QUIVERA

"In that half-forgotten era,

With the avarice of old,

Seeking cities he was told

Had been paved with yellow gold,

In the kingdom of Quivera--

Came the restless Coronado

To the open Kansas plain,

With his knights from sunny Spain;

In an effort that, though vain,

Thrilled with boldness and bravado.

League by league, in aimless marching,

Knowing scarcely where or why,

Crossed they uplands drear and dry,

That an unprotected sky

Had for centuries been parching.

But their expectations, eager,

Found, instead of fruitful lands,

Shallow streams and shifting sands,

Where the buffalo in bands

Roamed o'er deserts dry and meager.

Back to scenes more trite, yet tragic,

Marched the knights with armor'd steeds;

Not for them the quiet deeds;

Not for them to sow the seeds

From which empires grow like magic.

Never land so hunger-stricken

Could a Latin race remold;

They could conquer heat or cold--

Die for glory or for gold--

But not make a desert quicken.

Thus Quivera was forsaken;

And the world forgot the place

Through the lapse of time and space.

Then the blue-eyed Saxon race

Came and bade the desert waken."

In Colorado, El Moro, Las Animas, and Buena Vista are credentials of

Spanish occupancy, the last-named place being, so far as I have been

able to trace, the farthest camp marked by a name in the Colorado

district. They all sought gold, and having failed to find the thing

for which they made their quest, ran back, like a retiring wave.

Coronado and Eldorado are suffused with Spanish life, like a woman's

cheek with blushes when her lover comes. Over scorching deserts, and

along the western coasts of America, the Spaniard toiled, nor halted

till the soft Spanish speech mingled with the swift, ejaculatory

utterance of the far French frontier. For this search of theirs we

bless them, and shall always be glad they left their nomenclature to

mind us of what this now wrecked people had achieved.

And our geography is sown thick with reminiscences of the French

occupancy of America. Now he is a total foreigner in this realm he

helped so largely to discover. Not Acadia was more bereft of the

French after their sad banishment than our America is of French rule.

New Orleans has its creole.

In Quebec, of all American cities, you seem most in the old French

_regime_. The names above the business blocks would make you believe

that what you had read of the battle of Quebec was a myth, and that

Wolfe truly died and Montcalm lived to celebrate a victory; but when

you climb to the fortress, it is the Englishman's speech you hear, and

the English colors you see floating on the heights. The French empire

is melted away like snows of winter in the month of June. But those

now remote days, profligate of valor, when French trapper and

discoverer, fearless as Eric the Bold, fought their way along lake and

river, over plain and mountain, with fierce Indian and fiercer

winter,--those remote days are on us once more, when we forget our

history and read our geography. There may be no new France in

contemporaneous American history, but in contemporaneous geography

there is. The French discoverer fires the imagination. I confess to

wishing I might have tramped by his side through the dense forests;

have sailed in his canoe on lake and stream; have plodded with him, by

oar or sail, over the Great Lakes; have joined with him in portage;

have been boon companion with La Salle on his journey to the sea on the

wide and majestic Mississippi; have consorted with Pere Marquette. Few

American histories will do more to raise the temperature of one's blood

than Parkman's story of the French occupancy of North America.

And one reason why Gilbert Parker's "An Adventurer of the North" and

"Pierre and his People," books vivid with a boundless freedom and

heroism, hold attention and gather force in one's spirit is, that they

unconsciously, yet truly, carry us back to those bold days when such

episodes were not the exception, but the rule. Pioneering appeals, in

some degree, to us all; and in Frenchmen were such resiliency of

spirit, such abandon to adventure, as that they stand as typical

explorers. Who would not have been alongside Hennepin when he, on a

snowy winter day, first of all Europeans, saw thunder-voiced Niagara?

The English colonies seized, fortified, and held domain in small

compass, and guarded it against the world; but this was not the French

idea. They spread over a continent, as a sea might have done. The

light step of Mercury belonged to the French colonizer. He loved to

roam wherever untrod wastes beckoned. Englishmen in America did little

discovering; Frenchmen did much. They crossed the continent, and would

have done so had it been twice the breadth it was. I have already

shown how some of our commonest words in Western speech are of this

origin. While England hugged the Atlantic seaboard, Frenchmen had

navigated the Great Lakes, had sailed the Mississippi to the Gulf, had

set the seal of their names on the land they had traversed, had gone in

to the shoreless interior of the Far West; and to this day you can

track the old hunter to the Pacific Coast by the reminiscent names he

has left behind. The continent was his home. To him we owe much more

than we shall ever pay; but to recall the debt we owe him may serve to

make a wider margin to our own life at least. The vast extent of this

pioneer work of France may be seen by recalling that the battle of

Quebec gave England undisputed sway over what is now known as British

America, and what in the history of the United States was known as "the

Territory of the Northwest." This came from those by a single treaty.

One defeat cost them an empire. Nor was this all their territory.

This treaty of 1763 gave England only French acquisitions east of the

Mississippi and north of the Great Lakes, but left French America, west

of that river and south of the lakes, intact, which shows how the

common consent of nations accorded to French valor in exploration the

bulk of the North American continent. Essentially chivalrous, the

French explorer proved the knight-errant among American discoverers.

By the treaty of 1803, Napoleon ceded 1,171,931 square miles to the

United States, a tract eight times as large as France itself. France,

by rights acquired by discoveries, owned about two-thirds of the

continent of North America, and to-day owns not so much as would supply

burial room for a child! Saxon as I am, I confess I can not go to

Montreal or Quebec, nor look upon the regal St. Lawrence, without a

sort of Indian Summer regret filling my sky. The French as explorers

were magnificent.

And Frenchmen in those days of their discoveries were eminently devout,

either in fact or in habits of thought--sometimes one, sometimes

both--as may be inferred from the religiosity of the names they so

often gave the places of their discovery. In some instances, this fact

is to be explained by recalling that Jesuits were the explorers; but

matters conspired to one effect, namely, starring the path of their

discoveries by "saints," as with the Spaniards, as has been mentioned.

From the St. Lawrence, which is the noblest stream on which my eyes

have ever rested, to the old Saint Louis at the Mississippi's mouth, it

seems a march of palmers; for at every halt they planted a fleur de lis

and a cross. In this nomenclature, despite ourselves, is a witchery,

under whose spell I plead guilty to falling. On the Atlantic side of

Newfoundland is Notre Dame Bay, while beside the island northward the

majestic St. Lawrence mingles the lakes with the sea. Toil your way up

the river, as in the long ago the discoverers did, and see on either

shore the sacred names: St. Charles, St. Johns, St. Paul's Bay, and on

and on, across or through the continent, St. Mary's, St. Joseph, St.

Paul, St. Louis. So the voyager made journey. Lake Champlain tells

the inroad of a brave French discoverer. Au Sable chasm answers for it

that here, on this black water, the ubiquitous voyager has floated.

Vermont and Montpelier say, "Remember who has been here." Detroit (the

strait) is a tollgate for the French highway. Marquette, Joliet, La

Salle, wake from the dead a trinity of heroic discoverers. Than La

Salle, America never had a more valorous and indefatigable explorer.

Hennepin minds us of the discoverer of Niagara. Sault Ste. Marie, Eau

Claire, St. Croix River, the Dalles, are old camp-grounds of these

wanderers. In Indiana, Vincennes is one of the oldest French

settlements; Terre Haute (high ground) and La Porte are sign-manuals of

sunny France. St. Joseph, in Missouri, and Des Moines (swamp land), in

Iowa, and the name of a beautiful river in Kansas, Marais des Cygnes

(the river of swans), tell the trail of the old French trapper. Where

has he not been? Going farther westward, find in Wyoming the Belle

Fourche River; in Idaho are St. Joseph Creek, and Coeur d'Alene Lake,

and Lake Pend d'Oreille; in Washington are The Little Dalles, and in

Oregon, The Dalles; and in Utah, the Du Chasne River. Thus we have

tracked the French across the continent, from the St. Lawrence to the

Pacific. What travelers they were! But southward, along the great

River, there we come, not into scattering communities, but into a

veritable New France. Their names monopolize geography. Scan a map of

Louisiana, and see how populous it is with French patronymic locatives.

New Orleans (pronounce it New Or-le-ans, and hear French pride rising

in the word) is there, and St. John Baptist; Baton Rouge, and

Thibodeaux, and Prudhomme, and Assumption, and Calcasieu, and Saint

Landry, and Grand Coteau, and scores besides, tell how surely Louisiana

was a land peopled from the French kingdom and for the French king,

and, as those who discovered and those who settled fondly thought,

forever. So evanescent are the plans of men! The word "bayou," so

common in the regions neighboring the Mississippi, is a French word.

Prairie, butte, bayou, three terms in perpetual geography of this

Western World, are bequests of a departed people. The farthest west

and south I have tracked the French discoverer in a name is in

Nebraska, where they are identified in the name of the River Platte.

La Plata is the Spanish form, as will be seen to the south--say in

Texas--and here in the north is the French imprint in Platte, that wide

but shallow stream, flowing over its beds of shifting sands. Verily,

the French _regime_ in America was more than fiction. The names it

left will keep an eternal remembrance.

And the English came, and seeded down a land with their ideas,

language, laws, literature, political inclinations, and homestead

names. Those early emigrants, though refugees from oppressive misrule,

loved England notwithstanding. Of her they dreamed, to her they clung,

from her they imported sedate and musical names for their new homes

this side the sea. New England was the special bailiwick for such

sowing, though Virginia partakes of this seed and harvest. The rich

old English names, having in them so much history and memory,--how good

to see them on our soil! Those early colonists were not original, nor

particularly imaginative, but loyal lovers they were; and to give to

their home here the name attaching to their home there was pledge of

fidelity to dear old England. In Virginia, one will find what he can

not find in New England, namely, assertions of loyalty to English

princes; for the Puritans were never other than stanch friends of

liberty, a thing which grew upon the citizens of the Old Dominion by

degrees, and by slow degrees besides. They were loyalists and

royalists. This, New England was not, and could not be. The Old

Dominion's name, Virginia, and its first colony, Jamestown, bear

attestation to this loyalty of which mention is made, though the

State's name was given by that lover of Queen Elizabeth and lover of

America, Sir Walter Raleigh. Berkeley recalls that querulous old

loyalistic governor of Virginia, that fast believer in the divine right

of kings and of himself; Westmoreland, Middlesex, New Kent, Sussex,

Southampton, Surrey, Isle of Wight, King and Queen, Anne, Hanover,

Caroline, King William, Princess, Prince George, Charles City, are

names which tell of sturdy believers in kings. No such mark can be

found in the English colonies to the north. To England they were

attached, but not to English kings. Bath, York, Bedford, Essex,

Warwick, and time would fail to tell this story through. In Maryland

you may note this transplanted England too: Somerset, Saulsbury, Cecil,

Annapolis, Calvert, and St. Mary's, betraying the Roman Catholic origin

of the colony, as do Baltimore, Saulsbury, Northampton, and

Marlborough. Who can doubt the maternity of such names as these?

Now turn face toward New England, and find old England again: Berwick,

Shapleigh, Boston, Litchfield, Clearfield, Norfolk, Springfield, New

Britain, Hampton, Middlesex, Fairfield, Windham, East Lynne, Roxbury,

Kent, Cornwall, Bristol, Enfield, Stafford, Woodstock, Buckingham,

Stonington, Fair Haven, Taunton, Barnstable, Falmouth, Middlebury,

Bedford, Dartmouth, Pomfret, Abington,--but why extend the list,

musical as it is with the home days and the home land? But name

Plymouth, because it shows the tenacity of English loyalty to England;

for though the Mayflower, with her Puritans, might not have an English

port from which to set sail for a New World, they do yet name their

landing-haven after the English harbor. Blood is thicker than water

when the instincts are consulted. Seeing these names, we can not

mistake where we are. This is as certainly English as the

Pacific-coast line was Spanish and the Mississippi Valley French.

These Englishmen imported names as well as populations. And I, for

one, like them and their names; for they abound in suggestion. Who

settled Connecticut and Massachusetts we know from these locatives we

have read and for the names they brought; and for the liberty and

religion they sailed with across the seas, we remember them and love

them.

There are miscellaneous names, telling their tale, not of race

occupancy, but of who or what has passed this way, of beast, or bird,

or event, or man, which have left impress on geography,--things we do

well to study, and which will always lend a sort of enchantment and

vivacious interest to the pages of travel or geography. The villages

along a railroad are thus often of captivating interest. The Atchison,

Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, for instance, may illustrate this point.

Its name has interest of no common sort. Atchison is named after a

famous pro-slavery advocate, who came to Kansas, with his due quota of

"border ruffians," for the avowed purpose of making Kansas a slave

State. Topeka is an Indian name; Santa Fe is a Spanish landmark, tall

as a lighthouse builded on a cliff. At the Missouri line is Kansas

City, so named because this metropolis is created by Kansas. The

metropolis is in Missouri; but is made rich and great by Kansas men and

products. Kansas has not a large city in its borders, because this

Kansas City has engrossed the great business interests of a great

Commonwealth. The metropolis of Kansas, in other words, is in the

State of Missouri, and the name is as strict a speaking of truth as an

apostle could have commanded.

Passing along the line, find Holliday, so named from the projector of a

part of this railroad line; on is De Soto, always thrillingly historic;

farther is Eudora (a word of Greek genesis, and meaning a good gift,

though likely enough he who christened this village may have known as

little of Greek as a kitten); on is Lawrence, named for a famous

anti-slavery agitator and philanthropist of Massachusetts--for Lawrence

is a New England colony, as is Manhattan, farther up the Kansas River,

familiarly known as the "Kaw," which is the leading river of Kansas;

here is Lecompton, which keeps alive the memory of Lecompte, the Indian

chief; then comes Tecumseh, as clearly an Indian name as the former;

then Topeka, the capital of Kansas, and wearing an Indian sobriquet;

then comes Wakarusa (Indian, meaning "hip deep," the depth of the

stream in crossing); then Carbondale, so called because of the coal

deposits which created the village; then Burlingame, a beautiful

hamlet, wearing a famous name; then Emporia, a city of traffic, so

dubbed for reason of thinking it a famous trade center in the earlier

days; Barclay, named for the famous Quaker apologist, because this

village is a Quaker colony; Nickerson, for one of the original

promoters of this railroad; Great Bend, referring to a great bend the

Arkansas River makes at this place; Pawnee Rock, from a local

rallying-point of the Pawnees when this was an Indian hunting-ground;

Garden City, so named because, by irrigation, this locality was

redeemed from comparative barrenness; Granada, and Las Animas, and La

Junta, reminiscent words from the Spanish march into Kansas; Puebla,

clearly designating that strange people whose cliff dwellings are at

this hour one of the rarest studies in American archaeology. On

another branch of this same road: Olathe, an Indian name; Ottawa;

Algonquin, for "trader," Chanute, from an Indian chief, who was a local

celebrity; Elk Falls, referring to those days when this river (the Elk)

was famous for that species of graceful motion called the elk; farther

are Indian Chief and White Deer, names of evident paternity. I have

taken this time to run along this railroad line so as to show the

possibilities in this direction anywhere. To learn to read history

from the stations as we pass is surely an art worth learning. In

passing across the continent I have found it as if a guide had prepared

that way before us. The natural history of a region may thus be read

without resorting to a book. Count the fauna: Eagle River, Bald Eagle,

Buffalo Lake, Great Bear Lake, Salmon Falls, Snake River, Wolf Creek,

White Fish River, Leech Lake, Beaver Bay, Carp River, Pigeon Falls,

Elkhorn, Wolverine, Crane Hill, Rabbit Butte, Owl, Rattlesnake, Curlew,

Little Crow, Mullet Lake, Clam Lake, Turtle Creek, Deerfield, Porcupine

Tail, Pelican Lake, Kingfisher, Ravens' Spring, Deer Ears, Bee Hill,

Fox Creek, White Rabbit--can any one mistake the animals haunting these

places in earlier days? Trapper's Grove tells a story we feel, but

need not rehearse. So, descriptive words in vegetation, or person, or

characteristic, what volumes are contained in them! Crystal River,

Little Muddy, Elm Creek, Mission Creek (a stream on which was an Indian

mission), Calumet, Table Rock, Crab Orchard, Elm Creek, Lost River (the

river lost in the sand), Soldier Creek, Battle Creek, Corn Creek,

Spring Lake, Hackberry, Cottonwood Falls, Sand Hills, Poplar Hill, Cold

Springs, Oak Hill, Cavalry Creek, Bluff Creek, Peace Creek, Cedar

Bluff, Council Bluffs, Punished Woman's Lake, Highbank Creek, Big

Knife, Black River, Cypress Creek, Black Raven, Brier Creek, Big Lick,

Laurel, Hurricane Inlet, Dead Man's Bay, Pine Hill, Magnolia, Mountain

Meadow, Medicine Woods, Rush Creek, Salt Plain, Saline River, Lava Bed,

Wild Horse, Sinking Creek, Nameless, Grassy Trail (in the desert),

Azure Cliffs, Miry Bottom, Sand Dune Plateau, Grouse Creek,--these are

names as communicative of secrets as a child. Heath, Rock Lake, Wood

Lake, Grand Prairie, Lily Creek, Swift Falls, Calamus River, Evergreen

Lake, Lone Tree (a prairie locality), Spring Bank, Fort Defiance,

Pontiac, Smoky Hill River (these hills are always as if smoky),--what a

light these names shed on the region in which they occur!

And you can recapitulate American history in its most salient details

from a reading of our geography. Great names stay, and will not be

gone. As moss clings to the rock, so do great memories cling to

localities. Nature conspires to keep illustrious men from death.

Witness such names as follows: Lincoln (General Lincoln of

Revolutionary fame), Madison, Pulaski (the brave Pole who fought for

our freedom), Webster, Sumner, Henry (Patrick), Jackson (doughty

general and President), Breckinridge, Hancock (signer of the

Declaration of Independence), Lafayette, Clay, Pocahontas, Calhoun,

Randolph, Monroe, Franklin, Jefferson, Clark (the explorer), Douglas

(the "Little Giant"), Adams, Whitman (the Presbyterian missionary, who

saved to the United States Washington and Oregon, by a heroic episode

which deserves the perpetual gratitude of those States), Custer (the

general slain in Indian warfare), Union (to commemorate the

preservation of our Union), Benton (Thomas H., of Missouri, whose

daughter was wife of General John C. Fremont), Lewis and Clark

(discoverers), Garfield, Kane (Arctic explorer), Lincoln (the

emancipator), Polk, Houston, Lee (General Robert E.), Tyler, Van Buren,

Scott (General Winfield, of the Mexican War), Pike (the discoverer of

Pike's Peak), Marshall (Chief-Justice), Berkely, Hamilton (Alexander,

our first lord of the Treasury), Gadsden (he of "the Gadsden

Purchase"), Marion, Sumter (both of Revolutionary fame), Carteret,

Columbus, Stanton, Colfax, Greeley, Chase, Sherman, Seward, Fillmore,

Harlan (Senator), Butler (Ben), Johnson (obstreperous "Andy"), Grant

(our chiefest military hero), Polk (General), Brown (John Brown, of

Ossawatomie), Thomas (General), Sheridan, Wallace (General), St. John

(Prohibitionist, Republican governor of Kansas), Lane (Jim Lane, of

Kansas), McPherson and Sedgewick (both Union generals), Case, Dallas,

Boone, DeKalb, McDonough, Schuyler, DeWitt, Putnam, Kossuth, Hancock,

Palo Alto, Cerro Gordo (reminders of the Mexican War), Clayton (of the

Clayton-Bulwer Treaty), Emmet, Fremont, Taylor (President), Warren

(General), Clinton (DeWitt), Audubon, Story (Chief-Justice), Buchanan,

St. Clair, Montcalm, Kosciusko, Steuben, Tippecanoe,--to be acquainted

with these names is to possess knowledge of the virtual makers of

America in the range of statesmanship and military achievement.

One other item completes this tabulation. The aborigine of America,

the Indian, has left "his mark" across and through this Nation. He

never, in any true sense, owned this continent. He hunted and fought

across it. He swept by, like gusts of winter wind. He staid here, he

did not live here. Possession implies more than occupancy; it implies

improvement, industry, habitations, cities, destiny, as worked out by

sweat of toil. But this American Indian, who, in honor, never

possessed the territory, and has left no ruins of cities built by his

cunning and perseverance, nor codes, nor literature, has left us names

of lake, and stream, and mountain, and city. This stolid Indian,

though you would scarcely think it of him, had, in common with other

nomad and untutored peoples, poetic instincts. Their names, like those

of the Hebrews, had meanings, and were picturesque and beautiful,

sometimes, oftentimes, bewitchingly so. Some words have a music,

liquid as the whip-poor-will's notes heard in woodlands climbing a

mountain side. Minnehaha, "laughing water"--does not the word seem

laughing, like a falling stream? I once heard a distinguished

philologist say that, of all the rhythmic words he had hit upon in any

tongue, Winona was most exquisite. Surely it is not musical, but

music. See the pomp of names, like an Indian war march begun:

Athabasca, Wyoming, Tahoe, Niobrara, Mohawk, Sioux City, Nemaha,

Hiawatha, Seneca, Chippewa, Chicago, Saskatchewan, Pepacton ("meeting

of waters"), Winnepeg, Cheyenne, Manitoba, Penobscot, Narragansett,

Chicopee, Manhattan, and a host besides, a numberless procession.

Indian names cling with peculiar tenacity to lakes and rivers; for

those hunters knew all waters, and hunted beside all streams and lakes.

They were not seamen, and have left scant memorials of themselves in

names that fringe the sea; but to lakes they cling with tireless

tenacity.

Let these words suffice. As one who journeys in circles finds no end

of journeying, so I. This theme runs on, nor stops to catch breath. I

make an end, therefore, not because the subject is exhausted, but

because it is dismissed. But this study in geography is journeying

among dead peoples as certainly as it the land were crowded with

obelisk and tomb. To those who were and are not, say, Vale! Vale!

"Ye who love the haunts of Nature,

Love the sunshine of the meadow,

Love the shadow of the forest,

Love the wind among the branches,

And the rain-shower and the snowstorm,

And the rushing of great rivers

Through their palisades of pine-trees,

And the thunder in the mountains,

Whose innumerable echoes

Flap like eagles in their eyries,--

Listen to these wild traditions.

Ye who love a nation's legends,

Love the ballads of a people,

That like voices from afar off

Call to us to pause and listen,

Speak in tones so plain and childlike,

Scarcely can the ear distinguish

Whether they are sung or spoken,--

Listen to this Indian Legend.

Ye whose hearts are fresh and simple,

Who have faith in God and nature,

Who believe that in all ages

Every human heart is human,

That in even savage bosoms

There are longings, yearnings, strivings,

For the good they comprehend not,

That the feeble hands and helpless,

Groping blindly in the darkness,

Touch God's right hand in that darkness,

And are lifted up and strengthened,--

Listen to this simple story.

Ye, who sometimes, in your rambles

Through the green lanes of the country,

Where the tangled barberry-bushes

Hang their tufts of crimson berries

Over stone walls gray with mosses,

Pause by some neglected graveyard,

For awhile to muse, and ponder

On a half-effaced inscription,

Written with little skill of song-craft,

Homely phrases, but each letter

Full of hope and yet of heart-break,

Full of all the tender pathos

Of the Here and the Hereafter,--

Stay, and read this rude inscription."

Only saying, Read not the "Song of Hiawatha," but the story of dead

peoples by the ashes of their campfires,--these names they have left,

clinging to places like blue to distant hills.