[Sidenote: 1881.]
“Uncle Fritz, you spoke of Jefferson as a geographer or naturalist.”
“Oh, yes,” said Uncle Fritz, “when he was in France he was a great deal
with the philosophical set, who all thought that if people knew the
length of a degree of the meridian, and could rightly analyze water,
all would be well.”
“They should learn Dr. Watts,” said Esther.
“Dr. Watts! Frenchmen learn Dr. Watts?”
“Why, Dr. Watts implies that knowing is not quite enough. Don’t you
remember?
‘Who know what’s right, not only so,
But also _practise_ what they know.’”
And Esther gave a very funny emphasis and accent to “practise,” just as
she said Mr. Ockley, the Sunday-school teacher at North Holderness, did.
Uncle Fritz, not displeased with the comment, went on to say that some
of Jefferson’s worst follies and some of his most sensible enterprises
were dictated by his wish to be called a philosopher. “Of the whole set
of the philosophers whom he used to meet in the society of Paris, about
the time when the French Revolution was brewing, he only came to an
important post of power.
“One of his theories was peaceful war. He thought that the United
States could starve Europe into submission, if he cut off all trade.
But alas! It was the United States which starved, and Europe did not
know that anything was happening.
“Then he had a plan for keeping his navy on land, and carrying it about
in carts wherever the enemy might attack. But this never worked well.
“But he wrote an interesting book on the resources of Virginia,--he was
president of the Philosophical Society, and when you go and visit Mary
Lesley, at Philadelphia, she will take you to the library, and show you
no end of curious things in the archives, which have to do with him.
“I have a copy of a letter which he wrote to our old friend, Phil.
Nolan, when he was hunting wild horses in Texas. His namesake, Mr.
Joseph Jefferson, was kind enough to hunt that up for me in the State
Department at Washington.
“Philip Nolan was the first person to bring back to the United States
any accurate knowledge of the wonderful resources of Texas. The
Spaniards caught him there, violated their own safeguard, and killed
him in 1801. That is probably the reason why we have no answer to Mr.
Jefferson’s letter to him.
“Then, when Jefferson was well established in the presidency, he
determined to find what there was between the Mississippi and the
Pacific. Nobody who had left any reliable account had ever gone across
in the regions north of Mexico.
“If you will look in the Popular History again,” said Uncle Fritz,
“where you were looking when we had the Coronado reading, you will find
how four poor fellows of Narvaez’s expedition straggled across from
the gulf, slaves most of the time to Indians, in the years following
1528. But after them there was no authentic account of any passage.
“It is odd enough,” continued Uncle Fritz, “that every cyclopædia,
till within a few years, says that Carver, who went from here to Lake
Superior in 1768, went to the Pacific. You will find that in the
earlier editions of Appleton. So the old French cyclopædias say that
Chateaubriand, in 1792, went to the Pacific. In truth, he never went
beyond the Red River of Louisiana. Lewis and Clarke were the first men
to cross the Rocky Mountains and back, from the Mississippi to the
Pacific.
[Sidenote: 1804.]
“You see that as long ago as 1792, in that very fur-trade of which
Captain Cleveland gives you some account, Robert Gray, from Salem, here
in the ship Columbia, discovered the Columbia River. He sailed up,
gave his vessel’s name to it, and on that discovery, in a considerable
measure, rested, at one time, our claim to Oregon. Jefferson selected
two captains from the army, Meriwether Lewis and George Clarke, and
bade them organize an expedition to find this same Columbia River and
descend to the sea. This they did in the years 1804, 1805, and 1806.
You see, there were as yet no steamboats. They had to row, sail, and
tow, on their way up the Missouri, till they came to the mountains.
Slow work it was, to be sure. Then they bought horses from the Indians
and crossed the passes,--in the same regions where the Northern Pacific
Railroad was built in our own time,--and to them are due the names of
Lewis’s River and Clarke’s River, the two branches which unite in the
Columbia River.
“When they came back, they had not been heard from for more than two
years.
“This was the beginning of a series of government explorations which
have lasted till our time. The authorities at Washington publish every
year valuable reports of their agents in the Ethnological Department,
in the Irrigation Department, and in the Alaskan Department. Keep
your eyes on these reports. They do not get into book stores, but are
distributed with great liberality at Washington to any persons who
are interested. Of all the books made out of the journals of those
explorations, Irving’s ‘Astoria’ and ‘Captain Bonneville’ are the most
entertaining. Later down Francis Parkman’s book, when he spent a summer
with the Sioux, is charming.[25] Fremont is very entertaining. There
are several of his reports.
“Suppose we try the Great Northwest. That is a country which, before
Fulton invented the steamboat, seemed so useless that we almost lost it
at the treaty of Ghent by the mere indifference of our own negotiators.
“It was our dear old John Quincy Adams who hung on. He hated the
English so that he would not let them have even a wilderness if he
could help it.”
[Sidenote: 1814.]
Then Uncle Fritz asked Clement to bring him the third volume of Adams’s
Memoirs,[26] and he showed Clem. some of his marks at passages in the
negotiation of the treaty of 1814 with England.
“Mr. Gallatin told them that if they considered the remainder of the
article, the forty-ninth parallel of latitude, an equivalent, he wished
them to understand that we attached no importance to it at all. It
would, indeed, be a convenience to have the boundary settled; but the
lands there were of so little value, and the period when they might be
settled so remote, that we were perfectly willing that the boundary
there should remain as it is now, and without any further arrangement.”
“Why, Uncle Fritz, it was the State of Minnesota which Gallatin says
was of so little value,” said Bedford, who was on the floor, with
Colton’s Atlas open.
“To be sure it was, my boy. But please think what the State of
Minnesota would be without steamboats and without railroads. And even
in 1814, even Mr. Gallatin did not dream of what steamboats were to do.
[Sidenote: 1823.]
“But the steamboat was already pushing its nose into every river of
the West. And nine years after that remark of Mr. Gallatin, Col. Long
was sent up there to see where the new boundary--which is our present
boundary of 49° north latitude--would run. The old boundary of the
first treaty had proved quite impossible, because the Mississippi did
not rise where they thought it did.”
“And with Col. Long,” said Col. Ingham, “your readings connect with
Uncle Fritz. For this same Col. Long afterwards was interested
in railroads, and invented a locomotive which should burn hard
coal,--anthracite. When I was a boy, Mr. Hale bought one of these
engines for the Boston and Worcester Railroad. Those were days,
Bedford, when a good-natured boy had more rights than he has now, and
rules and regulations were not so many. I used to be a good deal at the
railroad station in Washington Street, and more than once have I coaxed
a good-natured engine-driver to give me a ride on ‘Col. Long,’ as we
always called his engine. What her real name was I have forgotten.
“But Laura did not come here to hear stories about locomotives; she is
all ready to read.”
And Laura read from the narrative of an expedition to the source of St.
Peter’s River.