The French in the Heart of America Part 23

Like provision has also been made with respect to oil, natural gas, and phosphate fields. Forest lands to the extent of nearly two hundred million acres have been reserved as a perpetual national domain, and, in addition to this, several States have forest reservations amounting to nearly ten million acres. [Footnote: Van Hise, pp. 216, 217.] The volume of forest legislation in the States is unprecedented, providing for forest service, forest study, and the prevention of forest-fires, with a prospect of laws providing for a more rigid public control of private forests.

An increasing public control of waters is another noticeable trend in legislation, and their increased utilization has already been noticed.

Joliet's ca.n.a.l has been built. Champlain's is at last completed. A President of the United States has recommended the deepening of La Salle's river. The valley is coming back to the French paths. These and many others are conservation projects only indirectly, but they intimate a thought of the future as do the heavy appropriations for the reclamation of arid and subarid regions, the government having spent seventy million dollars [Footnote: To June 1, 1912.] in such undertakings, making "one hand wash the other," as our saying is; that is, making the well-watered regions meet the expense of watering the arid.

And, finally, the States are beginning to take most serious and even radical measures to encourage farmers so to till their fields as to be able to bequeath them un-impoverished to those who come after. I think it not unlikely that eventually the demos, thinking of the future, will be as paternalistic as was Louis XIV, who told the habitant of the St. Lawrence how many horses he should keep.

This review of the resources of the valley of France in the midst of America, and of the forces that are now a.s.sembling to preserve for posterity its vast capital of earth, air, and water, is but an intimation of what might easily be expanded into a volume of itself. Indeed, much of my statistical material I have from a book by Doctor Charles R. Van Hise, president of the University of Wisconsin; but, meagre as this review is, it must give you, as it has given me, a stirring sense of the mighty reach of the paths of those few pioneers of France in those regions where the spirit of conservation is strongest.

While it is true that every human life, as Carlyle has said, stands at the conflux of two eternities--the one behind him, the other before--in a sense have the material preparations, extending during a length of time that to our measurement seems an eternity, converged upon and in those pioneers of Europe in that valley; and from them has diverged a civilization that now begins to look forward in the eyes of her prophets through years that seem as another eternity. Probably, says this eminent scientist of that valley, speaking of the past, "some of the deposits at present being mined are the result of agents ... a hundred million years ago"; [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 18.] and of the future: "We hope for a future ... not to be reckoned by thousands of years but by tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or even millions of years. And, therefore, so far as our responsibility is concerned, it is immaterial whether the coal will be exhausted in one hundred and fifty years or fifteen hundred years, or fifteen thousand years. Our responsibility to succeeding generations demands that we reduce its use to our absolute necessities, and therefore prolong its life to the utmost." [Footnote: Van Rise, p. 25.] Conservation has in such depth of years given a new perspective to the picture we have been painting of the life in that valley. The French were pioneers not merely of an exploiting individualism of a day, or of a hundred or two hundred years, not merely of a democracy thinking of an equality of the men of one generation, but also of the conserving dynamic civilization of hundreds of centuries of a people--to come back again to that best of definitions--who are the invisible mult.i.tude of spirits, the nation of yesterday and to-morrow.

The French priest, kneeling over the dying Indian child in the forest hut and stealthily touching its brow with water, had vision of another immortality than that, as we know; the empire which the French explorers and adventurers hoped to build with its capital on the Rock of Quebec, or on the Rock St. Louis of the Illinois, or at the mouth of the Mississippi did not grow in the fas.h.i.+on of their dream, as we of course realize. But we see, on the other hand, what promise of ages has been given to the faith and adventure which found incarnation in a frontier democracy whose energy and spirit made possible the great, l.u.s.ty republic of to-day, that now begins to talk of a thousand centuries.

Out in that far west, in a recent autumn, the men of the standing army were set to fighting forest-fires. This has seemed to me a happy omen of what the new conservatism of the world may ask of its soldiery--the conserving not of borders but of the resources of human life and of human life itself. And so have I added another cla.s.s to the inhabitants of the valley, to the precursors, the producers, the poets, and the teachers of to-morrow-the conservers of the day after to-morrow.

Our great philosopher William James gave expression in one of his last utterances to a hope that every man, rich or poor, may come to serve the State (as now every man in France does his military service) in some direct duty that asks the same obedience, the same sacrifice, the same forgetting of self that is asked of the soldier--that every man by the payment of the blood tax may be able to get and keep the spirit of neighborliness, to know how to sympathize more deeply with his fellow men, and to learn the joy of disinterested doing for the nation. [Footnote: "Memories and Studies: The Moral Equivalent of War," pp. 267-296.]

But in this demand and appeal of the new theory of our common responsibility, of a dynamic conservationism, is the germ of a larger patriotism than any that history has as yet defined--a patriotism that asks the lifetime service of an individualism with an all-time horizon.

CHAPTER XIX

THE HEART OF AMERICA

In the little town of St. Die in the east of France there was printed in the year 1507 a "Cosmographias Introductio"--an introduction to a forthcoming edition of Ptolemy--in which was included an account of the journeys of one Amerigo Vespucci, who is credited with the discovery of a new part of the world--a fourth continent. For this reason, the author recites, "quarta orbis pars, quam quis Americus invenit, Amerigen quasi Americi terram, sivi Americam nuncupare licit." And so the name America (for it was thought proper to give it the feminine form, "c.u.m et Europa et Asia a mulieribus sua sort.i.tae sint nomina") was probably first p.r.o.nounced in the mountain-circled town of St. Die, where the scholars of the Vosges, shut away from the sea and its greedy rumors of India, conceived more accurately in their isolation the significance of the western discoveries and made the new-found sh.o.r.es the edge not of Asia but of another continent.

Perhaps this new land should have been given some other name; but that it is futile now to discuss. America it has been these four hundred years and America it is doubtless always to be. And it is particularly gratifying to one who has come to care so much for France to find that the name of his own land--a name most euphonious and delectable to his ears--came of the christening at the font of the River Meurthe, the beautiful French dame of St. Die standing by as G.o.dmother, and that that name was first whispered to the world by the trees of the forests of the Vosges, whose wood may even have furnished the blocks to fas.h.i.+on first its letters. So may we go back and write this interesting if not important fact of French pioneering in America.

But let us rehea.r.s.e to ourselves once more before we separate the epic sequence of adventure and suffering which tells how much more than a name France gave to that continent just rising from the seas when the savants of St. Die touched her face with the baptismal water of their recluse learning.

Again the "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"--the America not of the imaging of the mountain men of St. Die but of the seeing and enduring of the seamen of Dieppe and St. Malo and Roch.e.l.le and Rouen.

Again Jacques Cartier stands alone within this "s.h.a.ggy continent," a thousand miles beyond the banks of the Baccalaos and the Isles of the Demons. Again for a moment Acadia echoes of the Sorbonne and of Arcadian poesy. Again the unblenching "preux chevalier" Champlain stands with his back against the gray cliff of Quebec fighting red and white foe alike, famine and disease, to keep a foothold in the wilderness, with the sublime faith of a crusader and the patient endurance of a Prometheus. Again the zealous but narrow rigor of Richelieu, flowering in his native land in the learning of the Sorbonne and preparing for him in the new world, as Le Jeune wrote, a "dazzling crown in heaven," builds by the St. Charles and the wreckage of Cartier's _Pet.i.te Hermine_, the house of Notre Dame des Anges, the "cradle of the great mission of New France." Again the fireflies light the meadow altar of Maisonneuve at Montreal on its birth- night. Again the gray gowns and the black, Le Caron, Brebeuf, Jogues, and Gamier, enter upon their glorious toils, their bare and sandalled feet, accustomed to the smooth walks of the convents of Brouage and Rheims and Paris, begin to climb the rough paths to the west, _ad majorem Dei gloriam._ Again the swift coureurs de bois, half-savage in their amba.s.sadors.h.i.+p of the woods, follow the traces of the most ancient road- makers, the buffalo and deer, and the voyageurs carry their boats across the portage places. Again the _Griffin_--the winged lion of the lakes-- flies from Niagara to the island in Green Bay, France's precursor of the million-tonned commerce of the northern seas, but sinks with her cargo of golden fleece in their blue waters. Again Marquette, the son of Laon, beholds with joy unspeakable the mysterious "great water," and yet again, La Salle stands by the lonely sea and cries his proclamation toward the limitless land.

And, seeing and hearing all this again, we have seen a land as large as all Europe emerge from the unknown at the evocation of pioneers of France who stood all or nearly all sooner or later in Paris within three or four kilometres of the very place in which I sit writing these words. Carder gave to the world the St. Lawrence River as far as the Falls of Lachine; Champlain, his Recollet friars and Jesuit priests and heralds of the woods added the upper lakes; and Marquette, Joliet, La Salle, Tonty, Hennepin, Radisson, Groseilliers, Iberville, Bienville, Le Sueur, La Harpe, the Verendrye--father and sons--and scores of other Frenchmen, many of forgotten names, added the valley of the river of a hundred thousand streams, from where at the east the French creek begins, a few miles from Lake Erie, to flow toward the Ohio even to the sources of the Missouri in the snows of the Rockies--"the most magnificent dwelling-place"--again to recall De Tocqueville, "prepared by G.o.d for man's abode; the valley destined to give the world a field for a new experiment in democracy and to become the heart of America."

I have not been able to write at any length of that part of all this vast region of France's pioneering and evoking where France is best remembered --remembered in speech that imitates that which is dearest to France's ears; remembered in voices that even in the harsh winds of the north keep something of the mellowness and softness of the south; remembered in the surnames that recall beautiful trees and fields of perfume and hills of vines and things of the sea which surrounded their ancestors; remembered in the appellations of the saints that protect their firesides and their fortunes; remembered in the names that still cling tenaciously to rivers and towns of that land which calls Champlain its father--Canada.

A traveller in the lower St. Lawrence Valley might well think himself east of the Atlantic as he hears the guard on the railway train from Montreal to Quebec call: St. Rochs, Les eboulements, Portneuf, Pont Rouge, Capucins, Mont Louis, Pointe au Chene; or hears the speech as he walks at the foot of the gray Rock of Quebec, or even reads the street signs in Montreal. There are memories there on every side, in their very houses and habits--yet memories which I fear are beginning to fade with the allurements of the land of hope to the far west and the northwest of Canada--the "land of hope," the new frontier of America, now of such interest to the people of that other valley, the Mississippi, which was once separated from Canada by no boundaries save watersheds, and these so low that there was reciprocity of their waters.

But even if I could keep you longer I am thinking that I should have asked you to spend it where there are fewer memories than in Canada, in the valley where the old French names, if kept at all, are often obscured in a new orthography or a different p.r.o.nunciation. Up in the boundary of waters between the two lands there is a lighthouse on an island called "Skilligallee." I was a long time in discovering that this meaningless euphonic name was but the memory of the Isle aux Galets--the island of the pebbles. So have the memories been lost in tongues that could not easily frame to p.r.o.nounce the words they found when they entered that farther valley where France's pioneering is almost forgotten, but where France should be best remembered.

A catalogue (and this book has been little else) of the reasons for such remembrance has doubtless brought little comfort; indeed, it may have brought some pain, because the recital of the reasons has but emphasized the forgetting and accentuated the loss.

But is France not to find, in a fuller consciousness of what has developed in that valley into which she led Europe, a higher satisfaction than could have come through the formal relations.h.i.+p of mother and colony, or any other that could be reasonably conjectured?

For Turgot's prophecy would have some day been realized, and there would perhaps have been a bitterness where now there is grat.i.tude. I can think of no series of relations that could have been of more profound and momentous import in the history of that continent, or that should give higher satisfaction to France in her thought of America than that which this summation permits us to recall once more.

France not only christened America; she not only stood first far inside that continent at the north and furnished Europe proof of its mighty dimensions; she also gave to this continent, child of her christening, the richest great valley of the world.

This valley she held in the t.i.tle of her own claim for more than a century from the time that her explorers first looked over its brim, held it by valors and sufferings which would have been gloriously recorded if their issue had been to keep by those waters the tongue in which they could be written and sung.

When France did yield it, because of forces outside the valley, not inside (there was hardly a sound of battle there), she gave it in effect to a new nation. She shared it with the aboriginal American, she gave it to the ultimate American. She got her t.i.tle from the first Americans who, as Chateaubriand said, called themselves the "Children of Always." She gave it to those who are beginning to think of it as belonging not to them but to the new "Children of Always."

By her very valorous holding she taught the fringe of colonies along the Atlantic the first lessons in union, and she gave them a leader out of the disciplines of her borders, George Was.h.i.+ngton, whom in the course of time she directly a.s.sisted with her sympathy and means to make certain the independence of those same colonies.

He, in turn, in the paths of the Old French War across the Alleghanies, found by a most singular fate not only the indissoluble bond between the eastern and the western waters but in those very paths the practical way to the more "perfect union" of the young nation that was to succeed to this joint heritage of England and of France.

To its estate of hundreds of millions of acres east of the Mississippi Napoleon added a half-billion more out of the one-time domain of Louis XIV and made it possible that the United States should some day develop into a world-power.

The half-valley, enlarged to its mountain bounds through the influence of its free soil on those whose feet touched it as pioneers, nourished a natural democracy founded in the equalities, the freedoms, and the fraternities of the frontier so vital, so powerful that it became the dominant nationalistic force in a continent-wide republic. Aided by the means of communication which a rampant individualism had prepared for it, it held that republic together, expressing itself most conspicuously in the democratic soul of Lincoln--who, following La Salle down the Mississippi, found his high mission to the world--and in the masterful, resourceful generals.h.i.+p of Grant.

The old French forts have grown into new-world cities, the portage paths have been multiplied into streets, the trails of the coureurs de bois have become railroads, and all are the noisy, flaming, smoky places and means of such an industry and exploitation as doubtless are not to be found so extensive and so intensive in any other valley of the earth.

A quant.i.tative a.n.a.lysis has led me to present statistics of its production and manufacture which would seem inexcusably braggart if it were not to remind the French and my own countrymen that it was the geographical descendants of France who, out of the wealth of their heritage of France's bequeathing, untouched from the glaciers and the Indians, were confuting with their wheat the prophecies of Malthus and making the whole world a more comfortable and a somewhat brighter place with their iron, their oil, their reapers, their wagons, and their sewing-machines. It were nothing to be ashamed of unless that were all.

But a careful qualitative a.n.a.lysis discovers in the life of that valley, which has been so widely advertised by its purely quant.i.tative output, a certain idealism that is usually obscured by the smoke of its individualism.

We have seen it in the grimy ravine by old Fort Duquesne, where, like the t.i.tanium which, in what way no chemist knows, increases the tensile strength of its steel, this practical idealism gives promise of a democracy that will stand a greater stress and strain.

We have seen it in the plans for the future of the city that has risen from the onion field along the Chicago River, where Marquette's spirit lived in a sick body through a bitter winter.

We have seen it in the setting apart of the white acres in every towns.h.i.+p for the training of the child of to-morrow, in the higher school that stands in thousands of towns and cities throughout the valley, and in the university supported of every State in that valley, such as that which we saw beside the falls where Hennepin tells of the Indian sacrificing his beaver-skin to the river spirit.

And, finally, we have seen the men of to-day, rising to that highest definition of a people--the invisible mult.i.tude of spirits, the nation of yesterday and of to-morrow--forgetting their interests of the moment, listening to the men of the universities speaking out of the past, and planning for the conservation of what they have left to them of the resources of the land for the "interests of mankind"--the true "Children of Always."

This, then, is what France has prepared the way for, in one of the vast regions where she was pioneer in America. Through the venture and the faith of her sons she won the valley with a past of a million of ages; through unrecorded valors she held it as her very own for a century, and, though she lost nominal t.i.tle to it as a territory, she has a ground-rent interest in it, real t.i.tle to a share in its human fruitage, which time can neither take away nor cloud but only augment.

The social and industrial life which has developed there by mere coincidence, or of direct cause, is distinctive and peculiar to that part of the United States which has a French background, though it now has made itself felt throughout the nation. And, however little in its feature and language the foreground may seem to take color of it, I shall always believe that the consecration of the rivers and paths, by explorations and ministries that were for the most part as unselfish as France's scholars.h.i.+p is to-day, must in some subtle way have had such a potency as the catalytic substances which work miracles in matter and yet are beyond the discerning of the scientist.

An English essayist [Footnote: G. K. Chesterton, "The Fallacy of the Young Nation," in his "Heretics," pp. 247-266.] has estimated that we of the United States are no longer young and finds in the fact that we have produced great artists the intimations of age. The art of Whistler and the letters of Henry James are to him the "sweet and startling" but "unmistakable cry of a dying man." But this essayist could not have known the men of the valley which is the heart of the nation as it is the heart of the country, the place of its dominant spirits. That valley, so rapidly exploited of its resources that it has grown ages poorer, is yet virile, youthful in its faults and its achievements. It has no "fine futility" as yet, and the cry is not "sweet" though it may be "startling." It is the shout of a young G.o.d, of a Jason driving the bulls in the fields of Colchis. The attenuations of distance may easily deceive one's ears who listens from across the ocean and the mountains.

I think it was this same essayist who said that to understand a people one must study them with the "loyalty of a child" and the patience not of a scientist but of a poet. I thank him for that, while I excuse his confounding of sounds that he hears in England from America, and agree that what we need in that valley to tell its story, to interpret it, is not a specialist in statistics nor an annalist, not a critic who looks at the smoke of the chimneys and visits the slaughter-houses only, but a poet who will have the patience to consult both the statistician and the annalist, a patient poet with the "loyalty of a child" toward his theme.

EPILOGUE

FRANCIS PARKMAN THE HISTORIAN OF FRANCE IN THE NEW WORLD

I make the epilogue of this story my tribute to Francis Parkman, who has in a sense made this all possible for me: first, by reason of the love he gave me long ago for his New France with its primeval forests, its virgin prairies, its glistening rivers, its untamed Indians, its explorers, its gray and black cowls, its coureurs de bois, its stars whose light had never before looked on a white face; and second, by reason of the ma.s.s of incident and color which he has supplied for the background of the life I have known in that valley.

On entering a college out in the midst of that region--the middle of the Mississippi Valley--nearly thirty years ago I was a.s.signed, as my first important task in English, the reading and criticism of one of Parkman's books. I think that "The Oregon Trail" was suggested. I read several volumes, however, but found my interest greatest in "The Pioneers of France in the New World" and "The Jesuits in North America." What I wrote I do not now remember (nor do I wish to refresh my memory), but so persistent was the grip of those graphic relations upon my imagination that years later, when leaving the presidency of that same college, I asked to be permitted to take from the library three books (replacing them with fresher copies): the chapel Bible--from which I had been read to by my president and professors and from which I in turn had read to succeeding students--a copy of Spenser's "Faerie Queene"--which my college's only poet, Eugene Field, had read through--and a volume of Parkman's on the pioneers of France.

So I take the opportunity to pay my tribute to him who long ago put these figures on the frontier of my imagination, and who has prevented my ever speaking in dispa.s.sion or without favorable prejudice of them.