The French in the Heart of America Part 7

Such was the almost soundless beginning of what soon developed into a mighty "processional," its rumblings of wagons and shoutings of drivers on land and blowing of conches on the rivers increasing, accompanied 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 pale, gaunt, slow- moving, half hunter, half farmer, too indolent to disturb the wilderness from which he got a meagre 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 immediate predecessor from the shade of the forest, who with his axe made a little clearing, built a "shack," turned his cattle into the gra.s.s that had grown for centuries untouched, and let his pigs feed on the acorns; then the more robust agriculturist who aggressively pushed back the shadows of the forest, planted the wilderness with seeds of a magic learned in the valleys of Europe and Asia, put up the fences of individualistic struggle, and built his log cabin, the wilderness castle, the 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--drab, 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 privation.

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 G.o.d." [Footnote: "Democracy in America," ed. Gilman, 1:512.]

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 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 cl.u.s.ters 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 perished 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 "infinite 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 picturesque 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 consequential in the history of the human race.

The Indians, hostile to this horde that built cabins upon their hunting- grounds and devoured their forests, were to the wilderness migrants, driven, not of the hand of man but, as De Tocqueville says, "of the hand of G.o.d" made manifest in some human instinct, some desire of freedom, some hatred of convention, some hope of power or possession, what the Kirghese and Bashkirs and Russians were to those Asiatic migrants, pursuing them day and night like fiends for thousands of miles. And the myriad sufferings of the American migrants from hunger and thirst, from the freezing cold and the blasting, blistering, wilting heat, from the fevers of the new-broken lands, from the ravages of locust and gra.s.shopper, and chinch-bug and drought, from isolation from human friendships, from want of gentle nursing--even De Quincey's improvident travellers 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 a.s.sembling their chariots in the skies above.

Here across the Mississippi Valley is an exodus accomplished 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, t.i.tanic labors, frontier battles, endured countless times, till these migrants of Europe and of the new- world seaboard, became, as children of the wilderness, a new people, with qualities so distinctive as to lead the highest authority [Footnote: Frederick J. Turner, "The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in American History," in Proceedings of the Mississippi Valley Historical a.s.sociation (1909-10), 3:159-184.] on the history of that valley to characterize the west not as a geographic division of the United States, but as a "form of society" with its own peculiar flowering, developed, not as Parkman's magnificent fleur-de-lis, [Footnote: See Epilogue.] 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 pa.s.sed, 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 character 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 civilization different from anything that has developed elsewhere 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 indeed the "foremost chapter in the files of time." As Amba.s.sador James Bryce has said: "What Europe is to Asia, what England is to the rest of Europe, what America is to England, that the western States are to the Atlantic States." [Footnote: "American Commonwealth," 1913 ed., 2:892.] The French may dispute the implied claim of the second of these comparisons, but even they will have a satisfaction in admitting that their particular part of the United States is to the rest, which was not touched by their priests and explorers, what "Europe is to Asia." And here is my particular justification for asking the imaginations of the people of France to occupy and hold that to which the preface has given them the best of t.i.tles.

Meanwhile, that migration, heralded, as we have seen, just before the Revolution, 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 westward. We are seldom out of sight, as we travel on this grand track (the national turnpike through Pennsylvania) 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 pa.s.sage 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 for the land-office of the district; where they may obtain a t.i.tle 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."

[Footnote: Morris Birkbeck, "Notes on a Tour in America, 1817," pp. 34, 35.] This is a detail of the exodus through the most northern mountain pa.s.s.

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 migratory birds, not mindful as they of seasons, "were typical of the overland migration"

across Tennessee and Kentucky. The poorer cla.s.ses travelled on foot, as at the north, but drew after them carts with all their household effects.

[Footnote: F. J. Turner, "Rise of the New West," p. 80.]

Still farther south "the same type of occupation was to be seen; the poorer cla.s.ses of southern emigrants cut out their clearings along the rivers that flowed to the gulf and to the lower Mississippi," [Footnote: F. J. Turner, "Rise of the New West," p. 90.] 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 the zone beyond the mountain walls that were the natural western fortifications of the Atlantic colonies.

But though many of those western wilderness immigrants were "poor pilgrims" and for a time squatters (as the immediately extramural population of Paris), they were recruited from the st.u.r.diest stock on the Atlantic side of the fortifications. Some went, to be sure, who had failed in the old place, but were ready to make new hazard; some wanted greater freedom than the more highly socialized and conventionalized life within the fortifications would permit; some longed for adventure; some sought a fortune or competency perhaps impossible in the old settlements; some had only the inherited promptings of 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 settlements. 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: saccharine many times sweeter than sugar, colors unknown to the old dyers, perfumes as fragrant as those distilled from flowers, medicines potent to allay fevers. 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 Alleghanies the elements and conditions were found to convert this Atlantic by-product, unpromising outwardly, into the substance of a new and precious civilization.

This overmountain procession came chiefly up the watercourses of the south and middle States. Prior to 1830 the ma.s.s 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 making, 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 first 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 finally marked the boundaries of the last farms in the pa.s.ses of the Rockies, that ancestry has followed the frontier westward from where Celoron planted the emblems of French possession along the Ohio to where Chevalier la Verendrye looked upon the snowy and impa.s.sable peaks of the Rockies.

The immigrants to America of that stock had, many of them, at once on reaching the new land found the foot-hills of mountains, chiefly in Pennsylvania. Here they settled, gradually pushing their way southward in the troughs of the mountain streams and making finally a "broad belt from north to south, a shield of sinewy men thrust in between the people of the seaboard and the red warriors of the wilderness," the same men who declared for American independence in North Carolina before any others, even before the men of Ma.s.sachusetts. 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 h.o.m.ogeneous--"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 lat.i.tude. 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 capacities 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 hillside homes and inst.i.tutional shelters as sh.e.l.ls found far from a receding sea, empty or habited by a new species of immigrant. [Footnote: In one of those far northern valleys which I know best there was a school, before the exodus, of some seventy pupils, gathered from the farmers' families of the neighborhood. Now there are not a half-dozen pupils, and they are carried to a neighboring district.]

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 claims 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 lat.i.tude 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. Meanwhile the hardiest joined the transmontane migration, and in the decade after the opening of the Erie Ca.n.a.l (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 strugglers 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 the north and the south, as far apart as Carolina and Ma.s.sachusetts, came together beyond the mountains in the united building of commonwealths; for over those mountains the rivers all ran toward the Mississippi, which tied the interests of all together.

There was no north-and-south line then. The men of the valley were all westerners, "men of the western world"; not yet very strong as nationalists, that is, as men of the United States. "Men of the western waters" they also called themselves, for they shunned the uplands and kept near the streams by which or along which they had come into the wilderness and from which they drank. Men of the axe they were, too, in that first occupancy, never 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 migration 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 suggestive of the conglomerate that was to be as practicable for building purposes (the co- efficient of spirit being once determined) as any h.o.m.ogeneous, age-old rock used in the structure of nations. It became "h.o.m.ogeneous" 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 gives 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, idiosyncrasies, 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 commonwealths 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 ca.n.a.l 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 La Salle's day and in Iberville's day), while the other was to run through the valley of the Great Lakes, down through the valley of the hostile Iroquois, into the harbor of New York. This is not observable on the topographical maps simply because of our unimaginative definition of a watershed. A watershed is changed, according to that definition, only by an actual elevation or depression of the surface of the earth, whereas a railroad or ca.n.a.l that bridges ravines and tunnels or climbs elevations, or a freight rate that diverts traffic into a new course, as suddenly raises or lowers and as certainly removes watersheds as if mountains were miraculously lifted and carried into the midst of the sea.

So there came to be not only two rivers but two valleys, the one of the lake and prairie plainsmen and the other of the gulf plainsmen. The steam shuttles flying east and west by land and water wove a pattern in the former different from the latter but on the same warp. Two widely unlike industrial and social systems gradually developed, and they, in turn, struggling for the mastery of lands beyond the Mississippi, divided the nearer west--once a h.o.m.ogeneous state of mind--into two wests and all but disrupted the Union.

Then the direct European immigration began, millions coming from single states of Europe, sifting into the neo-American settlements, but for the most part pa.s.sing on, in mighty armies, to possess whole tracts farther west, along and beyond the Mississippi. In some parts of the northwest to- day the parents of three men out of four were born in Europe--in Scandinavia, in Germany, in Russia, in Italy.

So France, keeping near her those whom she loves best, her own children, has yet seen her Nouvelle 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 pa.s.sing westward.

One of the banners which some of the wagons covered with canvas ("prairie- schooners," as they were called) used to fly was "Pike's Peak or Bust," an Americanism indicating 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 subst.i.tute 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 departed 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 bra.s.s," where the exodus had ended in the shadow of the Chinese wall. The inscription on these columns reads:

By the Will of G.o.d, Here, upon the Brink of these Deserts, Which from this Point begin and stretch away 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, G.o.d's Lieutenant upon Earth, The ancient Children of the Wilderness--the Turgote Tartars-- Flying before the wrath of the Grecian Czar, Wandering Sheep who had strayed away from the Celestial Empire in the year 1616, But are now mercifully gathered again, after infinite sorrow, Into the fold of their forgiving Shepherd.

Hallowed be the spot forever, and Hallowed be the day--September 8, 1771!

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 commemoration 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, Ended their century-long exodus The New Children of the Wilderness, Driven by the Hand of G.o.d 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 mountains.

CHAPTER VIII

THE PARCELLING OF THE DOMAIN

The domain of Louis XIV in the midst of America (between the Great Lakes and the gulf, the Alleghanies and the Rockies) embraced over seven hundred and fifty million acres. One-half of it, roughly, was covered with giant forests inhabited by fur-bearing animals with opulence upon their backs.

One-half was covered with vegetation, varying from the luxuriant prairie gra.s.s to the sage-brush of the shadeless plains, plains roamed by beasts clothed with valuable robes. Two-thirds of this domain was arable, with only the irrigation of the clouds, and all of it was destined some day to be cultivated, the clouds having the a.s.sistance of man-made irrigation or dry farming.

The portion east of the Mississippi (about three hundred million acres) was at one time estimated to be worth not more, politically and physically, than the island of Guadeloupe-an island represented by a pin- head on an ordinary map-producing forty thousand tons of sugar and about two million pounds each of coffee and cocoa.

Even the people of the Atlantic States were accused by westerners as late as 1786 of threatening secession and of being as ignorant of the trans- Alleghany country as Great Britain had been of America, and as inconsiderate. The western half, urged by the minister 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 at 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 settlements 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 relates to actual settlement, appears too distant and remote to strike the mind of a sober politician with much force. This, therefore, can only rest in speculation 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 settling 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 west of the river Mississippi will be advantageous, is at best extremely problematical. For ourselves, we are very much inclined to the opinion that, after all, it is the Island of N. Orleans by which the command of a free navigation of the Mississippi is secured, that gives to this interesting cession its greatest value, and will render it in every view of immense benefit to our country. By this cession we hereafter shall hold within our own grasp, what we have heretofore enjoyed only by the uncertain tenure of a treaty, which might be broken at the pleasure of another, and (governed as we now are) with perfect impunity.

Provided therefore we have not purchased it too dear, there is all the reason for exultation which the friends of the administration display, and which all Americans may be allowed to feel." [Footnote: York Herald, July 6, 1803.]

I quote this to show how far from appreciating France's generosity the easterners, and especially the anti-Jeffersonian Federalists in America, were at that time. Other and less conscientious newspapers put the prodigality of Jefferson's commissioners more graphically: