The French in the Heart of America Part 10

The force of gravity, the temptation of the tropics, the indifference of the east, the freedom from eastern and puritanical restraints, were all on the side of a "republic 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 import.

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 opening 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. [Footnote: I have been told by one who has been studying conditions in the great northwest fields of Canada that it is now possible to grow crops there that could not have been grown before the country was opened and cultivated to the south of them, so much longer have the frosts been delayed in the autumn.] In the Mississippi Valley, the gulf ports, fed of river and railroad, are increasingly 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 distantly a.s.sociated 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 the west should eventually, even without the help of steam and steel, attach itself to the east--even by streams of water.

Washington had hardly put off his uniform, after the peace of 1783, when he was planning for a western trip, and his diary on the third day of that trip of six hundred and eighty miles shows that his one object was to obtain information of the nearest and best communication between the eastern and the western waters. One of the kings of France said, when his grandson was made king of Spain, "There are no longer any Pyrenees," and Washington, when he saw the new republic forming, said, in effect, "There must be no Alleghanies." He expected a ca.n.a.l to erase the mountains, but the railroad accomplished this gigantic task with but slight aid of water.

And as the railroad tied the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic coast, so in time, aided of a government that had every reason to be grateful, it reached across the uninhabited plains, over the Rocky Mountains, which even the western statesmen said were the divinely appointed barriers, and across the desert beyond to the Pacific slope and tied it to a capital which is now nearer to San Francisco than once it was to Boston. A man from Missouri is speaker of the house in which Josiah Quincy spoke his provincial fears. A man from the mouth of the Mississippi, the highest authority in America on the French code, was but a little time ago appointed as the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States by a President who was born on the banks of the Ohio; that is, the highest office in each of the three independent branches of government (the executive, the legislative, and the judicial) have at one time been filled by men of the western waters. I am antic.i.p.ating a fact that belongs to a later theme, but there is no single fact that can better ill.u.s.trate 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 ill.u.s.tration 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, however, 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 market in one generation, indifferent to the fate of those who should come after-the pa.s.ses through the mountains being choked by cars carrying to the coasts crops from increasing acreage of declining productivity or the products of swiftly disappearing forests or the output of mines that must soon be exhausted.

Perhaps the railroads are not to be blamed for this decrease in productivity--a pa.s.sing phase of our agricultural life, as recent crop reports show. They are very loudly blamed that they do not carry these products fast enough or cheaply enough, though, according 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 the coasts and other sh.o.r.es, a.s.sisting 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 policies of land parcelling).

Practically the whole western country has tied itself to a wheel, and so whatever its happiness and welfare may be, come of or with the wheel. This territory is capable of self-support; it has still its independent spirit, bred of the pioneer who lived before the day of wheels; it is responsive to appeals that stop its restless movement--as the wheel of Ixion when Orpheus played; but none the less is it an eager, restless, unquiet 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 disturbance 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 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; another, the decline in the size of families; but it is attributable chiefly to the first 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 population, 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 ill.u.s.tration of that demigrating 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- born boy; another, president of the greatest southern railroad, was born at the mouth of the Mississippi; and still another, one of the wealthiest men in the world, was at one time a messenger boy and telegraph operator just over the mountains on the site of Fort Duquesne. Only one man of the company of nearly twenty men, a.s.sembled without thought of origin, had been born in New York. All had come from the country or from across the water, and most of them from the great Mississippi Valley. I speak of this while discussing the railroad, because it is their paths through the valley of the French that have made this phenomenon possible.

I have spoken of what the wheel has done in making the permanence of one republic of such an area a possibility. Nothing save a loose, heterogeneous confederation could have been practicable without its unifying service. It is only fair to those who made such gloomy prophecies in the early days to say that they had no intimation of what steam was destined to do. When Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, early in the nineteenth century, on a journey back from the west in a stage- coach, said that some day steam would drive wagons faster than they were going in the coach, his fellow pa.s.sengers thought him a dreamer--a visionary. But it was only a man of such dreams or visions who in those days could have seen the possibility which has to-day been realized through the railroad.

I have spoken of the part which the steam wheel has had in the rapid development and the exploitation of that great valley which, except for its pioneering in wild places, might have been seven hundred years, as Andrew Johnson predicted, in filling up, or at least two or three centuries.

I have intimated its influence in promoting migration cityward--a movement as wide as European civilization--but intensified there, where the inhabitants have not been tied through generations of inheritance or historic a.s.sociations to particular fields, where primogeniture has no observance, and where the traditions are of the wilderness and the visions are ever of a promised land beyond. The city 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 mediaeval. It is the nearer city and civilization that impress the imagination. The valedictorian of a cla.s.s, graduating as I entered college, told me a few months ago that he was building a trolley-line in Rome, and that, after all, Falernian wine, of which we who had never tasted wine out in that vineless region thought as some drink of the G.o.ds, was very bitter.

I have hinted at what the wheel has done, in what it carries, to make all look alike and think alike and act alike, 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 const.i.tuency can reach him every morning. The valley is reached every day, just as the people in a pure democracy were reached by the ancient stentor. The people are reserving to themselves more and more of the function of their one- time representatives, in such measures as the referendum and initiative intimate, and are trying to secure more accurate representation in such systems as the direct primary and proportional representation suggest; but these all are possible only through the aid of the wheel and of what it has brought. If the improvement of democracy is to come through more democracy, as some think, then the railroad is an essential agent of political progress as well as of economic exploitation and social h.o.m.ogeneity. I am not discussing this thesis but simply showing how dependent upon this physical agent is the machinery of democracy.

Moreover, mobility is almost an essential quality of the spirit of democracy, the free way to the farthest horizons, the open road to the highest position and service. When the atom becomes practically fixed by its environment, reposeful and stable, stratification sets in. We may or we may not have then something better.

It may seem to you a far cry from those rough, lawless coureurs de bois to the mobile but orderly people of that valley to-day. But after an experience of a few summers ago the distance does not seem so great.

Here is a journal of three days:

In the morning of an August day I was gathering some last data from the library of one of the greatest, though one of the newest, universities in the world--a two-hours' journey from where the coureur de bois Jean Nicolet, in robe of damask, first looked over the edge of the basin, (Not many years ago I sat there in an a.s.sembly of learned men gathered from the ends of the earth and arrayed in academic robes.) In the afternoon I walked over that first 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 midnight 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 Nip.i.s.sing and down the Ottawa River, where I saw the second day break, and then on past La Salle's seigniory of St. Sulpice, around Carder's mountain into Montreal, and thence to the Rock of Quebec.

It is a common, unimaginative metaphor in the United States to call the engine which leads the mighty trains across the country the iron horse; but it is deserving of a n.o.bler figure. It is the iron coureur de bois, still leading Europe into America, and America into a newer America.

CHAPTER X

IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN"

In the lower St. Lawrence Valley, among the French Canadians, where France is best remembered and where the shut-in life is not disturbed by current events or changing conventions or evanescent fashions, I am told there are traces in their language of the sea life of their ancestors on the coasts of Brittany and Normandy. When, for example, a neighbor approaches a farmhouse on horseback he is asked not to "alight" or to "dismount" but to "disembark," and he is invited not to "tie" his horse but to "moor" it. It is as if they were still crying ever in their unconscious memories, "Thala.s.sa, Thala.s.sa"; as if the very sh.e.l.ls of speech still carried the roar of the ocean which they who hold them to their ears have never seen.

If the language of the upper valley of the St. Lawrence and of the valley of the Mississippi remembered as distinctly its origin we should everywhere hear the plash of the oar in all the hospitality of their settlements. But all such traces have disappeared, or all but disappeared, in the Mississippi Valley. The only one that comes to me now, as possibly of the old French days, is one which is preserved in an adage not at all French but quite characteristic of the independent life that has occupied the banks of all the rivers: "Paddle your own canoe." Yet even in the s.p.a.ce of one or two generations of agricultural life 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 migration 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 migration 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 appropriateness (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 fleece 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 Argonautae; but the first American Argonauts went from France, and they built their _Argo_ on what is now Lake Erie, on the edge of the Field of the Bulls, near a place, grown into a beautiful city, which now bears the very name of the wild bull, the "buffalo," and within sound of the roaring of the dragon that had frightened all earlier explorers. So accurately do the details of the story of Jason's adventure become realities to-day! Champlain and others had heard only at a distance the thunder of the great cataract that was some day to become not only as docile as the dragon under Jason's taming but as useful as a million harnessed bulls.

La Salle gathered his ship-carpenters and his ship furniture between his journeys to Rouen (the place of his birth) and elsewhere for the means of purchase. But before the winter had come in Normandy his messengers were out amid the snows and naked forests of Canadian winters in continuance of that voyage toward the western Colchis.

In the autumn of 1678 a Franciscan friar, Hennepin, set out with two canoemen, the first solitary figures of the expedition--a gray priest from the gray Rock of Quebec, in a birch canoe, carrying with him the "furniture of a portable altar"--a priest who professed a zeal for souls, but who admitted a pa.s.sion for travel and a burning desire to visit strange lands. He relates of himself that, being sent from a convent in Artois to Calais at the season of herring fishing, he made friends of the sailors and never tired of their stories. "Often," he says, "I hid myself behind tavern doors while the sailors were telling of their voyages. The tobacco smoke made me very sick at the stomach, but nevertheless I listened attentively.... I could have pa.s.sed whole days and nights in this way without eating." [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 133. Hennepin, "A New Discovery of a Large Country in America," ed. Thwaites, 1:30.]

Along the way up the St. Lawrence he stopped to minister to the habitants --too few and too poor to support a priest--saying ma.s.s, exhorting, and baptizing. Early in November he arrived at the mission of Fort Frontenac, which he had two or three years before helped to establish in the wilds.

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, Hennepin, 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 lake 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 man," they beheld the "imperial cataract"--the "thunder of water," as the Indians called it--or, as Hennepin described it, that "vast and prodigious cadence of water which falls down after a surprising and most astonishing manner, insomuch that the universe does not afford its parallel, those of Italy and Switzerland being but sorry patterns." To this priest, Hennepin, we owe the first description and picture of Niagara, [Footnote: "Four leagues from Lake Frontenac there is an incredible Cataract or Waterfall, which has no equal. The Niagara river near this place is only the eighth of a league wide, but it is very deep in places, and so rapid above the great fall that it hurries down all the animals which try to cross it, without a single one being able to withstand its current. They plunge down a height of more than five hundred feet, and its fall is composed of two sheets of water and a cascade, with an island sloping down. In the middle these waters foam and boil in a fearful manner. They thunder continually, and when the wind blows in a southerly direction the noise which they make is heard for more than fifteen leagues. Four leagues from this cataract, or fall, the Niagara river rushes with extraordinary rapidity especially for two leagues into Lake Frontenac."--Hennepin, "Description of Louisiana,"

pp. 71-73.] probably now more familiar to the world than any other natural feature of this continent. He has somewhat magnified the height of these falls, making it five hundred feet in the edition of 1683, and raising it to six hundred in 1697; but they are impressive enough to acquit him of intentional falsification and powerful enough to run virtually all the manufacturing plants in the United States, if they could be gathered within its easy reach.

As it is, less than 9 per cent of the water that overflows from the four upper Great Lakes into the lower lake, once known as Lake Frontenac and now as Ontario, is diverted for utilitarian purposes; it supplies the Americans and the Canadians almost equally between the two sh.o.r.es five hundred thousand horse-power. [Footnote: "Under a treaty between the United States and the British Government only about 25 per cent of the theoretical horsepower of Niagara Falls can be developed. The estimate of the minimum amount of power that can be developed on the Niagara River above and including the Falls is 5,800,000 h.p., and the a.s.sumed maximum is 6,500,000 h.p. The treaty, therefore, limits present possible minimum development on both sides of the Falls to 1,450,000 h.p. Under the treaty only five-fourteenths of the power made available thereby belongs to the United States, its share being reduced by the diversion of water from Lake Michigan into the Drainage Ca.n.a.l at Chicago. There is 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 Corporations. Report on water-power development in the United States. 1912.]

What the conversion of the strength of this t.i.tan (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, showing the relative cost per month of a certain unit of power in a number of representative American cities. [Footnote: "a.s.suming the maximum power used to be one hundred horse-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 in the cities named is as [above]."--Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 135.]

Boston $937.50 Philadelphia 839.25 New York 699.37 Chicago 629.43 Cleveland 559.50 Pittsburgh 419.62 Buffalo 184.91 Niagara Falls 144.17

These figures are more significant as one contemplates the diminishing supply of coal in coming centuries, if not decades. According to the estimate of a reliable authority the available and accessible coal supply of the United States will be exhausted at the present rate of exploitation by the year 2027, and the entire supply by the year 2050.

Such statistics intimate the advantage possessed, perhaps beyond any other site in America, by the strip of sh.o.r.e on which La Salle's men, from the banks of the Seine, and Hennepin, the priest from Calais, that December night in 1678 encamped, building their bivouac fires amid the snows, three miles above the falls--and so opening to the view of the world a natural source of power and wealth more valuable than extensive coal-fields or rich mines of gold or silver.

It was but a great waterfall to La Salle and Tonty and Hennepin--an impeding, noisy, hostile object. And to the half-mutinous, quarrelsome workmen (French, Flemings, Italians) it was a demon, no doubt, whose very breath froze their beards into icicles. It was, in reality, potentially the most beneficent single, incarnate force bounded by any one horizon of sky, in that new world, developed by the tipping of the continent a little to the eastward after the upper lakes had been formed and the consequent emptying of their waters into the St. Lawrence instead of the Gulf of Mexico.

In January, 1679, a file of burdened men, some thirty in number, toiling slowly on their way over the snowy plains and "through the gloomy forests of spruce and naked oak trees," the priest accompanying with his altar lashed to his back, reached a favorable spot beside calm water several miles above the cataract: the site is identified as situate a little way above the mouth of Cayuga Creek, just outside the village of La Salle, in the State of New York. There 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 sh.o.r.es 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 return from Fort Frontenac, to give this sixty-ton vessel full equipment, for in the spring she was launched. The "friar p.r.o.nounced his blessing on her; the a.s.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 grotesques 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 enough 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 _Griffin_ 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 _Argo_, the "first bold vessel, dared the seas") no Orpheus standing "high on the stern" and "raising his entrancing strain."