare's plays as
those which gathered around the post-ofEce of
's Grove, where later this youth as postmaster
d the letters in his hat and read the newspapers
: they were delivered. He loved Bums for his
ophy that "a man's a man for a' that." So with
and others he found his high fellowships, even
he "swapped" stories (enriched of his reading)
his neighbors at the store or his fellow lawyers
: primitive taverns.
: there were less personal associations. He made
ndamental laws of a wilderness State an acquisi-
af his instincts. There is preserved in a law
FROM LA SALLE TO LINCOLN 277
to him on tables of stone by a prophet with shining
face. It was in that school, I believe, that he learned
his nationalism, his devotion to the Constitution — to
which in maturer years he gave this famed expres-
sion: "I would save the Union, I would save it in the
shortest way under the Constitution. . . . My par-
amount object in this struggle is to save the Union.
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I
would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the
slaves, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing
some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.
What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do
because I believe it helps to save the Union, and what
I forbeax, I forbear because I do not believe it would
help to save the Union."'
And when he had freed the negro by a proclamation
that violated the letter of the Constitution, it was
still that boy of the woods speaking in the man — the
boy who had learned his lesson beyond all possibility
of forgetting or misunderstanding — "I felt that mea-
sures otherwise unconstitutional might* become lawful
by becoming indispensable to the preservation of the
Constitution through ^e preservation of the nation."
It was from those shingles that he learned, too, the
place of the State in this nationalism. Its paternalism
has grown tremendously since 1824, when democracy
was a negative, a repressive and not a positive, aggres-
sive political and social spirit, but, as it was, it gave
him the foundation of the political structure within
whose lines he had to build later.
And with all this was a self-discipline in the two
great knowledges by which men have climbed from
■ Letter to Horace Gceeler, AuguK 31, t86a.
rHE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
s to gods — language and mathematics. He was
le day that there was an English grammar in a
six miles from his home, and he at once walked
lorrow it. And he studied geometry and algebra
This may seem to you an inconsequential thing,
ving myself on those same prairies not far away
he Sangamon acquired my algebra with little
ig and my solid geometry with only the tuition
3ok and of the sun or a lamp, I am able to ap-
e what the hardship of that self-schooling was.
more agreeable to watch the clouds while the
rested at the end of the furrow, to address, as
rns, lines to a field-mouse, or to listen to the song
Tieadow-lark, than to learn the habits of the three
lions then known, of points in motion, of lines
rsection, of surfaces in revolution, or to represent
known by algebraic instead of poetic symbols,
his private personal culture, as one' has observed,
> "embarrassing effects," because he shared so
FROM LA SALLE TO LINCOLN 279
thought." He seemed "but the average product,"
and yet, as this same writer has said, " at bottom Abra-
ham Lincoln differed as essentially from the ordinary
western American of the middle period as St. Francis
of Assisi differed from the ordinary Benedictine monk
of the thirteenth century."' He was not, like Jackson,
simply a lai^e, forceful version of the plain American
trans-Alleghany citizen; he made no clamorous, boast-
ful show of strength, powerful as he was physically and
intellectually. He shared genuinely, with no conscious-
ness of his own distinction, the "good-fellowship of
his neighbors, their strength of will, their excellent
faith, and above all their innocence." But he made
himself, by discipline of his own, " intellectually candid,
concentrated, and disinterested and morally humane,
magnanimous and humble." This is not the picture
of a conventional, generic democrat; and this is not,
we are assured by the earlier writers, the picture of the
westerner of that period. Indeed, Mr. Croly insists
that while these Lincolnian qualities are precisely the
qualities which Americans, in order to become better
democrats, should add to their strength, homogeneity,
and innocence, they are just the qualities (high intelli-
gence, humanity, magnanimity, and humility) which
Americans are "prevented by their individualistic
practice and tradition from attaining or properly valu-
ing." "Their deepest convictions," he contends,
"make the average unintelligent man the representa-
tive democrat, and the aggressive, successful individual
the admired national type." To them Lincoln is
simply "a man of the people" and an example of
strong will.
' Croly, "Promiae of American Life," p. 9a
PHE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
the man who said this did not know that land
»ln — which was the valley of La Salie, and even
that the valley of the tribe of men — for I be-
:s inhabitants knew that he was the embodiment
,t they coveted for themselves; that he was not
rdinary average but their best selves.
Ir individualism has been, I must say again,
practical compulsions and has had fruits that
: the eye. It is so insistent upon national pro-
ity, but none the less is it joined to a high ideal-
lat worships just the qualities that were so
;lousIy united in Abraham Lincoln. To be sure,
emember for their own excuse his coarse stories;
recall for their own justification his acceptance
political standards that he found; but the great
>f the people keep him in reverence and affection
; incarnation of patience, honesty, fairness,
nimity, humilityi not for his strength of will
Ily, but for His strength of charity and honesty.
FROM LA SALLE TO LINCOLN 281
day and generation uttered itself through him." He
expressed their ugliest forms and their most beautiful
developments.
None the less is it remarkable that not only should
the virility and nobility of the frontier have been ex-
hibited in him, but that the consummate skill and char-
acter known to the world's centres of culture should
have had, in his speech and intellectual attitude and
grasp, a new example.
When he wrote his letter in acceptance of the nomi-
nation to the presidency, he showed it to the superin-
tendent of public instruction in Illinois, whom he
called "Mr. Schoolmaster" (and who was years after
my own beloved schoolmaster) saying: "I am not very
strong on grammar snd I wish you would see if it is
all right." The schoolmaster had only to repair what
we call a "split infinitive." But the great utterances
of his life had no tuition or revision of schoolmasters.
They were his own in conception and expression. He
sent his Cooper Union speech in advance to several for
advice, and they, I am told, changed not a word.
Of his debates with Douglas (1858), his speech in
Cooper Union, New York, i860, his oration at the
dedication of the Soldiers' Cemetery at Gettysburg,
and of his second inaugural address, it has been said
that no one of them has been surpassed in its separate
field. Goldwin Smith said of the Gettysburg speech :
"Saving one very flat expression, the address has no
superior in literature." ' These appraisements I would
hesitate to repeat in France, where all letters come
finally to be adjudged, if I did not know that this last
■Goldwin Smith, "Early Yem of A. Lincolii." In R. D. Sbeppard,
"AbnhuQ LiocdD," p. tja.
282 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
document {the Gettysburg speech), at least, had been
admitted to the seat of the immortal classics. It is said
to have been written on scraps of paper, as the great
care-worn man rode in the car from Washington to
Gettysburg, and I have been told by one who was
present at the c ' '-" the quiet had hardly
come over the v; irred by the eloquence
of Edward Evei i-hich had lasted two
hours, before th noblest of American
orations, spoken inmusical voice by the
great lank figure manuscript, was over.
It is heard now of millions of school-
children from tht e Pacific:
"Fourscore and t go our fathers brought
forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in
liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men
are created equal.
"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing
whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so
dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great
battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a
portion of that field as a final resting-place for those
who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do
this.
"But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate — we can-
not consecrate — we cannot hallow— this ground. The
brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have
consecrated it far beyond our poor power to add or
detract. The world will little note nor long remember
what we say here, but it can never forget what they did
here. It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated
here to the unfinished work, which they who fought
FROM LA SALLE TO LINCOLN 283
here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for
us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining
before us — that from these honored dead we take in-
creased devotion to that cause for which they gave the
last full measure of devotion; that we here highly
resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain;
that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of
freedom; and that government of the people, by the
people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth/*
Bronze tablets bearing this oration for their in-
scription have been put on the walls of schoolhouses
and public buildings all the way across the continent —
plates in renewal of possession, that are another fruit-
age of the valley where the French planted their plates
of possession and repossession a century before.
But I would also have read — especially in France,
where letters are still being written that have the
quality of literature — a letter of this frontiersman. The
professor of history in the College of the City of New
York, showing me his museum, would have me read
again this letter in the hand of Abraham Lincoln; and
I would have those beyond America, as well as in that
valley, hear what a man of the western waters could
write before the coming of the typewriter:
"Dear Madam: I have been shown in the files of
the War Department a statement of the Adjutant-
General of Massachusetts that you are the mother of
five sons who have died gloriously on the field of
battle. I feel how weak and fruitless must be any
words of mine which should attempt to beguile you
from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I can-
not refrain from tendering to you the consolation that
"H£ FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
; found in the thanks of the Republic they died
. I pray that our heavenly Father may assuage
guish of your bereavement and leave you only
srished memory of the loved and lost and the
pride that must be yours to have laid so costly
[ice upon the altar of freedom,
urs very sincerely and respectfully,
"Abraham Lincoln."'
;e two examples illustrate not only the form of
:ech and writing, but the sympathy and the
of the soul of the man. They need only the
nent of a comment on the strength of his
t in expression. It is said of his Cooper Union
(his first speech before a large eastern urban au-
I think): "From the first line to the last, from
mises to his conclusion, he travels with a swift,
g directness which no logician ever excelled, an
:nt complete and full, without the affectation
FROM LA SALLE TO LINCX3LN 285
His first wide fame grew from a speech which he
delivered on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, the city that
had grown on the Illinois River by the side of La Salle's
Fort Crevecoeur. "When the white man governs him-
self," he said there, "that is self-government; but when
the white man governs himself and also governs an-
other man, that is more than self-^vemment — that is
despotism."' Two years later he made near there an
address so irresistible in its eloquence that the reporters
forgot why they were there and failed to take notes.
So there are but fragments preserved of what is known
as "the lost speech."
The minor anecdotes of his life that are treasured
and the stories which he is said to have told would fill
a volume — perhaps volumes. They all tell of a genius
who through adversity became resourceful, who through
the neighborly exchanges of a village learned a sym-
pathy as wide as humanity, and who with an infinite
patience and kindliness and good sense dealt with a
divided people.
The world outside the valley at first thought him a
buffoon because it heard only the echo of the hoarse
laughter after his stories. They found when he spoke
in Cooper Union that he had a mind that would have
sat unembarrassed and luminous in the company of
the men of the age of Pericles. But he had a sense
of humor that, had he been there, would have saved
Socrates from the hyssop. Mr. Biyce says, that all
the world knows the Americans to be a humorous
people.* "They are," he has said, "as conspicuously
the purveyors of humor to the nineteenth century as
' "Lincoln, Complete Worlu," ed. by Nicolay and H*y, a : 117.
'Bryce, "Americtn CommoniKaltli," a : 186.
:HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
;nch were the purveyors of wit to the eighteenth.
[This sense] is diffused among the whole people;
rs their ordinary life and gives to their talk that
tively new flavor which a European palate en-
And he adds: "Much of President Lincoln's
rity, and much also of the gift he showed for
ng confidence to the North at the darkest mo-
of the war, was due to the humorous way he
a turn things, conveying the impression of not
himself uneasy, even when he was most so."
was no mask, it was instinctive.
)ne of those days when the anxiety was keenest
le sky darkest a delegation of prohibitionists
:o him and insisted that the reason the north
t win was because the soldiers drank so much
y and thus brought the curse of the Lord down
:hem. There was, we are told, a mischievous
e in his eye when he replied that he considered
f unfair on the part of the Lord, because the
FROM LA SALLE TO LINCX>LN 287
"I ploughed around it." "And so," he said, "I got
rid of General . I ploughed around him, but it
took me three hours to do it."
This, then, was the lank boatman who came down
the river (that was once the River Colbert) and who,
seeing the horrors of the slave markets in New Orleans,
went back to the Sangamon with a memory of them
that was a "continual torment," as he said, and with a
vow to hit that institution hard if ever he had a chance.
It was this boatman who was twenty years later to
have, of all men, the chance.
One cannot tell here, even in outline, the story of
that irrepressible conflict in which this western plough-
man and lawyer became commander-in-chief of an
army of a million men and carried on a war involving
the expenditure of three billion dollars. One need not
tell it. It need only to be recalled that it was this
man of the western waters who first saw clearly, or
first made it clearly seen, that the nation could not
endure permanently half slave and half free. "I do
not expect the Union to be dissolved," he said, "but
I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become
all one thing or the other." And it was he who more
than any one single force brought the fulfilment of
his prophecy — of a nation reunited and all free.
He hated slavery. "If slavery is not wrong," he
said, "nothing is wrong." But he wanted to get rid
of it without injustice to those to whom it was an in-
herited, if cherished, institution. If he saw a venomous
snake in the road he would take the nearest stick and
kill it, but if he found it in bed with his children, "I
might hurt the children," he said, "more than the
snake and it might bite them." He was as tender and
■HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
Tate of the south as ever he was of an erring
ar in Illinois, where it is remembered that he
home with his giant strength one whom his
les would have left to freeze, and nursed him
li the night. So he sat almost sleepless, sad-
1, through the four dark years, but resolute,
g his own heart and those about him with a
bumor that came as "j^sop's Fables'* out of the
,nd their elemental wisdoms,
summer's day, when ploughing in the fields of
nd of Lincoln, I heard a sound of buzzing in
and, looking up, I saw a faint cloud against the
ky. I recognized it as a swarm of bees making
ay from a hive, they knew not where, and with
inct bom of the plains at once I began to follow
nd to throw up clods of earth to stop their flight,
g them down finally on the edge of the field
. branch of a tree, where they were at evening
;d into a new hive and persuaded back to prof-
FROM LA SALLE TO LINCOLN 289
For his words are like the images of Silenus which open.
They are ridiculous when you first hear them. . . .
His talk is of pack-beasts and smiths and cobblers and
curriers. . . . But he who opens the bust and sees
what is within will find they are the only words which
have a meaning in them and also the most divine,
abounding in fair images of virtue, and of the widest
comprehension, or rather extending to the whole duty
of a good and honorable man."*
The twenty-three centuries since Socrates do not
furnish me with a fitter characterization of Lincoln.
His image was as homely as that of Silenus was bestial.
His talk was of ploughs and boats, polecats and
whiskey. But those who opened this homely image
found in him a likeness as of no other man, and in his
wordsameaningthatwasofwidest and most ennobling
comprehension. And, as Crito said for all ages, after
the sun that was on the hilltops when Socrates took the
poison had set and darkness had come: "Of all the men
of his time, he was the wisest and justest and best."
So has the poet of that western democracy given to
all time this phrase, sung in the evening of the day of
Lincob's martyrdom, at the time when the lilac bloomed
and the great star early dropped in the western sky
and the thrush sang solitary: "The sweetest, wisest
soul of all my days and lands."'
We ask ourselves if he was the gift of democracy.
And we End ourselves answering: his peculiar excel-
lence could havecomeofnootherorderof society. We
ask ourselves anxiously if democracy has the unerring
instinct to find such men to embody its wishes, or did
^^H
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERIC
e him only for a talented rail-splitter — an avei
lan ? But we have no certain answer to thi
IS questioning. What gives most hope in nei
iions and problems, unknown to his day, howevei
t the more clearly his disinterestedness and foi
ice and magnanimity and humility are revealed
ider and deeper is the feehng of admiration am
or his character, which perhaps assures us, afte
;tter than anything else, of the soundness am
:y of the ideals of democracy,
y carried this man at death over into the vallej
birth, into the land of the men of the westen
! that was Nouvelle France, and there buriei
imong his neighbors, of whom he learned hi
of democracy, in the midst of scenes where h
lastered Its language, in the very ground tha
lught him his parables, by the side of the strear
;ave him sight of his supreme mission. Itisth
St visible monument to his achievement that th
■
CHAPTER XIV
THE VALLEY OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY
FRANCE evoked from the unknown the valley
that may, in more than one sense, be called the
heart of America. Her coureurs de hois opened
its paths made by the buffalo and the red men to the
shod feet of Europe. Her explorers planted the water-
shed with slender, silent portage traces that have
multiplied into thousands of noisy streets and tied
indissolubly the lakes of the north to the rivers of
the south from which they were long ago severed by
nature. Her one white sail above Niagara marked the
way of a mighty commerce. Her soldiers sowed the
molten seeds of tumultuous cities on the sites of their
forts, and her priests and friars consecrated with their
faith and prayers forest trail, portage*path, ship's sail,
and leaden plate.
But that is not all — a valley of new cities like the
old, of new paths for greater commerce, of more
altars to the same God I The chief significance and
import of the addition of this valley to the maps of the
world, all indeed that makes it significant, is that here
was given (though not of deliberate intent) a rich, wide,
untouched field, distant, accessible only to the hardiest,
without a shadowing tradition or a restraining fence,
in which men of all races were to make attempt to hve
together under rules of their own devising and enfoFO
ing. And as here the government of the people by the
rHE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
was to have even more literal interpretation
n that Atlantic strip which had traditions of
ty suffrage and church privilege and class dis-
cs, I have called it the "Valley of the New
:racy."
:n the French explorers entered it, it was a
of aboriginal, anarchic individualism, with little
Je spots of barbaric communistic timocracy, as
would doubtless have classified those migratory,
ory kingdoms of the hundreds of red kings, con-
rary with King Donnacona, whom Carrier found
; St. Lawrence — communities governed by the
e, restless spirit.
French communities that grew in the midst of
naked timocrats, whose savagery they soothed
ids and crucifixes and weapons, were the plant-
if absolutism paternalistic to the last degree.
annot easily imagine a socialism that would go
r in its prescriptions than did this affectionate.
VALLEY OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY 293
lustrate to what absurd lengths this jealous, paternal-
istic care extended:
"Chimney-sweeping having been neglected at Que-
bec, the intendant commands all householders promptly
to do their duty in this respect, and at the same time
fixes the pay of the sweep at six sous a chimney. An-
other order forbids quarrelling in church. Another
assigns pews in due order of precedence."'
One intendant issued a "mandate to the effect that,
whereas the people of Montreal raise too many horses,
which prevents them from raising cattle and sheep,
'being therein ignorant of their trtie interest, . . . now,
therefore, we command that each inhabitant of the
cotes of this government shall hereafter own no more
than two horses or mares and one foal — the same to
take effect after the sowing season of the ensuing year
(1710), giving them time to rid themselves of thdr
horses in excess of said number, after which they will
be required to kill any of such excess that may remain
in their possession."*
And, apropos of the trend toward cities, there is the
ordinance of Bigot, issued with a view, we are told, of
"promoting agriculture and protecting the morals of
farmers" by saving them from the temptations of the
cities: "We prohibit and forbid you to remove to this
town (Quebec) under any pretext whatever, without
our permission in writing, on pain of being expelled
and sent back to your farms, your furniture and goods
confiscated, and a fine of fifty livres laid on you for the
benefit of the hospitals."' There is even a royal edict
I Pirkmao, "Old Regime in Canada," p. 341.
■ Parkman, "Old Regime in Canada," p. J41.
'Parkman, "Old Regime in Canada," p. J41.
^HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
•A to prevent the undue subdivision of farms
"forbade the country people, except such as
uthorized to live in villages, to build a house or
■n any piece of land less than one and a half
! wide and thirty arpents long."'
this word should be added in intimation of the
sity of the paternalism:
e of the faults of his [Louis XIV's] rule is the
of his benevolence, for not only did he give
to support parish priests, build churches, and
: seminary, the Ursulines, the missions, and the
lis, but he established a fund destined, among
abjects, to relieve indigent persons, subsidized
every branch of trade and industry, and in other
:es did for the colonists what they would far
have learned to Jo for themselves."*
jEneas, therefore, these filial emigrants, seek-
w homes, not only carried their lauj el penates
z arms but bore upon their shoulders their father
VALLEY OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY 295
terest and neighborly love and of no abstract philo-
sophical theory or of protest against oligarchy; it came
from the application, voluntary for the most part, of
"older institutions and ideas to the transforming in-
fluence of land," free land; and such has been the
result, says Professor Turner,' that fundamentally
"American democracy is the outcome of the American
people in dealing with the West," that is, the people
of this valley of the French pioneers.
The democratical man, as Socrates is made to define
him in Plato's "Republic," was one in whom the
licentious and extravagant desires have expelled the
moderate appetites and love of decorum, which he
inherited from his oligarchical father. "Such a man,"
he adds, "lives a life of enjoyment from day to day^
guided by no regulating principle, but turning from
one pleasure to another, just as fancy takes him. All
pleasures are in his eyes equally good and equally
deserving of cultivation. In short, his motto is 'Liberty
and Equality.'"
But the early "democratical man" of that valley,
even if he came remotely from such oligarchical sires
as Socrates gives immediately to all democratical men,
reached his motto of "Liberty and Equality" through
no such sensual definition of life.
It is true that many of those first settlers migrated
from places where the opportunities seemed restricted
or conventions irksome or privileges unequal, but it
was no "licentious or extravagant desire" or flitting
from pleasure to pleasure that filled that valley with
' See hU "Significance of the Frontier in American Hiitory," in "Fifth
Yearbook of the Natbail Herbirt Society, 1899," alto hit "SigniScance
of the Miuiiaippi Valley in American fQatoty," in "Miuiiiippi Val^f
Hiitorical Auoctation Proceediogi, 1909-ia"
"HE FRENCH IK THE HEART OF AMERICA
pale-faced, lean-featured men and tired, gentle
1 who enjoyed the "liberty" not of a choice of
rable indulgences but of interminable struggles,
quality" of being each on the same social, eco-
and political footing as his neighbor. The
t democracy was derived of neigh borliness and
ellowship, the "natural issue of their interests,
ccupations, and their manner of life," and was
nstructed of any theory of an ideal state. Nor
hey frightened by the arguments of Socrates,
mnd in the "extravagant love of liberty" the
; to tyranny. And they would not have been
ned even if they had been familiar with his
le of democracy. They little dreamed that they
ixemplifying the doctrines of a French philoso-
r refuting those of a Greek thinker.
se primitive democratic and individualistic con-
; had not yet been seriously changed when, in
it of the valley which lies in the dim background
VALLEY OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY 297
The citizens made and mended the public roads, looked
after the sick in a neighborly way, bought their chil-
dren's schoolbooks, and buried their own dead. I can
remember distinctly wondering what a "poor officer"
was, for there were no poor in that society where
none was rich.
It was a community of high social consistency, pro-
moted not by a conscious, disinterested devotion to
the common welfare but by the common, eagerly in-
terested pursuit of the same individual welfares, where
there was room enough for all.
It is well contended in a recent and most profound
discussion of this subject by Professor Turner (of whom
I spoke as bom on a portage) that this homogeneity
of feeling was the most promising and valuable char-
acteristic of that American democracy.^
And it was, indeed, prolific of mighty consequences:
First of all, it made it possible for the United States
to accept Napoleon's proffer of Louisiana.
Second, it compelled the War of 181 2 and so con-
firmed to the United States the fruits of the purchase,
demonstrating at the same time that the "abiding-
place" of the national spirit was in the west.
And, third, that spirit of nationalism took into its
hands the reins of action in the time when nationality
was in peril. Before the end of the Civil War the
west was represented in the National Government by
the President, the Vice-President, the Chief Justice,
the Speaker of the House, the Secretary of the Trea-
sury, the Postmaster-General, the Attorney-General,
the General of the Army, and the Admiral of the Navy.
And it furnished, as Turner adds in summary, the
' See his ''Significance of the Missituppi Valley in American Historx.**
[HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
nal hero, the flower of frontier training and
le the mere fact of office-holding does not in-
thc place or source of power, it is noteworthy
ic ['residents since the war^to the election of
1 — Grant, Hayes, Garfield, McKinley, Harrison,
aft all came from this valley. Cleveland went
le edge of it, when a young man, to Buffalo and
only to become governor and President; Arthur,
icceeded to the presidency through the death of
snt Garfield, and President Roosevelt, who also
first to the presidency through the death of a
;nt and was afterward elected, were both residents
J York, though the latter had a ranch in the far
nd seems rather to belong to that region than
ice of his birth. Thus of the elected Presidents
was not one who had not a middle- western
experience, or association. The Chief Justices
ihe war have been without exception western
VALLEY OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY 299
Hercules so long as his feet touched the earth. How
intimately filial to the earth and neighborly the middle-
west pioneers were has been suggested. And it was
the secret of their success that they stood, every man
in his own field, on his own feet, and wrestled with his
own arms in primitive strength and virtue and self-
reliant ingenuity.
Democracy did not theorize much, and when it
did it stumbled. If it had indulged freely in the ab-
stractions of its practices, it would doubtless have
suffered the fate of Antaeus, who was finally strangled
in mid-air by a giant who came over the mountains.
As it was, this valley civilization apotheosized the
average man. Mr. Herbert Croly, in his "Promise of
American Life," makes this picture of him: "In that
country [the very valley of which I am writing] it was
sheer waste to spend much energy upon tasks which
demanded skill, prolonged experience, high technical
standards, or exclusive devotion. The cheaply and
easily made instrument was the efficient instrument,
because it was adapted to a year or two of use, and
then for supersession by a better instrument; and for
the service of such tools one man was as likely to be
good as another. No special equipment was re-
quired. The farmer was required to be all kinds of a
rough mechanic. The business man was merchant,
manufacturer, and storekeeper. Almost everybody
was something of a politician. The number of parts
which a man of energy played in his time was aston-
ishingly large. Andrew Jackson was successively a
lawyer, judge, planter, merchant, general, politician,
and statesman; and he played most of these parts with
conspicuous success. In such a society a man who per-
:HE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
in one job and who applied the most ngorous
:acting standards to his work was out of place
as really inefficient. His finished product did
-ve its temporary purpose much better than did
rrent careless and hasty product, and his higher
rds and peculiar ways constituted an implied
m upon the easy methods of his neighbors.
;erfered with the rough good-fellowship which
lly arises among a group of men who submit
aturedly and uncritically to current standards."*
lis what democracy, undefiled of aristocratic con-
and traditions, has produced ? it will be asked,
jre individualism in a virgin field wrought of its
unity only this mediocre, all-round, good-natured,
e, rough, energetic, ingenious efficiency ? Is this
ss, insipid "social consistency" the best wine
le valley can offer of its early vintages .''
ow those frontier Antii, who, with their feet on
■airie ground, faced every emergency with a
VALLEY OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY 301
would have been higher and the social wreckage smaller
— partly because of the encouragement of the economic
opportunity, and panly because of the encouragement
of a casteless society.
I cannot lead away from those familiar days without
speaking of other companionships which that valley
furnished beyond those intimated — companionships
which did not interfere with the rough frontier fellow-
ships that made democracy possible. For it was in
these same fields that Horace literally sat by the
plough and sang of farm and city. It was there that
Livy told his old-world stories by lamplight or at the
noon-hour. It was there that Pythagoras explained
his ancient theorem.
I cannot insist that these companionships and in-
timacies were typical, but they were sufficiently numer-
ous to disturb any generalizations as to the sacrifices
which that democracy demanded for the sake of
"social conditions" and economic regularity.
The advancing frontier soon spent itself in the arid
desert. The pioneer came to ride in an automobile.
The people began to jostle one another in following
their common aspirations, where once there was free-
dom for the energy, even the unscrupulous energy, of
all. Time accentuated differences till those who
started together were millions of dollars apart. Fail-
ures had no kinder fields for new trials. Democracy
had now to govern not a puritanical, industrious,
sparsely settled Arcady but communities of conflict-
ing dynamic successes, static envies, and complaining
despairs.
It met the new emergencies at first, one by one,
with no other programme than the most necessary re-
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
ts, encouragement of tariffs for the dynamic,
ved transportation for the static, and charity for
espairful; but all with an optimism bom of a
in destined success.
this has succeeded gradually a more or less
r defined policy of constructive individualism,
an increasingly democratic and less representa-
ontrol. The paternal absolutism of Louis XIV
■olved into the paternal individualism of a people
ire constantly struggling in imperfect speech to
their will understood and by imperfect machinery-
it done — and, as I beUeve, with increasingly dis-
sted purpose. It is, however, I emphasize, the
lalism of a highly individualized society,
escribed in an earUer chapter a frontier commu-
n that valley. See what has come in its stead,
city into which it has grown. The child coming
:he unknown, trailing clouds of glory, creeps into
immunity as a vital statistic and becomes of
VALLEY OF THE NEW DEMCX^RACY 303
nurses him in sickness, says a word over him if he dies
friendless, buries him in its potter's field, and closes his
account as a vital statistic in the mortality column.
And there are many agencies of restraint or anxious
care that stand in a remoter circle, ready to come in
when emergencies require. I have before me a report
of legislation in the States alone (that is, exclusive of
national and municipal l^islation) for two years. I
note here a few characteristic and illustrative measures
out of the thousands that have been adopted. They
relate to the following subjects:
Health of women and children at work; employer's
liability; care of epilepucs, idiots, and insane; regula-
tion of dentistry and chiropody; control of crickets,
grasshoppers, and rodents; exclusion of the boll-weevil;
the introduction of parasites; the quenching of fires;
the burning of debris in gardens; the destruction of
predatory fish; the prohibition of automatic guns for
hunting game; against hazing in schools; instruction
as to tuberculosis and its prevention; the demonstra-
tion of the best methods of producing plants, cut
flowers, and vegetables under glass; the establishment
of trade-schools; the practice of embalming.
I introduce this brief but suggestive list as intimat-
ing how far a democratic people have gone in doing for
themselves what Louis XIV at Versailles in the "ful-
ness of power" and out of "certain knowledge" did
for the trustful habitants of Montreal, who were
"ignorant of their trae interest."
And, of course, with that increased paternalism has
come of necessity an army of public servants — gov-
ernors and policemen, street cleaners and judges,
teachers and factory inspettors, till, as I have esti-
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
1, in some comniunities one adult in every thirty
aid servant of the public.
h paternalism is not peculiar to that valley. I
iber, years ago, when I was following the legisla-
)f an eastern State, that a bill was introduced
the depth of a strawberry box, and another
ig the vender of huckleberries to put on the
a label in letters of certain height indicating
:hey were picked in a certain way. And this
lalism is even more marked in the old-age pen-
provision in England, where the "mother of
ments," as one has expressed it, has been put on
vel of the newest western State in its parental
ude.
nowhere else than in this valley, doubtless, is
jaternalism so thoroughly informed of the indi-
listic spirit. Chestenon said of democracy that
not founded on pity for the common man. . . .
;s not champion man because man is miserable.
VALLEY OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY 305
a direct control of "politics" by the people — and that
movement has had its rise and strength in the Missis-
sippi Valley and beyond.
But who are the people who are to control f Only
those who are living and of electoral age and other
qualification ? I recall again Bismarck's definition :
"They are the invisible multitude of spirits — the nation
of yesterday and to-morrow." And that invisible mul-
titude of yesterday and to-morrow, whose mouths are
stopped with dust or who have not yet found human
embodiment, must find voice in the multitude of to-day
— the multitude that inherits the yesterdays and has
in it the only promise of to-morrow.
There may be some question there as to its being
always the voice of God, but no one thinks of any other
(except to add to it that of the woman). The "certain
knowledge" and the "fulness of power" of Louis XIV
have become the endowments of the average man —
and the average man is one-half or two-thirds of all the
voting men of the community or nation, plus one.
But that average man, forgetful of the multitude of
yesterday and ungrateful, has none the less wrought
into his very fibre and spirit the uncompromising in-
dividualism, the unconventional neighborliness, and
the frontier fellowships of yesterday. It is of that
that he is consciously or unconsciously instructed at
every turn. And he is now beginning to think more
and more of the invisible multitude, the nation of to-
morrow.
It is deplored that the so-called individuahty de-
veloped in that valley is "simply an unusual amount of
individual energy, successfully spent in popular and
remunerative occupations," that there is "not the
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
est conception of the individuality which may
in the gallant and exclusive devotion to some
erested and perhaps unpopular moral, intellec-
or technical purpose," as has such illustrious
Ition in France, for example. This is, we are told,
■the sacrifices to social consistency which menaces
Illness and intensity of American national hfe.
:he most serious problem is to make a nation of
endent kings who shall not exercise their inde-
ncies "perversely or irresponsibly."
n have been alvi'ays prone to make vocational
its the basis of social classification. In the Scrip-
ecord of man he liad not been seven generations
: first inhabited valley of earth before his descen-
were divided into cattlemen, musicians, and
inics. For the record runs that Lamech had
sons, Jabal, Jubal, and Tubal — Jabal who became
ither of those who live in tents and have cattle,
the father of those that handle the harp and the
VALLEY OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY 307
In the midst of that valley is a college town,* planted
by a company of migrants from an older State sev-
enty-five years ago who bought a township of land,
founded a college,* and built their homes about on
the wild prairie. It has now twenty thousand in-
habitants and is an important railroad as well as edu-
cational centre. It was nearly fifty years old when I
entered it as a student. That I studied Greek did not
keep me from knowing well a carpenter; that in spare
hours I learned a manual trade and put into type my
translation of "Prometheus Bound" did not bar me
from the homes of the richest or the most cultured.
Once, when a student, because of some little victory, I
was received by the mayor and a committee of citizens,
but the men at the engines in the shops and on the
engines in the yards blew their whistles. When I went
back to that college as its president it was not re-
membered against me that I had sawed wood or driven
a plough. I knew all the conductors and most of the
engineers on the railroads. I knew evety merchant
and nearly every mechanic, as well as every lawyer,
judge, and doctor. Men had, to be sure, their pref-
erential associations, but these were personal and
not determined of vocation or class. A recent mayor
of this city of two colleges was a cigar maker and, I
was assured by a professor of theology in a local
university, the best mayor it has had in years, and
he died driving a smallpox patient to a pest-house. I
received when in Paris, by the same mail as I recall,
a resolution of felicitation from a Protestant body of
which I was a member in that town, and a letter
of hke felicitation from the Catholic parish priest of
> Galeiburg, lU. * Knox College.
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
;ame city. I do not know how better to illustrate,
)se who are working at the problem of democracy
ler valleys, how democracy has wrought for itself
It valley of neighborliness and resourcefulness and
Y, in the wake of the monarchical, paternalistic
ion of France.
CHAPTER XV
WASHINGTON: THE UNION OF THE EASTERN
AND THE WESTERN WATERS
WE have followed the French explorers and
priests as pioneers through the valleys of the
St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mis-
sissippi to the gulf and the Rocky Mountains. But
there remains one further conquest, a conquest of
their adventurous imaginations only, for none of their
adventurous or pious feet ever travelled over the val-
ley lying south of the St. Lawrence watershed and
east of the AUeghanies, though they were probably
the first of white men to see those peaks rising in the
north of what is now New England, known as the
White Mountains.
Standing on the summit of one of the White Moun-
tains a few summers ago, I was shown a dim little in-
dentation of the sky at the northwest which I was
told was Mont Real. And since seeing that I have
imagined Jacques Cartier in 1535 looking off to the
southeast, when his disappointed vision of the west had
tired his tyesy and catching first sight of these dim
indentations of his sky, the White Mountains, which
the colonists from England did not see until a century
later and then only from their ocean side.
But whether the master pilot from the white-bas-
tioned St. Malo saw them or not, we have record that
309
1
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
iplain in his exploration of the Atlantic coast did
n their peaks upon his horizon; and so we may
of the French as the discoverers not merely of
[jrthem and western valleys, of the Adirondacks,
lose shadows Champlain and Brule and Father
s fought with the Iroquois and suffered torture,
f the snow-capped Rockies at whose feet Chevalier
Verendrye was obliged to turn back, but also
; tops of the white hills near the Atlantic coast,
1 1 have often seen lighted at sunrise while the
slopes and valleys were in darkness or shadow —
ouched by the French, as by that rising sun, only
:ir tops and by the trails of their eyes.
: the moment those mountains stand upon the
)n as the symbol of the only part of North Amer-
iSt of the Rockies which the French pioneers did
ossess before others by the trails of their feet or
aths of their boats. Verrazano of Dieppe had
along the Atlantic shore front, but so, perhaps.
1
■
WASHINGTON 311
"Continentals," as if their little hem of the garment
were the continent.
One wonders — if to little purpose — what would have
been the consequence if De Monts, whom Champlain
accompanied to America in 1604, had planted his Htcle
colony at some place farther south in his continental
grant made by Henry IV, stretching, as it did, all the
way from what is now Philadelphia to the St. Lawrence
— if, for example, he had anchored off the Island of
Manhattan, as well he might have done, five years
before Hudson came up the harbor in the Half Moon,
had settled there instead of on the sterile island of Ste.
Croix in the Bay of Fundy, where, amid the "sand,
the sedge, and the matted whortleberry bushes," the
commissioners to fix the boundaries between the United
States and Canada discovered in 1793 — nearly two
centuries later — the foundations of the "Habitation de
I'isle Ste. Croix" that the French had built in the
gloom of the cedars. Or if, when the scurvy-stricken
colony left that barren site, they had followed Cham-
plain to the mouth of the Charles, la riviere du Guast
— the site of Cambridge or Boston — or even to the
Bay St. Louis — ^which is remembered in Champlain's
journal as the place where the friendly Indians showed
him their fish-hooks made of barbed bone lashed to
wood, but which has become better known as Plym-
outh Bay where the Pilgrims landed fifteen years
later — there instead of Port Royal, where even Les-
carbot's "Ordre de Bon-Temps" could not overcome
the evil reports in France concerning a "churlish
wilderness"! Or if Champlain, instead of seeking
later the Rock of Quebec — whose rugged chaims he
could not forget even in the presence of the site of
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
1 or in the streets of Paris — had laid the founda-
3f his faith and his courage on the Susquehanna,
ample ! In any one of these contingencies there
have been a more prosperous Acadia. New
nd might conceivably have become Nouvelle
e, and New York City might be bearing to-day
ime of a seventeenth-century French prince.
idle conjecture, but it does, I think, help us to
;iate the happy destiny (or by whatever name
■quence of events may be called) not that kept
e out of that narrow Atlantic-coast strip but
)ut her in a position to become the power that
I in a very true sense force the jealous, many-
d colonies of that strip into a union, make pos-
the erection of that feeble union into a nascent
1, give it, though under certain compulsion, ter-
to become a world-power, and finally furnish
grudgingly, with a great western, overmountain
n in which to develop a democratic and a nation-
WASHINGTON 313
be a colony or a cluster of republics, even with all
that we have got by way of those and other English
migrants, except for these hardy men who kept battUng
with the ice and snow and water and famine at the
north.
But what I wish to emphasize here — and I am much
indebted to the young western historian Mr. Hulbert,
for this view — is that France, struggling to keep the
empire of her adventure and faith in the northern and
western valleys of America, gave to the world George
Washington. She made him, all unconsciously to be
sure, first in war. She saved htm, consciously, from
the fate of an unsuccessful rebel. And she made it
possible for him to be first in peace. These are all de-
fensible theses, however much or little credit France
may deserve in her purposes toward him.
Up in those same White Mountains there rises one
that bears his name, taller than the rest. It stands in
a presidential range that has no rivalling peak. A
singular felicity in the naming of the neighboring
mountains has given the name Lafayette to the most
picturesque of all. There are well-known and much-
travelled trails to the austere peak of Mount Washing-
ton. There is even a railroad now. Doubtless no
mountain in America is known in its contour to more
people, though there are many of loftier height and of
more inviting slopes.
So the outlines of the life of Washington are known
more widely than those of any other American. The
trails to the height of his achievement and genius have
doubtless been learned in the histories of France. And
asking my readers to travel over one of those well-wom
trails again, I can offer no better reason than that I
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
jn the way call attention to objects and outlooks
ihould be of special interest to the eyes of a com-
of men and women whose geographical or racial
tors gave us him in giving us the west,
shington was bom a British colonist. His great-
father settled in Virginia at about the time that
ille was making his way up the St. Lawrence to
dgniory of St. Sulpice above the Lachine Rapids,
ather, grandfather, and great-grandfather were
ersmen, farmers, or planters. He had himself the
line of the plantation, but he learned surveying
ad also the sterner experiences of its frontier prac-
Then came his appointment at nineteen as an
mt-general of colonial militia in Virginia and
that office the still sterner disciplines beyond
ontier, where France was tutor, without which
n he would doubtless have become and remained
cessful colonial Virginia planter and general of
WASHINGTON 315
They were men, as Kipling says of the colonials in
the Boer War, who could "shoot and ride." And
Washington was a strong athletic youth of fiery pas-
sions, which, given free rein, would have made him a
successful Indian chief. (Indeed, the Indians admired
him and called him Ha-no-da-ga-ne-ars — "the destroyer
of cities" — and at last admitted him, as a supreme
tribute, to their Indian paradise, the only white man
found worthy of such canonization.) But, nigged,
country-bom men though they were, it was in no such
neighboriy democracy as Lincoln knew that they were
bred. Washington had his slaves, his coat of arms,
and the occupations and leisures and pleasures, so far
as the frontier would peimit, of an English gentleman.
And it is no such slouchy, shabbily dressed figure as
Lincoln's that Washington presents. I saw a few
years ago a letter in Washington's own hand, in which
he gave directions to the tailor as to the number of
buttons that his coat should have, the shape of its lapel,
and the fit of its collar. He was most insistent upon
the conventions, though if such an assembly had been
held, as I have suggested, of the young men from the
eastern waters, there would have been no such uni-
formity of costume as now makes an audience of men
in America, or in Europe, so monotonously black and
white.
These young men did not dress alike; they did not
spell alike. Washington's letters show that he did not
even spell consistently with himself. And that first
man of the eastern waters to follow the French in
establishing a settlement on the western waters,
Daniel Boone, left this memorial of his orthography on
a tree in Kentucky: "C-I-L-L-E-D A B-A-R."
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
:y did not dress alike, they did not spell alike,
Hd not think alike. It was a great, and it must
seemed a hopeless, motley of men who were all
sciously to lay the foundations of a new national
ure.
■y were all of immigrant ancestors, and most of
of most recent immigrant ancestry, or of foreign
Though much more homogeneous in their lineage
:he present immigration, chey had not the unify-
;encies that now keep Maine and Florida within a
inutes of each other by telephone or a few hours
I.
there were in all, immigrants and sons of immi-
, hardly more in number than now enter that
land as aliens in one or two years. I spoke a few
ago at a dinner of the descendants of the May-
and was told that they numbered in all the
-y, as I recall, about three thousand — three thou-
lescendants in three hundred years of a hundred
WASHINGTON 317
But to come back to Washington: the appointment
of the stripling as adjutant-general with rank of major
was two years after the humpbacked Governor Ga-
lissonniere had sent Celoron down the Ohio on that
historic voyage of plate-planting, the news of which
had finally reached the ears of the governor of Vir-
ginia, who with many planters of Virginia (Washing-
con's family included) had a prospective interest in
lands along that same river. Then came the word
through Indian and trader (the only long-distance
telephones of that time) that forts were beginning to
grow where the plates had been planted.
It was then that the young farmer, surveyor, soldier,
just come of age, was chosen to carry a message to
the commander of the nearest French fort in the
valley — Fort Le Bceuf, which I have already described
— about fifteen miles from Lake Erie on the slight ele-
vation from which the waters begin to flow toward the
Mississippi. The commander was Legardeur de St.
Pierre, a one-eyed veteran of wars, but recently come
from an expedition out across the valley toward the
Rockies.
Parkman has made this picture of the momentous
meeting of France and America in the western wilder-
ness, which in its peopling has kept only a single tree
of those forests, a tree pointed out to me as the Wash-
ington tree, though it, too, may have come with the
migrants :
"The surrounding forests had dropped their leaves,
and in gray and patient desolation bided the coming
winter. Chill rains drizzled over the gloomy 'clearing,'
and drenched the palisades and log-built barracks, raw
from the axe. Buried in the wilderness, the military
rHE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
[Legardeur and his garrison] resigned themselves
;y might to months of monotonous solitude;
just after sunset on the eleventh of December, a
»uth [and he was only an inch shorter than Lin-
:ix feet three inches] came out of the forest on
ack, attended by a companion much older and
^r than himself, and followed by several Indians
lur or five white men with packhorses. Officers
:he fort went out to meet the strangers; and,
y through mud and sodden snow, they entered
gate. On the next day the young leader of the
with the help of an interpreter, for he spoke
;nch [a deficiency which he laments with great-
gret later in life], had an interview with the
mdant and gave him a letter from Governor
Jdie. St. Pierre and the officer next in rank,
new a little English, took it to another room
dy it at their ease; and m it, all unconsciously,
ead a name destined to stand one of the noblest
WASHINGTON 319
that I am determined to conform myself to them with
all the Exactness and Resolution which can be expected
from the best Officer. ... I don't know that in the
Progress of this Campaign [of repossession] anything
passed which can be reputed an Act of Hostility or is
contrary to the Treaties which subsist between the
two Crowns. . . . Had you been pleased, Sir, to have
descended to particularize the Facts which occasioned
your Complaints I should have had the Honor of
answering you in the fullest, and, I am persuaded, most
satisfactory Manner."
In the spring the two hundred canoes which Wash-
ington saw moored by the Riviere aux Bceufs carried
the builders of Fort Duquesne and a garrison for it
down La Belle Riviere, and a little later is heard the
volley of the Virginia backwoodsmen up on the Laurel
ridges a little way back from Duquesne, the volley
which began the strife that armed the civilized world
— the backwoodsmen commanded by the Virginia
youth, George Washington.
It is in that lonely ravine up among the ridges
which I have described in an earlier chapter that the
union of the eastern and western waters began. And
there should be a monument beside Jumonville's to
keep succeeding generations mindful of the mighty
consequence of what happened then.
This fray of the mountains was one of the most
portentous of events in American history. It was not
only the grappling of two European peoples and two
systems of government out upon the edges of the
civilized world — the stone-age men assisting on both
sides — a fray in which Legardeur de St. Pierre,
Coulon de Jumonville, and de Villiers, his avenging
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
er, were France, and Washington was England,
s the beginning of the making of a new nation,
ich that tall youth, who found the whizzing of
s a "charming sound," was to be the very comer-
was here having his first tuition of war. De
rs let him march back from Fort Necessity un-
;d, when he might, perhaps, have ended the
- of this young major in the great meadows where
"ought "through the gray veil of mists and rain."
ington was taught by France, in these years of
r warfare — for he W€nt four times over the moun-
— he was spared by France in the end to help
Tom France the title of the west, or so it seemed
, in 1763, the war which his command had begun
■ndcd in the surrender of that vast domain to
nd. But we know now that the struggle had
issue.
; steep path of the years when the colonies were
WASHINGTON 321
from Franklin's lodgings in Passy to spread the good
news, and in such mad haste that he upset his carriage
and dislocated his arm. And when we next look out
from the path we see the British soldiers passing in
surrender between two lines drawn up at Yorktown,
the American soldiers on one side with Washington at
their head, and on the other the French soldiers under
Count Rochambeau.
Washington and Legardeur de St. Pierre at Fort Le
Boeuf, Washington and Rochambeau at Yorktown 1
You have been told again and again that except for
the France of Rochambeau the War of Independence
would probably have failed and that the colonies
would have remained English colonies. But let us
remember that except for the France of Legardeur de
St. Pierre there would probably not have been, as
Parkman says, a "revolution"; and by the France of
Legardeur I mean the spirit of France that had illus-
trarion in his lonely, exiled watching of the regions won
by her pioneers.
The French man-of-war Triumph brought to Phila-
delphia in May of 1783 the treaty of Paris. In the
December following General Washington said farewell
to his officers and returned to Mount Vernon, his
estate on the Potomac. There he was busied through
the next few months in putting his private affairs in
order, in superintending the reparation of his planta-
tion, and in receiving those who came to him for
counsel or to express their gratitude. It was as a level
bit of the mountain trail from which the traveller
catches glimpses of a peaceful valley. And that is all
that the traveller usually sees.
But there is a farther view. From that level path
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
an see over the Alleghanies the great valley so
ar to our eyes from other points of view, stretch-
iward the Mississippi.
the autumn of 1784 (eight months after his fare-
;o the army) Washington leaves his home, as it
rs, to visit some lands which he had acquired
; result of his earlier and martial trips out bevond
aurel Hills. He had title to forty thousand acres
id the mountains. He had even purchased the
f this first battle in the meadows, where he had
Fort Necessity and where he was himself cap-
by the French, but from which he was permitted
back over the mountains with his flags flying and
ums beating. A "charming field of encounter"
led the place in his youthful exuberance before the
■ in 1753- "Much Hay may be cut here When
ound is laid down in Grass; and the upland. East
: Meadow is good for grain," he wrote in his un-
nental diary, September 12, 1784. For over the
WASHINGTON 323
September 6. "Remained at Bath all day and was
showed the Model of a Boat constructed by the in-
genious Mr. (James) Rumsey for ascending rapid cur-
rents by mechanism. . . . Having hired three Pack
horses to give my own greater relief. . . ."
September 11. "This is a pretty considerable water
and, as it is said to have no fall in it, may, I conceive,
be improved into a valuable navigation. . . ."
September 12. "Crossing the Mountains, I found
tedious and fatieguing {sic\ ... In passing over
the Mountains I met numbers of Persons and Pack
horses . . . from most of whom I made enquiries of
the nature of the Country. . . ."
September 13. "I visited my Mill" [a mill which
he had had built before the Revolution]. . . .
September 15. "This being the day appointed for
the Sale of my moiety of the Co-partnership Stock
many People were gathered (more out of curiosity I
believe than from other motives). My Mill I could ob-
tain no bid for. . . ."
September 19. "Being Sunday, and the People liv-
ing on my Land, apparently very religious" [these were
Scotch-Irish who had squatted on a rich piece of land
patented by Washington], "it was thought best to
postpone going among them till to-morrow. . . ."
September 20. "I told them I had no inclination
to sell; however, after hearing a good deal of their
hardships, their Religious principles (which had brought
them together as a society of Ceceders [sic]) and un-
willingness to seperate [stc] or remove; I told them I
would make them a last offer. . . ."
September 22. "Note — In my equipage Trunk and
the Canteens — were Madeira and Port Wine — Cherry
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
:e — Oyl, Mustard— Vinegar^and Spices of all
—Tea, and Sugar in the Camp Kettles (a whole
if white sugar broke up about 7 lbs. weight). . . .
shing lines are in the Canteens. . . ."
'tember 23. "An Apology made to me from the
: of Fayette {thro' Mr. Smith) for not addressing
e Cheat at the Mouth is about 125 y'^ wide — the
mgahela near d''''^ that — the colour of the two
rs is very differ*, that of Cheat is dark (occasioned
conjectured by the Laurel, among which it rises,
hrough which it runs) the other is clear, & there
irs a repugnancy in both to mix, as there is a
line of division betw" the two for some distance
' the fork; which holds, I am told near a Mile. —
!heat keeps to the right shore as it descends, &
ther the left.
nemben^. "At the crossing of this Creek McCul-
1 path, which owes its origen [sic] to Buffaloes. . . .
WASHINGTON 325
In this revelation of Washington out of the laconic
misspelled entries of his diary we have not only a
most human portrait but an intimation of bis prac-
tical far-seeing statesmanship. He looms even a larger
figure as he rides through the fog of the Youghiogheny,
for there he appears as the prophet of the eastern and
western waters. In his vision the New France and the
New England are to be indissolubly bound into a New
America. He had written Chevalier de Chastellux
from Princeton, October 12, 1783, after a return from
the Mohawk Valley, that he could not but be struck
by the immense extent and importance "of the vast
inland navigation of these United States," that should
bring that great western valley into communication
with the east, and that he would not rest contented
until he had explored that western country and tra-
versed those lines which have given bounds to a new
empire. And as he comes back over the Alleghanies
from this journey of six hundred and eighty miles on
the same horses he writes: "No well-informed mind
need be told how necessary it is to apply the cement
of interest to bind all parts together by one indissoluble
band." And the indissoluble band is the smooth road
and the navigable stream or canal.'
England and France had both restrained western
migration, and the young provincial republic was
doubtless of no mind to encourage it, so far as it then
knew its mind. But Washington had a larger, wiser
view than any other except Franklin, and even Frank-
lin was not ardent for the canals. Washington was
thinking, some will say, of the trade that would come
over those paths; and so he was, but it was not prima-
rily for his own advantage, not for the trade's sake, but
* A. B. Hulbert, "Wuhingtoa ud the Wett," p. 100.
I THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
pe sake of the weak little confederation of States
ich he had ventured all he was and had.
I was (as my old professor of history in Johns Hop-
Tvas the first to point out') the first to suggest the
; of the western country into "free, conve-
l and independent governments," and here he ap-
I the first not to speculate about but to seek out
fding streams and climbing mountains a practical
Ito a "more perfect union," and not merely for
I jealous States lying along the Atlantic and within
\ of its commerce, but for all the territory and
5 of their new heritage.
singularly enough this very journey led not
Ito the establishment of those paths between the
nd west, the national road, the canals reaching
the sources of the rivers, and ultimately the
l-AUeghany railroad, but to the making of that
Itched document, the Constitution of the United
And in this wise:
WASHINGTON 327
So this peaceful joumey of the warrior over the moun-
tains to the great meadows and down into the tangled
ravines of West Virginia became not only the prophecy
of the indissoluble bond between the east and west;
it became the first step in that movement which led
the original States themselves into that more perfect
union.
The sequence, which did not occur to me until I read
recently the diary of that trans-AIleghany joumey,
gives Washington a new, if a homelier, majesty.
Napoleon the Great has spoken his praise of Washings
ton as a general. Many of our own historians agree that
it is very doubtful if without Washington the struggle
for independence would have succeeded. Other men
were important. He was indispensable. This intimates
the occasion we have for gratitude that the commander
of the French let him march out of Fort Necessity
in 1754.
The world has for a century been repeating the
eulogies that have outlived the invective of his day —
and that are only now becoming humanized by the
new school of historians who will not sacrifice facts to
glowing periods. Washington is now more of a human
being and less of a god than the Washington whom
Lincoln found in Weems's "Life."
Yet with all the humanizing is he the austere, rugged,
inaccessible mountain, its fiery passions hidden, its
head above the forests. And so will he stand in history
the justest of men, a man of highest purity of purpose
and of greatest practical wisdom; but, if as a mountain,
then as one that hides somewhere in its slopes such a
path as we have learned to know in our journeys over
this course, a portage path between two great valleyi
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
its summit has blessed, for he was as a portage
letween the eastern and western waters, between
istitutions of New England and the fleur-de-lis
of Nouvelle France,
ave visited the unmarked field where Fort Le
once stood, by French Creek, the field where
most momentous and far-reaching question ever
ht to issue on this [American] continent"' was
^ the stripling Washington to the veteran Legar-
le St. Pierre.
ive, in my worship of the great general, followed
;h the rain and sleet of a winter's night and in
ud of a country road his famous march from the
ig of the Delaware to Trenton, made in that
tiber night of 1776 when the struggle seemed most
;ss.
1 I have been in the place in which — as to at
)ne historian — he seems to me the most of a man
he most of a prophet, even the most of a god,
CHAPTER XVI
THE PRODUCERS
ON the wonderful background which the passing
Hfe of that valley has filled with dim epic fig-
ures that are now but the incarnations of Euro-
pean long^gs, as rich in color as that which lies more
consciously back of Greece and Rome or in the fields
of Gaul (the splendors of the court of Versailles shining
through the sombre forests and into the huts of the
simple habitants) — on this I have depicted the rather
shadowy suggestions of a matter-of-fact, drab de-
mocracy which is usually made to obscure all that
background with its smoke. But if I have made your .
eyes see what I have tried to show, the colors and figures
of the background still show themselves.
I have now to put against that wonderful back-
ground, dim as it is, the new habitants. I suggested
earlier the emergence of their gaunt figures from the
forests and the processional of their ships of the prairies
through the tall grass that seemed as the sea itself.
I had in my thought to speak of these new inhabi-
tants as workers, but that word has in it too much of
the suggestion of endless, hopeless, playless labor. Yet
they are workers all — or nearly all. There are some
tramps, vagrants, idlers, to be sure, the spray of that
restless sea. But when a man of great wealth wishes
to give up systematic work he generally goes out of the
FHE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
or begins a migratory life, as do the wild birds
valley.
these busy, ever-working people of the valley
tter characterized by other names, and they may
ided into three overlapping classes:
"he precursors, those that run before, the ex-
5, the discoverers, the inventors, the prophets.
The producers, those, literally, who lead forth:
ikes, marshals, generals of democracy, bringers
Df things from the ground, the waters, by brain
uscle; and the transporters of the things brought
to the places of need.
The poets, that is, in the old pristine Greek
the makers, the creators, in the generic sense,
)t merely in the specific sense of makers of verses,
'ou object to my terminology as exalting too
the common man, as putting sacred things to
le use, as demeaning prophecy and nobihty and
I shall answer that it is because of the narrowing
THE PRODUCERS 331
were he writing now, to include it in Natura Deorum
instead of Natura Rerum.
The son of Sirach, in his Book of Wisdom, has de-
scribed the man who did the work of the world in an-
cient times; for "how shall he become wise," begins
this essay, "that holdeth the plough, that glorieth in
the shaft of the goad, that driveth oxen, and is oc-
cupied in their labors, and whose discourse is of the
stock of bulls ? He will set his heart upon turning his
furrows, his wakefulness is to give his heifers their fod-
der. So is every artificer and work-master that passeth
his time by night as by day, they that cut gravings
of signets; and his diligence is to make great variety;
he will set his heart to preserve likeness in his portrai-
ture, and will be wakeful to finish his work. So is the
smith, sitting by the anvil, and considering the un-
wrought iron; the vapor of the fire will waste his flesh,
and in the heat of the furnace will he wrestle with his
work; the noise of the hammer will be ever in his ears,
and his eyes are upon the pattern of the vessel; he will
set his heart upon perfecung his works, and he will be
wakeful to adorn them perfectly. So is the potter
sitting at his work, and turning the wheel about with
his feet, who is always anxiously set at his work, and
all his handiwork is by number; he will fashion the
clay with his arm, and will bend its strength in front of
his feet; he will apply his heart to finish the glazing,
and he will be wakeful to make clean the furnace.
All these put their trust in their hands; and each be-
cometh wise in his own work. Without these shall
not a city be inhabited, and men shall not sojourn or
walk up or down therein. They shall not be soug^
for in the council of the people, and in the asserabljr
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
shall not mount on high; they shall not sit on
eat of the judge, and they shall not understand
■ovenant of judgment; neither shall they declare
action and judgment, and where parables are
shall not be found. But they will maintain the
: of the world; and in the handiwork of their
is their prayer."
e wisdom of the scribe, however, he said, "cometh
pportunity of leisure." That wisdom the west,
lave already intimated, has not yet learned. Such
ne as I witnessed a little time ago in the amphi-
re of the Sorbonne, a scene typical of what oc-
many times a day there, is not yet to be seen in
'alley. I saw that hall filled in the early after-
with an audience markedly masculine, listening
ecture on early Greek life, interspersed with read-
Tom the Homeric epics, I cannot visualize, much
could wish to, a like scene in the Mississippi
y, except in the atmosphere of a woman's club.
THE PRODUCERS 333
to the voices of the invisible multitude of spirits of the
past (who after all help to constitute a nation no less
than the multitude of spirits of the present, and of
the future), it is that inability to credit disinterested,
materially unproductive, purposes and pursuits, and
fit them into the philosophy of a perfectibility based on
material prosperity — it is all of these that intimate the
shortcomings of that life of the Valley of Hurry.
I saw another great and, as it seemed, non-univer-
sity audience in the same amphitheatre in Paris listen-
ing just after midday to a lecture on Montesquieu, and
I had not sufficient imagination to picture such an
audience as near the Stock Exchange of Chicago as
the Sorbonne is to the Bourse — in that western city
where men take hardly time at that hour of day to
eat, much less to philosophize. They will not pause to
hear Montesquieu remind them that "democracy is
virtue" or to hear Homer speak of virtue as the ancients
conceived it.
But, on the other hand, and there is another side,
they will give up private business, eating, and all to
stop a patent dishonesty, to improve the mail service,
to discuss the smoke nuisance that happens to be
choking their throats, or get rid of the beggar at the
door, or to go to a ball game.
They do not there in any great number appreciate
the wonderful, indefatigable, disinterested efforts of
scholars, arusts, poets, in the narrower sense — the
wisdoms of seeming idleness or leisure. On the other
hand, I am sure that the poetry and prophecy of those
who (again in the language of the son of Sirach) are
"building the fabric of the world" are not appreciated
either in Paris or Chicago, partly because of conven-
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
and inadequate representation in the old world,
because of the smoke and noise and the thought
e "unwrought iron" in the new world,
the geographical precursors of that valley I have
:n. But there are others who have enlarged the
daries and increased the size of acres discovered
le first precursors. Let me without fatiguing sta-
s give intimation of what I mean in one or two
rations of the successors of the coureurs de bois,
unners before, the later prophets of the valley.
It of a trough up in the Alleghany Mountains —
sf those troughs occupied by the sinewy Scotch-
pioneers who first, after the French, as you will
1, crept down into the great valley — there jour-
i one day, a century after Celoron, a young man
orseback. He rode as many miles as La Salle
on foot in that memorable heart-breaking jour-
rom Fort Crevecceur to Fort Frontenac. He rode
igh the territory which La Salle had so appeal-
THE PRODUCERS 335
sable, a sickle — a vibrating sickle driven by horses, that
would in a day do the work of a dozen, twenty, thirty,
forty men, women, children, and grandmothers. In
his eastern home he had, like La Salle, suffered from
creditors, from jeering neighbors who thought him
visionary, if not crazed, and from fearful laborers who
broke his machines; but there in that golden western
valley he found sympathy, and, on the Chicago por-
tage, a site for the making of his sickles, fitted into
machines called harvesters — there where the French
precursor's boat and sword were found not long ago.
Seventeen years later, on his imperial farm. Napoleon
III (whose royal ancestors had given the very site for
the factory) fastened the cross of the Legion of Honor
upon the breast of this prophet.
There were others who went with him or followed
him into that richer valley, adding the self-rake to the
sickle, then putting a platform on the harvester so
that the men who bound the sheaves had no longer
to walk and bend over the grain on the ground, as they
had done since before the days of Ruth and Naomi,
then devising an iron arm to take the place of one of
flesh, and finally putting a piece of twine in the hand
of that iron arm and making it do the work of the
binder. I cannot help wondering what Tonty of the
iron hand would have said could he have seen that
half-human machine cutting the wheat, and with its
iron hand tying it in bundles, there in the fields of
Aramoni, just back of the Rock St. Louis.
But I do not need to idealize or emphasize to men of
France the service of this particular precursor, who was
for years considering the unwrought iron, making ex-
periment after experiment before he came down into
1
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMER
golden valley, literally to multiply its acrt
Iredfold; for the French Academy of Science
d that he had "done more for the cause of a
ire than any other living man," and a late Pr
of the French Republic is quoted as saying t
out this harvester "France would starve."
; of Spain, the Emperor of Germany, the Czai
la, the Sultan of Turkey, and the Shah of Pe
added their tributes to those of the Presidem
French Republic, and all the nations of the ea
iterally bringmg their glory and their honor i
city of the portage strip, which, in a sense,
ng across and out of it paths to all the ot
;n valleys of the earth, for we are told that
es are reaping the fields of "Argentina in Janu:
jr Egypt in February, East India in Mai
ico in April, China in May, Spain in June, low;
, Canada in August, Sweden in September, >
in October, South Africa in November, and Bui
THE PRODUCERS 337
tillable, grain-growing valleys of this planet; and yet
a recent, most observing English critic, Mr. Wells,
saw as he left that city only a "great industrial deso-
lation" netted by railroads. He smelled an unwhole-
some reek from the stock-yards, and saw a bituminous
reek that outdoes London, with vast chimneys right and
left, "huge blackened grain-elevators, flame-crowned
furnaces, and gauntly ugly and filthy factory build-
ings, monstrous mounds of refuse, desolate, empty
lots, littered with rusty cans, old iron, and indescrib-
able rubbish. Interspersed with these are groups of
dirty, disreputable, insanitary-looking wooden houses."'
Nothing but these in a place whose very smoke was a
sign of what had made it possible for the nations of
the earth even to subsist at all in any such numbers,
or if at all, on anything better than black bread.
And, after all, this precursor, this runner before, was
but one of hundreds of later Champlains, Nicolets, and
La Salles, in the wake of whose visions came the pro-
ducers, those who led forth the com and wheat from
the furrows, the trees from the forests, the coal from
the ground, the iron from the hills, the steel from the
retorts, the fire from the wells, the water from the
mountains, electricity from the clouds and the cataract
— dukes, field-marshals, generals, demigods whom no
myth has enhaloed or poetry immortalized.
Prometheus, bringing fire to mortals, did in a more
primitive way what they have done who have led forth
the oil of the rocks (petroleum) to light the lamps of
the earth. Orpheus, who sang so entrancingly that
mortals forgot their punishments and followed him,
and Amphion, who drew the stones into their places
' H. G. Weill, "Future io America," p. 59.
1
C!^^^^H
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMER
le W2lls by his music, performed no more c
cle than a lad who tips a Bessemer conver
ules is remembered as a hero of the garden of
lerides for all time, whereas he probably but
;d oranges from Spain to the eastern Medii
in, and is hardly to be mentioned by the side
a Mississippi Valley transporter and importei
Hill.
It let us follow more particularly the produc
e fields, whom we call the farmers there, the r
n the son of Sirach had in mind when he said
ancient days: "How shall he become wise t
;th the plough, that glorieth Jn the shaft of
, . . . and whose discourse is of the stock
?" It was a farmer's son who invented the 1:
:r, and four-fifths of the men (whom the writer
n I am indebted for many of these facts ab
"armer, calls "harvester kings") — along with
^h kings and wagon kings of whom democracy
THE PRODUCERS 339
the census shows, for the fanner now works with the
old-time power of five men.
Six per cent of the human race (and the larger part
of that six per cent is in the Mississippi Valley) pro-
ducer one-fifth of the wheat of the world, two-thirds of
the cotton, and three fourths of the com (and this
takes no account of its reapers and mowers that gather
the crops in other valleys).
It would cost three hundred million dollars more to
harvest the world's wheat by hand, if it were possible,
than it costs now by the aid of the harvester and reaper."
Some years ago in a trial made in Germany in the
presence of the Emperor and his ministers, it was
shown that a Mississippi Valley harvester driven by
one man could do more in one day than forty Polish
women with old-fashioned sickles.*
The precursor of the harvester saw grandmothers
and mothers in the fields working day and night to
cut and gather the harvest, but he could not now
(except among the new immigrant farmers) see that
spectacle. I cannot recall that, until I met that old-
world population coming over the mountains as I
made my first journey east out of that valley, over
twenty years ago, I ever saw a woman at work in the
fields.
The gallantry of that primitive pioneer life kept
her in the cabin, which was the castle, and, while her
labor was doubtless not less than her husband's, it had
the sanctity of its seclusion and its maternal ministries
to life. In the new industrialism that has invited the
daughters of the Polish women harvesters into the
■ H. N. Cutoa, "Romuice of die Reaper," p. 178.
* H. N. Crmoo, "Romance of the Reaper," pp. 134, 135.
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
)ries yonder there is this constant and increasing
ern which is insisting upon a living wage, whole-
; sanitary environment, and on shorter hours of
r for women and children — this purpose that will
lately bring skies and sunsets without exposure or
-breaking labor.
1 my way to a provincial university in the north
ranee not long ago, I saw a peasant mother standing
te misty morning at the mouth of a small thresher,
ing into it the sheaves handed her by her husband,
lorse in a treadmill furnishing the power. When
ssed in the misty morning of the next day she was
feeding the yellow sheaves into the thresher; and
iught how much better that was than the flail.
1 a farm in the northwest, a hundred miles square,
)ng ago as 1893, three hundred self-binders were
ing the wheat at the cost of less than a cent a
el — with practically no human labor beyond
ng,^ and there are seven thousand harvesting ma-
THE PRODUCERS 341
while in the United States it is one hundred and thiny-
eight acres, and in the States west of the Mississippi
two hundred and eleven acres.
And the product ? One harvest, in the picturesque
words of Mr. Casson, would buy Belgium, two would
buy Italy, three would buy Austria-Hungary, and five,
at a spot-cash price, would take Russia from the Czar.
Seven bushels of wheat for every man, woman, and
child of the ninety or more millions in America and a
thousand million dollars' worth of food to other nations t
That is the sum of the product — of what has been led
forth in a single year.
But the leader forth, the producer, the man who
set his heart upon "turning his furrows," whose "wake-
fulness was to give heifers their fodder," he has himself
risen. He has, as I said of the fanners of Aramom
(the sons of the first settlers who are sdll turning up
occasionally a flint arrow-head in the fields) — he has
his daily paper, his daily mail, his telephone. He
"pays his taxes with a week's earnings." He ploughs,
plants, sows, cultivates, reaps by machinery. The
poet Gray could find only with difficulty in that valley
a footsore ploughman homeward wending his weary
way, and Millet would in vain look for a sower, a man
with a hoe, a woman reaper with a sickle, a man with
a scythe or cradle. The new-world peasant is not
only maintaining more than his per-capita share of the
"fabric of the worid" but he is taking his place in the
councils of men.
What is most promising now is that these followers
of the old pioneers of France in that valley are be-
ginning to add to their acres new dominions, discovered
by the new pioneers of France, such as the chemists
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
oisier and Berthelot, forerunners of the modem
ols of agricultural chemistry and physical chemis-
One hundred years after La Salle completed the
:rway journey to the gulf through that valley,
oisier made a discovery of the composition of water
f that has been of immense benefit, I am told, to
farmer of that valley and of other valleys. And
1 came Berthelot with his teaching of how to put
ther again, to synthetize, what man has waste-
■ dissipated. France's men of the lens and the
rt have become precursors where France's men of
boat and the sword went first, and have opened
IS to even richer fields than those in which the har-
ers have reaped.
here are as many agricultural colleges in the United
es as there are Stares; there are at least fifty agri-
iral experiment stations, and there is ever new
ision for scientific agricultural research,
ere is a partial catalogue of the enactments and
THE PRODUCERS 343
1913. — ^^7i500, experimental work in dry farming, dairy-
ing, etc.
1913-14. — County commissioners, on petition of one hundred
taxpayers, to appoint county agriculturist;
salary paid by county and expenses by county.
State, and United States.
ILLINOIS
1913. — Authorized counties to appropriate £5,000 annually
for soil and crop improvement.
See "American Year Book, 1913," p. 466.
IOWA
1913, — ^$500, cross-breeding of fruits and edible nuts. Au-
thorizing establishment of county corpora-
tions for improvement of agriculture.
40,000, experiment station.
10,000, veterinary investigation.
17,000, experimental farm.
40,000, agricultural extension.
See "American Y«ar Book, 1913," p. 465.
KANSAS
1913-14. — $55,000, experiment station.
15,000, production and dissemination of im-
proved seeds.
102,500, for six branch stations, two of which are
new.
125,000, pumping-plants at experiment station.
LOUISIANA
l9i2.^Police juries of several parishes authorized to appro-
priate not to exceed $1,000 annually in aid of
farmers' co-operative demonstration work; also
to acquire and establish experimental farms.
MICHIGAN
191Z. — ^Authorizing and regularing county agricultural de-
partments for advice and assistance to farmers.
MINNESOTA
1913. — ^$60,000, maintenance of county agricultural agaiU;
counties each to pay $l,ooa
1
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
MISSOURI
14. — $25,000, county farm advisers.
20,000, soil experiments.
30,000, agricultural investigations.
5,000, promotion of com growing.
12,000, soil survey.
50,000, hog-cholera serum work.
2,500, orchard demonstration.
10,000, agricultural laboratories.
12,000, animal husbandry.
5,000, dairying.
MONTANA
—520,000, demonstration of dry-land fanning.
—County commissioners may, upon vote of 51 per cent
of electors, appropriate Jioo per month for
agricultural instructor, remainder of salary to
be paid by State and United States.
NEBRASKA
12.— Sioo,ooo, establishment of school of agriculture.
3,000, agricultural botanical worL.
THE PRODUCERS 345
TEXAS
1911. — ^Authorizing county commissioners' courts to estab-
lish experimental farms.
1913. — Railroads may own and operate experimental farms.
WISCONSIN
1913. — Beginning January t, 19141 jio,ooo, county agricul-
tural representatives, agricultural develop-
ment, etc.
WYOMING
1912. — $4)000, agriculture and soil-culture experiments.
1913. — $4,000, experiments along lines of agriculture and soil
culture.
5,000, purchase and maintenance of experimental
&rm.
1914-15. — $5,000, dry-farm experiments.
See "AmeriuQ Yeu Book, 191]," p. 466.
And nearly every State availed itself by specific act
of certain appropriations under a federal grant. In
addition to all this, appropriations are generally made
for the holding of farmers' institutes at which instruc-
tion is given by experts and farmers exchange experi-
ences.
The agricultural colleges have a total of over one
hundred thousand graduates, men and women, and it is
they, and those who follow in increasing numbers, who
are to cultivate the valley of Lavoisier and Berthelot
even as the pioneers and producers of the past have
cultivated for the world the valley of Marquette and
La Salle.
It is not all as bright and promising as this rather
generalized picture may seem to indicate. There are
still isolations, there are bad crops in unfavorable
places and untoward seasons. There are human fail-
1
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
It is an intimation of the darker side that Presi-
Roosevelt appointed a commission' a few years
see what could be done for the ignorances, the
omenesses, the monotonies of country Ufe in Amer-
ind to prevent the migration to cities, even as
i XIV. But all that I have described is there
;ressively, blusteringly, optimistically there — and
ing most confidently on. It is for the most part
nperate life. All through that valley there has
t a movement, moral, economic, or both, which
losed saloons and prevented the sale of intoxicat-
rink of any sort in States or communities all the
from the lakes to the gulf.
t, singularly enough, there is promise of a new age
:ohol, I am told- Farmers can distil a variety of
01 from potatoes at a cost of ten cents a gallon
jse it in gasolene engines most profitably, which
one who has written most informingly and hope-
of the American farmer to foreshadow the day
THE PRODUCERS 347
resenting it by means of color or expressing the rhythm
of its growth in metered words. But, I believe that
there is as much beauty and poetry there as among
the isles of Greece, if only it were interpreted by the
disinterested spirit and skill of the artist, the scholar,
and the poet.
If we turn for a moment to the precursors who have
led the way to the valley that lies beneath, the valley
of the strata of coal and iron, with its subterranean
streams of precious metal, its currents of gold and silver,
and its lakes of oil and gas, and from these precursors
to the producers and transporters who have led these
elements forth to the uses of man, we shall find a like
story — another chapter of democracy's dreaming of
kings.
The same author whom I have quoted liberally
above has written what he calls "The Romance of
Steel" in that valley. It begins with an Englishman
of French ancestry, Bessemer, and one Kelly, an Irish-
American, bom on the old Fort Duquesne point. They
had discovered and developed, each without the knowl-
edge of the other, the pneumatic process of treating
iron — that is, of reBning it with air and making steel.
Bessemer's name became associated with the process.
But the industry has made Kelly's birthplace, the site
of the old French fort, its capital (with another of
those poetic Btnesses that multiply as we put the pres-
ent against the past).
France not only gave to Pittsburgh her site but the
crucibles in which her fortunes lay. Bessemer was
the son of a French artist living in London in poverty.
Young Bessemer had invented many devices, when
Napoleon III, one day in a conversation, complained
348 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
to him that the metal used in making cannon was of
poor quality and expensive. He began experiments
in London at the Emperor's suggestion and later
sent the Emperor a toy cannon of his own making.
It was in this experimenting, as I infer, that the idea
struck him of making malleable iron by introducing
air into the fluid first experiments were
not particularly ind when he read a
paper on the pi icturing steel without
fuel before the ion for the Advance-
ment of Science, ery British steelmaker
roared with lai azy Frenchman" and
that it was vote i his silly paper in the
minutes of the aa
To-day, on the same authonty, "there are more than
a hundred Bessemer converters in the United States,"
and they "breathe iron into steel at the rate of eight-
een billion pounds a year" — "two and a quarter mil-
lions of pounds every hour of the day and night."
With their companion open-hearth converters and
I "On the 13th of Augutt, 1856, the author had the honor of reading a
paper before the mechanical tection of the British AsBociation at Chelten-
ham, Thia paper, entitled 'The Manufacture of Malleable Iron and
Steel without Fuel,' wa» the firit account that appeared shadowing forth
the importint manufacture now generally known aa the Bessemer process.
"Itnaaonly through the earnest solicitation of Mr. George Rennie, the
then president of the mechanical section of this aMociation, that the inven-
tion was, at that early etage of iti development, thus prominently brought
forward; and when the author reSects on the amount of labor and expendi-
ture of time and money that were found to be still necessary before any
commercial results from the working of the process were obtained, he has
no doubt whatever but that, if the paper at Cheltenham had not then been
read, the important system of manufacture to which it gave rise would to
this hour have been wholly unknown."
Henry Beuemer, "On the Manufacture of Cast Steel: Its Progress and
Employment ai a Substitute for Wrought Irttn." British Association for
the Advancement of Science, Report, 1865. Mechanical Science Section,
pp. 165-6.
I
I
THE PRODUCERS 349
attendant furnaces and mills, they not only hold the
site of the old fort but make a circle of glowing for-
tresses around the valley — in Buffalo, in Birmingham,
Alabama, and in the "red crags" of the Rockies at
Pueblo, beneath Pike's Peak. And within ten years a
whole new city,* not far from Chicago, on Lake Mich-
igan, has been made to order. A river was turned
from its course, a town was moved, and an entirely
new city was constructed with homes for nearly twenty
thousand workmen near a square mile of furnaces and
mills.
The attention of the world has been centred upon
the millionaires whom this mighty trade has made.
The very book which I have quoted so literally carries
as its luring subtitle, "The Story of a Thousand Mil-
lionaires." "A huge, exclusive preoccupation with
dollar-getting," says H. G. Wells. But an occupation
that finds the red earth and the white earth, carries it
hundreds of miles to where the coal is stored or the
gas is ready to be lighted, assembles the labor from
Europe, and converts that red earth, with almost
human possibilities, into rails and locomotives (that
have together made a republic such as the United States
possible), into forty-story buildings and watch-springs,
into bridges and mariners' needles, into battle-ships
and lancets, into almost every conceivable instrument
of human use, can hardly be rightfully called a pre-
occupation with dollar-getting, though it has brought
the perplexing problem that has so much disturbed the
hopes of democracy, dreaming of such masterful chil-
dren, producers, and poets, yet dreading the very in-
equalities that their energies create.
* Guf, Indiuit.
3SO THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
There comes constantly the question as to how all
this initiative which has been so titanic is to be recon-
ciled with the general good — a world-wide and insis-
tent problem, which will be more serious there when
the neighborliness is not so intimate. But the new
neighborly element will be found, we must believe, as
an element has \ istrengtheningof steel.
I was told by n visiting the mills in
Pittsburgh, that er knows that a little
titanium mixed i iron after its boiling
in air multiplie rength immeasurably,
though no one it is so. Perhaps, in
the plans for the ttsburgh and Chicago,
we have sign of ium that will increase
the tensile strength ot democracy in the places where
the stress and strain are greatest.
But my concern just now is that the reader shall
see how the valley first explored by the French has
given and is giving bread to the world, and has post-
poned the dread augury of the Malthusian doctrine;
how the larger valley of the explorers of the lens and
crucible, Lavoisier and Berthelot, is opening into infin-
ite distances; and how the under valley, when breathed
upon by the air, has given its wealth to the over valley
— and through this all to realize that France's geo-
graphical descendants are out of those three valleys
evoking, making, a new world.
For they are a people of makers — of new-age poets,
not mere workers glorying in the shafts of their goads,
wakeful to adorn their work and keep clean the fur-
nace, and making their "craft their prayer" (an im-
possibility in these days of the high division of labor)
but rough, noisy, grimy, braggart creators, caring not
I
I
THE PRODUCERS 351
for the straighuess of the furrow unless it produces
more, the beauty of the goad unless it promotes speed,
the cleanliness of the furnace unless it increases the
output, or the craft itself; but only of the product, the
thing led forth, and its value to the world. If so much
is said of the dollar, it is because the dollar is the kilo-
watt, the measure of the product. And while we have
not yet found the ideal way of distributing what has
been led forth, do not let that fact obscure the world
service of these new-world Prometheans, who have
carried the fire to a mortal use which even the gods of
Greece could not have imagined and have turned the
air itself into fuel to feed it.
A young man, bom son of a stone-mason in that
valley, who has been successively a student, clerk,
lawyer, solicitor-general of a great railroad, its presi-
dent, and later the head of an industry that is carrying
electricity over the world, said to me not long ago
that he was building a trolley-Iine in Rome. It seemed
a profanation. But if the titular function of the official
who holds the highest spiritual office there was once
the care of bridges (Pontifex Maximus), will the higher
utilization of those bridges not be some day made as
poetic, as spiritual, as high a function of state and
society ?
I see that son of the stone-mason, with blanched
face and set jaw, facing and quelling a body of strikers
threatening to tear up the tracks along the Chicago
River, as brave as Horatius at the bridge across the
Tiber. There is a vivid picture of democracy's great-
est problem in that valley. Then I see him flinging
almost in a day a new bridge across the Tiber. There
is a companion picture, a gleam of democracy's poesy.
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
e writing of the habitants of one of those smoky
' cities said: "They are not below poetry but
: it." Rather are they making it— ^rough, virile,
ess, rhymeless. It reminds me of some of Walt
nan's verses that at first seem but catalogues of
!y objects on his horizon but that by and by are
tg, in some rough rhythm, a song that stirs one's
of rocks, led from cisterns in the valley, that
ecamp found so dark and gloomy on the Celoron
ey, to the lamp of the academician and the peas-
wheat from millions of age-long fallow acres to
the world from fear of hunger; flour from the
ing of the mills of the saint to whom La Salle
d; wagons, sewing-machines, ploughs, harvesters
the places of the portages; bridges, steel rails,
ready-made structures of twenty stories from the
! of the forts; unheard-of fruits from the trees of
ew garden of the Hesperides (under the magic of
THE PRODUCERS
353
air to be heard. Some said there was but the slamming
of doors, but I had evidence of my own ears that the
music was there. I have not imagined this song of the
valley, nor have I improvised it. Its vibrations which
I myself feel are but transmitted as best an imperfect,
detached frame in the midst of other sounds and in-
terests can.
THE THOUGHT OF TO-MORROW 355
a few tons of coal in a shed, a box of crayons, and per-
haps a map. The master made his own fires and
swept unaided, or with the aid of his pupils, the floor.
When, years later, in a larger building on the same
site I came to be master of the same school, and
gathered for work at night the farmers' sons who could
not leave the fields by day, except in winter, I even
paid the expense of the light. Now, if not on that
site, certainly on thousands of others, in schools spring-
ing from such beginnings, the community provides not
only chalk and electric light, but pencils, paper, books,
lenses, compasses, lathes, libraries, gymnastic ap-
paratus, pianos, and even food, if not free, at any rate
at cost, in addition to trained teachers, trained in public
normal schools, and janitors, and automatic ventila-
tors to insure pure air, and thermostats to preserve an
even temperature. The public has become father,
mother, physician, and guild master as well as teacher
of the new generation.
The public has even become the nurse, for in most
of the large cities the kindergarten has become trans-
formed into a public institution which takes the child
from the home, sometimes almost from the cradle,
but more often from the street, at the age of four,
five, or six years, and keeps it until it is ready for the
tuitions of the elementary grades. In St. Louis, just
across and up the river from Fort Chartres, where the
initial municipal experiment was made, there are now
more than two hundred and eighty-three such schools.
It has, moreover, gone beyond these serious maternal
employments. The strenuous civilization of the west
has insisted that every man shall work. But now
that it has succeeded in this^ it is not only beginning
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
psist that he shall not work too much — the maxi-
i hours of labor in many employments being fixed
-but he is being taught how to play wisely.
I of the most stirring books that I have read recently,
lie Spirit of Play and the City Streets," is an appeal
by Miss Addams, of Chicago, whose noble
. has been for years among the people who live
; by Marquette's portage hut — an appeal for the
Ignition of the play instincts and their conversion
1 a greater permanent human happiness. There are
[sties which intimate that the per-hour efficiency
pen in some parts of America, whose number of
> of labor has been lessened, has also been dimin-
■diminished because of their imprudent use of
■ leisure, of their play time. So the thought of
pi experts is turning to teaching children to play
y, they whose ancestors were compelled to leave
llaying.
Ispeak of this here to intimate how far in its thought
THE THOUGHT OF TO-MORROW 357
properties in the State was $2,170, that the average
expenditure for each pupil was $28.86, and for each
inhabitant $6.58, and that of the 507,109 pupils en-
rolled in the State only six per cent were in private
schools — the average for the States of the west vary-
ing from less than one per cent to sixteen per cent.
The elementary school followed the frontier at even
pace. It was usually the first public building of every
community, large or small. That everybody saw it
for what it was, I cannot maintain; but that it was the
symbol of the nation of to-morrow, borne daily before
the people of the present is certain. The westerners
carried rails in the Lincoln campaign, in their pride of
his humble birth and vocation; they carried miniature
log cabins in another campaign in exaltation of an-
other frontier hero. They pictured ploughs and axes
on the shields of their commonwealths. But if one
were to seek a symbol for the democracy of that valley,
one could find none more appropriate than the image
of a frontier schoolhouse. It is the most poetical thing
of all that western landscape, when it is seen for what
it is, though it is not always architecturally imposing.
A signal-box, says an English essayist, such as one
sees along the railroads, is only called a signal-box,
but it is the house of life and death, a place "where
men in an agony of vigilance light blood-red and sea-
green fires to keep other men from death." A post-
box is only called a post-box; it is a sanctuary of human
words, a place to which "friends and lovers commit
their messages, conscious that when they have done so
they are sacred, and not to be touched not only by
others but even by themselves."* And so a school-
' G. K. Cheiierton, on Mr. Rudysrd Kipling, in hit "Heretici," p. 41.
I THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
: is only called a schoolhouse, but it is a place
the invisible spirits of the past meet in the
It the nascent spirits of the future — the meeting-
2 of the nation of yesterday and to-morrow. And
show that image of the schoolhouse upon a
I of white, as suggesting those white acres conse-
! of the domain of Louis XIV to the children of
|?est.
me years ago, when walking across the island of
) Rico in the West Indies, just after its occupation
pnnexation by the United States, I met in the in-
mountains one morning a man carrying upon
fioulders a basket filled with flowers, as it seemed
; at a distance. As he approached, however, I
Ithat he was bearing the dead body of his child,
I flowers about it, to burial in consecrated ground
away. The first task of the new government
, as in the western States, was to make fields con-
Ited for the living child, to set apart sites for
THE THOUGHT OF TO-MORROW 359
of to-morrow. There are over ten million children in
the public schools of that valley alone in America, and,
as I stated above, less than eight per cent in the private
schools; in the State of Indiana, where Lincoln had his
slight schooling, less than three per cent are in private
schools — that is, practically the entire people of the
coming generation will have had some tuition of the
common school, some equality of fitting.
Third, as is to be inferred from the second fact,
children of rich and poor, of banker and mechanic,
doctor and tradesman, come together, and in a per-
fectly natural companionship, though in the great
cities, where there is less homogeneity, this mingling
is somewhat disturbed by social stratification and the
great masses of immigrants.
So is the motto of the French Republic written the
length and breadth of that valley, though it may never
actually be seen upon a lintel or door-post: the "lib-
erty" of access to the knowledges which are to assist
in making men as free as they can be; an elevating
"equality" such as a State can give to men of un-
equal endowments, capacities, and ambitions; and a
"fraternity" which is unconscious of else than real
differences.
I gave intimation in an earlier chapter of the cos-
mopolitan quality of the human material gathered
into those houses of prophecy. There is separation of
Caucasian from African in the south, and there is more
or less unwilling association of Caucasian and Oriental
in places of the far west on the Pacific slope, but ex-
cept for these and for individual instances where, for
example, the social extremes are brought together,
these minglings are but microcosms of the State itself.
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
; schools are not in that valley, in any sense, places
vided by wealth for poverty, by one class for another
harity schools; they are the natural meeting-houses
iemocracy, with as little atmosphere of pauper or
;s schools as the highways, on which even the Presi-
t must obey the custom which controls the humblest.
Lnd let me say in passing: there is no body of men
1 women in America more useful to the State, more
li-minded, more patriotic, than the army of pubhc
ool-teachers — out great soldiery of peace,
'hey are a body six times the size of our standing
\y — more than a half-million in number (547,289)
ecruited from the best stock we have and animated
higher purposes, more unselfish motives than any
er half-million public or private vocationalists of
erica. The total expenditure for the common schools
)ut fout and a half times the appropriation for the
iding army, though the number of teachers is six
es (which intimates how little we pay our public
THE THOUGHT OF TO-MORROW 361
have to increase her standing army of soldiers, and even
then, with the multitudes of individual ignorances,
malices, selfishnesses growing in her own valleys and
being disembarked by millions at her ports, she would
be powerless to defend her ideals.
One whom I have already quoted as speaking so dis*
paragingly of Chicago said that the most touching
sight he saw in America was the marching of the
phalanxes of the nation of to-morrow past one of the
generals or colonels of that standing army of teachers.
It was not in Chicago, but it might have been. This
particular phalanx had not been in America long.
They were singing "Sweet Land of Liberty" as they
marched, swishing their flags, and then they paused
and repeated in broken speech:
" Flag of our great republic, inspirer !n battle, guard-
ian of our homes, whose stars and stripes stand for
bravery, purity, truth, and union, we salute thee I
We, the natives of distant lands who find rest under
thy folds, do pledge our hearts, our lives, and our
sacred honor to love and protect thee, our country,
and the hberty of the American people forever."' A
Uttle florid, you may say. "But think," said the
English visitor, even as he passed out into the filthy
street, " think of the promise of it 1 Think of the flower
of belief that may spring from this warm sowing I"
And what gives most promise now is that this
tuition has assumed a more positive interest in the
nation of to-morrow. The pioneer school was a place
of discipline, a place of fraternity, and it had the co-
operation of the home discipline and of the discipline
of the primitive industrial life in which the boy joined
' M. G. Weill, "Future io America," p. loj.
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
I during his school years. But that tuition was in
nse as unsocialized as was the democracy of that
It was assumed that this meagre training would
) the boy with all the tools of citizenship. Bemg
■ to read, write, and cipher, his own instincts and
lests would somehow procure good government and
>. Whatever patriotic stimulus his school
J him, as I recall out of my experience, was through
itory which engendered a feeling of hostility toward
land. That is being succeeded by a positive pro-
lime that thinks very definitely of the boy's fullest
■nent and of his social spiritualization. The
lolhouse has become, or is in the way of becoming,
tivic centre of the nation.
Lt on top of the eight years' training of the ele-
Itary school, which was considered at first the full
lure of the obligation of the community, the State
rat region came to build additional years of dis-
— the high schools, first to equip young men for
THE THOUGHT OF TO-MORROW 363
where La Salle gathered about his rock-built castle
his red allies to the number of thousands and attempted
to build up what La Barre, in his letter to Louis XIV,
characterized as an imaginary kingdom for himself —
there is a beautiful nver city, bearing the Indian name
of "Ottawa," and in the midst of it a large building
that was for me the capital of an imaginary kingdom,
my one-time world, though it is called a township
high school. I speak of it because it is typical of the
instruction and influence that have come out of the
long past, and that are looking into the long future,
in thousands of the towns and cities that have each
about them as many aspiring men, women, and youth
as La Salle had savage souls about his solitary castle in
the wilderness.
These are the new Rocks St. Louis, these the eagles'
nests of the new Nouvelle France — I have visited
scores of them — at Peoria, that was Fort Crevecceur;
at Joliet, where is now one of the best-equipped schools
in the valley; at Marquette, upon Lake Superior; at
Chicago, where I spoke one day to four thousand
high-school boys and girls, for in most of these
schools the boys and girls are taught together. The
valley has one of these schools every few miles, where
are gathered for the higher, sterner disciplines of de-
mocracy those who wish to prepare themselves for its
larger service.
Their courses are four years in length, and, though
varying widely, have each a core of mathematics, Eng-
lish, foreign languages, and either science or manual
training or commerce. In some large cities the schools
are differentiated as general, manual training, and com-
mercial.
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
lit the States of that valley have not stopped here.
the encouragement of national grants — again
I the great domain of Louis XIV — they have estab-
iniversities with colleges of hberal arts and
, and schools of agnculture, forestry, mining,
lieenng, pharmacy, veterinary surgery, commerce,
ledicine, and philosophy. There is not a State
1 that valley that has not its university in name
1 most instances in fact. They admit both men
women and there is no fee, or only a nominal fee,
pidents of the State. These are the great strategic
s and strongholds of the new democracy.
little way back from Cadillac's fort on the Detroit
r is one, the oldest, the University of Michigan —
d in 1837— with 5,805 students. A few years
addressed there, at commencement, over eight
red candidates for degrees and diplomas in law,
Line, pharmacy, liberal arts and science.
little way from the Fox-Wisconsin portage is an-
THE THOUGHT OF TO-MORROW 365
scholarship directly to the people. It needs sorely ad-
vice of the arts that centre in Paris, as most of those
universities do. It needs advice not of industry but
of the indefatigable disinterestedness of the French.
Behind the Falls of St. Anthony in the Mississippi
River, first described and named by Father Hennepin, is
the University of Minnesota, with 6,642 students. The
principal deity of the Sioux was supposed to live under
these falls, and Hennepin, the priest of Artois, speaks
in his journal of hearing one of the Indians at the
portage around the falls, in loud and lamenting voice
haranguing the spirit to whom he had just hung a robe
of beaver-skin among the branches of a tree. The
buildings that are and are planned to be on this site
would tell better than a chapter of description what
a single State has done and is purposing at this
portage of St. Anthony of Padua, where hardly more
than a lifetime ago the savage was sacrificing beaver-
skins to the god of the Mississippi. There are many
great laboratories and academic buildings upon that
high shore at present, but a score more are in prospect
for this mighty democratic university of letters and
science, law and medicine, that will house In other
centuries perhaps not merely the appeased spirit of
the Mississippi but such learning as is in Paris or was
in Padua, whose saint is still remembered by the falls;
for the university has the necessary means. When
the Eglise of the Sorbonne, which Richelieu had con-
secrated, was being built, the French priests out along
the shores of Superior were preparing the way for
this new-world university. Certain lands in that iron
region which they first explored were given by the
nation as dowry to the university. These were not
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
;ht to be valuable, as at the time of the grant the
valuable timber and farming land had been sold.
;n years ago, more or less, a train-load of iron ore
irought down from that region to Allouez, a town
le lake named in memory of the priest of St.
t — and now the lands of the university are valued
>m thirty to fifty millions of dollars.'
e might follow the River Colbert all the way down
alley and trace its branches to the mountains on
■ side, and find in every State some such fortress:
wa a university with 2,255 students; in Illinois
■ith 4,330; and so on to the banks of the river in
i where La Salle died — and there learn that the
extensive of all in its equipment may some day
These, besides the scores of institutions of private
ation, but compelled to the same public spirit
e State universities, tell with what thought of
irrow the geographical descendants of France are
their tasks of to-day, where Allouez and Mar-
THE THOUGHT OF TO-MORROW 367
spoke in prophecy when he said that the earth had
grown more beautiful with their coming.
The common school, the high school, the college and
university — the common school compulsory for every
child; the high school open to every boy and girl, with-
out regard to race, creed, or riches; the university
accessible to every young man and woman who has
the ambition, the endurance, to make his way or her
way to the frontiers of the spirit and endure their
hardships ! For I think of these universities as the
free lands that were out upon the borders of that
valley, except that this frontier of the mind will never,
never find its limit. There will always be a frontier
beyond, for new settlers, new squatters, of the telescope
which makes the universe smaller, of the microscope
which enlarges it, of the written word, the spoken word,
the unknown quantities, the philosophies of life. Do
we not see the illimitable fields opening even beyond
the vision of those men of the crucible and retort, who
are but leading the new fanners on to visible fields of
increasing richness ?
Hardly less cosmopolitan are the men of science and
letters who are actually in those regions, and only less
so those tens of thousands, who, like migrants of the
earlier days, are going forward, many to the farthest,
lonesomest frontiers of knowledge, but all to something
beyond their immediate ancestral lot or field.
I am not thinking of the additions to the world's
learning in all this, great as it is but impossible of ap-
praisement. Nor am I thinking chiefly of the indus-
trial and material advantages. I think it was some
bacteriological discovery, known as the Babcock test,
resulting in a great improvement in the making of
368 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
butter, that gave the University of Wisconsin its first
wide sympathetic support. It was the discovery by
a professor in one of the western universities of the
means of inoculating with some fatal disease, and so
exterminating, an insect that destroyed wheat and
oats, which g?vp that nrnfpKinr a. chancellorship, I am
told, and his liberal appropriations.
But those ac 'ames, while not to be
belittled, I h; :alogue and recite here.
I am thinking lue of this great public
educational sj nking constantly of to-
morrow — of t of to-morrow, to some
extent, to whi , as railroads' and ships'
courses, lead; i rters of to-morrow, per-
haps; but more specifically and more especially of the
higher happiness of those particular regions and the
success of its democracy. I am thinking of what these
institutions of the people's own devising are doing
toward the making of a homogeneous spirit, in which
individual, disinterested, and varied achievement will
have a liberty to grow — as perhaps in no other soil of
earth.
Democritus said two thousand years and more ago:
"Education and nature are similar. For education
transforms the man, and in transforming him creates
in him a new nature." The State in its three institu-
tions — the common school, the high school, the college
and university — has many in its care and under its
tuitions for fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years, and in
these tuitions has she created in her children a new
nature, whatever their ancestry or place of birth.
Memories of Europe's forges and trees, or fields of
roses and golden mountains, and even of Asia's wil-
THE THOUGHT OF TO-MORROW 369
dernesses, are in the names of many who enter those
doors; the memories of other languages are in the mus-
cles of their tongues or the formation of their organs
of speech. Like the ancient Ephraimites at the fords
of Jordan, they cannot "frame to pronounce" certain
words. And memories of persecution or of vassalage
are in the physical and mental attitudes of some. But
they are all reborn of a genealogy impersonal but
loftier in its gifts than any mere personal heritage — a
genealogy which, like that of the children of Deucalion,
begins in the earth itself, the free soil.
I have often thought and spoken of how artificial
differences disappear when, let us say, Smith (English)
and Schmidt (German) and Cohen (Hebrew), Coletti
(ItaHan) and D'Artagnan (French) and McGregor
(Scotch) and Olsen (Scandinavian) and McCarthy
(Irish) and Winslow (of old America) travel together
through the parasangs of the "Anabasis," or together
follow Cxsar into Gaul, or together compute a solar
parallax, or build an arch, or do any one of a thousand
things that have no national boundaries or racial char-
acteristics. This is an extreme but not an unheard-of
assembling of elements which the State has the task of
assimilating to its own ideals.
I have not spoken, I cannot speak, of methods of
that teaching, of its shortcomings, of it crudities in
many places, of its general want of appreciation of
form and color (of its particular need of France there),
of its utilitarian inclinations, and of its eager haste.
The essential thing that I have wanted to say is that
this valley is not only more democratic socially and
politically than any other part of America, unless it
be that narrow strip farther west, but is also more
370 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
consciously and vitally and constantly concerned about
the nation of to-morrow.
I spoke of the flaming ingot of steel swinging in
the smoky ravine by the site of Fort Duquesne as the
symbol of the new human metal that is made of the
mingling of men of varied race, tradition, and ideals in
the labor of But above that in a
clearer sky shi ^ful symbol — the house
of the school, : of the invisible spirits,
the place of pr against a white field.
The historia :he origins of these in-
stitutions to N England, to Germany,
to Greece. It :red that France went
first and hallo' But it is my hope that
out in that valley, once a ycai, school and university
may be led to look back to the men who there ven-
tured all for the "greater glory of God" and majesty
of France and found a field for the greater freedom
and fraternity of mankind.
My own thought goes back to the place by the St.
Charles River where Carrier's boat, which he could
not take back to St. Malo because so many of his men
had died, was left to be buried by the river, the place
where Montcalm gathered his shattered army after
the defeat on the Plains of Abraham. It was there
that a structure once stood, made of planks hewn out
of the forest, plastered with mud and thatched with
long grass from the meadows. It was the residence of
Notre Dame des Anges, the house from which the first
martyrs were to go forth toward the west. This was,
says Parkman, the cradle of the great mission of New
France. And to this my thought goes as the precursor
of the university in the Valley of the New Democracy.
CHAPTER XVIII
"THE MEN OF ALWAYS"
IF one travels along the lower St. Lawrence in sum-
mer, one sees the narrow strips of the one-time
great seigniories, clinging like rihbons of varied
colors, green, gold, and brown, to the ancient river, of
Cartier and Champlain. There is on each strip, a
little way back from the river, a picturesque cottage,
usually thatched, not roofed by shingles, with its out-
buildings close about, such as Longfellow writes of in
Acadia — memories of homes "which the peasants of
Normandy built in the reign of the Henries." There
is usually on each a section of meadow for the cattle,
a section of tilled field for the wheat and com and
vegetables and a section of woodland for the fire-wood
— each strip, so divided, being a complete miniature
seigniory. Everything is neat. One feels that not a
wisp of hay is lost (for it was in haying time that I
passed), that every tree is as carefully watched as a
child, that whatever is taken from the fields they are
not impoverished. The living owners, when they go
to their graves, leave their little patches of earth as
rich as they found them. There is no hurrying. The
habitants go at the pace of their oxen. They are
thrifty, apparently contented, conservers of what they
have; they spend prudently for to-day; they save for
to-morrow — not for the to-morrow of the nation, but
for the to-morrow of the family. They are avowedly
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
^idualistic, nepotic conservationists and only in
nal.
(lis IS one picture. I put beside it another. Out
: farther edge of the Mississippi Valley one finds
>ther extreme. Within the past twenty-two years
I tracts of vacant land have been purchased by
■government from the Indians (and let me here
Ithat the government has been trying to deal
with these people; mistakes have been made,
should say that the nation had in its recent
Kment of them, despite reports I have heard in
, pauperized rather than robbed them). These
> have been opened to settlement — all the rest of
[great public domain that was immediately desir-
I having been occupied, as we have seen. When,
pSg, the first of these tracts, nearly two milUon
was to be opened, twenty thousand people were
y just outside its borders — some on swift horses,
E in wagons or buggies, and some in railroad trains.
"THE MEN OF ALWAYS" 373
peaceful life on the St. Lawrence as one can well
imagine. Practically all of the available land (nearly
two million acres) was taken during the course of a
few days.
At the later opening of another tract one hundred
thousand persons took part in the race for the "last
of the people's land." And these scenes But illustrate
the rough races to the gold-fields and the iron moun-
tains and the oil-wells, in eagerness to seize whatever
earth had to offer and turn it to immediate wealth —
rough, restless precursors, producers, poets eager for
to-day, yet coming by and by, as we have seen, to be
ready to spend for to-morrow, building schools and
universities, enlarging the Beld of public provision and
service, and filling the land, once neighborly, individ-
ualistic, with institutions of philanthropy.
But the habitant of that farther valley is consider-
ate neither of himself nor of generous nature. He is
ready to spend his all, or her all, of to-day for to-day
and for to-morrow, and to some extent unselfishly, but
not to save it. He lives "angerously" and takes al!
the risks. His thought of the future is not nepotic or
thrifty; it is likely to be altruistic, publicistic. I sup-
pose that the constitution and laws of Oklahoma,
whose land was the last to be added to the public do-
main and its commonwealth among the last to the
roll of States, has been more generous-minded toward
its children than any other. It set apart not only
sections sixteen and thirty-six in every township for
the public schools; it reserved two more sections in
every township for kindred uses. But in all this, as I
pointed out, it is spending for the future, not saving,
hoarding.
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
he nepotic conservationist of the St. Lawrence,
, in his place, saves because if he leaves but an
Kusted field behind him he is robbing his children
■ grandchildren of their rightful, personal heritage,
"boomer" of Oklahoma exploits and spends lav-
r because of a sublime confidence in the illimitabil^
pf the resources of nature and in the resourceful-
I of the coming generations.
ut the natural scientists— the foresters, the physiog-
!, the geologists— have within a very few years
laking themselves heard in warning. They have
■that "the mountains of France, of Spain, and China
p been denuded of their forests in large measure so
he supply of wood is inadequate to meet the needs
e people,"' that "in Spain and Italy, though
1 countries, the people suffer more from the cold
in America because of insufficient fuel,"' that
;-haIf of the people of the world go to bed hun-
' or at any rate insufficiently nourished for the
"THE MEN OF ALWAYS" 375
The coal-fields of the United States (which lie al-
most exclusively in and upon the eastern and western
edges of the Mississippi Valley) were, at the rate at
which coal was used a few decades ago, practically
inexhaustible. But the per-capita consumption has
increased from about a ton in 1870 to 5.6 tons in
1907.' Up to 1908, 7,240,000,000* tons had been
mined, but over ten million tons were wasted in the
mining of seven billions. You may recall the prophecy
which I quoted earlier, that if the mining and wasting
go on at the same rate of increase as in the past few
decades the supposed illimitable fields will he ex-
hausted in one hundred and fifty years — that is by the
year 2050.* This is one of the statistics of those
watchmen on the walls who, instead of standing in
high places with telescopes, sit at microscopes or over
tables of figures. That seems a long period of time,
one hundred and fifty years, but it was only a little
longer ago that a French explorer saw the first signs
of coal in that valley along the Illinois, and, as the
scientist has intimated, there is no reason why we should
not expect a future of thousands of years for the coal
that has been thousands or millions of years in the
making.
The petroleum and natural^as fields are also nearly
all in that valley or on its edges. (I think it was in
the narrow valley of La Belle Riviere, which Pere
Bonnecamp found so dark on that Celoron expedition,
that this oil of the rocks was first found.)^ If we as-
> Van Hiie, p. 33. ■ Van HUe, p. 35. * Van Hiie, p. 35.
'Natural gaa and buniing ipringi were early known to the French
pioneera and Jnuit* who penetrated the Iroqucui countiy, at the following
eitracta show:
"It WM during thi* interval that, in order to pan awajr the time, I went
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
: that the fields have all been discovered and that
present rate of exploitation is to continue, the sup-
pf petroleum will be exhausted by 1935 (twenty-
k'ears), or, if the present production goes on with-
icrease, in ninety years (t, e,, eighty-six years),'
I that of natural gas in twenty-five years (». e.,
■ty-one years from 1914).*
the metal which the Indians worshipped as
lirit when they first saw it in the hands of the
^ch, a substance so precious that their name for
■eant "all kinds of good," has, too, been taken
I feverish haste from its ancient places. Joliet and
[, de LaSallE, under the escort of two Indian), about four league*
I of the village where we were staying, to see a very eitraordioarj
Issuing from a moderately high rock, it formi ■ small brook.
ter ia very clear but has a bad odor, like that of the mineral marshes
i, when the mud on the bottom is stirred with the foot. I applied a
BTid the water immediately took fire and burned like brandy, and was
Itinguished until It rained. This flame is among the Indians a sign of
)r sterility according as it exhibits the contrary qualities. TTiere
ranee of sulphur, saltpetre or any other combustible material.
"THE MEN OF ALWAYS" 377
Marquette saw deposits of this ore near the mouth of
the Ohio in 1673, but it was a century and a half
before the harvesting of this crop, down among the
rocks for millions of years before, began. And now, if
no new fields are found and the increased use goes on
at the rate of the last three decades, all the available
high^rade ore will have become pig iron and steel
billets, bridges, battle-ships, sky-scrapers, and loco-
motives, and all kinds of goods, within the next three
decades.*
The forests of the United States — the forests pri-
meval, with the voice of whose murmuring pines and
hemlocks Longfellow begins his sad story of the Aca-
dians — contained approximately one billion acres,' a
region not conterminous with, but almost as large as,
the Mississippi Valley. Of that great, tempering, be-
nign shadow over the continent, tempering its heat,
giving shelter from its cold, restraining the waters,
there is left about 65 per cent in acreage and not
more than one-half the merchantable timber — five
hundred million acres gone in a century and a half.'
And as to the land itself — the land first symbolized
in the tuft of earth that St. Lusson lifted toward the
sky that day in 1671 at Sault Ste. Marie, when he took
possession of all the land between the seas of the north
and west and south — in the first place, the loss each
year from erosion is six hundred and ten million cubic
yards.* This is, of course, inconsiderable in a short
period but in a long period of years means a mighty
loss of nourishing soil. With this loss is that of nitro-
> Van Hue, p. 68. * V*n Hbe, p. aio. ■ Van Hbe, p. ito.
' Van Hi««, p. 307, quoted from W. J. SinllnMn, "Report National Coo-
•ervation ComnuHbn," ] : 3^7-361,
I THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF .\MERICA
Ipotassium, and phosphorus, things of which the
ft had not even heard the names a few years ago.
lyield of farms in the United States during the
■ years does not show a decreased average,
must be remembered that in this period there
I been brought under cultivation new and virgin
which have in their bountiful yield kept up the
lal average. One authority says that, taking the
Iry by regions and by districts and considering
I has actually happened, he is led to the conclusion
Ithe fertility of the soil for 50 per cent of our coun-
|as been lessened.^
; significance of these facts lies in the desire of
Beople to know the truth and seek a remedy.
1 a sense the public domain has been exhausted,
pick of the land has been pre-empted, occupied.
f it is to grow with all its crops, and to put forth
Jail its products such a public spirit as this, France
liave given to America a treasure infinitely more
"THE MEN OF ALWAYS" 379
Even the streams of water that bore the French into
the valley have dwindled, many of them, or are in
despair and tears, between shallows and torrents, long-
ing for the forests, it is said by the scientists — longing
for the days of the French, the poet would put it. So
are the rivers crying, "In the days of Pere Marquette"
— the days of the "River of the Immaculate Concep-
tion." And so are the prophets of science crying as
the prophets of inspiration cried of old: O valley of a
hundred thousand streams, valley of a million cen-
turies of rock and iron and earth, O valley of a century
of man I The riches of the gathering of a million
years are spent in a day. Baldness has con^ upon
the mountains, as upon Gaza of old. The trees have
gone down to the waters. The iron has flowed like
blood from the hills. The fire of the ground is being
given to the air. The sky is filled with smoke. The
soil is being carried into the sea; its precious dust of
nitrogen and phosphor blown to the ends of the earth.
The fresh lands are no more. There are no mines to '
be had for the asking. The frontier has become as the
centre, the new as the old.
But it is not a hopeless prophecy — an unconstruc-
tive, pessimistic, lamentation. The way of reparation
is made clear.
If I were to speak only of what has been done under
the inspiration of that prophecy, I should have little
that is deBnitely measurable to present, but in making
a catalogue of the averting advice of that prophecy, I
am giving intimation of what will in all probability be
done. For the people of that valley are not wittingly
going to give their once fertile lands as stones, even
to the sons of others who ask for bread, nor their
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
ms as serpents of pestilence to those who ask for
lese are some of the items of their constructive
;rvation programme:
al. — The waste in the mining of coal must be re-
el from 50 and 150 per cent of the amount taken out
i, 15, or ID per cent by the working of upper beds
the utihzation of slack, etc.' The reckless waste
al in the making of coke can be prevented by the
i£ the right sort of oven. It is estimated that
; would be a saving of ^50,000,000 per annum if
a substitution were made.' The tremendous loss
le power value,* from 20 to 33 per cent, and of
linating value' (99 per cent) in coal because of its
rfect consumption can be greatly reduced by the
oyment of mechanical stokers and other devices.
use of the gas-engine in the place of the steam-
le,^ the use of power developed from water, and
diffused carbon dioxide in the air tempering the
"THE MEN OF ALWAYS" 381
dred billion feet were consumed and almost as great
an amount wasted through uncontrolled wells> leaky
pipes, etc'
Iron {and, in less measure, gold, silver, and other
metals), whose life does not, as coal and oil and gas,
perish with the using, but some of whose value is lost
in the transformation from one state of use to another,
needs only to be more economically mined and used.*
Non-metallic, inexhaustible materials, as stone, clay>
cement, should be employed in their stead when pos-
sible.' Every scrap of iron should be conserved, cry
our constructive prophets, even as the Indians trea-
sured it. We may not need it, but succeeding genera-
tions will. It may be recast to their use. We are but
its trustees.*
Forests,^ — A reduction of the waste in cutting (this
is 25 per cent of the total value of the timber cut) ; of
the waste in milling and manufacture, and in turpen-
tining. This last waste is appalling but preventable
in full or large measure. The lessening the demand
for lumber by a preservative treatment of all mer-
chantable timber. A utilization of by-products. (Un-
doubtedly science will be most helpful here.) Precau-
tions against (ires and their control. Reforestation.
Maintenance of forests on what are called essential
areas, such as high altitudes and slopes, as tending to
prevent floods and erosion. (France here gives most
impressive example in planning to bring under con-
> Van HiK, p. 58. > Vm Hue, p. 68.
' I watched day by diy for weelu the erection of a great building in
Paria, and I noticed how little iron or steel wai used as compared with
that in such stnicturci in New York. We shall undoubtedly come to that.
■ See, "Iron Ore Re*curcei of the World," International Geological Con-
gresi, 1 910.
• Van Hiie, pp. aaj-atia.
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
I about three thousand torrential streams in the
Pyrenees, Ardennes, and Cevennes by means,
Bly at least, of afforestation, $14,000,000 out of
0,000 being provided for this purpose.' Italy,
luse of the greatly increased destruction by the
I has begun the reforestation of the Apennines to
lextent of a million acres.) Battle with insect pests
1 finally the substitution of other materials for
a, thus not only saving the trees but diminishing
s by fire.
pni/,^'— The control of water to prevent erosion,
) tillage, and contour ploughing. The restoration
litrogen and phosphorus by rotation of crops, phos-
jes, fertilizers, and electricity. The destruction of
lous insects, mammals, and weeds. The reclama-
n of wet lands. The introduction of new varieties
rops.
■ flifr. — A fuller use in the place of other sources
pwer that are exhausted in use. It is believed that
"THE MEN OF ALWAYS" 383
This is, indeed, as the writing of that ancient prophet
of Israel who, in his vision of the restoration of his
city and his land and the healing of its waters, saw a
man with a radiant face, a line of flax in his hand and
a measuring reed. And wherever this man of radiant
face measured he caused the waters to run in dry
places and deep rivers to course where the waters were
but ankle-deep; fish to swarm again in the rivers and
the seas to be free of pollution; salt to come in the
miry places and trees to grow upon the land with un-
withering leaves and abundant meat.
So have these modern prophets with optimistic
faces written of their vision, only the fulfilment comes
not simply of the constructive measuring of statistics.
It takes some trees a hundred years to grow; and dams
and reservoirs for the deepening of shallow streams are
not made over night as once they were by nature, or
as they grew in the vision of Ezekiel.
None the less is the prophecy a long way toward
fulfilment when the vision is seen. And that it has
been seen is intimated by this sentence, too optimistic
no doubt, from a book on the subject by one of the
major prophets of conservation, recently published in
America. "Conservation," he says, "has captured the
nation."
It is not the thrifty, nepotic, static conservation of
the St. Lawrence habitant, which depends upon the
self and family interest of each landholder to keep the
fields enriched and to prevent the washing away of
the soil. It is a dynamic and paternalistic conserva-
tion — a conservation that thinks of great dams for the
restraint of waters and reservoirs for their impound-
ing to the extent of millions or billions of cubic feet.
384 THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
forestation of great stretches of mountain slope, of
restrictions and compulsions of other than personal and
family interests — a paternalism that looks bejrond the
next generation or even two generations and to the
feeding of other children than one's own lineal descend-
ants — a paternalism that is not exploiting but fidudaiy.
It is interesting to observe again how the beginnings
of this conservation have been made in the fields
where stood the first hospitals for the sick among the
living, the first memorials to the dead, the first schools
for the children of to-day that are to be the nation of
to-morrow. Here also begin to rise the structures d
the thought for the day after to-morrow.
The first notable assembling of men in the interest
of conservation, chiefly of men already in public service
— the President of the United States, the Vice-Presi-
dent, members of the cabinet, justices of the Supreme
Court, members of Congress, the governors of thirty-
four States, representatives of the other States, the
governors of the Territories, and other public officials,
with a number of representatives of societies and a
few guests — met in 1908, to discuss questions relative
to conservation. Probably not in the history of the
nation has there sat in its borders an assembly of men
so widely representative. This gathering resulted in
the appointment of a National Conservation Commis-
sion by the President, but Congress made no appro-
priation for meeting the expense of its labors; and so
private enterprise and providence have undertaken the
carrying out of the movement.
A great body of men and women scientists, public-
spirited citizens from all parts of the nation, under the
presidency of Doctor Charles W. Eliot, former president
"THE MEN OF ALWAYS" 385
of Harvard University, began a campaign of educa-
tion to the end that ultimately and soon — before the
riches have gone — this concern for the far future may
become fixed in the law and conscious provision of the
people.
I spoke in the last chapter of Hennepin's seeing a
savage making sacrifice to the spirit of the Mississippi,
supposed to live under the Falls of St. Anthony. You
will recall the description of the great public univer-
sity beside it that represents the sacrifice of the de-
mocracy of to-day for the nation of to-morrow. In-
stead of the beaver-skin which the poor Indian hung
in the branches of a tree near the falls as his offering,
the State has hung its gift of forty million dollars for
the highest training of its sons and daughters. But
there is still, if possible, a nobler aspiration to put
against that primitive background and beside the In-
dian's beaver-skin, for the gift is as yet little more than
an aspiration.
A few miles back from these same falls there was
held in 1910 a convention of many thousands fr 
