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THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA JOHN FINLEY PREFACE
Most of what is here written was spoken many months ago in the
Amphitheatre Richelieu of the Sorbonne in Paris and some of it in Lille
Nancy Dijon Lyons Grenoble Montpellier Toulouse Bordeaux Poitiers
Rennes and Caen; and all of it was in the American publisher's hands
before the great war came effacing with its nearer adventures perils
sufferings and anxieties the dim memories of the days when the French
pioneers were out in the Mississippi Valley "The Heart of America."
As it was spoken the purpose was to freshen and brighten for the French
the memory of what some of them had seemingly wished to forget and to
visualize to them the vigorous hopeful achieving life that is passing
before that background of Gallic venturing and praying. It was planned
also to publish the book simultaneously in France; and less than a week
before the then undreamed-of war the manuscript was carried for that
purpose to Paris and left for translation in the hands of Madame Boutroux
the wife of the beloved and eminent Emile Boutroux head of the Fondation
Thiers and sister of the illustrious Henri Poincare. But wounded soldiers
soon came to fill the chambers of the scholars there and the wife and
mother has had to give all her thought to those who have hazarded their
all for the France that is.
But it was my hope that what was spoken in Paris might some day be read in
America and particularly in that valley which the French evoked from the
unknown that those who now live there might know before what a valorous
background they are passing though I can tell them less of it than they
will learn from the Homeric Parkman if they will but read his immortal
story.
My first debt is to him; but I must include with him many who made their
contributions to these pages as I wrote them in Paris. The quotation-
marks diligent and faithful as they have tried to be have I fear not
reached all who have assisted but my gratitude extends to every source of
fact and to every guide of opinion along the way from the St. Lawrence to
the Gulf of Mexico even if I have not in every instance known or
remembered his name.
As without Parkman's long labors I could not have prepared these chapters
so without the occasion furnished by the Hyde Foundation and the
nomination made by the President of Harvard University to the exchange
lectureship I should not have undertaken this delightful filial task. The
readers' enjoyment and profit of the result will not be the full measure
of my gratitude to Mr. James H. Hyde the author of the Foundation to
President Lowell and to him whose confidence in me persuaded me to it.
But I hope these enjoyments and profits will add something to what I
cannot adequately express.
That what was written could in the midst of official duties be prepared
for the press is due largely to the patient verifying proof-reading
labors of Mr. Frank L. Tolman my young associate in the State Library.
The title of this book (appearing first as the general title for some of
these chapters in _Scribner's Magazine_ in 1912) has a purely geographical
connotation. But I advise the reader in these days of bitterness to go
no further if he carry any hatred in his heart.
JOHN FINLEY.
STATE EDUCATION BUILDING ALBANY N. Y.
Washington's Birthday 1915.
CONTENTS
I. INTRODUCTION
II. FROM LABRADOR TO THE LAKES
III. THE PATHS OF THE GRAY FRIARS AND BLACK GOWNS
IV. FROM THE GREAT LAKES TO THE GULF
V. THE RIVER COLBERT: A COURSE AND SCENE OF EMPIRE
VI. THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE AND THE DREAM OF ITS REVIVAL
VII. THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS
VIII. THE PARCELLING OF THE DOMAIN
IX. IN THE TRAILS OF THE COUREURS DE BOIS
X. IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN"
XI WESTERN CITIES THAT HAVE SPRUNG FROM FRENCH FORTS
XII. WESTERN TOWNS AND CITIES THAT HAVE SPRUNG FROM FRENCH PORTAGE PATHS
XIII. FROM LA SALLE TO LINCOLN
XIV. THE VALLEY OF THE NEW DEMOCRACY
XV. WASHINGTON: THE UNION OF THE EASTERN AND THE WESTERN WATERS
XVI. THE PRODUCERS
XVII. THE THOUGHT OF TO-MORROW
XVIII. "THE MEN OF ALWAYS"
XIX. THE HEART OF AMERICA
EPILOGUE
THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
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").
CHAPTER I
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 Pere 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 Crevecoeur. 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.
CHAPTER II
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 a passage to the
Indies.
It was from St. Malo that Carrier set sail on the highroad to Cathay as
he imagined one April day in 1534 in two ships of sixty tons each.
[Footnote: I crossed back over the same ocean nearly four hundred years
later to a French port in a steamship of a tonnage equal to that of a
fleet of four hundred of Carrier's boats; so has the sea bred giant
children of such hardy parentage.] There is preserved in St. Malo what is
thought to be a list of those who signed the ship's papers subscribed
under Carrier's own hand. It is no such instrument as the "Compact" which
the men of the _Mayflower_ signed as they approached the continent nearly
a century later but it is none the less fateful.
The autumn leaves had not yet fallen from the trees of Brittany when the
two ships that started out in April appeared again in the harbor of St.
Malo carrying two dusky passengers from the New World as proofs of
Carrier's ventures. He had made reconnoissance of the gulf behind
Newfoundland and returned for fresh means of farther quest toward Cathay.
The leaves were but come again on the trees of Brittany when with a
larger crew in three small vessels (one of only forty tons) he again went
out with the ebb-tide from St. Malo; his men some of whom had been
gathered from the jails having all made their confession and attended
mass and received the benediction of the bishop. In August he entered the
great river St. Lawrence whose volume of water was so great as to
brighten Carrier's hopes of having found the northern way to India. On he
sailed with his two dusky captives for pilots seeing with regret the
banks of the river gradually draw together and hearing unwelcome word of
the freshening of its waters--on past the "gorge of the gloomy Saguenay
with its towering cliffs and sullen depths depths which no sounding-line
can fathom and heights at whose dizzy verge the wheeling eagle seems a
speck"; on past frowning promontory and wild vineyards to the foot of the
scarped cliff of Quebec now "rich with heroic memories then but the site
of a nameless barbarism"; thence after parley with the Indian chief
Donnacona and his people on through walls of autumn foliage and frost-
touched meadows to where the Lachine Rapids mocked with unceasing laughter
those who dreamed of an easy way to China. There entertained at the
Indian capital he was led to the top of a hill such as Montmartre from
whose height he saw his Cathay fade into a stretch of leafy desert bounded
only by the horizon and threaded by two narrow but hopeful ribbons of
water. There hundreds of miles from the sea he stood probably the only
European save for his companions inside the continent between Mexico
and the Pole; for De Soto had not yet started for his burial in the
Mississippi; the fathers of the Pilgrim Fathers were still in their
cradles; Narvaez's men had come a little way in shore and vanished; Cabeca
de Vaca was making his almost incredible journey from the Texas coast to
the Pacific; Captain John Smith was not yet born; and Henry Hudson's name
was to remain obscure for three quarters of a century. Francis I had
sneeringly inquired of Charles V if he and the King of Portugal had
parcelled out the world between them and asked to see the last will and
testament of the patriarch Adam. If King Francis had been permitted to see
it he would have found a codicil for France written that day against the
bull of Pope Alexander VI and against the hazy English claim of the
Cabots. For the river "the greatest without comparison" as Cartier
reported later to his king "that is known to have ever been seen"
carried drainage title to a realm larger many times than all the lands of
the Seine and the Rhone and the Loire and richer many times than the land
of spices to which the falls of Lachine "the greatest and swiftest fall
of water that any where hath beene scene" seemed now to guard the way.
"Hochelaga" the Indians called their city--the capital of the river into
which the sea had narrowed a thousand miles inland from the coasts of
Labrador which but a few years before were the dim verge of the world and
were believed even then to be infested with griffins and fiends--a city
which vanished within the next three quarters of a century. For when
Champlain came in 1611 to this site to build his outpost not a trace was
left of the palisades which Cartier describes and one of his men pictures
not an Indian was left of the population that gave such cordial welcome to
Cartier. And for all Champlain's planning it was still a meadow and a
forest--the spring flowers "blooming in the young grass" and birds of
varied plumage flitting "among the boughs"--when the mystic and soldier
Maisonneuve and his associates of Montreal forty men and four women in
an enterprise conceived in the ancient Church of St. Germain-des-Pres and
consecrated to the Holy Family by a solemn ceremonial at Notre-Dame knelt
upon this same ground in 1642 before the hastily reared and decorated
altar while Father Vimont standing in rich vestments addressed them.
"You are" he said "a grain of mustard-seed that shall rise and grow till
its branches overshadow the earth. You are few but your work is the work
of God. His smile is on you and your children shall fill the land."
[Footnote: Francois Dollier de Casson "Histoire du Montreal" quoted in
Parkman's "Jesuits in North America" p. 209 a free rendering of the
original. "Voyez-vous messieurs dit-il ce que vous voyez n'est qu'un
grain de moutarde mais il est jete par des mains si pieuses et animees de
l'esprit de la foi et de la religion que sans doute il faut que le ciele
est de grands desseins puisqu'il se sert de tels ouvriers et je ne fais
aucun doute que ce petit grain ne produise un grand arbre ne fasse un
jour des merveilles ne soit multiplie et ne s'etende de toutes parts."]
Parkman (from the same French authority) finishes the picture of the
memorable day: "The afternoon waned; the sun sank behind the western
forest and twilight came on. Fireflies were twinkling over the darkened
meadow. They caught them tied them with threads into shining festoons and
hung them before the altar where the Host remained exposed. Then they
pitched their tents lighted their bivouac fires stationed their guards
and lay down to rest. Such was the birth-night of Montreal." [Footnote:
Francois Dollier de Casson "Histoire du Montreal" quoted in Parkman's
"Jesuits in North America" p. 209 a free rendering of the original. "On
avait point de lampes ardentes devant le St. Sacrement mais on avait
certaines mouches brillantes qui y luisaient fort agreablement jour et
nuit etant suspendues par des filets d'une facon admirable et belle et
toute propre a honorer selon la rusticite de ce pays barbare le plus
adorable de nos mysteres."]
On the both of September in 1910 two hundred thousand people knelt in that
same place before an out-of-door altar and the incandescent lights were
the fireflies of a less romantic and a more practical age. Maisonneuve and
Mademoiselle Mance would have been enraptured by such a scene but it
would have given even greater satisfaction to the pilot of St. Malo if he
could have seen that commercial capital of the north lying beneath the
mountain which still bears the name he gave it and stretching far beyond
the bounds of the palisaded Hochelaga. It should please France to know
that nearly two hundred thousand French keep the place of the footprint of
the first pioneer Jacques Cartier. When a few weeks before my coming to
France I was making my way by a trail down the side of Mount Royal through
the trees--some of which may have been there in Cartier's day--two lads
one of as beautiful face as I have ever seen though tear-stained emerged
from the bushes and begged me in a language which Jacques Cartier would
have understood better than I to show them the way back to "rue St.
Maurice" which I did finding that street to be only a few paces from the
place where Champlain had made a clearing for his "Place Royale" in the
midst of the forest three hundred years ago. That beautiful boy Jacques
Jardin brown-eyed bare-kneed in French soldier's cap is to me the
living incarnation of the adventure which has made even that chill
wilderness blossom as a garden in Brittany.
But to come back to Cartier. It was too late in the season to make further
explorations where the two rivers invited to the west and northwest so
Cartier joined the companions who had been left near Quebec to build a
fort and make ready for the winter. As if to recall that bitter weather
the hail beat upon the windows of the museum at St. Malo on the day when I
was examining there the relics of the vessel which Cartier was obliged to
leave in the Canadian river because so many of his men had died of scurvy
and exposure that he had not sufficient crew to man the three ships home.
And probably not a man would have been left and not even the _Grande
Hermine_ would have come back if a specific for scurvy had not been found
before the end of the winter--a decoction learned of the Indians and made
from the bark or leaves of a tree so efficacious that if all the "doctors
of Lorraine and Montpellier had been there with all the drugs of
Alexandria they could not have done so much in a year as the said tree
did in six days; for it profited us so much that all those who would use
it recovered health and soundness thanks to God."
Cartier appears again in July 1536 before the ramparts of St. Malo with
two of his vessels. The savages on the St. Charles were given the _Petite
Hermine_ [Footnote: James Phinney Baxter "A Memoir of Jacques Cartier"
p. 200 writes: "The remains of this ship the _Petite Hermine_ were
discovered in 1843 in the river St. Charles at the mouth of the rivulet
known as the Lairet. These precious relics were found buried under five
feet of mud and were divided into two portions one of which was placed
in the museum of the Literary and Historical Society of Quebec and
destroyed by fire in 1854. The other portion was sent to the museum at St.
Malo where it now remains. For a particular account _vide Le Canadien_ of
August 25 and the _Quebec Gazette_ of August 30 1843; 'Transactions of
the Quebec Literary and Historical Society for 1862'; and 'Picturesque
Quebec' Le Moine Montreal 1862 pp. 484-7."] its nails being accepted
in part requital for the temporary loss of their chief. Donnacona whom
Cartier kidnapped.
A cross was left standing on the shores of the St. Lawrence with the
fleur-de-lis planted near it. Donnacona was presented to King Francis and
baptized and with all his exiled companions save one was buried where I
have not yet learned but probably somewhere out on that headland of
France nearest Stadacone the seat of his lost kingdom.
Cartier busied himself in St. Malo (or Limoilou) till called upon in
1541 when peace was restored in France to take the post of captain-
general of a new expedition under Sieur de Roberval "Lord of Norembega
Viceroy and Lieutenant-General of Canada Hochelaga Saguenay
Newfoundland Belle Isle Carpunt Labrador the Great Bay and Baccalaos"
[Footnote: Baxter "Memoir of Jacques Cartier" note p. 40 writes:
"These titles are given on the authority of Charlevoix 'Histoire de la
Nouvelle France' Paris 1744 tome I p. 32. Reference however to the
letters patent of January 15 1540 from which he professes to quote and
which are still preserved and can be identified as the same which he says
were to be found in the Etat Ordinaire des Guerres in the Chambre des
Comptes at Paris does not bear out his statement."] with a commission of
discovery settlement and conversion of the Indians and with power to
ransack the prisons for material with which to carry out these ambitious
and pious designs thereby as the king said employing "clemency in doing
a merciful and meritorious work toward some criminals and malefactors
that by this they may recognize the Creator by rendering Him thanks and
amending their lives." Again Cartier (Roberval having failed to arrive in
time) sets out; again he passes the gloomy Saguenay and the cliff of
Quebec; again he leaves his companions to prepare for the winter; again he
ascends the river to explore the rapids still dreaming of the way to
Asia; again after a miserable winter he sails back to France eluding
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