The French in the Heart of America Part 12

1912.] and I do not know how much tin. And, in a sense, all from a small box or crate of plates made of lead--six, eight, or more in number, eleven inches long, seven inches wide, and one eighth of an inch thick, and engraved with an inscription--one of which was found not long ago, by some lads, protruding from the bank of one of the tributary rivers! The inscription ran (in translation):

"Year 1749, in the reign of Louis XV., King of France, We, Celoron, commanding the detachment sent by the Marquis De la Galissoniere, Commander General of New France, to restore tranquillity in certain villages of these cantons, have buried this plate at [here is inserted the name of the tributary at its confluence with the Ohio] this [date] as a token of renewal of possession heretofore taken of the aforesaid river, Ohio, of all streams that fall into it, and all 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 confluences 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 Shakespeare'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 symbolized 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 louis d'or before him, and the princes and princesses, dukes and d.u.c.h.esses and courtiers about him, had but followed the advice of Marquis de la Galissonniere, the humpbacked governor-general of Canada, who furnished Celoron with his leaden seeds and appointed the place of the sowing--if Louis XV had but answered his Canadian governor's prayer and sent French peasants where the plates were buried, or had even let those who wanted to flee to that valley, as they would have fled by tens of thousands, preferring the hardships and privations of the pioneer to the galleys, the dungeons, or the gallows--then "Versailles" in that valley of the Ohio would not be merely what it is, a ward or township in a city that bears the name of a British statesman.

"Or, if soldiers had been sent!" Parkman, approaching the great valley in imagination with Celoron, from the north, exclaims, "the most momentous and far-reaching question ever brought to issue on this continent was: 'Shall France remain here or shall she not?' If by diplomacy or war she had preserved but the half or less than half of her American possessions, then a barrier would have been set to the spread of the English-speaking races, there would have been no Revolutionary War and, for a long time at least, no independence." [Footnote: Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," p. 5.]

(Which but emphasizes what I have said as to the part, the negative part as well as the positive, France conspicuously and unconsciously played in the making of a new nation.)

If "the French soldiers left dead on inglorious continental battle-fields could," as Parkman says, "have saved Canada, and perhaps made good her claim to the vast territories of the West," [Footnote: Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," p. 41.] 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 member 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 commission, who may have set foot nearly two centuries before somewhere on the coast of North America below Labrador, and from a very expansive interpretation of a treaty with the Indians at Lancaster, Pa., in 1744, the trans-Alleghany Indians protesting, however, not less firmly than the French, that the lands purchased 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 Pennsylvanians 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 mouth of the Miami River and back. There are no hilarious songs in this prelude such as were heard from the crests of the Blue Ridge when Spotswood's hors.e.m.e.n came up from the other side. It has to me the atmosphere and movement of some Greek tragedy, though one writer likens it to mediaeval mummery. Perhaps it is only a knowledge of its import and the end that makes it sombre and grave despite the beautiful setting to this prelude which one may read to- day in the French archives. So full of portent and color it is that I wonder no one has woven its incidents, slight as they are, into French literature or into that of America.

"I left Lachine on the 15th of June," begins Celoron's journal, [Footnote: Margry, 6:666.] now in the Departement de la Marine, in Paris, "with a detachment formed of a captain, eight subaltern officers, six cadets, an armorer, twenty men of the troops, one hundred and eighty Canadians, and nearly thirty savages--equal number of Iroquois and Abenakes." They filled twenty-three canoes in a procession that was halted by shipwreck, by heat, by lack of rain and by too much rain, by difficult portages, and damage to the canoes.

Over a part of their first portage from Lake Erie I walked one night years ago through a drenching rain, such as they endured in the seven days in which they were carrying their canoes and baggage up those steep hills through the then dense forest of beech, oak, and elm, to the waters of Lake Chautauqua, where now many thousands gather every summer, from children to white-haired men and women, to study history, language, sciences, cooking, sewing, etc., and to attend conferences daily.

But the expedition then was often stopped by savages who ran away to avoid the excessive speechmaking and lecturing of these old-world orators, conferenciers; and the ears and eyes of the auditors who did not run away were opened by strings of wampum, though they were often too little moved by the love of their father Onontio and his concern lest the English should make themselves masters and the Indians their victims.

There is in a Paris library a map of this expedition made by the hand of Pere Bonnecamps, who signs himself "Jesuitte Mathematiciant." He kept a diary, [Footnote: Translation in "Jesuit Relations," ed. Thwaites, vol.

69. "Account of the voyage on the Beautiful River made in 1749 under the direction of Monsieur de Celoron."] 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 sometimes 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 children," 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 officers if that please you--to give you good spirit, so that you will only work in good affairs.... Follow my advice. Then the sky will always be beautiful and clear over your villages." [Footnote: Margry, 6: 677.]

"My father," said the spokesman for the savages at another council, "we pray you have pity on us; we are young men who cannot reply as the old men could; what you have said to us has opened our eyes [received gifts], given us spirit, we see that you only work with good affairs.... [The great Onontio in Paris is playing all the while in Paris with the louis d'or.] Examine, my father, the situation in which we are. If thou makest the English to retire, who give us necessaries, and especially the smith who mends our guns and hatchets, we would be without help and exposed to die of hunger and of misery in the Belle Riviere. Have pity on us, my father, thou canst not at present give us our necessaries. Leave us at least for this winter, or at least till we go hunting, the smith and some one who can help us. We promise thee that in the spring the English will retire." [Footnote: Margry, 6:683.]

And so the expedition pa.s.sed on from river to river, from tribe to tribe, planting plates and making appeals to the savages, down the Ohio to the Miami, up the Miami, stopping at the village of a chief known as La Demoiselle, thence by portage to the French settlement on the Maumee, and so back to Lake Erie. Then came the fort builders in their wake, and so the "Spartoi," the soldiers, almost literally sprang from the earth of the sowing of the plates.

At one place (the place where the Loups prayed for a smith) they found a young Englishman with a few dozen workmen building a stockade, but they sent him back beyond the mountains over which he 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 Cartier and Champlain had made their way into the continent.

It is a fact, remarkable to us now, that the first 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 militia, 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 t.i.tle 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 Voltaire, [Footnote: Voltaire, "The French in America" in his "Short Studies in English and American Subjects," p. 249.] and "it was not a cannon-shot" that gave the signal but, as Parkman said, "a volley from the hunting pieces of a few backwoodsmen, commanded by a Virginia youth, George Washington." [Footnote: Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," 1:3.]

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 explorations and claims and the farthest verge of English adventure, on the watershed twenty miles from Lake Erie, and requesting, in the name of Governor Dinwiddie and of the shade of John Cabot, the peaceable departure of those French pioneers and soldiers, who, as the letter which the young colonel bore stated, were "erecting fortresses and making settlements upon the the river [Ohio] so notoriously known to be the property of the Crown of Great Britain."

The edge of the Great Lakes' basin is only a little way, at the place where he stood, from the watershed of the Mississippi River. A little farther up the sh.o.r.e, where Celoron made portage, it is only six or eight miles across, and here it is but a little more, and the "height of land"

is hardly noticeable. The French built a fort on a promontory in the lake --a promontory almost an island--Presque Isle; and there, where the waters begin to run the other way, that is, toward the gulf, they built still another which they called Le Boeuf, an easier portage than the Chautauqua.

From the former fort the city of Erie, a grimy, busy manufacturing city, has grown. The latter has produced only a village, on whose weed-grown outskirts the ruins of a fort still look out upon the meadow where the little stream called "French Creek" starts, first toward France, in its two-thousand-mile journey to the gulf that lies in the other direction.

For twenty miles I followed the stream one day to where it became a part of Celoron's river-in imagination calling the French back to its banks again, but finding them slow to come, for that part of the valley seemed not particularly attractive. It is a little farther down the lake that the vineyards fill all the sh.o.r.e from the lake to the watershed. And in that very country 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 Boeuf, asked Washington, in rich diplomatic sarcasm, to descend to the particularization 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 questioning. There was then no talk of Cabot or La Salle, 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 Washington 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 is 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 Youghiogheny River," which marks the grave of Jumonville.

Washington, the major of colonial militia in the Alleghany 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 achievement. That skirmish ended all for him. But let it be remembered even now that he was a representative of France standing almost alone, at the confluence of all the waters for hundreds of miles on the other slope of the Alleghanies, in defense of what other men of France had won by their hardihood.

I heard a great audience at the Academy applaud the brave endurance of French priests and soldiers in Asia. Some day I hope these unrenowned men who sacrificed as much for France in America will be as notably remembered. There is a short street in Pittsburgh that bears Jumonville's name--a short street that runs from the river into a larger street with the name of one of his seven brothers, De Villiers, Coulon de Villiers, who hastened from Montreal, while another brother hastened from the Illinois to avenge his death.

But the cairn on the hillside has grown to no high monument. Mr. Hulbert, who has written with filial pen of the valley, says that occasionally a traveller repairs a rough wooden cross made of boards or tree branches and planted among the rocks of the cairn. [Footnote: A. B. Hulbert, "The Ohio River," pp. 44, 45.] But on a recent visit to the grave out in that lonesome ravine, I found that a permanent tablet had been placed there instead of this fragile cross.

I must leave to your unrefreshed memories the exploits of Beaujeu and Braddock, of Contrecoeur and Forbes, blow up Fort Duquesne of the past, and come into the city of to-day, for I wish to put against this background this mighty city where it is often difficult to see because of the smoke.

The French, as we are well aware, came to their 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 (whose 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 pa.s.s 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 Duquesne Club in time for a city day's work. It was about as far from Paris to Ma.r.s.eilles 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 important 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 [Footnote: R. B. Naylor, address before the Ohio Valley Historical a.s.sociation (quoted in Hulbert, "Ohio River," pp. 365-6).] 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 mult.i.tudes of human beings that pa.s.s through it are comparable in number with the migrant tonnage and inanimate cargoes; for Pittsburgh is "the ant.i.thesis 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 the watersheds, as we have seen, have been shifted. One who sees that throng pa.s.s to-day back and forth, to and from the valley and the ocean, must know that there are no Alleghanies in our continental topography, as Washington saw and as Webster stated there could not be in our politics. If one makes the journey from the ocean in the night, one may hear, if one wakes, the puffing of two engines, as in the Jura Mountains, but there will be nothing else to tell him that the s.h.a.ggy Alleghany Mountains have not been cast into the midst of the sea-- nothing except the groaning of the wheels.

The Indians near Pittsburgh, I have said, prayed the messenger of Onontio that they might keep their English smith--and the prayer seems to have been abundantly answered, for Pittsburgh appears at first to be one vast smithy, so enveloped is it in the smoke of its own toil, so reddened are its great sky walls by its flaming forges, so filled is the air with the dust from the bellows, and so clangorous is the sound of its hammers. It is a city of Vulcans--a city whose industry makes academic discussions seem as the play of girls in a field of flowers. It is not primarily a market-place, this point of land, one of the places where the French and English traders used to barter guns, whiskey, and trinkets for furs. It is a making place--a pit between the hills, where the fires of creation are still burning.

Celoron and his sombre voyage had been in my mind all day, as I sat in a beautiful library of that city among books of the past; but in the evening, as Dante accompanied by Virgil, I descended circle by circle to the floor of the valley--with this difference, that it was not to a place of torment but to the halls of the swarth G.o.ds 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-world 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 thousand 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?

In each of these halls there pa.s.s in orderly succession cars with varied cargoes; red ore from the faraway hills beyond Superior, limestone fragments from some near-by hill, and sc.r.a.p 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 out in those very forests from which the red ore was dug--and comes forth purified, to be cast into flaming ingots, to be again heated and then crushed and moulded and sawed and pierced for the better service of man.

In the course of a few minutes one sees a few iron carloads of ore that was a month before lying in the earth beyond Superior transformed into a girder for a bridge, a steel rail, a bit of armor-plate, a beam for a sky- sc.r.a.per--and all in utter human silence, with the calm pushing and pulling of a few levers, the accurate shovelling by a few hands, the deliberate testing by a few pairs of experienced eyes.

Here is the new Fort Duquesne that is holding the place of the confluence of the rivers and trails just beyond the Alleghanies, and this is the ammunition with which that begrimed but strong-faced garrison defends the valley to-day, supports the city on the environing hills and the convoluted plateau back of the point, spans streams the world around, builds the skeletons of new cities and protects the coasts of their country.

There are many others in that garrison, but these makers of steel are the core of that city, in which "the modern world," to use the words of one of our first economists, "achieves its grandest triumph and faces its gravest problem" [Footnote: John R. Commons, in _Survey_, March 6, 1909, 1:1051.]

--the "mighty storm mountain of capital and labor."

I quote from this same economist a comprehensive paragraph descriptive of its riches: "Through hills which line these [confluent] rivers run enormous veins of bituminous coal. Located near the surface, the coal 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 c.o.ke. Then there are vast stores of oil [seven million five hundred thousand gallons annually] natural gas [of which two hundred and fifty million feet are consumed daily], sand, shale, clay and stone, with which to give Pittsburgh and the tributary country the lead of the world in iron and steel, gla.s.s, electrical machinery, street-cars, tin plate, air-brakes and firebrick." [Footnote: J. R. Commons, "Wage Earners of Pittsburg," in _Survey_, March 6, 1909, 21:1051-64.]

And to all this natural bounty the national government has added that of the tariff and of millions spent in river improvements, while Europe has contributed 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 contribution of France through 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 a.s.sembled 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 something more than iron, more valuable than gold. But it is only another sign, too, of forces that have a.s.sembled from all parts of the earth, men represented in the varied cargoes that are poured by a seemingly omnipotent hand into those furnaces--red-blooded men, and with them slag that has gone through the fires of older civilizations.

Here, let me say again, is being made a new metal; this no one can doubt.

It is not merely a melting and a restamping of old coin with a new superscription, a new sovereignty--a composite face instead of a personal likeness--it is the making, as I have said in other ill.u.s.trations and metaphors, of a new race.

If I had an instinct of human character, such as the intuitive sense of the fibre and tension of steel possessed by the man who watches the boiling in the furnaces and who, from time to time, puts aside his smoked gla.s.ses and looks at the texture of a typical bit of his metal, or who stands at the emptying of the furnace into the ladle and directs the addition of carbon or magnesium to bring his output to the right const.i.tuency, I could tell you what strains and stresses this new people would stand. As it is, I can only make a surmise, perhaps not more valuable than yours.

The makers of steel were concerned only to get the primacy in steel. Human character was of concern only as it made better steel and more of it. They took the red ore where they could get it richest in iron and cheapest, and they took red-blooded labor where they could get it strongest--sinewed, clearest-eyed, and cheapest. "There are no able-bodied men between the ages of sixteen and fifty years left in my native town," said a Servian workman in the mills. "They have all come to America. The agricultural districts and villages of the mid-eastern valleys of Europe are sending their strongest men and youths, nourished of good diet and in pure air, stolid and care-free, into that dim canyon-Servians, Croatians, Ruthenians, Lithuanians, Slovaks, with Italians, Poles, and Russian Jews."

[Footnote: P. Roberts, "The New Pittsburg," in _Charities and the Commons_, January 2, 1909, 21:533. See also J. A. Fitch, "The Steel Workers," New York, 1910.] It is from Slavs and mixed people of the old European midland, says one, "where the successive 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 profits. 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 burn 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 compet.i.tor, 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 discernment and thrift is now furnishing an a.n.a.logue for the conscious utilization of other waste--waste of native capacity of the steel-worker for happiness and usefulness.

Mr. Carnegie has indeed led the way in the establishment of libraries, art galleries, museums, inst.i.tutes of training and research out of what were but waste if spent as some millionaires spend their profits. All these things upon the hills are by-products of the steel-mills down in the ravine. In every luminous ingot swung in the mills that were his, there is something toward the pension of a university professor out in Oregon, something for an artist in New York or Paris, something for an astronomer on the top of Mount Wilson, something for the teacher in the school upon the hill, something for every library established by his gift.