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THE FRENCH IN THE HEART OF AMERICA
BY
JOHN FINLEY
PREFACE
Most of what is here written was spoken many months ago in the
Amphithéâtre 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 Émile Boutroux, head of the Fondation
Thiers, and sister of the illustrious Henri Poincaré. 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, Père 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 Crèvecoeur. 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.