The French in the Heart of America - John H. Finley

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"THE MEN OF ALWAYS"

      XIX. THE HEART OF AMERICA

      EPILOGUE

      THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA

       Table of Contents

      From "a series of letters to a friend in England," in 1793, "tending to shew the probable rise and grandeur of the American Empire":

      "It struck me as a natural object of enquiry to what a future increase and elevation of magnitude and grandeur the spreading empire of America might attain, when a country had thus suddenly risen from an uninhabited wild, to the quantum of population necessary to govern and regulate its own administration."

      G. IMLAY ("A captain in the American Army during the late war, and a commissioner for laying out land in the back settlements").

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      INTRODUCTION

      I address the reader as living in the land from which the pioneers of France went out to America; first, because I wrote these chapters in that land, a few steps from the Seine; second, because I should otherwise have to assume the familiarity of the reader with much that I have gathered into these chapters, though the reader may have forgotten or never known it; and, third, because I wish the reader to look at these new-world regions from without, and, standing apart and aloof, to see the present restless life of these valleys, especially of the Mississippi Valley, against the background of Gallic adventure and pious endeavor which is seen in richest color, highest charm, and truest value at a distance.

      But, while I must ask my readers in America to expatriate themselves in their imaginations and to look over into this valley as aliens, I wish them to know that I write, though myself in temporary exile, as a son of the Mississippi Valley, as a geographical descendant of France; that my commission is given me of my love for the boundless stretch of prairie and plain whose virgin sod I have broken with my plough; of the lure of the waterways and roads where I have followed the boats and the trails of French voyageurs and coureurs de bois; and of the possessing interest of the epic story of the development of that most virile democracy known to the world. The "Divine River," discovered by the French, ran near the place of my birth. My county was that of "La Salle," a division of the land of the Illinois, "the land of men." The Fort, or the Rock, St. Louis, built by La Salle and Tonty, was only a few miles distant. A little farther, a town, Marquette, stands near the place where the French priest and explorer, Père Marquette, ministered to the Indians. Up-stream, a busy city keeps the name of Joliet on the lips of thousands, though the brave explorer would doubtless not recognize it as his own; and below, the new- made Hennepin Canal makes a shorter course to the Mississippi River than that which leads by the ruins of La Salle's Fort Crèvecoeur. It is of such environment that these chapters were suggested, and it has been by my love for it, rather than by any profound scholarship, that they have been dictated. I write not as a scholar—since most of my life has been spent in action, not in study—but as an academic coureur de bois and of what I have known and seen in the Valley of Democracy, the fairest and most fruitful of the regions where France was pioneer in America.

      There should be written in further preface to all the chapters which follow a paragraph from the beloved historian to whom I am most indebted and of whom I shall speak later at length. I first read its entrancing sentences when a youth in college, a quarter of a century ago, and I have never been free of its spell. I would have it written not only in France but somewhere at the northern portals of the American continent, on the cliffs of the Saguenay, or on that Rock of Quebec which saw the first vessel of the French come up the river and supported the last struggle for formal dominion of a land which the French can never lose, except by forgetting: "Again their ghostly camp-fires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for Civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its forests, priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of ancient barbarism. Men steeped in antique learning, pale with the close breath of the cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives, ruled savage hordes with a mild, parental sway, and stood serene before the direst shapes of death. Men of courtly nurture, heirs to the polish of a far-reaching ancestry, here, with their dauntless hardihood, put to shame the boldest sons of toil." [Footnote: Parkman: "Pioneers of France in the New World." New library edition. Introduction, xii-xiii.]

      These are the regions we are to explore, and these are the men with whom we are to begin the journey.

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      FROM LABRADOR TO THE LAKES

      We shall not be able to enter the valley of the Mississippi in this chapter. There is a long stretch of the nearer valley of the St. Lawrence that must first be traversed. Just before I left America in 1910 two men flew in a balloon from St. Louis, the very centre of the Mississippi Valley, to the Labrador gate of the St. Lawrence, the vestibule valley, in a few hours, but it took the French pioneers a whole century and more to make their way out to where those aviators began their flight. We have but a few pages for a journey over a thousand miles of stream and portage and a hundred years of time. I must therefore leave most of the details of suffering from the rigors of the north, starvation, and the Iroquois along the way to your memories, or to your fresh reading of Parkman, Winsor, Fiske, and Thwaites in English, or to Le Clercq, Lescarbot, Champlain, Charlevoix, Sagard, and others in French.

      The story of the exploration and settlement of those valleys beyond the cod-banks of Newfoundland begins not in the ports of Spain or Portugal, nor in England, but in a little town on the coast of France, standing on a rocky promontory thrust out into the sea, only a few hours' ride from Paris, in the ancient town of St. Malo, the "nursery of hardy mariners," the cradle of the spirit of the West. [Footnote: After reaching Paris on my first journey, the first place to which I made a pilgrimage, even before the tombs of kings and emperors and the galleries of art, was this gray-bastioned town of St. Malo.]

      For a son of France was the first of Europeans, so far as we certainly know, to penetrate beyond the tidewater of those confronting coasts, the first to step over the threshold of the unguessed continent, north, at any rate, of Mexico. Columbus claimed at most but an Asiatic peninsula, though he knew that he had found only islands. The Cabots, in the service of England, sailing along its mysterious shores, had touched but the fringe of the wondrous garment. Ponce de Leon, a Spaniard, had floundered a few leagues from the sea in Florida searching for the fountain of youth. Narvaez had found the wretched village of Appalache but had been refused admission by the turbid Mississippi and was carried out to an ocean grave by its fierce current; Verrazano, an Italian in the employ of France, living at Rouen, had entered the harbor of New York, had enjoyed the primitive hospitality of what is now a most fashionable seaside resort (Newport), had seen the peaks of the White Mountains from his deck, and, as he supposed, had looked upon the Indian Ocean, or the Sea of Verrazano, which has shrunk to the Chesapeake Bay on our modern maps and now reaches not a fiftieth part of the way to the other shore.

      It was a true son of France who first had the persistence of courage and the endurance of imagination to enter the continent and see the gates close behind him—Jacques Cartier, a master pilot of St. Malo, commissioned of his own intrepid desire and of the jealous ambition of King Francis I to bring fresh tidings of the mysterious "square gulf," which other Frenchmen, Denys and Aubert, may have entered a quarter of a century earlier, and which it was hoped might disclose

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