THE PEOPLING OF THE WILDERNESS
Let us remind ourselves again, before the hordes of frontiersmen and
settlers come over the mountains and up the lakes and down the rivers,
erasing most of the tangible memories of the inter-montane, primeval
western wilderness, that France evoked it from the unknown.
A circle drawn round the Louvre with the radius of two kilometres,
enclosed the little patch of earth from which were evoked these millions
of acres of untouched forests and millions of acres of virgin plain and
prairie, seamed and watered by a hundred thousand streams, washed by a
chain of the mightiest inland fresh-water oceans, and guarded by two
ranges of mountains. Within that narrow circle, four kilometres in
diameter, stood Cartier dreaming of Asia, asking for permission to explore
the mysterious square gulf, the St. Lawrence, and again presenting to the
king the dusky captive Donnacona; within that circle was the street, Rue
aux Ours, whose meat shops Lescarbot in Acadia remembered as the place of
good food and doubtless of excited talk concerning the unexplored New
France, whose hardships and pleasures he afterward tasted; within that
circle Champlain walked, as in a dream, we are told, impatient as a lion
in a cage, longing to be again upon the wilderness path, westward of
Quebec, toward the unknown; within that circle the priest Olier, of St.
Germain-des-Prés, had his vision that led to the founding of Montreal,
whose consecration was celebrated also within that same circumference at
the Cathedral of Notre Dame; within that circle La Salle lodged in Rue de
la Truanderie, awaiting his fateful commission that should give him leave
to make real his dream of a wilderness empire; not a stone's throw away
from the Rue de la Truanderie ran the street having its beginning or end
in Rue aux Ours, Rue Quincampoix, in which the thousands jostled and
fought from morning till night for the purchase of stock in that same
wilderness empire; and it was finally within that same circle that the
wilderness dream, seen for a moment again by Napoleon, grew into the
vision of a republic--a republic that might be found, as Napoleon said,
"too powerful for Europe in two or three centuries," but in whose bosom
dissensions, as he prophesied, could be looked for in the future. A
wilderness, with a radius of nearly a thousand kilometres, was evoked from
the envisioning, praying, adventuring, and enduring of a few Frenchmen,
led by fewer Frenchmen, who stood sooner or later all within the narrow
circle that sweeps around the Sorbonne, but four kilometres in diameter.
I walked, in the afternoon of the last day of the old year 1910, entirely
around the old city of Paris by way of its fortifications, in a circle
three kilometres longer of radius, within a few hours encompassing a
ground, rich in what it yields to-day in fruits of art, literature, and
science--of indefatigable, intellectual industry and imagination--but
richer than its inhabitants know in what has grown upon the billion acres
which it has lifted out of the ocean, [Footnote: For it will be remembered
that to geographers before Cartier this Mississippi Valley was but a sea,
even as ages before it actually was.] and given as a soil where
civilization could gather its forces from all peoples and begin afresh on
the problems of the individual and society.
It is a new view of Paris, I know. No historian of the United States has,
so far as I am aware, presented it. Yet I think it is not a distorted
vision which enabled me, looking in from the old fortifications, to see
Paris not merely as the capital of art and of a great modern language and
literature, as those who live there see her, nor as the centre of gayety
and frivolity, as so many of my own countrymen see her, but as the parent
of fruitful wildernesses, as a patron of pioneers, as the divinity of the
verges, as the godmother of a frontier democracy.
It is to be remembered, too, let me say again, that, while England held
control of one half of the Mississippi Valley for twenty years after 1763,
and Spain of the other half for twenty more, the occupation was hardly
more than nominal. Indeed, the English king, George III, in 1763 forbade
colonization--as Louis XIV at one time had wished to prevent it--beyond
the Alleghany Mountains without his special permission, and, moreover, it
was hardly more than ten years after the titular transfer to England that
the colonists declared themselves independent. As for the Spanish
sovereign, delaying five years in sending a representative to take over
the government of his unprofitable half of the wilderness, he had no need
to make a decree forbidding settlement. There were no eager settlers.
What virtually happened, therefore, was that the pioneers of France gave
the valley not to England, not to Spain, not even to the American-English
colonists, but to the pioneers of the young republic, who, whatever their
origin, were without European nationality.
It may be said with approximate accuracy that, while the British flag
supplanted the French for a little on a few scattered forts on the east
side of the Mississippi and the Spanish flag floated for a little while on
the other side of the river, the heart of America really knew in turn,
first, only the old Americans, the Indians; second, the French pioneers;
and third, the new Americans.
The valley heard, as I have said, hardly a sound of the Seven Years' War,
the "Old French War" as Parkman called it. Only on its border was there
the slightest bloodshed. All it knew was that the fleur-de-lis flags no
longer waved along its rivers and that after a few years men came with
axes and ploughs through the passes in the mountains carrying an emblem
that had never grown in European fields--a new flag among national
banners. They were bearing, to be sure, a constitution and institutions
strange to France, but only less strange to England, and perhaps no less
strange to other nations of Europe.
I emphasize this because our great debt to English antecedents has
obscured the fact that the great physical heritage between the mountains,
consecrated of Gallic spirit, came, in effect, directly from the hands
that won its first title, the French, into the hands of American settlers,
at the moment when a "separate and individual people" were "springing into
national life."
This territory was distinct from that of the British colonies up to the
very time of the American Revolution. And when the Revolution was over and
independence was won, by the aid of France let it be remembered, the only
settlements within the valley were three little clusters of French
gathered about the forts once French, then for a few years nominally
English, and then American: two thousand inhabitants at Detroit and four
thousand at Vincennes, on the Wabash, and in the hamlets along the
Mississippi above the Ohio.
How little the life of those settlements was disturbed is intimated by
what occurred in one of the Illinois villages--that about Fort Chartres.
The venerable and beloved commander, Louis St. Ange de Belle Rive, had
upon the first formal surrender ascended the Mississippi River and crossed
to the Spanish territory, where the foundations of the city of St. Louis
were being laid, but the British officer in command at Fort Chartres dying
suddenly, and there being no one competent to succeed him, St. Ange
returned to his old post, restored order, and remained there until another
British officer could reach the fort. The habitants were accustomed "to
obey, without question, the orders of their superiors.... (They) yielded a
passive obedience to the new rulers.... They remained the owners, the
tillers of the soil." [Footnote: Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," 1:38,
Alleghany edition.] And one of the last acts of the Continental Congress
and the first of the new Congress, under the Constitution, was to provide
for an enumeration of these French settlers and for the allotment to them
of lands in this valley where they had been the sole owners.
Many of the French habitants were not of pure blood. The French seldom
took women with them into the wilderness. They were traders, trappers, and
soldiers. They married Indian wives, untrammelled, as President Roosevelt
says, "by the queer pride which makes a man of English stock unwilling to
make a red-skinned woman his wife, though anxious enough to make her his
concubine." [Footnote: Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," 1:41.]
They were under ordinary circumstances good-humored, kindly men, "always
polite" [Footnote: "Winning of the West," 1:45.]--in "agreeable contrast"
to most frontiersmen--religious, yet fond of merrymaking, of music and
dancing; and while, as time went on, they came to borrow traits of their
red neighbors and even to forget the years and months (reckoning time, as
the Indians did, from the flood of the river or the ripening of
strawberries), still they kept many valuable and amiable qualities, to be
merged eventually in the new life that soon swept over their beautiful
little villages. Of the coming of a strange, new, strenuous life, a stray
English or American fur trader gave them occasional presentment, as it
were, the spray of the swelling, restless sea of human spirits, beating
against the mountain barriers and flung far inland.
In the early part of the eighteenth century an English governor of the
colony of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood, had led a band of horsemen known
afterward as his "Knights of the Golden Horseshoe," with great hilarity,
"stimulated by abundance of wine, champagne, rum," and other liquors, over
the Blue Ridge Mountains, a part of the Alleghany Range, to the
Shenandoah. He had talked menacingly of the French who held the valley
beyond, had encouraged the extension of English settlements to break the
line of French possessions, and had formed a short-lived Virginia-Indian
company to protect the frontier against French and Indian incursions. This
expedition was a visible challenge. With his merry company he buried a
record of his "farthest west" journey in one of the bottles emptied en
route and then went back to tidewater. That was the end of his adventure;
little or nothing came of his "flourish" except the extension of the
Virginia frontier to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Only traders and trappers
ventured farther or even so far during the next three or four decades, and
they were a "set of abandoned wretches," or so a later governor
characterized them, though Parkman mentions some exceptions, and I wish to
believe there were more, since one of them, I find, carried my own name
far into that country on his trading and hunting expeditions among and
with the Indians.
Searching, a few years ago, the files of a paper published early in the
nineteenth century on the edge of this wilderness, which was already
calling itself the _Western World_--a paper, one of the first of the
myriad white leaves into which the falling forests have been converted and
scattered thick enough to cover every square foot of the valley--I
happened upon this record, surprised as if a bit of the transmontane sea
spray had touched my own face on the Mississippi: "That delightful
country" (Kentucky), it ran, "from time immemorial had been the resort of
wild beasts and of men only less savage, when in the year 1767 it was
visited by John Finley and a few wandering white men from the British
colony of North Carolina, allured by the love of hunting and the desire of
barter with the Indians. The distance of this country from populous parts
of the colonies, almost continuous wars, and the claims of the French had
prevented all attempts at exploration."
I seize upon this partly because, having succeeded to the name of this
hunter and trader, who entered the valley just as St. Ange was yielding
Fort Chartres to the English and crossing the Mississippi, I am able to
show that my own ancestral sympathies while dwelling on the frontiers were
not with the French. But I quote it chiefly because he was a typical
forerunner, a first frontiersman.
Like the coureur de bois Nicolas Perrot, of exactly a century before, he
was only the dawn of the light--the light of another day, which was
beginning to appear in the valley. For it was he who led Daniel Boone to
the first exploring and settling of that wilderness south of the Ohio,
which, to quote further from the paper called the _Western World_,
[Footnote _Western World_, published at Frankfort, Ky., 1806-8, by John
Wood and Joseph M. Street.] had a soil "more fat and fertile than Egypt"--
and was the place where "Pan, if he ever existed, held dominion unmolested
of Ceres or Lucinia."
Such was the almost soundless beginning of what soon developed into a
mighty "processional," its rumblings of wagons and shoutings of drivers on
land and blowing of conches on the rivers increasing, accompanied by the
sound of rushing waters, the cry of frightened birds, and the thunders of
crashing trees. First came this silent hunter and fur trader, almost as
stealthy as the Indian in his movements; then the pale, gaunt, slow-
moving, half hunter, half farmer, too indolent to disturb the wilderness
from which he got a meagre living, planting his meagre crops among the
girdled trees of withered foliage, which he did not take the trouble to
cut down; then the backwoodsman, sallow as his immediate predecessor from
the shade of the forest, who with his axe made a little clearing, built a
"shack," turned his cattle into the grass that had grown for centuries
untouched, and let his pigs feed on the acorns; then the more robust
agriculturist who aggressively pushed back the shadows of the forest,
planted the wilderness with seeds of a magic learned in the valleys of
Europe and Asia, put up the fences of individualistic struggle, and built
his log cabin, the wilderness castle, the birthplace of the new American;
then the speculator and promoter (the hunter and explorer of the urban
occupation); and finally in their wake the builders of mills and factories
and cities--drab, smoky, vainglorious, ill-smelling, bad-architectured
centres of economic activity, fringed with unoccupied, unimproved, naked
areas, plotted and held for increment, earned only by risk and privation.
This processional, "this gradual and continuous progress of the European
race toward the Rocky Mountains," says the vivid pen of De Tocqueville,
"has the solemnity of a providential event. It is like a deluge of men,
rising unabatedly and driven daily onward by the hand of God." [Footnote:
"Democracy in America," ed. Gilman, 1:512.]
The story of this anabasis has been told in hundreds and thousands of
fragments--the anabasis that has had no katabasis--the literal going up of
a people, as we shall see, from primitive husbandry and handicraft and a
neighborly individualism, to another level, of machine labor, of more
comfortable living, and of socialized aspiration.
De Quincey has gathered into an immortal story the dramatic details of an
exodus that had its beginning and end just at the time when these half
huntsmen, half traders were creeping down from the farther ridges of the
Alleghanies into the wilderness, where the little French settlements were
clinging like clusters of ripened grapes to a great vine--the story of the
flight of the Kalmuck Tartars from the banks of the Volga, across the
steppes of Europe and the deserts of Asia to the frontiers of China--the
story of the journey of over a half million semi-barbarians, half of whom
perished by the way from cold or heat, from starvation or thirst, or from
the sabres and cannon of the savage hosts pursuing them by day and night
through the endless stretches--the story of the translation of these nomad
herdsmen on the steppes of Russia through "infinite misery" into stable
agriculturists beneath the great wall of China.
If the myriad details of this new-world migration could be summarized with
like genius, we should have a drama to put beside the exodus of Israel
from Egypt and their conquest of Canaan--a drama, less picturesque and
highly colored than that of the flight of the Tartars--their Oriental
costumes, their fierce horses, their camels and tents, showing, unhidden
of tree against the snowy or sandy desert--but infinitely more
consequential in the history of the human race.
The Indians, hostile to this horde that built cabins upon their hunting-
grounds and devoured their forests, were to the wilderness migrants,
driven, not of the hand of man but, as De Tocqueville says, "of the hand
of God" made manifest in some human instinct, some desire of freedom, some
hatred of convention, some hope of power or possession, what the Kirghese
and Bashkirs and Russians were to those Asiatic migrants, pursuing them
day and night like fiends for thousands of miles. And the myriad
sufferings of the American migrants from hunger and thirst, from the
freezing cold and the blasting, blistering, wilting heat, from the fevers
of the new-broken lands, from the ravages of locust and grasshopper, and
chinch-bug and drought, from isolation from human friendships, from want
of gentle nursing--even De Quincey's improvident travellers did not endure
more, nor the children of Israel, to whose thirst the smitten rock yielded
water, to whose hunger the heavens ministered with manna and the earth
with quail, whose pursuing enemies were drowned in the sea that closed
over their pathway, and whose confronting enemies in the land they entered
to possess were overcome by the aid of unseen armies that were heard
marching in the tops of the mulberry-trees, or were seen by friendly
vision assembling their chariots in the skies above.
Here across the Mississippi Valley is an exodus accomplished not of a
single night, as these two of which I have just spoken, but extended
through a hundred years of home leavings and love privations. Here is an
anabasis of a century of privations, titanic labors, frontier battles,
endured countless times, till these migrants of Europe and of the new-
world seaboard, became, as children of the wilderness, a new people, with
qualities so distinctive as to lead the highest authority [Footnote:
Frederick J. Turner, "The Significance of the Mississippi Valley in
American History," in Proceedings of the Mississippi Valley Historical
Association (1909-10), 3:159-184.] on the history of that valley to
characterize the west not as a geographic division of the United States,
but as a "form of society" with its own peculiar flowering, developed, not
as Parkman's magnificent fleur-de-lis, [Footnote: See Epilogue.] by cross-
fertilization, nor by grafting, but simply by the planting or sowing of
Old World seeds on new and free land, where the mountains kept off the
pollen of alien spirit, where the puritanical winds of the New England
coast were somewhat tempered by the warmer winds from the south, where the
waters had some iron in them, but, most of all, where the soil was
practically as free as when it came from the hands of the glaciers and the
streams.
It is this distinctiveness of development, due to the mountains' challenge
to every man's spirit as he passed, to the isolation which compelled him
to work out his own salvation, and to the constant struggle, largely
single-handed, with frontier forces--as well as the uniqueness of
background--that gave the west a character which identifies it to
discerning minds quite as much as its geographic boundaries. It is this
fact which makes the French pioneering preface to a civilization different
from anything that has developed elsewhere in the United States, and not
only different in the past but now the dominant force in American
education, politics, and industry.
What that civilization would have been without the adventurous French
preface we can but vainly surmise. What it is with that background, that
preface, is indeed the "foremost chapter in the files of time." As
Ambassador James Bryce has said: "What Europe is to Asia, what England is
to the rest of Europe, what America is to England, that the western States
are to the Atlantic States." [Footnote: "American Commonwealth," 1913 ed.,
2:892.] The French may dispute the implied claim of the second of these
comparisons, but even they will have a satisfaction in admitting that
their particular part of the United States is to the rest, which was not
touched by their priests and explorers, what "Europe is to Asia." And here
is my particular justification for asking the imaginations of the people
of France to occupy and hold that to which the preface has given them the
best of titles.
Meanwhile, that migration, heralded, as we have seen, just before the
Revolution, by huntsmen and traders, meagre by reason of Indian hostility
and the need of soldiers on the Atlantic side of the mountains till
independence had been won, became appreciable at the end of the century
and grew to an inundating stream after the War of 1812 had made the
Mississippi secure to the new republic beyond all question.
"Old America," said an observing English traveller in 1817, "seems to be
breaking up and moving westward. We are seldom out of sight, as we travel
on this grand track (the national turnpike through Pennsylvania) towards
the Ohio, of family groups behind and before us.... A small waggon so
light that you might almost carry it, yet strong enough to bear a good
load of bedding and utensils and provisions and a swarm of young citizens,
and to sustain marvellous shocks in its passage over these rocky heights
with two small horses and sometimes a cow or two, comprises their all;
excepting a little store of hard earned cash for the land-office of the
district; where they may obtain a title for as many acres as they possess
half dollars, being one-fourth of the purchase money. The waggon has a
tilt, or cover, made of a sheet, or perhaps a blanket. The family are seen
before, behind, or within the vehicle, according to the road or the
weather, or perhaps the spirits of the party.... A cart and single horse,
frequently affords the means of transfer, sometimes a horse and pack
saddle. Often the back of the poor pilgrim bears all his effects, and his
wife follows, bare footed, bending under the hopes of the family."
[Footnote: Morris Birkbeck, "Notes on a Tour in America, 1817," pp. 34,
35.] This is a detail of the exodus through the most northern mountain
pass.
Farther south the procession moved in heavy wagons drawn by four or six
horses. "Family groups, crowding the roads and fords, marching toward the
sunset," at right angles to the courses of the migratory birds, not
mindful as they of seasons, "were typical of the overland migration"
across Tennessee and Kentucky. The poorer classes travelled on foot, as at
the north, but drew after them carts with all their household effects.
[Footnote: F. J. Turner, "Rise of the New West," p. 80.]
Still farther south "the same type of occupation was to be seen; the
poorer classes of southern emigrants cut out their clearings along the
rivers that flowed to the gulf and to the lower Mississippi," [Footnote:
F. J. Turner, "Rise of the New West," p. 90.] and later still farther west
into what is now Texas.
The squatters whom I saw in my walk around the city of Paris, inhabiting
what was the military zone with their portable houses, or in their
dilapidated shacks, had better shelter than they who first invaded the
zone beyond the mountain walls that were the natural western
fortifications of the Atlantic colonies.
But though many of those western wilderness immigrants were "poor
pilgrims" and for a time squatters (as the immediately extramural
population of Paris), they were recruited from the sturdiest stock on the
Atlantic side of the fortifications. Some went, to be sure, who had failed
in the old place, but were ready to make new hazard; some wanted greater
freedom than the more highly socialized and conventionalized life within
the fortifications would permit; some longed for adventure; some sought a
fortune or competency perhaps impossible in the old settlements; some had
only the inherited promptings of the nomad savage in them, and kept ever
moving on, making their nameless graves out in the gloom of the forest or
upon the silent plains.
It was indeed a motley procession, the by-product of the more or less
conservative, sometimes politically or religiously intolerant,
aristocratic tide-water settlements. Yet do not make the mistake of
thinking that it was slag or refuse humanity, such as camps in the narrow
zone around the gates of Paris. It is rather like an industrial by-product
that has needed some slight change or adaptation to make it more valuable
to society than the original product upon which the manufacturers had kept
their attention fixed--or, at any rate, to make the margin of profit in
the whole industry greater. Out of once discarded, seemingly valueless
matter have come our coal-tar products: saccharine many times sweeter than
sugar, colors unknown to the old dyers, perfumes as fragrant as those
distilled from flowers, medicines potent to allay fevers. Up in the woods
of Canada last summer I found a chemist trying to do with the wood waste
what Remsen and Perkin and others have done with coal waste, and I cannot
resist the suggestion of my metaphor that there in the forest valleys
beyond the Alleghanies the elements and conditions were found to convert
this Atlantic by-product, unpromising outwardly, into the substance of a
new and precious civilization.
This overmountain procession came chiefly up the watercourses of the south
and middle States. Prior to 1830 the mass of pioneer colonists in most of
the Mississippi Valley had been contributed by the up-country of the
south. The dominant strain in those earlier comers, as President Roosevelt
reminds us, was Scotch-Irish, a "race doubly-twisted in the making, flung
from island to island and toughened by exile"--a race of frontiersmen than
whom a "better never appeared"--a race which was as "steel welded into the
iron of an axe." They form the kernel of the "distinctively and intensely
American stock who were the pioneers of the axe and the rifle, succeeding
the French pioneers of the sword and the bateaux."
What I have just said of them, these Scotch-Irish, is in quotation, for as
I have already intimated, my own ancestry is of that double-twisting; and
since the time when my first American ancestor settled as the first
permanent minister beyond the mountains, following the paths of the French
priests in their missions and became a member of a presbytery extending
from the mountains to the setting sun, until my last collateral ancestor
living among the Indians helped survey the range lines of new States and
finally marked the boundaries of the last farms in the passes of the
Rockies, that ancestry has followed the frontier westward from where
Céloron planted the emblems of French possession along the Ohio to where
Chevalier la Vérendrye looked upon the snowy and impassable peaks of the
Rockies.
The immigrants to America of that stock had, many of them, at once on
reaching the new land found the foot-hills of mountains, chiefly in
Pennsylvania. Here they settled, gradually pushing their way southward in
the troughs of the mountain streams and making finally a "broad belt from
north to south, a shield of sinewy men thrust in between the people of the
seaboard and the red warriors of the wilderness," the same men who
declared for American independence in North Carolina before any others,
even before the men of Massachusetts. With this stock there went over the
mountain men of other origins, of course, English, French Huguenots,
Germans, Hollanders, Swedes; but the Scotch-Irish were the core of the new
life, which in "iron surroundings" became strongly homogeneous--"yet
different from the rest of the world--even the world of America, and
infinitely more the world of Europe."
In the north the great rivers lay across the tedious paths that ran with
the lines of latitude. And so it was partly for physiographic reasons that
the first far-stretching expansions of the New England settlements were
not toward this great western wilderness but northward along the narrower
valleys. It was not until the migration had filled the meagre limits and
capacities of these smaller valleys and had carried school-houses and
churches and town halls well up granite hillsides, that the western exodus
came, to leave those hillside homes and institutional shelters as shells
found far from a receding sea, empty or habited by a new species of
immigrant. [Footnote: In one of those far northern valleys which I know
best there was a school, before the exodus, of some seventy pupils,
gathered from the farmers' families of the neighborhood. Now there are not
a half-dozen pupils, and they are carried to a neighboring district.]
Farms were abandoned for the fertile fields of the far west, from which
wheat can be imported for less than the cost of raising it on the sterile
hills and in the short-summered valleys. New England had once claimed a
fraction of the great west, as, indeed, had most of the other seaboard
colonies. But these claims were surrendered to the general government, as
we shall see later, "for the common good," and so her migrants had none
other than that instinct which follows lines of latitude to keep them
practically within the zone of her relinquished claims. Over into New
York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania her children overflowed till a map of
these States in 1820, colored to show the origin and character of their
various communities, made practically all of western New York, a part of
New Jersey and the northern third of Pennsylvania, an expanded New
England. Meanwhile the hardiest joined the transmontane migration, and in
the decade after the opening of the Erie Canal (1830-40) the whole
northern edge of the valley takes color of New England conquest.
So the first peopling was a mingling of the children of the first
strugglers with a raw savage continent; men already schooled in adversity,
already acquainted with some of the frontier problems--civilization's most
highly individualized, least socialized material, the wheat of the new
world's first winnowing.
What is particularly to be observed is that men of the north and the
south, as far apart as Carolina and Massachusetts, came together beyond
the mountains in the united building of commonwealths; for over those
mountains the rivers all ran toward the Mississippi, which tied the
interests of all together.
There was no north-and-south line then. The men of the valley were all
westerners, "men of the western world"; not yet very strong as
nationalists, that is, as men of the United States. "Men of the western
waters" they also called themselves, for they shunned the uplands and kept
near the streams by which or along which they had come into the wilderness
and from which they drank. Men of the axe they were, too, in that first
occupancy, never venturing far from the trees that gave them both roof and
fuel. It was later, as we have seen, that the men of the plough came where
the men of the axe had cleared the way.
It is interesting to notice that when these builders of new States came to
devise symbols for their official seals, many of them took the plough,
that implement which we know was carried in the first Aryan migration into
the plains of Europe, but some of them put a rising sun on the horizon of
their shields--the sign of the consciousness of a new day.
The foundation, then, of the new societies was laid in what might be
called a concrete of character and lineage--heterogeneous, but all of the
neo-American period and not of the paleo-European. Here came the ancestors
of Abraham Lincoln, among the axemen from the South, and here the
ancestors of General Grant, among the builders of towns, from New England,
both born in cabins. And these instances are but suggestive of the
conglomerate that was to be as practicable for building purposes (the co-
efficient of spirit being once determined) as any homogeneous, age-old
rock used in the structure of nations. It became "homogeneous" not as
bricks or stones built into a wall by mortar or cement but as concrete,
eternal as the hills, needing not to be chiselled and split but only to be
moulded and "set" at just the right moment. If this gives any suggestion
of want of permanence, of liability of cracking, then the figure is not
fortunate. I mean only to suggest, by still another metaphor, that out of
the myriad rugged individualities, idiosyncrasies, and independences a new
rock has been formed.
How distinctly western this first migration was you may know from the fact
that there was frequent talk of secession from the Union by the seaboard
commonwealths in the early post-revolutionary days. There were even, as we
have seen, hopes and fears that a Franco-American republic might grow out
of that solidarity and independent spirit that were ready to forsake the
government on the eastern side of the mountains, which seemed to be
heedless of western needs. This tells us, who are conscious of the
national spirit which is now stronger, perhaps, in that valley than in any
other part of the Union, how strong the western, the anti-nationalistic,
spirit must have been then.
But that was before the coming of the east-and-west canal and the east-
and-west railroads, which virtually upheaved a new watershed and changed
the whole physiographic, social, and economic relationships of the west.
The old French river Colbert, the Eternal River, was virtually cut into
two great rivers, one of which was to empty into the gulf (just as it did
in La Salle's day and in Iberville's day), while the other was to run
through the valley of the Great Lakes, down through the valley of the
hostile Iroquois, into the harbor of New York. This is not observable on
the topographical maps simply because of our unimaginative definition of a
watershed. A watershed is changed, according to that definition, only by
an actual elevation or depression of the surface of the earth, whereas a
railroad or canal that bridges ravines and tunnels or climbs elevations,
or a freight rate that diverts traffic into a new course, as suddenly
raises or lowers and as certainly removes watersheds as if mountains were
miraculously lifted and carried into the midst of the sea.
So there came to be not only two rivers but two valleys, the one of the
lake and prairie plainsmen and the other of the gulf plainsmen. The steam
shuttles flying east and west by land and water wove a pattern in the
former different from the latter but on the same warp. Two widely unlike
industrial and social systems gradually developed, and they, in turn,
struggling for the mastery of lands beyond the Mississippi, divided the
nearer west--once a homogeneous state of mind--into two wests and all but
disrupted the Union.
Then the direct European immigration began, millions coming from single
states of Europe, sifting into the neo-American settlements, but for the
most part passing on, in mighty armies, to possess whole tracts farther
west, along and beyond the Mississippi. In some parts of the northwest to-
day the parents of three men out of four were born in Europe--in
Scandinavia, in Germany, in Russia, in Italy.
So France, keeping near her those whom she loves best, her own children,
has yet seen her Nouvelle France draw to it the children of all other
nations. As from Hagar exiled in the wilderness has a new race sprung--has
the wilderness been peopled.
In my boyhood the last division of that great exodus, largely made up of
migrants from the eastern half of the valley, was still passing westward.
One of the banners which some of the wagons covered with canvas ("prairie-
schooners," as they were called) used to fly was "Pike's Peak or Bust," an
Americanism indicating the intention of the pilgrims to reach the mountain
at the western terminus of the great valley or die in the attempt.
Occasionally one came back with the inglorious substitute legend upon his
wagon, "Busted"--a laconic intimation of failure. But this was the
exception. The west kept, till it had made them her own, most of those who
ventured their all for a home in the wilderness.
There were "two great commemorative monuments that arose to mark the depth
and permanence of the awe" which possessed all who shared the calamities
or witnessed the results of the Tartar migration. One was a "Romanang"--a
"national commemoration, with music rich and solemn," of all the souls who
departed to the rest of Paradise from the "afflictions of the desert"--and
the "other, more durable and more commensurate to the scale of the
calamity and to the grandeur of the national exodus," "mighty columns of
granite and brass," where the exodus had ended in the shadow of the
Chinese wall. The inscription on these columns reads:
By the Will of God,
Here, upon the Brink of these Deserts,
Which from this Point begin and stretch away
Pathless, treeless, waterless,
For thousands of miles, and along the margins of many
mighty Nations,
Rested from their labors and from great afflictions,
Under the shadow of the Chinese Wall,
And by the favor of Kien Long, God's Lieutenant upon
Earth,
The ancient Children of the Wilderness--the Turgote
Tartars--
Flying before the wrath of the Grecian Czar,
Wandering Sheep who had strayed away from the Celestial
Empire in the year 1616,
But are now mercifully gathered again, after infinite sorrow,
Into the fold of their forgiving Shepherd.
Hallowed be the spot forever,
and
Hallowed be the day--September 8, 1771!
Amen.
There have been many expositions of the fruits of the Mississippi Valley's
agriculture and manufacture and mining and thinking and teaching and
preaching and ministering, but there has been no general commemoration
with "music rich and solemn" of those who endured the "afflictions of the
wilderness," though the last of the pioneers will soon have departed to
his rest, for fourteen years ago it was officially declared that there was
no longer a frontier. But mighty columns not of man's rearing stand upon
the farther edge of that western valley, columns of rock rich with gold
and silver and every other precious metal, surmounted, some of them the
year through, with capitals of snow and lacking only the legend:
Here upon the Brink of the Plains
Which stretched away pathless, treeless, boundless,
Ended their century-long exodus
The New Children of the Wilderness,
Driven by the Hand of God
Westward and ever Westward
Till they have at last entered
Into the full Heritage of those
Who, first of Pioneers,
Traced the rivers and lakes of this Valley
Between the eternal mountains.