The French in the Heart of America Part 11

Nor did a throng of proud Thessalians or of "transported demi-G.o.ds" stand round to cheer them off. The naked Indians, their hands over their mouths in wonderment or shouting, "Gannorom! Gannorom!" alone saw the great boat move out over the waters without oar or paddle or towing rope. For music there was only the _Te Deum_ again, sung by raw, unpractised voices, such as one might hear among the boatmen of the Seine. It was not such music, at any rate, as that of Orpheus, to make plain men grow "heroes at the sound." Doubtless no one felt himself a hero. The only intimation of any consciousness of a high mission comes from Hennepin, who, when the _Griffin_, some days later, was ploughing peacefully through the straits that led to the Mer Douce--"verdant prairies, dotted with groves and bordered with lofty forests" on either side, "herds of deer and flocks of swans and wild turkeys" within sight, and the "bulwarks plentifully hung with game"--wrote: "Those who will one day have the happiness to possess this fertile and pleasant strait, will be very much obliged to those who have shown them the way."

"Very much obliged"? No, Hennepin! Of the hundreds of thousands who now pa.s.s through or across those straits every year, or of those thousands who possess its sh.o.r.es, not a hundred, I venture to say, remember "those who showed the way"! They have even forgotten "that the first European voice that Niagara ever heard was French"! Ste. Claire!--the name you gave to the beautiful strait beyond the "Symplegades" of your voyage, in grat.i.tude and in honor of the day on which your company reached it--has become masculine in tribute to an American general. 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 grat.i.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 Marquette's bones were doubtless by that time gathered by his devoted savage followers, and it was thence that they pa.s.sed 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 sh.o.r.e 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 boat _Argo_, though the greatest ship known to the early myths of Greece, and though dedicated, we are told, to Neptune at the end of the voyage, became the pioneer of no such mighty fleet as did the _Griffin_. The list of the Greek ships and commanders in the Iliad offers but a pygmy a.n.a.logy. And if you were to go to Buffalo to- day, near the site of that first shipyard (a little farther away from the falls), you would know that the successors of La Salle in new _Griffins_ had actually brought back the golden fleece--the priceless fleece, the fleece of the plains if not of the forests. Day after day its gold is hung against the sky as the grain is lifted from the ships into elevators which can store at one time twenty-three million bushels of wheat.

The coasts of the lakes up which the _Griffin_ led the oarless way are three thousand three hundred and eighty-five miles in length, or, including those of the lower lake, Frontenac, which was also first touched of French keels, over four thousand miles. The statistics of the traffic which has grown in the furrow of that wind-drawn plough would be fatiguing if they did not carry you to heights of a wider and more exhilarating view.

We have occupied and apportioned the billion acres of French domain among sixty million people. Here is an added domain in which no landmarks can be set--which belongs to all men.

These are a few graphic facts gathered from recent reports and books about the Great Lakes: [Footnote: Edward Charming and M. F. Lansing, "The Story of the Great Lakes." Macmillan, New York, 1909. James O. Curwood, "The Great Lakes." Putnam, New York, 1909. James C. Mills, "Our Inland Seas."

McClurg, Chicago, 1910.]

Nearly as many people live in States that have ports upon those sh.o.r.es 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. [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 4. "In 1913 the total tonnage of the Great Lakes was 2,940,000 tons, of the United States 7,887,000 tons."--Report United States Commission of Navigation.]

They have made possible a saving in cost of transportation (and so of production) of several hundred million dollars in a single year.

[Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 4.]

Only ninety million dollars have been spent by the government for their improvement in the whole history of their occupation, above Niagara Falls, [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 9.] while France in that time has spent for harbors and waterways alone seven hundred and fifty million dollars.[Footnote: "Four hundred and fifty million dollars of this total has been for the improvement and maintenance of the waterways."--Report of National Waterways Commission, p. 507.] They have been privately developed.

Six times as much freight pa.s.ses over these lakes as through the Suez Ca.n.a.l in a year. [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 6.]

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. [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," pp. 25, 26, and Report of United States Commission of Navigation, 1913.]

If one were to stand on the sh.o.r.e 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 pa.s.sion for exploring a new country"), one would now see a vessel pa.s.sing one way or the other every twelve minutes, on the average, day and night during the eight months of open navigation.

Nor are they small sailing vessels of a few tons' burden, but great sailless, steam-propelled hulks, carrying from five to ten thousand tons.

So it is no fleet of graceful galleons--half bird, half lion, as the _Griffin_ was--that have followed in her wake up what Hennepin called "the vast and unknown seas of which even the savages knew not the end." They have, in the evolution of nautical zoology, lost beak, wings, and feathers, and now like a shoal of wet lions, tawny and black, their powerful heads and long steel backs just visible above the blue water, they course the western Mediterranean from spring to winter. [Footnote: It is an intruding and probably whimsical, but fascinating, thought that the wings of the griffin have become evolved into the air-ships which first began successfully to fly, in America, near the sh.o.r.es of the lake on which the Griffin itself was hatched. The Wright brothers were born near one of those lakes. It is not a far-fetched or labored thought which pictures that simple, rough-made galleon--very like the model of the ship on the shield of Paris--as leading two broods across the valley above the Falls, one of lions that cannot fly and one of sea-birds, hydroplanes, whose paths are the air, but whose resting-places are the calm water; the brood of the sea and the brood of the sky, hatched from one nest at the water's edge.]

The ships of the lion brood are, some of them, five or six hundred feet in length, and carry eleven thousand tons of cargo. I have seen the skeleton of one of these iron-boned beasts, and I have been told that eight hundred thousand rivets go into its creation. And upon hearing this I could not but hear the deafening clamor caused by La Salle's driving the first nail or bolt, Father Hennepin declining the honor because of the "modesty of [his] religious profession."

As to the cargoes that these ships bring back, the story is even more marvellous. First in quant.i.ty is iron ore, forty-seven million four hundred and thirty-five thousand seven hundred and seventy-one tons in 1912 [Footnote: "Mineral Industry," 21:455.] from the sh.o.r.es of Superior, where Joliet had made search for copper mines, where Father Allouez--in the midst of reports of baptisms and ma.s.ses--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 billion and a half in sight on those sh.o.r.es, which have already given to the ships hundreds of millions of their dark treasure.

After the ore, lumber, one billion one hundred and sixty-five million feet [Footnote: Monthly Summary of Internal Commerce of the United States, December, 1911.] in one year (1911); a waning amount from the vanishing forests that once completely encircled these lakes. Alexander Pope, whose "Ode on St. Cecilia'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 hundred and sixty billion feet of pine have descended from the forests of Michigan alone, [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 57.] 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," [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 54.] the "greatest lumber towns" in the world that have grown up practically on the very site of the shipyard at the mouth of Cayuga Creek, a little way above the falls.

And after the ore and lumber, grain--the fleece of the fields, immensely more valuable than that of the forests; one hundred and fifty million bushels in one year and eleven million barrels of flour--a fortnight's bread supply for the entire world. [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes,"

p. 49.]

And after ore and lumber and grain, fuel and other bulky necessities of life.

The casual relation between the pioneer building and journey of the _Griffin_ and these statistics cannot, of course, be established, but what no inspired human prophecy could have divined, or even the wildest dreaming of La Salle have imagined, is as sequential as the history that has been made to trace all new-world development in the wake of the caravels of Columbus. The storms of nature and the jealousies in human b.r.e.a.s.t.s thwarted La Salle's immediate ambitions, but what has come into that northern valley has followed closely in the path of his purposes, the path traced by his ship built of the trees of Niagara and furnished by the chandleries of Paris.

The mystery of the vanishing of this pioneer vessel only enhances the glory of its venture and service--as its loss but gave new foil to the hardihood of La Salle and Tonty. We can imagine the golden-brown skins scattered over the blue waters as the bits of the body of the son of the king of Colchis strewn by Medea to detain the pursuers of the Argonauts.

It was the first sacrifice to the valley for the fleece. In the depths of these Lakes or on their sh.o.r.es were buried the bones of 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_ carried in her the prophecies of other than lake vessels. 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 commander: 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 G.o.d that ... rivers should have been navigable, He would not have wanted human a.s.sistance to make them such" would be horrified by the sacrilege that has been committed and is being contemplated by the followers of the men of the _Griffin_.

They have made a ca.n.a.l around the Falls (which Hennepin first saw breathing a cloud of mist over the great abyss)--a ca.n.a.l that, supplemented by other ca.n.a.ls along the St. Lawrence River, allows vessels of fourteen-foot draught 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 pa.s.s from Erie to Huron--the Symplegades (clashing rocks) of the new-world voyage.

They have made ca.n.a.ls 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 extraordinary address--ca.n.a.ls through which sixty-two million tons pa.s.sed in 1910 toward the east and south.

They have made and deepened harbors all the way around the sh.o.r.es till ships two hundred times the size of the _Griffin_ can ride in them.

Yet this is not all. The symbols of La Salle's vision revived in the lakes memories of the days when their waters ran through the Mississippi Valley to the gulf--the very course which La Salle's unborn _Griffin_ was to take.

When the continent tilted a little to the east and in the tilting poured the water of the upper lakes over the Niagara edge into the St. Lawrence, that same tilting stopped the overflow down into the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico at the other end of the lakes. But so slight was the tilting that the water still sweeps over, in places, when the lakes are high, and sometimes even carries light boats across.

Of late engineers have, in effect, been undoing with levels and scoops and dredges what nature did in a mighty upheaval. They are practically tipping the bowls back the other way and so making currents to run down the old channel toward the gulf through the valleys of the Des Plaines and the Illinois to the Mississippi.

And so that dream which the dying _Griffin_ spoke to the lake, and the lake to the rivers in the time of flood--when intercommunication was possible--is to be realized, except that steam or electricity will take the place of winds, and screws of sails. [Footnote: Herbert Quick, "American Inland Waterways," New York, 1909.]

Meanwhile a great battle of the lakes is waging--a battle of levels, it might better be called, between those, on the one side, who wish to maintain the grandeur 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 ca.n.a.ls 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 generous supply during the dry seasons; in which event there will be water enough to keep Niagara in perennial beauty and power, to fill all the present and prospective harbors and ca.n.a.ls 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." [Footnote: Herbert Quick, "American Inland Waterways," New York, 1909.]

But another amicable battle is on--a battle of the eastern levels--between the men of the old French valley to the north (_i.e._, the St. Lawrence) and the men of the old Iroquois valleys to the south, of the Mohawk and the Hudson. In 1830 a ca.n.a.l was built by the latter from above the Falls to the navigable Hudson, and with high ceremony a cask of the water of Lake Erie was emptied into New York harbor as symbol of the wedding of lake and ocean. Then Canada built her Welland Ca.n.a.l around Niagara and made ca.n.a.ls along the St. Lawrence and channels in the St. Lawrence past the Lachine Rapids to Montreal, and even made the way from there to the sea deeper that the growing ocean vessels might come to old Hochelaga. Now New York has begun deepening the old and almost useless Erie Ca.n.a.l from seven and nine feet to twelve feet, and to take barges one hundred and fifty feet long and twenty-five feet beam, with a draught of ten feet, and Canada is contemplating still deeper channels that will let the ocean steamers into every port of the Great Lakes. She is even thinking of a ca.n.a.l that will follow the path of Champlain, up the Ottawa and across the old portage to Lake Nip.i.s.sing and thence by the French River into Lake Huron; and of an alternative course by another of Champlain's paths, from Ontario across to Huron by way of Lake Simcoe and the Trent River, in either route avoiding Niagara altogether, paths that would shorten the water distance by hundreds of miles and bring Europe almost as near to the sh.o.r.es where Le Caron ministered to the Hurons as to New York City.

It is a rivalry between the old Champlain paths and the La Salle paths, with just an intimation from those who look far into the future that a new water path still farther north--of which Radisson gave some premonition-- may carry the wheat of the far northwest from Winnipeg beyond Superior and beyond the courses of the Mississippi up to Hudson Bay and across the ocean to European ports, brought a thousand 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 unknown to them, is fulfilled, it is not beyond thinking that a captain of a seagoing vessel 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-sc.r.a.per" I heard a local descendant of the _Griffin_ screeching) for the lifting of the bridges that will open the way to the Mississippi, the heart of America.

CHAPTER XI

WESTERN CITIES THAT HAVE SPRUNG FROM FRENCH FORTS

It is a strange and varied crop that has grown from the leaden plates with French inscriptions, planted by St. Lusson, La Salle, and Celoron by lakes and rivers in that western country. The mythical story of the sowing of Cadmus in the Boeotian field is again rather tame by comparison with a true relation of what has actually occurred within the memory of a few generations in a valley as wild when Celoron traversed the course of La Belle Riviere (the name given by the French to the Ohio, which was known to the Indians as the "River of the Whitecaps") with his little fleet only a century and a half ago as was Boeotia when Cadmus set out from Phoenicia in search of his sister, Europa (that is, Europe), back beyond the memory of history.

It was a bourgeoning, most miraculous, in those spots of the west, a new Europa, where soldiers sprang up immediately upon the sowing, like the sproutings of Cadmus' dragon's teeth, to fight one another and to build strongholds that should some day be cities, even as Cadmea, the fortress of the "Spartoi," became the city of Thebes.

So, in this sowing, did France become the mother of western cities, of Pittsburgh and Buffalo, of Erie, of St. Louis, of Detroit and New Orleans, of Peoria and St. Joseph, and still other cities whose names have never been heard by the people--of France--even as Phoenicia, in the wanderings of her adventurous son, Cadmus, became the mother of Thebes and the G.o.dmother 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), the first of 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 many furnaces, two of which alone, it has been estimated by some one, have poured forth enough molten iron in the last thirty years to cover with steel plates an inch thick a road fifty feet wide stretching from the Alleghany edge of the valley not merely to the mouth of the Ohio but on to the other mountain border, where all dreams of a way to the western sea were ended.

And this highway of plates across the empire of New France gives but suggestion of the meagerest fraction of the fruitage of the planting of the leaden plates or the grafting of the arms of France upon the trees along the Ohio--forty pounds of iron, it has been estimated by one graphic statistician, for every man, woman, and child on the globe to-day, [Footnote: H. N. Ca.s.son. United States produces thirty million tons annually, Pennsylvania eleven and a quarter million. "Mineral Resources,"