THE RIVER COLBERT: A COURSE AND SCENE OF EMPIRE
A CHARACTERIZATION OF THE RIVER WHOSE EXPLORATION AND CONTROL GAVE TO
FRANCE LOUISIANA AND THE LAND OF THE ILLINOIS
To the red barbarian tribes, of which Parkman says there were a thousand,
the river which passed through their valley was the "Mississippi," that
is, the Great Water. They must have named it so under the compulsion of
the awe in which they stood of some parts of it, and not from any
knowledge of its length. They must have been impressed, especially they of
the lower valley, as is the white man of to-day, by the "overwhelming,
unbending grandeur of the wonderful spirit ruling the flow of the sands,
the lumping of the banks, the unceasing shifting of the channel and the
send of the mighty flood." No one tribe knew both its fountains and its
delta, its sources and its mouth. To those midway of the valley it came
out of the mystery of the Land of Frosts and passed silently on, or, in
places, complainingly on, to the mystery of the Land of the Sun, into
neither of which dared they penetrate because of hostile tribes. While the
red men of the Mississippi lowlands were not able as the "swamp angel" of
to-day to discern the rising of its Red River tributary by the reddish
tinge of the water in his particular bayou, or to measure by changing
hues, now the impulses of the Wisconsin or of the Ohio, and now of the
richer-silted blood of the Rockies (as Mr. Raymond S. Spears, writing of
the river, has graphically described), [Footnote: "The Moods of the
Mississippi," in _Atlantic Monthly_, 102:378-382. See also his "Camping on
a Great River," New York, Harper, 1912, and numerous magazine articles.]
yet as they gazed with wonderment at these changes of color, they must
have had inward visions of hills of red, green, and blue earth somewhere
above their own lodges or hunting-grounds, and must even have had at times
some tangible message of their brothers of the upper waters, some
fragments of their handiwork, such as a broken canoe, an arrow-shaft. But
the men of the sources, up toward the "swamps of the nests of the eagles,"
on the low watersheds, heard only vague reports of the sea or gulf; even
the Indians of Arkansas, as we read in the account of the De Soto
expedition, could or would "give no account of the sea, and had no word in
their language, or idea or emblem, that could make them comprehend a great
expanse of salt water like the ocean."
So the river was not the source or father of running waters, but the
great, awe-inspiring water. The French were misled, as we have seen, when
they first heard Indian references to it, thinking it was what they were
longing for--the western ocean, a great stretch of salt water instead of
another and a larger Seine. And when they did discover that it was a
river, their first concern was not as to what lay along its course, but as
to where it led.
A prominent American historian, to whom we are much indebted, with
Parkman, for the memorials of this period, praises by contrast those who
kept within smell of tide-water along the Atlantic shore. But when we
reach the underlying motives of the exploration and settlement of that
continent, do they who sought the sources and the paths to the smell of
other tide-waters deserve dispraise or less praise than those who sat
thriftily by the Atlantic seashore?
The English colonists were struggling for themselves and theirs, not for
the good or glory of a country across seas. They had no reason to look
beyond their short rivers, so long as their valleys were fruitful and
ample. Shall they be praised the more that they did not for a century
venture beyond the sources of those streams? The first French followers of
the river courses were, as we have seen, devotees of a religion for the
salvation of others, bearers of advancing banners for the glory of France,
and lovers of nature and adventure. And if there were, as there were,
avaricious men among them, we must be careful not to blame them more than
those whose avarice or excessive thrift was economically more beneficial
to the world and to the community and the colony and to themselves.
Economic values and moral virtues, as expressed in productivity of fields,
mines, factories, church attendance, and obedience to the selectmen, are
so easy of assessment that it is difficult to get just appraisement for
those who endured everything, not for their own freedom or gain but for
others' glory, and accomplished so little that could be measured in the
terms of substantial, visible, tangible, economic, or ecclesiastical
progress.
Who first of Europeans looked upon this river at the gulf we do not know,
but on a Ptolemy map, published in Venice in 1513, it is thought by some
that the delta is traced with distinctness, as less distinctly in
Waldseemüller's map of 1507. Five years later (1518) on Garay's map of
Alvarez de Pineda's explorations, there descends into the gulf a
sourceless river, the Rio del Espiritu Santo, which is thought by some to
be the same river that Marquette's map showed under the name de la
Conception, ending its course in the midst of the continent; but it is
more generally thought now to be the Mobile River, and the Gulf del
Espiritu Santo to be the Bay of Mobile. Narvaez, as I have said, tried a
score of years after to enter the Mississippi, but he was carried out to
sea in his flimsy improvised craft, by its resisting current. Cabeça de
Vaca may have seen it again after he left Narvaez, but we have no record
in his narrative that distinguishes it from any other river. Then came the
accredited discoverer De Soto, who found it but another obstacle in his
gold-seeking path toward the Ozarks and who found it his grave on his
harassed, disappointed journey back toward Florida.
It was more than a hundred years after "it pleased God that the flood
should rise," as the chronicle has it, and carry the brigantines built by
De Soto's lieutenant, Moscoso, with his emaciated followers "down the
Great River to the opening gulf," before another white face looked upon
this great water. It was in 1543 that Moscoso and his men disappeared,
sped on their voyage by the arrows of the aborigines. It was a June day in
1673 that Marquette and Joliet, coming down the Wisconsin from Green Bay,
saw before them, "avec une joye que je ne peux pas expliquer," the slow,
gentle-currented Mississippi; or, as Mark Twain has measured the time in a
chronology of his own: "After De Soto glimpsed the river, a fraction short
of a quarter of a century elapsed, and then Shakespeare was born, lived a
trifle more than a half a century,--then died; and when he had been in his
grave considerably more than half a century, the second white man saw the
Mississippi." [Footnote: "Life on the Mississippi," Hillcrest edition, pp.
19, 20]
In 1682 La Salle followed it to where it meets the great gulf, possessing
with emblems of empire and his indomitable spirit the lower reaches of the
stream whose upper waters had first been touched by the gentle Marquette
and the practical Joliet and the vainglorious Hennepin. Between that day
and the time when it became a course of regular and active commerce (again
in Mark Twain's chronology), "seven sovereigns had occupied the throne of
England, America had become an independent nation, Louis XIV and Louis XV
had rotted--the French monarchy had gone down in the red tempest of the
Revolution--and Napoleon was a name that was beginning to be talked
about." [Footnote: "Life on the Mississippi," p. 20.] Of what befell in
that period, marked by such figures and events, a later chapter will tell.
Here our thought is of the river itself, the river of "a hundred thousand
affluents," as one has characterized it; the river which for a little time
bore through the valley of Louisiana and of the Illinois the name of the
great French minister "Colbert."
To the Spanish the river was a hazard, a difficulty to be gotten over. To
the Indian it was the place of fish and defense. To the Anglo-American
empire of wheels, that later came over the mountains, it was a barrier
athwart the course, to be ferried or forded or bridged, but not to be
followed. To be sure, it was (later) utilized by that empire, for a little
while, as a path of dominant, noisy commerce in haste to get its products
to market. And the keels of commerce may come again to stir its waters.
But the river will never be to its later east-and-west migrants what it
was to the French, whose evangelists, both of empire and of the soul, saw
its significance, caught its spirit into their veins, and (from the day
when Marquette and Joliet found their courage roused, and their labor of
rowing from morning till night sweetened by the joy of their expedition)
have possessed the river for their own and will possess it, even though
all the land belongs to others, and the rivers are put to the uses of
millions to whom the beautiful speech of the French is alien. Many a time
in poling or paddling a boat in its tributaries in years gone by, have I
thought and said to my companion: "How less inviting this stream would be
if the French with valiant, adventurous spirit had not first passed over
it!" And my companion was generally one who was always "Tonty" to me. It
is still the river of Marquette and Joliet, Nicolet, Groseilliers and
Radisson, La Salle and Tonty, Hennepin and Accau, Gray Gowns and Black
Gowns, Iberville and Bienville, St. Ange and Laclede; for across every
portage into the valley of that river, it was the men of France, so far as
we know, who passed, first of Europeans, from Lake Erie up to Lake
Chautauqua; or across to Fort Le Boeuf and down French Creek into the
Alleghany and the Ohio (La Belle Rivière); or up the Maumee and across to
the Wabash (the Appian Way); or from Lake Michigan up the St. Joseph and
across to the Kankakee, at South Bend; or, most trodden path of all, from
Green Bay up the Fox River and across to the Wisconsin; or at Chicago from
the Chicago River across to the Des Plaines (to which with the Illinois
River the French seem to have given the name "Divine"), and so on to the
Mississippi.
It is this last approach that I learned first and, though a smoke now
hangs habitually over the entrance as a curtain, I have for myself but to
push that aside to find the Divine River way still the best route into the
greatest valley of the earth. Man has diverted this Divine River to very
practical uses, and even changed its name, but it is hallowed still beyond
all other approaches to the Great River. In a hut on the portage Père
Jacques Marquette spent his last winter on earth in sickness; down the
river the brave De la Salle built his Fort St. Louis on the great rock in
the midst of his prairies, and still farther down his Fort Crèvecoeur. On
no other affluent stream are there braver and more stirring memories of
French adventure and sacrifice than move along those waters or bivouac on
those banks. And so I would have one's imagination take that trail toward
the Mississippi and first see it glisten beneath the tall white cliffs
which stand at the portal of the Divine River entry.
Its branches are reputed to have all borne at one time the names of
saints, and it had like canonization itself. But these streams of the
Mississippi, like the Seine, have none or few of the qualities that make
this saintly terminology appropriate. It is anthropomorphism, not
canonization, that befits its temper and its lure. Mystery no longer hangs
over its waters. Now that all the prairie and plain have been occupied,
the mystery has fled entirely from the valley or has hidden itself in the
wilderness and "bad lands." All is translated into the values of a matter-
of-fact, pragmatic, industrial occupation.
These are some of the pragmatic and other facts concerning it which I have
gathered from the explorers and surveyors and lovers of this region, Ogg
[Footnote: Ogg, F. A., "Opening of the Mississippi," New York, 1904.] and
Austin [Footnote: Austin, O. P., "Steps in the Expansion of our
Territory," New York, 1903.] and Mark Twain [Footnote: Mark Twain, "Life
on the Mississippi," various editions.] among them.
Its length lies wholly within the temperate zone. In this respect it is
more fortunately situated than the more fertile-valleyed Amazon, since the
climate here, varied and sometimes inhospitable as it is, offers
conditions of human development there denied.
The main stream is two thousand five hundred and three miles in length, or
more truly four thousand one hundred and ninety miles, if the Mississippi
and Missouri be taken; that is, many times the length of the Seine. As
Mark Twain, who is to be forever associated with its history, has said, it
is "the crookedest river" in the world, travelling "one thousand three
hundred miles to cover the same ground that a crow would fly over in six
hundred and seventy-five." For a distance of several hundred miles the
Upper Mississippi is a mile in width. Back in 1882 it was seventy miles or
more [Footnote: Mark Twain, "Life on the Mississippi," p. 456.] wide when
the flood was highest, and in 1912 sixty miles wide. The volume of water
discharged by it into the sea is second only to the Amazon, and is greater
than that of all European rivers combined--Seine, Rhine, Rhone, Po,
Danube, and all the rest, omitting the Volga. The amount is estimated at
one hundred and fifty-nine cubic miles annually--that is, it would fill
annually a tank one hundred and fifty-nine miles long, a mile wide, and a
mile high. With its tributaries it provides somewhat more than sixteen
thousand miles of navigable water, more than any other system on the globe
except the Amazon, and more than enough to reach from Paris to Lake
Superior by way of Kamchatka and Alaska--about three-fourths of the way
around the globe.
The sediment carried to the sea is estimated at four hundred million tons
[Footnote: Humphrey's and Abbot's estimate.] annually. As one has put it,
it would require daily for its removal five hundred trains of fifty cars,
each carrying fifty tons, and would make two square miles each year over a
hundred and thirty feet deep. Mark Twain in "Life on the Mississippi" is
authority for the statement that the muddy water of the Missouri is more
wholesome than other waters, until it has settled, when it is no better
than that of the Ohio, for example. If you let a pint of it settle you
will have three-fourths of an inch of mud in the bottom. His advice is to
keep it stirred up. [Footnote: "Life on the Mississippi," p. 182.]
The area which it drains is roughly a million and a quarter square miles,
or two-fifths of the United States. That is, as one graphic historian has
visualized it in European terms, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, and
Italy could be set down within its limits and there would still be some
room to spare.
The river has the strength (for the most part put to no use) of sixty
million horses. The difference between high water and low water in flood
conditions is in some places fifty feet, which shows that it has a wider
range of moodiness than even the Seine.
The rim dividing the Mississippi basin from that of the Great Lakes is, as
we have seen, low and narrow; in some places, especially in wet seasons,
the watershed is indistinguishable. The waters know not which way to go.
This fact furnishes the explanation of the ease with which the French
explorers penetrated the valley from the north. A high mountain range kept
the English colonists out of it from the east. The Spanish found no
physical barriers at the south (except the water, which gave the Frenchmen
help), but, as we have seen, on the other hand, they found no adequate
inducement.
The isotherm which touches the southern limits of France passes midway
between the source and mouth of the river. In the northern half, it has
the mean annual temperature of France, England, and Germany; in the
southern half, of the Mediterranean coasts.
From the gulf into which it empties, a river (that is, an ocean river, or
current) runs through the ocean to the western coasts of Europe; another
runs out along the northeastern coast of South America, and, still another
is in waiting at the western terminus of the Panama Canal to assist the
ships across the Pacific.
A fair regularity and reliability of rainfall have made the rich soil of
the valley tillable and productive without irrigation, except in the far
western stretches; and these blessings are likely to continue, as one
authority puts it, "so long as the earth continues to revolve toward the
east and the present relationship of ocean and continent continues."
Including Texas and Alabama (which lie between the same ranges of
mountains with this valley, though their rivers run into the gulf and not
into the Mississippi), this valley has perhaps one hundred and forty
thousand miles of railway, or about sixty per cent of the total mileage of
the country, or twenty-five per cent of the mileage of the entire globe.
"In richness of soil, variety of climate, number and value of products,
facilities for communication and general conditions of wealth and
prosperity, the Mississippi Valley surpasses anything known to the Old
World as well as the New." It produces the bulk of the world's cotton and
oil; of corn it raises much more than all the rest of the world combined,
and of each of the following (produced mainly in this same valley) the
United States leads in quantity all the nations of the earth: wheat,
cattle, hogs, oats, hay, lumber, coal, iron and steel, and other mineral
products.
Its valley supports an estimated population of over fifty millions, or
over half that of the whole United States; and has an estimated
maintenance capacity of from 200,000,000 [Footnote: Justin Winsor,
"Mississippi Basin," p. 4.] to 350,000,000 [Footnote: A. B. Hart, "Future
of the Mississippi Valley," _Harper's Magazine_, 100:419, February, 1900.]
or from four to seven times its present population. It has been tilled
with "luxurious carelessness." A peasant in Brittany or a forester in
Normandy would be scandalized by the extravagant, profligate use of its
patrimony. That it is likely to have at least the 250,000,000 by the year
2100, and with intensive cultivation will be able to support them, is
allowed by estimates of reliable statisticians. Europe had 175,000,000 at
the beginning of the nineteenth century and North America 5,308,000. The
former has somewhat more than doubled its population in the century since;
America has increased hers about twenty times, and the Mississippi Valley
several thousand times. It is not unreasonable to expect the doubling of
the population of that valley in another century and its quadrupling in
two.
Let De Tocqueville make summary of those prideful items in his description
of the valley, embraced by the equator-sloping half of the continent: "It
is upon the whole," he says, "the most magnificent dwelling-place prepared
by God for man's abode"--a "space of 1,341,649 square miles--about six
times that of France"--watered by a river "which, like a god of antiquity,
dispenses both good and evil." [Footnote: "Democracy in America," 1:22,
21, 20. New York, 1898.]
And it was still another Frenchman who first gave to the world an accurate
description of the sources of the river. On his own account, Nicollet,
sometime professor in the College Louis le Grand, set out in 1831 to
explore the river from its mouth to the source. He spent five years in
these regions which he described as "a grand empire possessing the
grandest natural limits on the earth." He then returned to a little
Catholic college in Baltimore as a teacher, but the United States
Government, hearing of his valuable service, commissioned him to make
another expedition that would enable him to complete his map of the region
of the sources. What he then accomplished has given him "distinct and
conspicuous place among the explorers of the Mississippi." His map shows
myriad lakes in the region of the sources (where the slightest jar of
earth might turn in other directions the water of these brimming bowls),
so many indeed, that there would seem to be only lake and marsh and
savannas. But we see him looking off toward plateaus "looming as if [they
were] a distant shore." Another picture I shall always keep from his
report is of his stolid half-breed guide (who usually waited for him and
his companion with face toward them) sitting one day somewhat ahead of the
party on a slight elevation, which makes the watershed between the rivers
of the north and the rivers of the south, his face turned from them,
gazing in silent rapture upon the boundless stretch of plains.
How their magical influence possessed him, as well as that child of forest
and plain, Nicollet, a peasant boy of Savoy, a professor in Paris,
interrupts his topographical report to tell: "It is difficult to express
by words the varied impressions which the spectacle of these prairies
produces. Their sight never wearies. To look a prairie up or down, to
ascend one of its undulations, to reach a small plateau (or, as the
voyageurs call it, a prairie planche), moving from wave to wave over
alternate swells and depressions and finally to reach the vast,
interminable low prairie that extends itself in front--(be it for hours,
days or weeks)--one never tires; pleasurable and exhilarating sensations
are all the time felt; ennui is never experienced. Doubtless there are
moments when excessive heat, a want of fresh water, and other privations
remind one that life is a toil; but these drawbacks are of short duration.
There are no concealed dangers--no difficulties of road; a far-spreading
verdure, relieved by a profusion of variously colored flowers, the azure
of the sky above, or the tempest that can be seen from its beginning to
its end, the beautiful modifications of the changing clouds, the curious
looming of objects between earth and sky, taxing the ingenuity every
moment to rectify--all, everything, is calculated to excite the
perceptions and keep alive the imagination. In the summer season,
especially, everything upon the prairies is cheerful, graceful, and
animated. The Indians, with herds of deer, antelope and buffalo, give life
and motion to them. It is then they should be visited; and I pity the man
whose soul could remain unmoved under such a scene of excitement."
[Footnote: Report intended to illustrate a map of the hydrographical basin
of the upper Mississippi River, Washington, 1843, 26th Cong., 2d Sess.,
Sen. Doc. 237, p. 52.]
It is a singular fortune that has made a son of France, a century and a
half after the discovery of this mighty stream, the explorer and
cartographer of its sources, a fortune that has its partial explanation at
least in the lure of this stream for the Gallic heart.
Mrs. Trollope, a famous English traveller, found its lower valley
depressing, as has many another: "Unwonted to European eyes and mystically
heavy is the eternal gloom that seems to have settled upon that region.
Whatever wind may blow, however bright and burning the southern sun may
blaze in the unclouded sky, the stream is forever turbid and forever
dark." Of the scene at its mouth, where La Salle and his men had sung with
such joy, she says: "Had Dante seen it, he might have drawn images of
another Bolgia from its horrors." [Footnote: "Domestic Manners of the
Americans," p. r] But no French visitor, so far as I know, has ever found
it gloomy, even in flood or tempest on its subtropical stretches; nor has
he found those level vastnesses desolate. A traveller, Paul Fountain by
name, and so of French origin, I suspect, wandering over those valley
plains in the early days, tells of the sense of freedom, health, and
strength that they give: "There is no air like the prairie air--not even
the grand freshness of the boundless ocean itself.--The loveliness and
variety of the prairie odors are quite indescribable, as are its superb
wild flowers. It is a paradise. No man who has lived on it long enough to
know it and love it (no great time, I can assure you) ever experiences
real happiness after he has left it. There is a longing and eager craving
to return to the life. The vulgar cowboys and hunters, uneducated and
unpoetical past all degree, never leave it except to get drunk. Their
money gone, back they go to get fresh strength and more pelf for another
orgie; but if by chance they abandon the wild, free life, they soon drink
themselves to lunacy or death, and their last babblings are of the
glorious wilderness they all love." [Footnote: "The Great Deserts and
Forests of North America," p. 22.] This is the too exuberant expression of
one who had probably never had a hearth of his own in France, but it gives
some intimation of the charm of that great and seemingly infinite sweep of
level ground, which many, and especially unimaginative minds, find so
monotonous.
We cannot be quite sure, when we listen to some recent critics, that
Châteaubriand ever saw this great valley. Certainly we who have grown up
in it have never found his reindeer and moose about our homes (save in our
Christmas-time imaginations). Paroquets that in the woods repeated the
words learned of settlers are not of the fauna known to reputable Ohio
naturalists, nor have two-headed snakes been found except in the vision of
those who see double in their intoxication. The tamarind and the terebinth
are not of its forest-trees. But whether or not Châteaubriand visited it
in person, his imagination had frequent residence upon the Mississippi and
its tributaries. His "Atala" put into French literature a country where
many have loved to dwell, though its fauna and flora were not more
accurate in some respects than the mineralogy and meteorology of the John
Law scheme, known later as the "Mississippi Bubble," that made France wild
with excitement once. However, I have recalled the fervid pen of
Châteaubriand, not as that of a faunal or floral naturalist, but to have
it rewrite these sentences: "Nothing is more surprising and magnificent
than this movement and this distribution of the central waters of North
America" (whence flows the Mississippi), "a river which the French first
descended; a river which flowed under their power, and the rich valley of
which," as the translator has rendered it, "still regrets their genius,"
but, as Châteaubriand doubtless meant it, and as it is better translated,
"still grieves for their spirit," their "familiar" ("et dont la riche
vallée regrette encore leur génie"). [Footnote: "Travels in America and
Italy," 1:72, 73, London, 1828.]
I think that Châteaubriand had accurate instinct in divining the river's
grieving for the spirit that (with all the practical genius which now
inhabits the valley) is still needed to give an appreciation of that in
the valley which lies beyond the counting of statistics or even the
glowing rhetoric of the orators of liberty.
Hamlin Garland, reared in that valley, and first known in American letters
as the author of remarkable stories of life on a Western farm, "Main
Travelled Roads," has recently given expression to this grieving (though
he says no word of the French) in an essay on "The Silent Mississippi,"
published a few years ago. He speaks of the river's bold, blue-green
bluffs "looking away into haze," of its golden bars of sand "jutting out
into the burnished stream," of its thickets of yellow-green willows, of
the splendid old trees and of its glades opening away to the hills (all
making a magical way of beauty), only to use it as a background for the
statement that "not one beautiful building" is to be seen on its banks
"for a thousand miles." There are many towns, but "without a single
distinctive building; everything is a flimsy jumble, out of key,
meaningless, impertinent, evanescent, too, thanks to climate." "We took a
wild land beautiful as a dream," he proceeds, "and we have made a refuse
heap. The birds of the trees have disappeared, the water-fowl have gone,
every edible creature has vanished. An era of hopeless, distinctive
vulgarity is upon us."
I have travelled down the smaller waterways of the valley with like
feeling, which, though it has led to no such comprehensive generalization,
yet gave me a distinct consciousness of their "grieving," if not for the
French, at any rate for the silences that preceded the French, and for
their own riparian architecture. The busy towns along the streams I have
known have turned their faces from these streams toward the railroads.
They have left the riverside to the thriftless men and the truant boys.
Stables and outhouses look upon their waters, and the sewers pollute them.
And if on some especially eligible bluff better buildings do stand, their
owners or builders show no appreciation of what the bluff or river cares
for, but reproduce the lines of some pretentious edifice that has no
relation, historic or otherwise, to it or to the site. The old mills, with
their feet in the water, are almost the only sympathetic structures--
especially so when they are in ruins.
I once followed the upper waters of the stream (the Ohio) along which
Celoron, of whom I shall speak later, planted his emblems of French
possession. He would doubtless care to claim that valley even to-day,
though unsightly houses and sheds line it, and pipes and shafts of iron,
hastily rigged up and left to rust when done with, run everywhere, and the
scum of oil is on the water. The profit of the hour was all that was
visible of motive or achievement in that smoky valley, though I know it is
not safe to generalize, for miracles have been wrought in that very
valley.
A change is coming in many of the towns and cities of both the lesser and
the larger rivers. In the town that I knew best, thirty years ago only a
few ventured upon the water, and they were the fishermen or rivermen who
had not much to do with the community life; now the steam or gasolene
launch is making these streams highways of pleasure, and so is bringing
them within the daily life of thousands.
Waiting for a boat in St. Louis one beautiful summer morning on the quay,
where in Paris I should have found the book-stalls, I saw a Pullman train
just starting for New York, and at the water's edge under the stately
bridge one tramp "barbering" another. But, reading the morning paper, I
found by chance that back in the city there was one man at least, a
teacher and artist, who had the old-time French feeling for the grieving
river. It was dark before I found him, after my day on a steamboat whose
most important passenger, pointed out to me with some apparent pride by
the old-time captain, was a brewer, author of a brew more famous in those
parts than the artist's river pictures which I saw by candle-light that
night in his schoolroom.
The artist had his river studio upon one of the beautiful cliffs which La
Salle must have seen when he came out of the Illinois into the
Mississippi. And it was within a few miles of that studio, it may be
added, that I found, too, one noteworthy exception to Mr. Hamlin Garland's
statement concerning riparian architecture.
These are hopeful intimations succeeding the fading of the last traces in
that region of the old French days, traces which I found a few hours'
journey below St. Louis, in the village of Prairie du Rocher (locally
pronounced Prary de Roosh); for Cahokia, where I stopped first, had no
mark of the French regime except the "congregation," which was, as the
priest told me, two hundred years old. The village had no distinctiveness.
But Prairie du Rocher had its own atmosphere and charm. French skies never
produced a more glorious August sunset than I saw through the Corot trees
of that village, which stands or reclines beneath the cliffs and looks off
toward the river that has receded far to the westward. I tried to find the
old French records of which I had heard, but there was a new priest who
knew not the French; yet I did not need them to assure me that the French
had been there. At dawn, after such a peaceful night as one might have in
upper Carcasonne, I found my way to the river near which are the ruins of
Fort Chartres--all that is left of the greatest French fortress in the
Mississippi Valley, the last to yield to man and the last to surrender to
nature. The town, Nouvelle Chartres, with all its color and gayety, has
become a corn field, and only the magazine of the fort remains, hidden, a
gunshot from the river, among the weeds, bushes, vines, and trees.
Fourteen miles below is the site of the oldest French village in the upper
valley. But the river was jealous and took it all, foundation and roof, to
itself. The charms of old Kaskaskia, the sometime capital of all that
region, are "one with Nineveh and Tyre." Not a vestige is left of its
first days and only a broken structure or two of its later glory.
Nor is there any other trace, so far as I could learn, anywhere down the
winding stream till one reaches New Orleans. The red sun-worshippers in
their white garments--familiar of old to the French--even they have
followed their divinity toward its setting, and only among those with
African shadows in their faces do they still sing, as I have heard, of the
"brave days of D'Artaguette." The monuments do not remember beyond the
bravery and carnage of the Civil War, or at farthest beyond the War of
1812. I was myself apprehended for a foreign spy one day while I was
searching too near to the guns of a present fort for more ancient
monuments.
The great river and some of its tributaries have a commerce, but it is of
an inanimate and unappealing kind. They no longer draw the throngs daily
to the wharfs as in the days of the glory of the steamboat. Everybody is
in too much of a hurry to travel by water.
An old Mississippi River steamboat captain [Footnote: George B. Merrick,
"Old Times on the Upper Mississippi," Cleveland, A. H. Clark Co., 1909.]
has written a reminiscent book, in which he tells with sorrow of the
departed majesty and glory of the river, the glamour remaining only in the
memories of those who knew the river sixty years or more ago. He laments
the passing of that mighty fleet, destroyed by the very civilization that
built it--a civilization which cut down the impounding forests and so
removed the great natural dams which must in time be replaced by
artificial ones if the rivers are ever to run full again in the dry
seasons and not overflow in the wet. It is that day of the Mississippi
that is best known in our literature. Mark Twain has put forever on the
map of letters (where the Euphrates, the Nile, the Ilyssus, the Tiber, the
Seine, the Thames long have been) the Mississippi, the river which the
French first traced upon the maps of geography. So we are especially
indebted to the French for Mark Twain, who began his career as a "cub"
pilot on the river which in turn gave him the name by which the world is
ever to know him.
It was he who once wrote of this river: "The face of the water, in time,
became a wonderful book--a book that was a dead language to the uneducated
passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its
most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And
it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story
to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was
never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave
unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you
could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so
wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so
absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with every reperusal."
[Footnote: "Life on the Mississippi," pp. 82-83.]
When I was entering the English Channel on my way to Havre, the captain
showed me what varied courses must be taken at different hours and
different days to gain full advantage of tide and current and yet avoid
all danger. But, as this Mississippi River pilot has observed, it is now a
comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run these buoyed and lighted
ship channels; it was then quite another matter to pilot a steamboat in
the Mississippi or Missouri, "whose alluvial banks cave and change
constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose sand-
bars are never at rest, whose channels are forever dodging and shirking,
and whose obstructions" had fifty years ago to be "confronted in all
nights and all weathers without the aid of a single lighthouse or a single
buoy." [Footnote: "Life on the Mississippi," p. 86.] And yet that man, who
came to know, in age, the courses of human emotions the world over, could,
as a young man, shut his eyes and trace the river from St. Louis to New
Orleans, and read its face as one "would cull the news from a morning
paper."
It was for years a wish of mine that when Mark Twain should come to die,
he should lie not in an ordinary sepulchre of earth but in the river which
he knew so well and loved, and of whose golden days he sang. I wished that
the river might be turned aside from its wonted channel, as the River
Busentinus for the interment of Alaric, and then, after his burial there,
be let back into it again, that he might ever hear the sonorous voice of
its waters above him, and, perhaps, now and then the call of the leadsman
overhead, crying the depth beneath, as he himself in the pilot-house used
once to hear the call "Mark Twain" from the darkness below. So it was a
disappointment to me that when the world followed him to his grave it was
to a little patch of earth outside the valley, beyond the reach of even
the farthest tributary of the Mississippi.
The great river has been the course of one empire and the scene of many.
Spain, France, England, and the United States have each claimed its
mastery, as we have seen or shall see. The Germans once dreamed of a state
on its banks, but could not agree as to the locality (Minnesota or Texas),
so variedly tempting was the fertility of its upper and its lower waters.
The sons of the Norsemen are now tilling the land around its sources.
Indeed, it has now upon its banks and within the reach of its myriad
streams a babel of earth's races, although the river has not, as the River
of the Lotus Flower, conformed them to one uniform type.
We are beginning now to realize more keenly that the river has yet to be
conquered. It has yielded complete sovereignty to no people. It has made
light of the emblems of empire. It has even ignored the white, channel-
marking signals of the government that now exercises lordship over all the
land it drains. Its untamed spirit flaunts continual challenge in the face
of all men. It has had in derision the building of cities and towns. One
town, for example, has been left to choose between being left high and dry
five miles from water, or of meeting the fate of old Kaskaskia. And though
the town has already thrown a million dollars to the river, as if to some
unappeased god, the river is merciless. One town and another have been
ostracized or destroyed, their wharfs left far inland or carried away to
some commerceless bayou. The sentiment I have regarding the river makes it
difficult to excuse its infidelity toward one little French town in
particular, St. Genevieve. I can do so only by assuming that the river has
cared less for its later inhabitants than it did for those who gave it
name. It has laughed at the embankments on which hundreds of millions have
been spent by nation, state, and private enterprise to keep its flood in
restraint. Shorn of its trees, as Samson of his long hair, it has pulled
down the pillars of man's raising into its own destroying waters. In 1912
a space nearly two and a half times the size of the State of New Jersey
was devastated. [Footnote: Seventeen thousand six hundred and five square
miles.] In 1913 the loss in a single year was one hundred and sixty
million dollars. [Footnote: One hundred and sixty-three million, U. S.
Weather Bureau estimate.] In the last thirty years it is estimated the
loss has been a half of a billion, and it would have been immensely
greater, of course, if the river had not been given unchallenged freedom
of great, unclaimed swamps. And yet the river has never at any one time
massed its great army of waters. At one time it has been the Ohio, at
another the Missouri, and then the Red that it has sent against the
fortifications. If all these streams were to be brought in flood at once
the lower valley would be swept clean.
So it is no martial simile that I am using. It is a real battle that is
continuously on. The gaunt sharp-shooter, pacing the embankment with
Winchester in hand to shoot any burrowing confederate of the river, a rat,
or mole, is a real and not an imaginary figure. And the battles that have
been fought along its course are as play by the side of those yet to be
waged before it is subdued by man.
It is fitly the War Department of the government that has been watching
its every movement, that has set the signals on its fitful tide, and that
has recorded its every shift for years as if it were an animate enemy. Its
changing area, velocity, discharge--items of infinite permutations--are
all noted and analyzed. But the war department of the government is still
almost as powerless to control the river as the Yazoo farmer who watches
its changing moods, not by instruments but by the movement of an eddy in
his own hidden bayou. The battle is with floods, shallows, and erosion,
but it is essentially a battle with floods, for not until their
strongholds are taken, controlled, is the complete conquest assured. It
was control of the mouth of the river that seemed so important in early
days. The effort to obtain that led ultimately to the purchase of
Louisiana (that is, the west bank of the river) from the French by the
United States. It was the confirmation of that security of navigation
which gave the battle of New Orleans its high significance. Then the mouth
(thus obtained) was found too shallow for the demands of commerce, and
there followed what some one with poetic instincts has called the battle
of the shoals, a battle in which General Eads, who had bridged the river
at St. Louis, compelled the river by means of jetties to run deeper and
carry heavier burdens.
But the future battle-fields are perceived to lie toward the sources, at
the eaves, as it were, of the watersheds, the headwaters of its
tributaries as well as its own. No deepening, embanking, straightening,
canalization of the river is to be permanently effective until all danger
of flood can be removed.
Wandering among those tributaries, seeing the trickling fountains of
several of them, watching the timid stream in the naked, deforested fields
(not knowing quite which way to go, east or west, north or south), I have
been strongly appealed to by the plan of impounding in reservoirs these
first waters, whose freedom (no longer restrained in youth by the sage
forests) makes them libertines and wantons in the distant valleys below.
Such impounding has successful inauguration in five small reservoirs now
in operation on the headwaters of the Mississippi out of forty-two
planned. An ambitious plan for controlling the turbulent Ohio by a system
of from seventeen to forty-three reservoirs at an estimated cost of from
twenty to thirty-four millions of dollars has been suggested by Mr. M. O.
Leighton of the United States Geological Survey, and received indorsement
from the Pittsburgh Flood Commission, the Dayton Flood Commission, and the
National Waterways Commission. These would suffice to keep the lawless
waters within temperate bounds in the spring and to give more generous
navigable currents in the summer and autumn. Against the great expense of
such a project is set the tremendous possibilities in the development of
water-power. Of the theoretical sixty millions of horse-power in the
current of the Mississippi, it is estimated that about six and a half
millions can be economically developed throughout the year, while twelve
millions could be developed during six months or more without storage
reservoirs. An adequate system of reservoirs might double or treble these
totals, while a million or two would be immediately available to begin the
payment of the debt, and more of the strength would be harnessed to that
purpose in time. So, it is urged, the river would be made to meet the
expense of its own conquest. [Footnote: See reports of the National
Conservation Commission in 1909; National Waterways Commission, 1912;
Report Commissioner of Corporations on Water-Power Development in the
United States, 1912; J. L. Mathews "Remaking the Mississippi," Boston,
1909.]
And once that is done the river may be straightened, shortened, deepened,
leveed, and made a docile, reliable carrier of commerce. It may then be
compelled to a respect for cities and government signals and wharfs and
mills. And the astute suggestion of the practical Joliet for the
canalization of its waters, may be realized in the safe passage not merely
of boats but of stately, giant, ocean-sized vessels from the Great Lakes
to the gulf.
A hundred years ago (1809) one Nicholas Roosevelt, commissioned of Robert
Fulton (the inventor of the steamboat) and others, was sent to Pittsburgh
to build the first steamboat to be launched in western waters. So
confident was this young man of the success of steamboat navigation of the
Ohio and Mississippi that, on his journey of inspection, he purchased
coal-mines along the way and arranged to have the coal piled up on the
river bank against the time of its need by boats whose keels had not been
laid and whose existence even depended upon the approval of eastern
capitalists. It suggests the prevision of the nephew, Theodore Roosevelt,
in making provision for the coaling of ships in the east long before the
Spanish War was in sight. I was on the Marquette-Joliet portage the very
day that this same nephew was predicting with like confidence to the
people of St. Louis that the Mississippi would be deepened till from the
lakes to the gulf it should be a course for seagoing vessels. Champlain
suggested the Panama Canal three hundred years before its building.
Joliet, in 1673, suggested the lakes-to-the-gulf ship waterway, [Footnote:
Margry, 1:268.] and by the three-hundredth anniversary, perhaps, it will
be completed.
I made a journey in 1911 that began at the first settlements of the French
in Nova Scotia, touched the Bay of Chaleur and the lower St. Lawrence, and
then followed the French water paths all the way to the mouth of the
Mississippi, where the master of pilots, a descendant of France, carried
me out into the Gulf of Mexico. Starting back before dawn in a little
boat, I saw, just as the sun was coming up over the swamps where the river
begins to divide, the hulk of a great seagoing vessel against the morning
sky. It seemed then a gloomy apparition; but as I think of it now it was
rather the presage of the new commerce than the ghost of that which has
departed.
That the Valley of a Hundred Thousand Streams--streams that together touch
every community of any size from the Alleghanies to the Rockies--streams
whose waters all find their way sooner or later into the Mississippi--will
ever give up battle till the great water itself is conquered, no one who
knows the determined people in that valley will ever question. The sixty
million people will not be resisted permanently by the sixty million
horses of the river, though the strength of the horses be driven by all
the clouds that the gulf sends up the valley to its aid. Some day the
great, free River Colbert will run vexed of impenetrable, unyielding walls
to the sea. Its "titanic ambition for quiet flowing" down this beautiful,
gently sloping valley to the gulf (which, as one has said, "has been its
longing through ages") will have been turned to human ministry. The spirit
of the great water will have become as patient, as thoughtless of its own
wild comfort or ambitions as that of the priest who dedicated it to the
honor of the mother of the most patient of men.