The French in the Heart of America Part 6

There are glimpses here and there of gayety and halcyon days that give brightness to the story so full of tragedy. There was in the very heart of the valley (near the site of St. Louis, where a great world's fair was held a few years ago), Fort Chartres, mentioned above, "the centre of life and fas.h.i.+on in the West" as well as "a bulwark against Spain and a barrier to England." [Footnote: See Edward G. Mason, "Old Fort Chartres," in his "Chapters from Illinois History," 1901.] But in time the Indians, stirred by the English rivalry, swarmed as well as mosquitoes about the place, and there were battles, the echoes of which are still heard, we are told, in the regions south of St. Louis even in Our days. A young French officer, the Chevalier d'Artaguette, captured by the Chickasaws, was burned at the stake. He and his kin were loved by all the French and the song they used to sing of him is kept in a negro melody whose "oft-repeated chorus" ran:

"In the days of D'Artaguette, He! Ho! He!

It was the good old time.

The world was led straight with a switch, He! Ho! He!

Then there were no negroes, no ribbons, No diamonds For the vulgar.

He! Ho! He!"

And here even in this remote place premonitions of the great and imminent struggle with the English are ominously heard. We hear the governor- general of Canada, the Marquis de la Galissonniere, asking the home government in France not to leave the little colony of Illinois to perish --not for its own sake, but "else Canada and Louisiana would fall apart"; still urging, moreover, the value for fabrics of the wool of buffaloes, which roam the prairies in innumerable mult.i.tudes, the readiness of the earth for the plough, and the availability of the buffalo as a domestic animal. "If caught and attached to a plough," says the governor, who spoke truthfully but with little knowledge of this wild animal, "it would move it at a speed superior to that of the domestic ox." I do not know how appealing this harnessing of the original motive power of the prairie to the uses of agriculture was, and it is not of importance now. The buffalo has long since gone. Even the ox and the Norman horse, so long in use there, have been largely supplanted by that mysterious force, electricity, which Franklin was discovering on the other side of the Alleghany Mountains at the very time that this suggestion was being made to the minister of Louis XV. It is known, however, that the king took thought of the little Illinois colony, for the fort of wood was transformed under the direction of Chevalier de Macarty into a fortress of stone and garrisoned by nearly a regiment of French troops. A million crowns it cost the king, but this could not have distressed his Majesty, engaged in "throwing dice with piles of Louis d'or before him" and princes about him.

This was in the early fifties, and the fort was hardly transformed before the rifles of George Was.h.i.+ngton's men were heard from the eastern barriers disputing the claim of the French to the Ohio country. Jumonville, who was slain among the rocks of the Laurel Mountains, in the Alleghanies (killed in the opening skirmish of the final struggle), had a young brother, Neyon de Villiers, a captain in Chevalier de Macarty's garrison at Fort Chartres; and eastward he hastened, up the Ohio, to avenge his brother's death. "M. de Wachenston" (as the name appears in French despatches) was driven back, and so the "Old French War" in America began.

It was from this mid-continent fortress and its fertile environs that help in arms and rations went to the support of that final struggle along the mountains and lakes, even as far as La Salle's old Fort Niagara, where the valiant Aubry, at the head of his Illinois expedition, fell covered with wounds and many of his men were killed or taken prisoners. That was about all that one in the interior of the valley heard of the battles of the Seven Years' War out upon its edges.

What gives peculiar interest in this fortress to us to-day is that it was for a little time the only place in North America where the flag of the French was flying. All New France had been ceded by the treaty of Paris in 1763, but the little garrison of forty men still held Fort Chartres.

Pontiac and other friendly Indians intercepted all approaching English forces till, in 1765 (two years after the treaty of Paris and the cession of Canada and all the valley east of the Mississippi), St. Ange, the commander, announced to Pontiac, friendly to the end, that all was over, that "Onontio, their great French father," could no longer help his red children, that he was beyond the sea and could not hear, and that he, Pontiac, must make peace with the English. Then it was that the forty- second Highlanders, the "Black Watch," were permitted to enter the fort and to put the red cross of St. George in place of the fleur-de-lis. And so it was at Fort Chartres that the mighty struggle ended and that the t.i.tular life of the great empire of France in the new world actually went out.

The river, seemingly sentient, and still French, as I have said, soon swept away the site of the village outside the fort; and when the English had begun to look upon this as their permanent headquarters in the northwest--this fort, which Captain Pittman had reported to be the best- built fort in America--the still hostile river rose one night, and with its "resistless flood" tore away a bastion and a part of the river wall, then moved its channel away, and left the fort a mile inland.

The magazine still stands, or did a little time ago when I visited the site and found it nearly hidden by the trees, bushes, and weeds--all that is visibly left of the old French domain--and not far away, hidden at the foot of a hill, lies, as I have said, the village of Prairie du Rocher, "a little piece of old France transplanted to the Mississippi" a century and a half ago and forgotten.

It was on Champlain's cliff and beneath Cartier's Mount Royal that the unequal contest for the possession of America ended, where it began--a contest whose story, as Parkman says, in a sense demeaning his own great contribution, "would have been a history, if faults of const.i.tution and the bigotry and folly of rulers had not dwarfed it to an episode." But if it was an episode to the New Englander, or even to Frenchmen at the distance in time at which I write, it rises to the importance of history out in that region of America, where a century of unexampled fort.i.tude needs rather an epic poet than a historian to give it its place in the world's consciousness.

Indeed, historians of the United States to-day, as well as statesmen of that time, are in substantial agreement in this: That the presence of the French on all the colonial borders compelled a confederation of the varying interests of the several English colonies, kept them penned in between the mountains and the sea until there had been developed some degree of solidarity, some ability to act together; and then by the sudden, if compulsory, withdrawal of the pressure not only allowed their expansion but relieved them of all need of help from England and so of dependence upon her.

"We have caught them at last," said Louis XV's minister, Choiseul, speaking of the treaty of Paris in 1763. [Footnote: Bancroft, "History of the United States," 4:460.] Burke [Footnote: William Burke, "Remarks on the Letter Addressed to Two Great Men."] prophesied that the removal of France from North America would precipitate, as it did, the division of the British Empire. And Richard Henry Greene, the great English historian, dates the foundation of the great independent republic of the west (the United States) from the triumph of Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham.

It is interesting testimony in support of this fear of the eventual loss of all the colonies in such a cession, or such an acceptance, that the English commissioners debated long whether it might be more profitable to retain the little island of Guadeloupe instead of all New France. And it would appear that except for the advice of Benjamin Franklin this subst.i.tution would probably have been made.

France, then, having borne the brunt of conflict with nature and the natives in that valley, having revealed the riches of that valley to the world, having consecrated its entire length and breadth by high valor and sacrifice, having possessed that valley practically to the very eve of the birth of the nation that now occupies it, and having helped by substantial aid the struggling colonies to their independence, deserves (not through her monarchs or ministers chiefly, but through the new-world pioneers, who gave ill.u.s.tration of the spirit and stuff of Frenchmen) a lasting and a large share of credit for the establishment of the republic which has its most vigorous life in that valley.

New France has pa.s.sed and New England, too, but in their stead the new republic, recruited from all nations under heaven, ties their lost dominions into a power which is immensely greater than the sum of the two could have been, greater than it could have been in the hands of either alone.

There was for a little time a dream of the revival of New France out beyond the Mississippi, for there was a vast part of that valley that did not pa.s.s to England in 1763. The great territory between the Mississippi and the mountains, whose "snow-enc.u.mbered" peaks the Verendrye brothers had so longingly looked upon, was abandoned to Spain, or rather thrust upon Spain, already claiming it. France wanted to give it to England in order that Florida might be saved to Spain, her ally, but England did not hesitate as she did in making choice between the eastern half of the valley and Guadeloupe. She declined. So with an apparent magnanimity, which is greatly to be discounted when we come to know how worthless even the people of the United States, years later, considered this trans- Mississippi country, France, "secretly tired of her colony," finally induced Spain to accept it. The Spanish monarch, as if making the best of a bad bargain, took it with many excuses for his seemingly poor judgment.

But though Louis's minister, Choiseul, chuckled outwardly over the embarra.s.sment to England of his compulsory cession of Canada, New France, Illinois, and Louisiana (instead of Guadeloupe) and made a show of magnanimity in thrusting the other half of the Mississippi upon Spain, and though Turgot's simile between colonies and ripe fruit was often repeated for justification and consolation, the loss of these possessions was undoubtedly keenly felt and the dream of their recovery cherished; at any rate, the recovery of that part which lay beyond the Mississippi.

But that possession had become more precious to the sovereign of Spain, who refused the proffers that France was able to make in the next thirty years. The dream of repossession became fonder to the French republic.

Talleyrand, who had spent a year in travel in the United States, urged the acquisition not merely for France's own sake but to curb the ambitions of the Americans, "whose conduct ever since the moment of their independence is enough to prove this truth: the Americans are devoured by pride, ambition, and cupidity."

"There are," he said, "no other means of putting an end to the ambition of the Americans than that of shutting them up within the limits which nature seems to have traced for them; but Spain is not in a condition to do this great work alone. She cannot, therefore, hasten too quickly to engage the aid of a preponderating power, yielding to it a small part of her immense domains in order to preserve the rest."

"Let the court of Madrid cede these districts to France and from that moment the power of America is bounded by the limit which it may suit the interests and the tranquillity of France and Spain to a.s.sign her. The French Republic ... will be a wall of bra.s.s forever impenetrable to the combined efforts of England and America." [Footnote: Quoted in Henry Adams's "History of the United States," 1:357.]

If in Napoleon's mind the dream was as sinister, as regards the United States, it was not so for long. It contemplated at first the occupation of Santo Domingo, the quelling of the insurrection there, then the seizure of Louisiana, already promised to France by Spain, then the acquisition of Florida, the conversion of the Gulf of Mexico into a French lake, and ultimately the extension of the province of Louisiana to the Alleghanies and, perhaps, even to the old borders of New France along the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence. But plague and slaughter met his armies in Santo Domingo in the first step toward the realization of his vast design, and the vision, in the s.h.i.+fting light of events in Europe and on the sh.o.r.es of America as well, soon a.s.sumed other shape and color and at last disappeared entirely, supplanted by the vision of a strengthened American republic that would come to be a rival of England. This was what came (in his own language) instead of his dream of a New France beyond the Mississippi, beyond the American republic:

"I know the full value of Louisiana, and I have been desirous of repairing the fault of the French negotiator who abandoned it in 1763. A few lines of a treaty have restored it to me, and I have scarcely recovered it when I must expect to lose it. But if it escapes from me, it shall one day cost dearer to those who oblige me to strip myself of it than to those to whom I wish to deliver it. The English have successfully taken from France, Canada, Cape Breton, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the richest portions of Asia. They are engaged in exciting troubles in St. Domingo. They shall not have the Mississippi which they covet. Louisiana is nothing in comparison with their conquests in all parts of the globe, and yet the jealousy they feel at the restoration of this colony to the sovereignty of France acquaints me with their wish to take possession of it, and it is thus that they will begin the war.... I think of ceding it to the United States. I can scarcely say that I cede it to them, for it is not yet in our possession. If, however, I leave the least time to our enemies, I shall only transmit an empty t.i.tle to those republicans whose friends.h.i.+p I seek. They only ask of me one town in Louisiana, but I already consider the colony as entirely lost, and it appears to me that in the hands of this growing power, it will be more useful to the policy and even to the commerce of France than if I should attempt to keep it." [Footnote: Marbois, "History of Louisiana," pp. 263-264.]

The United States Commissioner came one day to Paris to purchase New Orleans, and he went back to America with a deed to more than 800,000 square miles of the region which La Salle had claimed for Louis XIV by virtue of the commission which he carried in his bosom from the Rue de la Truanderie more than a century before:

"The First Consul of the French Republic, desiring to give to the United States a strong proof of friends.h.i.+p, doth hereby cede to the said United States, in the name of the French Republic, forever and in full sovereignty, the said territory, with all its rights and appurtenances, as fully and in the same manner as they might have been acquired by the French Republic." [Footnote: Treaty of Purchase between the United States and the French Republic, Art. I.]

The dream faded into something undefined but greater, relieving Napoleon and France of immediate dangers and promising more to humanity, we must agree, than a colony administered at that distance and separated from a young, growing nation merely by a s.h.i.+fting river that must inevitably have made trouble instead of preventing it.

Whatever may be said of Napoleon's motives or compulsions in this matter or of his service to mankind in others, he has been "useful to the universe," not in preventing England from ruling in that valley and so dominating America, but in making it possible for the United States to undertake the greatest task ever given into the hands of a republic, and at the same time enabling it to keep the good-will of that people who might (if the other dream had been realized) have become the worst of her enemies. It was Napoleon, whatever his motive, Napoleon in the name of the French people, who gave the United States the possibility of becoming a world-power.

CHAPTER VII

THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS

Let us remind ourselves again, before the hordes of frontiersmen and settlers come over the mountains and up the lakes and down the rivers, erasing most of the tangible memories of the inter-montane, primeval western wilderness, that France evoked it from the unknown.

A circle drawn round the Louvre with the radius of two kilometres, enclosed the little patch of earth from which were evoked these millions of acres of untouched forests and millions of acres of virgin plain and prairie, seamed and watered by a hundred thousand streams, washed by a chain of the mightiest inland fresh-water oceans, and guarded by two ranges of mountains. Within that narrow circle, four kilometres in diameter, stood Cartier dreaming of Asia, asking for permission to explore the mysterious square gulf, the St. Lawrence, and again presenting to the king the dusky captive Donnacona; within that circle was the street, Rue aux Ours, whose meat shops Lescarbot in Acadia remembered as the place of good food and doubtless of excited talk concerning the unexplored New France, whose hards.h.i.+ps and pleasures he afterward tasted; within that circle Champlain walked, as in a dream, we are told, impatient as a lion in a cage, longing to be again upon the wilderness path, westward of Quebec, toward the unknown; within that circle the priest Olier, of St.

Germain-des-Pres, had his vision that led to the founding of Montreal, whose consecration was celebrated also within that same circ.u.mference at the Cathedral of Notre Dame; within that circle La Salle lodged in Rue de la Truanderie, awaiting his fateful commission that should give him leave to make real his dream of a wilderness empire; not a stone's throw away from the Rue de la Truanderie ran the street having its beginning or end in Rue aux Ours, Rue Quincampoix, in which the thousands jostled and fought from morning till night for the purchase of stock in that same wilderness empire; and it was finally within that same circle that the wilderness dream, seen for a moment again by Napoleon, grew into the vision of a republic--a republic that might be found, as Napoleon said, "too powerful for Europe in two or three centuries," but in whose bosom dissensions, as he prophesied, could be looked for in the future. A wilderness, with a radius of nearly a thousand kilometres, was evoked from the envisioning, praying, adventuring, and enduring of a few Frenchmen, led by fewer Frenchmen, who stood sooner or later all within the narrow circle that sweeps around the Sorbonne, but four kilometres in diameter.

I walked, in the afternoon of the last day of the old year 1910, entirely around the old city of Paris by way of its fortifications, in a circle three kilometres longer of radius, within a few hours encompa.s.sing a ground, rich in what it yields to-day in fruits of art, literature, and science--of indefatigable, intellectual industry and imagination--but richer than its inhabitants know in what has grown upon the billion acres which it has lifted out of the ocean, [Footnote: For it will be remembered that to geographers before Cartier this Mississippi Valley was but a sea, even as ages before it actually was.] and given as a soil where civilization could gather its forces from all peoples and begin afresh on the problems of the individual and society.

It is a new view of Paris, I know. No historian of the United States has, so far as I am aware, presented it. Yet I think it is not a distorted vision which enabled me, looking in from the old fortifications, to see Paris not merely as the capital of art and of a great modern language and literature, as those who live there see her, nor as the centre of gayety and frivolity, as so many of my own countrymen see her, but as the parent of fruitful wildernesses, as a patron of pioneers, as the divinity of the verges, as the G.o.dmother of a frontier democracy.

It is to be remembered, too, let me say again, that, while England held control of one half of the Mississippi Valley for twenty years after 1763, and Spain of the other half for twenty more, the occupation was hardly more than nominal. Indeed, the English king, George III, in 1763 forbade colonization--as Louis XIV at one time had wished to prevent it--beyond the Alleghany Mountains without his special permission, and, moreover, it was hardly more than ten years after the t.i.tular transfer to England that the colonists declared themselves independent. As for the Spanish sovereign, delaying five years in sending a representative to take over the government of his unprofitable half of the wilderness, he had no need to make a decree forbidding settlement. There were no eager settlers.

What virtually happened, therefore, was that the pioneers of France gave the valley not to England, not to Spain, not even to the American-English colonists, but to the pioneers of the young republic, who, whatever their origin, were without European nationality.

It may be said with approximate accuracy that, while the British flag supplanted the French for a little on a few scattered forts on the east side of the Mississippi and the Spanish flag floated for a little while on the other side of the river, the heart of America really knew in turn, first, only the old Americans, the Indians; second, the French pioneers; and third, the new Americans.

The valley heard, as I have said, hardly a sound of the Seven Years' War, the "Old French War" as Parkman called it. Only on its border was there the slightest bloodshed. All it knew was that the fleur-de-lis flags no longer waved along its rivers and that after a few years men came with axes and ploughs through the pa.s.ses in the mountains carrying an emblem that had never grown in European fields--a new flag among national banners. They were bearing, to be sure, a const.i.tution and inst.i.tutions strange to France, but only less strange to England, and perhaps no less strange to other nations of Europe.

I emphasize this because our great debt to English antecedents has obscured the fact that the great physical heritage between the mountains, consecrated of Gallic spirit, came, in effect, directly from the hands that won its first t.i.tle, the French, into the hands of American settlers, at the moment when a "separate and individual people" were "springing into national life."

This territory was distinct from that of the British colonies up to the very time of the American Revolution. And when the Revolution was over and independence was won, by the aid of France let it be remembered, the only settlements within the valley were three little cl.u.s.ters of French gathered about the forts once French, then for a few years nominally English, and then American: two thousand inhabitants at Detroit and four thousand at Vincennes, on the Wabash, and in the hamlets along the Mississippi above the Ohio.

How little the life of those settlements was disturbed is intimated by what occurred in one of the Illinois villages--that about Fort Chartres.

The venerable and beloved commander, Louis St. Ange de Belle Rive, had upon the first formal surrender ascended the Mississippi River and crossed to the Spanish territory, where the foundations of the city of St. Louis were being laid, but the British officer in command at Fort Chartres dying suddenly, and there being no one competent to succeed him, St. Ange returned to his old post, restored order, and remained there until another British officer could reach the fort. The habitants were accustomed "to obey, without question, the orders of their superiors.... (They) yielded a pa.s.sive obedience to the new rulers.... They remained the owners, the tillers of the soil." [Footnote: Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," 1:38, Alleghany edition.] And one of the last acts of the Continental Congress and the first of the new Congress, under the Const.i.tution, was to provide for an enumeration of these French settlers and for the allotment to them of lands in this valley where they had been the sole owners.

Many of the French habitants were not of pure blood. The French seldom took women with them into the wilderness. They were traders, trappers, and soldiers. They married Indian wives, untrammelled, as President Roosevelt says, "by the queer pride which makes a man of English stock unwilling to make a red-skinned woman his wife, though anxious enough to make her his concubine." [Footnote: Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," 1:41.]

They were under ordinary circ.u.mstances good-humored, kindly men, "always polite" [Footnote: "Winning of the West," 1:45.]--in "agreeable contrast"

to most frontiersmen--religious, yet fond of merrymaking, of music and dancing; and while, as time went on, they came to borrow traits of their red neighbors and even to forget the years and months (reckoning time, as the Indians did, from the flood of the river or the ripening of strawberries), still they kept many valuable and amiable qualities, to be merged eventually in the new life that soon swept over their beautiful little villages. Of the coming of a strange, new, strenuous life, a stray English or American fur trader gave them occasional presentment, as it were, the spray of the swelling, restless sea of human spirits, beating against the mountain barriers and flung far inland.

In the early part of the eighteenth century an English governor of the colony of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood, had led a band of hors.e.m.e.n known afterward as his "Knights of the Golden Horseshoe," with great hilarity, "stimulated by abundance of wine, champagne, rum," and other liquors, over the Blue Ridge Mountains, a part of the Alleghany Range, to the Shenandoah. He had talked menacingly of the French who held the valley beyond, had encouraged the extension of English settlements to break the line of French possessions, and had formed a short-lived Virginia-Indian company to protect the frontier against French and Indian incursions. This expedition was a visible challenge. With his merry company he buried a record of his "farthest west" journey in one of the bottles emptied en route and then went back to tidewater. That was the end of his adventure; little or nothing came of his "flourish" except the extension of the Virginia frontier to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Only traders and trappers ventured farther or even so far during the next three or four decades, and they were a "set of abandoned wretches," or so a later governor characterized them, though Parkman mentions some exceptions, and I wish to believe there were more, since one of them, I find, carried my own name far into that country on his trading and hunting expeditions among and with the Indians.

Searching, a few years ago, the files of a paper published early in the nineteenth century on the edge of this wilderness, which was already calling itself the _Western World_--a paper, one of the first of the myriad white leaves into which the falling forests have been converted and scattered thick enough to cover every square foot of the valley--I happened upon this record, surprised as if a bit of the transmontane sea spray had touched my own face on the Mississippi: "That delightful country" (Kentucky), it ran, "from time immemorial had been the resort of wild beasts and of men only less savage, when in the year 1767 it was visited by John Finley and a few wandering white men from the British colony of North Carolina, allured by the love of hunting and the desire of barter with the Indians. The distance of this country from populous parts of the colonies, almost continuous wars, and the claims of the French had prevented all attempts at exploration."

I seize upon this partly because, having succeeded to the name of this hunter and trader, who entered the valley just as St. Ange was yielding Fort Chartres to the English and crossing the Mississippi, I am able to show that my own ancestral sympathies while dwelling on the frontiers were not with the French. But I quote it chiefly because he was a typical forerunner, a first frontiersman.

Like the coureur de bois Nicolas Perrot, of exactly a century before, he was only the dawn of the light--the light of another day, which was beginning to appear in the valley. For it was he who led Daniel Boone to the first exploring and settling of that wilderness south of the Ohio, which, to quote further from the paper called the _Western World_, [Footnote _Western World_, published at Frankfort, Ky., 1806-8, by John Wood and Joseph M. Street.] had a soil "more fat and fertile than Egypt"-- and was the place where "Pan, if he ever existed, held dominion unmolested of Ceres or Lucinia."