THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE AND THE DREAM OF ITS REVIVAL
The readers who have through these chapters been companions of Champlain,
La Salle, Joliet, Marquette, and others in the discovery of the mighty
rivers and the conquest of the mighty vastnesses of the new world will
have, if they continue, yet before them even harder and more disheartening
ventures, as La Salle himself had that April day in 1682, when he turned
from the column which he had planted in sight of the Gulf of Mexico, four
thousand miles from the Cape of Labrador, and began to drive his canoes up
the river which he had traced forever, if too tortuously, on the maps of
the earth.
During the chapter since we reached the shores of that lonely sea without
a sail, we have, covering in prospect two centuries, contemplated the
majesty of that river of a hundred thousand affluents.
Now, as we turn our faces toward the lakes and Canada again, a century of
hardship confronts us. If the readers endure it with me, as I have endured
it again and again, they will have added again to their France and their
United States memories more precious than the titles to boundless prairies
and trackless forests.
La Salle was not content with the discovery of the great waterway to the
gulf, the tracing of whose course had ended all dreams of a shorter route
to China by aid of its current. In place of his La Chine dream grew
another dream: to open this valley to France from the south instead of
from the north, where the way was long and perilous, closed half the year
by ice and storm, and beset all the year by hostile intrigue, envy, and
dishonesty of colonial officials. A Franco-Indian colony was to be
established along the Illinois under the protection of Fort St. Louis on
the Rock. Ultimately a chain of forts and colonies would hold the
watercourse all the way from gulf to gulf-from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to
the Gulf of Mexico-maintained by revenues from the hides and wool of the
buffalo then roaming the woods and prairies and plains from one side of
the valley to the other; the Indians would gather about these centres for
gain and protection; and in the midst of this wilderness he would hold for
France the empire that the inscription on the column at the mouth of the
river claimed. The crows might fly about his fields, but they could not
then touch his rich crops. Griffins--flocks, fleets of griffins--would fly
above them.
That was the vision with which he started northward from the mouth of the
great river, the vision out of which he might at once have been starved
except for the meat of alligators shot along the way. Seized of a
dangerous illness, he sent Tonty on to Mackinaw to forward news of the
discovery to Canada, and unable, even after months of Father Membré's
care, to go to Paris to prepare for the carrying out of his great scheme,
he, joined by Tonty, climbs the Rock St. Louis and lays out ramparts on
its crest, of which I thought I discovered traces many years ago. It was
another Rock of Quebec, rising sheer a hundred and twenty-five feet above
the river in the midst of the prairie. About it gathered under his
protection many tribes of Indians, in common dread of the Iroquois, in
common hope, doubtless, of gain from commerce with the French. La Salle,
in a report to be found in the archives of the Marine in Paris, states
that his extemporized colony numbered four thousand warriors, or twenty
thousand souls. [Footnote: Margry, 2:363. Parkman, "La Salle," pp. 317,
318.] It had come up as Jonah's gourd and might as quickly wither, as the
village of the Illinois but a few years previous had withered into
desolation in a few hours before the hot breath of the terrorizing fame of
the Iroquois. From his seigniorial aerie he sent messages to the governor
of Canada, no longer the friendly Frontenac but a Pharaoh who knew not
this Joseph, praying for cooperation, saying that he could not leave his
red allies lest, if the Iroquois should strike in his absence, they would
think him in league with their dread enemies; asking that his men who go
down with hides in exchange for munitions be not retained as outlaws;
urging that it is for the advantage of his creditors (for his losses had
amounted to forty thousand crowns) that they do not seize his goods-since
the means of meeting all his debts would then be destroyed-and begging for
more men with whom to make this colony permanent and gather the more
remote Indian tribes around the sheltering Rock St. Louis. [Footnote:
Margry, 2:314. Parkman, "La Salle," pp. 320-324.]
But it was not such prayers that reached Louis XIV, who, on May 10, 1682,
before La Salle's report of the discovery of the Mississippi arrived at
Versailles, had directed that no further permission should be given to
make journeys of discovery toward the Mississippi, as the colonists might
better be employed in cultivating the lands.
This is an example of the advice the king is receiving from his governor
in Quebec: "You will see that ... [La Salle] has been bold enough to give
you intelligence of a false discovery and that, instead of returning to
the colony to learn what the King wishes him to do, he does not come near
me, but keeps in the backwoods, five hundred leagues off, with the idea of
attracting the inhabitants to him, and building up an imaginary kingdom
for himself, by debauching all the bankrupts and idlers of this country,
... All the men who brought me news from him have abandoned him, and say
not a word about returning, but sell the furs they have brought as if they
were their own; so that he cannot hold his ground much longer." [Footnote:
Parkman, "La Salle," p. 323.]
Meanwhile the king, the same king who five years before had said in La
Salle's commission that he had "nothing more at heart" than the
exploration of that country, writes to the governor of Canada from
Fontainebleau: "I am convinced, as you, that the discovery of the Sieur de
la Salle is very useless, and that such enterprises ought to be prevented
in the future." [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 324.]
In his extremity, his supplies cut off, his men sent to Quebec deserting
with the profits of his hides, La Salle leaves Tonty on the Rock, starts
for Quebec, intending to go to France, meets on the way an officer
appointed to succeed him in all his wilderness authority, and in the
spring of 1684 is again a lodger in Rue de la Truanderie, a miserable
little street in Paris where, as I have said before, I have tried to
locate the lodging of the valiant soul who once dwelt upon the mysterious
rock near my boyhood home.
Thence this man of "solitary disposition," whose life had been joined to
savages, and who had for years had "neither servants, clothes nor fare
which did not savor more of meanness than of ostentation," and who was of
such natural timidity that it took him a week "to make up his mind to go
to an audience" with Monseigneur de Conti, is summoned to an interview
with the king himself.
La Salle's memorials, which recall by way of introduction his five
journeys of upward of five thousand leagues, in great part on foot,
through more than six hundred leagues of unknown country among savages and
cannibals, and at the cost of one hundred and fifty thousand francs, and
which propose projects that seem in some of their features quixotic and
visionary, received favorable consideration of the king and his minister
Colbert's son. La Salle's wilderness empire is restored to him and he is
granted four ships in which to carry soldiers, mechanics, and laborers to
establish a fort and colony at the mouth of the Mississippi, to open up
all the interior of America from the south, and incidentally to make war
on the Spaniards (who were claiming the gulf for their own), and to seize
their valuable mines.
The quarrellings of this expedition (due in part to the divided command);
the failure to find the mouth of the Mississippi since, we are told, La
Salle had been unable in 1682 to determine its longitude; the landing on
the shores of Texas, far beyond the mouth of the Mississippi; the loss of
one of the vessels to the Spanish, the wreck of two others, and the return
of the fourth to France; the miserable fate of the colony left on those
desolate shores; the long search of La Salle and his companions for the
"fatal river"--these make a dismal story whose details cannot be rehearsed
here, a story whose tragic end was the murder of La Salle by one of his
own disaffected followers in March, 1687, on the banks of the Trinity
River.
There is time, as we hasten on, for only a few words over the body of this
"iron man," left "a prey to the buzzards and wolves" of the wilderness in
which he sacrificed all, as Champlain, for France.
"One of the greatest men of his age," said Tonty, who was nearest to him
in all his labors save his last. "Without question one of the most
remarkable explorers whose names live in history," writes Parkman.
[Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 430.] His "personality is impressed in
some respects more strongly than that of any other upon the history of New
France," says another historian, Fiske. [Footnote: "New France and New
England," p. 132.] "For force of will and vast conceptions; for various
knowledge and quick adaptation of his genius to untried circumstances; for
a sublime magnanimity, that resigned itself to the will of Heaven, and yet
triumphed over affliction by energy of purpose and unfaltering hope--this
daring adventurer had no superior among his countrymen," says Bancroft.
[Footnote: "History of the United States," 3: 173.] And further, in the
estimate of a recent historian of the valley, "for all the qualities of
rugged manhood, courage, persistency that could not be broken, contempt of
pain and hardship, he has never been surpassed." [Footnote: James K.
Hosmer, "Short History of the Mississippi Valley," p. 140.]
Let him who next to Tonty knew him better than all the other chroniclers
say a last word--one which will justify the time that we have given to
following the fortunes and adversities of this spirit, unbroken to the
last: "He was a tower of adamant, against whose impregnable front hardship
and danger, the rage of man and of the elements, the southern sun, the
northern blast, fatigue, famine, disease, delay, disappointment and
deferred hope, emptied their quivers in vain.... Never under the
impenetrable mail of paladin or crusader beat a heart of more intrepid
mettle than within the stoic panoply that armed the breast of La Salle. To
estimate aright the marvels of his patient fortitude, one must follow on
his track through the vast scene of his interminable journeyings....
America owes him an enduring memory; for in this masculine figure she sees
the pioneer who guided her to her richest heritage." [Footnote: Parkman,
"La Salle," p. 432.]
France had deserved well of that valley had she done nothing more than to
set that rugged, fearless figure in the heart of America, a perpetual foil
to effeminacy and submission to softening luxury, to the arts that seek
merely popularity, to drunkenness and other vices which he combated even
in that wilderness, to sycophancy and demagogy--a perpetual example of the
"vir" and virtue in the noblest sense in which mankind has defined them.
In the grand amphitheatre in the Sorbonne, I witnessed one day in Paris a
celebration of the conquests of the French language in lands outside of
France: conquests in the islands of the West Indies, where La Salle
suffered all but death; in Canada, where he had his first visions; and in
Louisiana, where he perished. Though his name was not spoken, it were a
reason for greater celebration in France that the spirit of such a
Frenchman as La Salle had enduring memory in the severe ideals of manhood
that are for all time to possess the men of that valley to which he guided
the world.
There is a grave for which I wished to make search in Rouen, the grave of
the mother of La Salle, to whom he wrote in 1684: "I hope ... to embrace
you a year hence with all the pleasure that the most grateful of children
can feel with so good a mother as you have always been." [Footnote:
Parkman, "La Salle," p. 364.] I wish I could have made her know--but since
I could not, I tried to let France know instead--that there are millions
who could speak to-day as the most "grateful of children" what her son and
France's son was never permitted to utter.
La Salle's dream of New France did not fade with his last sight of his
empire of Louisiana. But the century in which he was born and died had all
but gone out before the stirring of his life's vision and sacrifice,
strengthened by appeal of the gallant and faithful Tonty, resulted in the
offer by one who has been called the "Cid of Canada," Le Moyne
d'Iberville, to carry out the schemes of La Salle, and it was becoming
clear that France must act at once or England would build the glorious
structure which La Salle had designed. In the offer of this young Canadian
and his brother Bienville were the purposes that gave substantial
foundation to Louisiana. Sailing with their two ships in 1699, they were
caught in the "strong, muddy current of fresh water," which La Salle had
unluckily passed without seeing. They entered this stream and, after
several days of exploration, had verification of the identity of the river
in a letter (or "speaking bark," as the Indians called it), dated the 2Oth
of April, 1685, which Tonty, years before, when making the journey down
the river in search of La Salle, had left in the hands of an Indian chief
to be delivered to La Salle, or, as the chief called him, "the man who
should come up the river."
The fortunes which befell those of this colony, trying to find a suitable
site in that land of bushes and cane-brakes, are not agreeable to follow.
For thirteen years the "paternal providence of Versailles" watched over
them, sending them marriageable women, soldiers, priests, and nuns, but so
little food that famine and pestilence often came to their miserable
stockades. They were under injunction "to seek out pearl fisheries," "to
catch bison-calves, tame them and take their wool," and "to look for
mines." What employment for the founders of an empire! [Footnote: In one
of the branches of that river at whose mouth they settled I saw a summer
or two ago, one of the men of that valley wading in its water, still in
search of pearls. A pearl worth a thousand dollars had once been found
near by, and so (in the same hope that animated the mind of King Louis
XIV) man after man in that neighborhood had abandoned his fertile farm to
search for pearls, only to be reduced, as the poor settlers of early,
Louisiana, to live upon the shell-fish in which the pearls refused to
grow.]
One cannot resist the temptation to say again: If only Louis XIV had had
the good sense, unblinded of pearls and gold and bigotry and some other
things, to let the industrious, skilled Huguenots, flying from France
after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, settle in Louisiana, instead
of forcing them to swell the numbers of the English colonies on the
Atlantic coast, and eventually assist them in taking the New France from
which they had been debarred!
The French engineer of an English ship, appearing on the river one day,
had furtively handed Bienville a petition of four hundred Huguenots in the
Carolinas to be allowed to settle in Louisiana and to have the privilege
of worship, such as is enjoyed to-day. The answer came from Versailles to
the cane-brakes--from Versailles, where, amid scenes "which no European
court could rival," the "greatest of France, princes, warriors,
statesmen," were gathered week after week in the "Halls of Abundance,
Venus, Mars and Apollo," from Versailles to the half-starved little group
sitting in exile by the gulf, far from abundance, without love, in dread
of Mars, and with no arts of Apollo save the sound of the wind in the
trees and the moan of the sea: "Have I expelled heretics from France in
order that they should set up a republic in America?"
One has reminded us that while Iberville was making almost futile attempts
with the half-hearted support of his government to establish this colony
at the mouth of the Mississippi, Peter the Great was beginning to lay the
foundations of St. Petersburg in as unpromising a place--a barren,
uncultivated island which was a frozen swamp in winter and a heap of mud
in summer, in the midst of pathless forests and deep morasses haunted by
wolves and bears. Peter the Great spent great treasure in clearing the
forests, draining the swamps, and raising embankments for this future
capital of an empire. Louis XIV had only to let certain Frenchmen settle
on these less forbidding coasts, that might soon have become the capital
of as fruitful a province as Peter the Great's; and the transformation
would have been made, as in New England, without any assistance from the
king except perhaps for defense.
It is due the memory of Iberville, often slandered as was La Salle before
him, not that the story of his all but hopeless struggles should be
repeated here but that the object toward which he so valiantly struggled
should be clearly seen. He had read Father Membré's account of the La
Salle voyage of discovery and Joutel's story of the last expedition. He
had even had a conversation with La Salle, and had heard his own lips
describe the river; and he had known Tonty of the Iron Hand, faithful to
the last. Iberville had a mind capable of entertaining the vision, and he
had a spirit capable of following it. He seems to have been for a time
after La Salle's death his only great-minded follower. He wrote on
reaching Rochelle after his first voyage that "if France does not
immediately seize this part of America, which is the most beautiful, and
establish a colony strong enough to resist any which England may have
here, the English colonies (already considerable in Carolina) will so
thrive that in less than a hundred years they will be strong enough to
seize all America." [Footnote: Margry, _l. c._, IV:322.]
But the answer from Versailles only hastened the fulfilment of Iberville's
prophecy. It is as a page torn from a contemporaneous suburban villa
prospectus that speaks of one of those migratory settlements of Iberville
on the shores of the gulf as a "terrestrial paradise," a "Pomona," or "The
Fortunate Island." And the reality which confronts the home seeker is
usually more nearly true to the idealistic details than that which
Governor Cadillac, wishing no doubt to discredit his predecessor, reported
when he went to succeed Bienville for a time as governor: "I have seen the
garden on Dauphin Island, which had been described to me as a terrestrial
paradise. I saw there three seedling pear-trees, three seedling apple-
trees, a little plum-tree about three feet high, with seven bad plums on
it, a vine some thirty feet long, with nine bunches of grapes, some of
them withered, or rotten, and some partly ripe, about forty plants of
French melons and a few pumpkins." [Footnote: Parkman, "A Half Century of
Conflict," 1:309.]
Bienville, the brother, also deserves remembrance both in France and
America--dismissed once but exonerated, returning later to succeed the
pessimistic Cadillac and to lay the foundations of New Orleans on the only
dry spot he had found on his first journey up the river, there to plant
the seed of the fruits and melons and pumpkins of the garden on Dauphin
Island, that were to bring forth millionfold, though they have not yet
entirely crowded out the cypress and the palmetto, and the fleur-de-lis
that still grows wild and flowers brilliantly at certain seasons.
It was some time before this, however, that the king, nearing the end of
his days, vexed with his wars, tired of his expensive and unproductive
venture, gave over the colony into the hands and enterprise of a
speculator, one Antoine Crozat, a French merchant whose purse had been
open to Louis for his wars. There was a total population at this juncture
(1712) of three hundred and eighty souls, about one half of whom were "in
the king's pay." Crozat, the king's deputy despot, finds no better fortune
than the king, and soon (1717) resigns his charter, to be succeeded in his
anxieties and privileges by that famous Scotch adventurer John Law, who
organized the Mississippi Company in order to enjoy the varied monopolies
assembled in its charter--monopolies which would make any inhabitant of
that trust-hating valley to-day fume in denouncing. It was a tobacco
trust, a coinage trust, a revenue trust, a slave-holding trust, a mining
trust, a trade trust wrapped in one, with an unlimited license. It was,
moreover, a conscience trust, a speech trust, a religion trust, a race
trust. It was, in short, the ultimate, sublimated expression of a
monopolistic theory made effective in a charter. Immigration, within these
restrictions, was not likely to be voluntary and eager, as was the case in
New England, and, since the company was under the one compulsion of
providing a certain number of colonists and slaves, immigration was
forced. Every conceivable sound economic and philosophical principle was
violated, and yet investors came from all parts of Europe. "Crowds of
crazed speculators jostled and fought each other" before the offices of
the company in the Rue Quincampoix [Footnote: A now disreputable street,
or so it seemed as I walked through it one day in the dusk.] from morning
till night to get their names inscribed among the stockholders, and,
though five hundred thousand foreigners were attracted to Paris by
opportunities for speculation, scarcely a colonist went willingly to the
Eldorado of the company, whose stock was capitalized in billions and
"whose ingots of gold were displayed in Paris shop-windows." There were
maps of that valley to be found in abundance in Paris in those days with
mines indicated on them indiscriminately. When the bubble burst, Louisiana
"became a name of disgust and terror" in Europe, and doubtless thousands
hoped never to hear the word "Mississippi" again, and yet it was only time
that was needed to make even such wild prophecies true.
The monopolistic venture failed. Many of the colonists whom the company
entered died or ran away; millions of pounds had been spent, there was no
return, and there was little tangible to show for it all--a few thousand
white settlers, many of whom, in a phrase current to-day in the States,
were "undesirable citizens," living in palisaded cabins. So the little
settlement became a crown colony again and came back to the king, but not
to him in whose name it had been originally taken, for that king was dead.
Louis XIV's name, kept in "Louisiana," claims now but a fragment of that
vast territory which might have been his forever. The little outcast
colony was laid on the steps of Versailles again, and was again subject to
"paternalistic nursing," because of or in despite of which it began at
last to show signs of growth. It was at the cost of a half-century of
time, of eight or more millions of livres to the king, Crozat and the
company, of millions upon millions more to those who bought the worthless
stock of the Mississippi Company, and of ignominy and shame, that La
Salle's dream began to have realization, while on the Atlantic seaboard
the English colonies were growing luxuriantly in comparative neglect.
Meanwhile French explorers were traversing this mighty interior valley
with all the spirit of Cartier, Joliet, Champlain, and La Salle. Pierre
Charles le Sueur had ascended the Mississippi far toward its source in
search of copper and lead. Bernard de la Harpe and Louis Juchereau, the
Sieur de St. Denis, explored the Red River and penetrated as far as the
Spanish settlement of St. Jean Baptiste on the Rio Grande. Each might have
a volume. The turbid Missouri even (which Marquette and Joliet first saw
heading great trees down into the Mississippi) was not passed by as
impervious to the hardihood of undaunted, amphibious geographers such as
La Harpe and Du Tisne.
Two brothers, Pierre and Paul Mallet, penetrated to the old Spanish
settlement at Santa Fé and may have been the first of Frenchmen to see the
farther boundary of the valley, the Rocky Mountains. Whether they did or
not, it is certain that far to the northwest two other brothers did reach
that mighty range and "discovered that part of it to which the name Rocky
Mountains properly belongs."
The brothers La Vérendrye in 1735, two centuries after Cartier, were still
looking for a way to the western sea (Mer de l'Ouest). With their father
these sons ventured their lives and gave their fortunes to the exploration
of the northwest out beyond Lake Superior, out past the ranch where a
century and a half later President Roosevelt wrote the "Winning of the
West," out to or beyond the edge of what is now the great Yellowstone
National Park, anticipating by more than sixty years the first stages of
the famous Lewis and Clark expedition. The snow covered the peaks of the
Big Horn Mountains, but the party probably forced a way to the Wind River
Range before they reluctantly turned back from the foot of the mountains,
disappointedly fancying that they might have seen the Pacific if they
could have reached the summits.
It is not far from the place where they began their homeward journey that
I have seen two trickling streams, within a few yards of each other,
start, one toward the gulf and one toward the Pacific--but the latter had
seven or eight hundred miles of mountain and forest to pass before it
could touch what the Vérendrye brothers hoped to see. Yet, though they, as
Cartier, Champlain, Nicolet, La Salle, and scores of others did not find
the way to the western sea, their unappreciated, heroic efforts made at
their own expense stretched the line of French forts all the way across
the valley from sea to mountain range, completing, as one historian has
represented it, a T, but as it seems to me rather a cross, with a
perpendicular column reaching from the gulf to Hudson's Bay, and its
transverse strip from the Big Horn Mountains to Cape Breton. Or so it
stood for a day in the world's history, raised by unspeakable suffering, a
vision once seen never to be forgotten.
Chevalier de la Vérendrye, who had seen, first of white men, the snow-
capped mountains, "sank into poverty and neglect," and finally perished in
the shipwreck off the island of Cape Breton. So was the whole east and
west line of French pioneering retraced and extended in the life of one
hardy French family. [Footnote: Parkman, "The Discovery of the Rocky
Mountains," in _Atlantic Monthly_, 61:783-793. "A Half Century of
Conflict," 2:4-43. Thwaites, "A Brief History of Rocky Mountain
Exploration," pp. 26-36.]
And as to the north and south line, every year saw its foundations and
strength increase as if it were a a growing tree. Along the Mississippi,
forts were planted and Jesuit and Sulpician missions grew. The Illinois
country enjoyed a "boom," as we say in America, even in those days, and
became known for a time as the Garden of New France; but only for a time,
for it was so easy to earn a livelihood there that it was not long before
the habitants reverted, under temptation, to the preagricultural, hunting
state after giving a moment's prophecy of the stirring life that was some
day to make it the garden of the new world, the busiest spot in the busy
world.
There are glimpses here and there of gayety and halcyon days that give
brightness to the story so full of tragedy. There was in the very heart of
the valley (near the site of St. Louis, where a great world's fair was
held a few years ago), Fort Chartres, mentioned above, "the centre of life
and fashion in the West" as well as "a bulwark against Spain and a barrier
to England." [Footnote: See Edward G. Mason, "Old Fort Chartres," in his
"Chapters from Illinois History," 1901.] But in time the Indians, stirred
by the English rivalry, swarmed as well as mosquitoes about the place, and
there were battles, the echoes of which are still heard, we are told, in
the regions south of St. Louis even in Our days. A young French officer,
the Chevalier d'Artaguette, captured by the Chickasaws, was burned at the
stake. He and his kin were loved by all the French and the song they used
to sing of him is kept in a negro melody whose "oft-repeated chorus" ran:
"In the days of D'Artaguette,
Hé! Ho! Hé!
It was the good old time.
The world was led straight with a switch,
Hé! Ho! Hé!
Then there were no negroes, no ribbons,
No diamonds
For the vulgar.
Hé! Ho! Hé!"
And here even in this remote place premonitions of the great and imminent
struggle with the English are ominously heard. We hear the governor-
general of Canada, the Marquis de la Galissonnière, asking the home
government in France not to leave the little colony of Illinois to perish
--not for its own sake, but "else Canada and Louisiana would fall apart";
still urging, moreover, the value for fabrics of the wool of buffaloes,
which roam the prairies in innumerable multitudes, the readiness of the
earth for the plough, and the availability of the buffalo as a domestic
animal. "If caught and attached to a plough," says the governor, who spoke
truthfully but with little knowledge of this wild animal, "it would move
it at a speed superior to that of the domestic ox." I do not know how
appealing this harnessing of the original motive power of the prairie to
the uses of agriculture was, and it is not of importance now. The buffalo
has long since gone. Even the ox and the Norman horse, so long in use
there, have been largely supplanted by that mysterious force, electricity,
which Franklin was discovering on the other side of the Alleghany
Mountains at the very time that this suggestion was being made to the
minister of Louis XV. It is known, however, that the king took thought of
the little Illinois colony, for the fort of wood was transformed under the
direction of Chevalier de Macarty into a fortress of stone and garrisoned
by nearly a regiment of French troops. A million crowns it cost the king,
but this could not have distressed his Majesty, engaged in "throwing dice
with piles of Louis d'or before him" and princes about him.
This was in the early fifties, and the fort was hardly transformed before
the rifles of George Washington's men were heard from the eastern barriers
disputing the claim of the French to the Ohio country. Jumonville, who was
slain among the rocks of the Laurel Mountains, in the Alleghanies (killed
in the opening skirmish of the final struggle), had a young brother, Neyon
de Villiers, a captain in Chevalier de Macarty's garrison at Fort
Chartres; and eastward he hastened, up the Ohio, to avenge his brother's
death. "M. de Wachenston" (as the name appears in French despatches) was
driven back, and so the "Old French War" in America began.
It was from this mid-continent fortress and its fertile environs that help
in arms and rations went to the support of that final struggle along the
mountains and lakes, even as far as La Salle's old Fort Niagara, where the
valiant Aubry, at the head of his Illinois expedition, fell covered with
wounds and many of his men were killed or taken prisoners. That was about
all that one in the interior of the valley heard of the battles of the
Seven Years' War out upon its edges.
What gives peculiar interest in this fortress to us to-day is that it was
for a little time the only place in North America where the flag of the
French was flying. All New France had been ceded by the treaty of Paris in
1763, but the little garrison of forty men still held Fort Chartres.
Pontiac and other friendly Indians intercepted all approaching English
forces till, in 1765 (two years after the treaty of Paris and the cession
of Canada and all the valley east of the Mississippi), St. Ange, the
commander, announced to Pontiac, friendly to the end, that all was over,
that "Onontio, their great French father," could no longer help his red
children, that he was beyond the sea and could not hear, and that he,
Pontiac, must make peace with the English. Then it was that the forty-
second Highlanders, the "Black Watch," were permitted to enter the fort
and to put the red cross of St. George in place of the fleur-de-lis. And
so it was at Fort Chartres that the mighty struggle ended and that the
titular life of the great empire of France in the new world actually went
out.
The river, seemingly sentient, and still French, as I have said, soon
swept away the site of the village outside the fort; and when the English
had begun to look upon this as their permanent headquarters in the
northwest--this fort, which Captain Pittman had reported to be the best-
built fort in America--the still hostile river rose one night, and with
its "resistless flood" tore away a bastion and a part of the river wall,
then moved its channel away, and left the fort a mile inland.
The magazine still stands, or did a little time ago when I visited the
site and found it nearly hidden by the trees, bushes, and weeds--all that
is visibly left of the old French domain--and not far away, hidden at the
foot of a hill, lies, as I have said, the village of Prairie du Rocher, "a
little piece of old France transplanted to the Mississippi" a century and
a half ago and forgotten.
It was on Champlain's cliff and beneath Cartier's Mount Royal that the
unequal contest for the possession of America ended, where it began--a
contest whose story, as Parkman says, in a sense demeaning his own great
contribution, "would have been a history, if faults of constitution and
the bigotry and folly of rulers had not dwarfed it to an episode." But if
it was an episode to the New Englander, or even to Frenchmen at the
distance in time at which I write, it rises to the importance of history
out in that region of America, where a century of unexampled fortitude
needs rather an epic poet than a historian to give it its place in the
world's consciousness.
Indeed, historians of the United States to-day, as well as statesmen of
that time, are in substantial agreement in this: That the presence of the
French on all the colonial borders compelled a confederation of the
varying interests of the several English colonies, kept them penned in
between the mountains and the sea until there had been developed some
degree of solidarity, some ability to act together; and then by the
sudden, if compulsory, withdrawal of the pressure not only allowed their
expansion but relieved them of all need of help from England and so of
dependence upon her.
"We have caught them at last," said Louis XV's minister, Choiseul,
speaking of the treaty of Paris in 1763. [Footnote: Bancroft, "History of
the United States," 4:460.] Burke [Footnote: William Burke, "Remarks on
the Letter Addressed to Two Great Men."] prophesied that the removal of
France from North America would precipitate, as it did, the division of
the British Empire. And Richard Henry Greene, the great English historian,
dates the foundation of the great independent republic of the west (the
United States) from the triumph of Wolfe on the Heights of Abraham.
It is interesting testimony in support of this fear of the eventual loss
of all the colonies in such a cession, or such an acceptance, that the
English commissioners debated long whether it might be more profitable to
retain the little island of Guadeloupe instead of all New France. And it
would appear that except for the advice of Benjamin Franklin this
substitution would probably have been made.
France, then, having borne the brunt of conflict with nature and the
natives in that valley, having revealed the riches of that valley to the
world, having consecrated its entire length and breadth by high valor and
sacrifice, having possessed that valley practically to the very eve of the
birth of the nation that now occupies it, and having helped by substantial
aid the struggling colonies to their independence, deserves (not through
her monarchs or ministers chiefly, but through the new-world pioneers, who
gave illustration of the spirit and stuff of Frenchmen) a lasting and a
large share of credit for the establishment of the republic which has its
most vigorous life in that valley.
New France has passed and New England, too, but in their stead the new
republic, recruited from all nations under heaven, ties their lost
dominions into a power which is immensely greater than the sum of the two
could have been, greater than it could have been in the hands of either
alone.
There was for a little time a dream of the revival of New France out
beyond the Mississippi, for there was a vast part of that valley that did
not pass to England in 1763. The great territory between the Mississippi
and the mountains, whose "snow-encumbered" peaks the Vérendrye brothers
had so longingly looked upon, was abandoned to Spain, or rather thrust
upon Spain, already claiming it. France wanted to give it to England in
order that Florida might be saved to Spain, her ally, but England did not
hesitate as she did in making choice between the eastern half of the
valley and Guadeloupe. She declined. So with an apparent magnanimity,
which is greatly to be discounted when we come to know how worthless even
the people of the United States, years later, considered this trans-
Mississippi country, France, "secretly tired of her colony," finally
induced Spain to accept it. The Spanish monarch, as if making the best of
a bad bargain, took it with many excuses for his seemingly poor judgment.
But though Louis's minister, Choiseul, chuckled outwardly over the
embarrassment to England of his compulsory cession of Canada, New France,
Illinois, and Louisiana (instead of Guadeloupe) and made a show of
magnanimity in thrusting the other half of the Mississippi upon Spain, and
though Turgot's simile between colonies and ripe fruit was often repeated
for justification and consolation, the loss of these possessions was
undoubtedly keenly felt and the dream of their recovery cherished; at any
rate, the recovery of that part which lay beyond the Mississippi.
But that possession had become more precious to the sovereign of Spain,
who refused the proffers that France was able to make in the next thirty
years. The dream of repossession became fonder to the French republic.
Talleyrand, who had spent a year in travel in the United States, urged the
acquisition not merely for France's own sake but to curb the ambitions of
the Americans, "whose conduct ever since the moment of their independence
is enough to prove this truth: the Americans are devoured by pride,
ambition, and cupidity."
"There are," he said, "no other means of putting an end to the ambition of
the Americans than that of shutting them up within the limits which nature
seems to have traced for them; but Spain is not in a condition to do this
great work alone. She cannot, therefore, hasten too quickly to engage the
aid of a preponderating power, yielding to it a small part of her immense
domains in order to preserve the rest."
"Let the court of Madrid cede these districts to France and from that
moment the power of America is bounded by the limit which it may suit the
interests and the tranquillity of France and Spain to assign her. The
French Republic ... will be a wall of brass forever impenetrable to the
combined efforts of England and America." [Footnote: Quoted in Henry
Adams's "History of the United States," 1:357.]
If in Napoleon's mind the dream was as sinister, as regards the United
States, it was not so for long. It contemplated at first the occupation of
Santo Domingo, the quelling of the insurrection there, then the seizure of
Louisiana, already promised to France by Spain, then the acquisition of
Florida, the conversion of the Gulf of Mexico into a French lake, and
ultimately the extension of the province of Louisiana to the Alleghanies
and, perhaps, even to the old borders of New France along the Great Lakes
and the St. Lawrence. But plague and slaughter met his armies in Santo
Domingo in the first step toward the realization of his vast design, and
the vision, in the shifting light of events in Europe and on the shores of
America as well, soon assumed other shape and color and at last
disappeared entirely, supplanted by the vision of a strengthened American
republic that would come to be a rival of England. This was what came (in
his own language) instead of his dream of a New France beyond the
Mississippi, beyond the American republic:
"I know the full value of Louisiana, and I have been desirous of repairing
the fault of the French negotiator who abandoned it in 1763. A few lines
of a treaty have restored it to me, and I have scarcely recovered it when
I must expect to lose it. But if it escapes from me, it shall one day cost
dearer to those who oblige me to strip myself of it than to those to whom
I wish to deliver it. The English have successfully taken from France,
Canada, Cape Breton, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the richest portions
of Asia. They are engaged in exciting troubles in St. Domingo. They shall
not have the Mississippi which they covet. Louisiana is nothing in
comparison with their conquests in all parts of the globe, and yet the
jealousy they feel at the restoration of this colony to the sovereignty of
France acquaints me with their wish to take possession of it, and it is
thus that they will begin the war.... I think of ceding it to the United
States. I can scarcely say that I cede it to them, for it is not yet in
our possession. If, however, I leave the least time to our enemies, I
shall only transmit an empty title to those republicans whose friendship I
seek. They only ask of me one town in Louisiana, but I already consider
the colony as entirely lost, and it appears to me that in the hands of
this growing power, it will be more useful to the policy and even to the
commerce of France than if I should attempt to keep it." [Footnote:
Marbois, "History of Louisiana," pp. 263-264.]
The United States Commissioner came one day to Paris to purchase New
Orleans, and he went back to America with a deed to more than 800,000
square miles of the region which La Salle had claimed for Louis XIV by
virtue of the commission which he carried in his bosom from the Rue de la
Truanderie more than a century before:
"The First Consul of the French Republic, desiring to give to the United
States a strong proof of friendship, doth hereby cede to the said United
States, in the name of the French Republic, forever and in full
sovereignty, the said territory, with all its rights and appurtenances, as
fully and in the same manner as they might have been acquired by the
French Republic." [Footnote: Treaty of Purchase between the United States
and the French Republic, Art. I.]
The dream faded into something undefined but greater, relieving Napoleon
and France of immediate dangers and promising more to humanity, we must
agree, than a colony administered at that distance and separated from a
young, growing nation merely by a shifting river that must inevitably have
made trouble instead of preventing it.
Whatever may be said of Napoleon's motives or compulsions in this matter
or of his service to mankind in others, he has been "useful to the
universe," not in preventing England from ruling in that valley and so
dominating America, but in making it possible for the United States to
undertake the greatest task ever given into the hands of a republic, and
at the same time enabling it to keep the good-will of that people who
might (if the other dream had been realized) have become the worst of her
enemies. It was Napoleon, whatever his motive, Napoleon in the name of the
French people, who gave the United States the possibility of becoming a
world-power.