IN THE TRAILS OF THE COUREURS DE BOIS
"It is a mistake," said one of the statesmen of the Mississippi Valley,
Senator Thomas H. Benton, "to suppose that none but men of science lay off
a road. There is a class of topographical engineers older than the schools
and more unerring than the mathematicians. They are the wild animals--
buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, bears-which traverse the forest not by
compass but by an instinct which leads them always the right way-to the
lowest passes in the mountains, the shallowest fords in the rivers, the
richest pastures in the forests, the best salt springs, and the shortest
practicable lines between remote points. They travel thousands of miles,
have their annual migrations backwards and forwards, and never miss the
best and shortest route. These are the first engineers to lay out a road
in a new country; the Indians follow them, and hence a buffalo road
becomes a warpath. The first white hunters follow the same trails in
pursuing their game; and after that the buffalo road becomes the wagon
road of the white man, and finally the macadamized road or railroad of the
scientific man." [Footnote: Speech on a bill for the construction of a
highway to the Pacific, December 16, 1850.]
A hunter of wild sheep in the Rocky Mountains following their trails
wonders if they were made a year, five, or ten years ago, and is told by
the scientist at his side that they may have been sixteen thousand years
old, so long have these first engineers been at work. In some places of
Europe, I am told, their fellow engineers, longer in the practice of their
profession, have actually worn paths in the rocks by their cushioned feet.
It is a mistake, therefore, we are reminded, to suppose that the forests
and plains of the Mississippi Valley were trackless. They were coursed by
many paths. If you have by chance read Châteaubriand's "Atala," you will
have a rather different notion of the American forests, especially of the
Mississippi Valley. "On the western side of the Mississippi," he wrote,
"the waves of verdure on the limitless plains (savannas) appear as they
recede to rise gradually into the azure sky"; but on the eastern half of
the valley, "trees of every form, of every color, and of every perfume
throng and grow together, stretching up into the air to heights that weary
the eye to follow. Wild vines ... intertwine each other at the feet of
these trees, escalade their trunks and creep along to the extremity of
their branches, stretching from the maple to the tulip-tree, from the
tulip-tree to the hollyhock, and thus forming thousands of grottos, arches
and porticos. Often, in their wanderings from tree to tree, these creepers
cross the arm of a river, over which they throw a bridge of flowers.... A
multitude of animals spread about life and enchantment. From the
extremities of the avenues may be seen bears, intoxicated with the grape,
staggering upon the branches of the elm-trees; caribous bathe in the lake;
black squirrels play among the thick foliage; mocking-birds, and Virginian
pigeons not bigger than sparrows, fly down upon the turf, reddened with
strawberries; green parrots with yellow heads, purple woodpeckers,
cardinals red as fire, clamber up to the very tops of the cypress-trees;
humming-birds sparkle upon the jessamine of the Floridas; and bird-
catching serpents hiss while suspended to the domes of the woods, where
they swing about like creepers themselves.... All here ... is sound and
motion.... When a breeze happens to animate these solitudes, to swing
these floating bodies, to confound these masses of white, blue, green, and
pink, to mix all the colors and to combine all the murmurs, there issue
such sounds from the depths of the forests, and such things pass before
the eyes, that I should in vain endeavor to describe them to those who
have never visited these primitive fields of nature." And when René and
Atala were escaping through those forests they "advanced with difficulty
under a vault of smilax, amidst vines, indigo-plants, bean-trees, and
creeping-ivy that entangled our feet like nets.... Bell serpents were
hissing in every direction, and wolves, bears, carcajous and young tigers,
come to hide themselves in these retreats, made them resound with their
roarings." [Footnote: Châteaubriand, "Atala," trans. Harry, pp. 2, 3, 19.]
A trackless, howling wilderness, indeed, if we are to accept this as an
accurate description of scenes which, as I have intimated, it is now
suspected that Châteaubriand's imagination visited, unaccompanied of his
body. But a recent indigenous writer on the valley and its roads--having
in mind, to be sure, the forests a little farther north than those in
which Atala and René wandered--assures us that they were neither
"pathless" nor "howling." He writes that in 1775 (eighteen years before
the first white settlement in the State of Ohio) there were probably as
many paths within the bounds of that State on which a man could travel on
horseback at the rate of five miles an hour as there are railways in that
State to-day. And the buffalo paths were-some of them, at any rate--roads
so wide that several wagons might have been driven abreast on them--as
wide as the double-track railroads. So the Indian farther west had his
highways prepared for him by the instincts of these primitive engineers
that knew nothing of trigonometry or the sextant or the places of the
stars. [Footnote: Hulbert, "Historic Highways," vol. I, pt. II.]
Nor did these first makers of roads howl or bellow their way over them. On
this same authority (Hulbert) I am able to assure you that the forest
paths were noiseless "traces," as they were originally called, in the
midst of silences disturbed only by the wind and the falling waters.
Wolves did sometimes howl in the forests or out upon the plains, but it
was only in hunger and in accentuation of the usual silence. Neither they
nor the bears growled or howled, except when they came into collision with
each other, or starvation.
And there were not even birds to give cheer to the gloom of these black
forests, whose tree tops were knitted together by vines, but had no
undergrowth, since the sun could not reach the ground. "The birds of the
forest came only with the white man." There were parrots in Kentucky, and
there were in Ohio pigeons and birds of prey, eagles and buzzards, but the
birds we know to-day and the bees were later immigrants from lands that
remembered Aristophanes or the hills of Hymettus, or that knew Shelley's
skylark or Keats's nightingale or Rostand's tamer fowls or Maeterlinck's
bees.
Even if we allow to the forests Chateaubriand's color in summer and the
clamor in times of terror--color and clamor which only a keen eye and ear
would have seen and heard--we cannot longer think of them as pathless, if
inhabited by those ancient pathmakers, the buffalo, deer, sheep. And,
naturally, when the Indian came, dependent as he was upon wild game, he
followed these paths or traces made and frequented by the beasts--the ways
to food, to water, to salt, to other habitats with the changing seasons.
The buffalo roads and the deer trails became his vocational trails--the
streets of his livelihood. And as his enemy was likely to find him by
following these traces, they became not only the paths of peace but the
paths of war. When the red man trespassed upon the peaceful trails of his
enemy, he was, in an American idiom, "on the war-path."
Then in time the European trader went in friendly search of the Indian by
these same paths, and they became the avenues of petty commerce. As street
venders in Paris, so these forest traders or runners went up and down
these sheltered paths, as dark in summer as the narrowest streets, only
they went silently, though they were often heard as distinctly in the
breaking of twigs or in their muffled tread by the alert ears of the
Indians as the musical voices of these venders are heard in the city. And
the places where these traders put down their cheap trinkets before their
dusky patrons grew into trading-posts, prophetic of future cities and
towns.
Such were the paths by which the runners of the woods, the French coureurs
de bois, first emerged--after following the watercourses--upon the western
forest glades and the edges of the prairies and astonished the aboriginal
human owners of those wild highways that had known only the soft feet of
the wolf and fox and bear, the hoofs of the buffalo and deer, and the bare
feet or the moccasins of the Indians (the "silent shoes," as I have seen
such footgear advertised in Boulevard St. Germain).
It has been said by a chemist of some repute that man came, in his
evolution, out of the sea; that he has in his veins certain elements--
potassium, calcium, magnesium, sodium--in the same ratio in which they
appeared in the water of the Pre-Cambrian ocean. Whether this be true or
not, one stage of human development carries marks of the forest, and from
that period "having nothing but forest knowledge, forest dreams, forest
fancies, forest faith," as an American writer has said, man emerges upon
the plains of history.
So, though the French civilization still smells and sounds of the sea, and
followed the streams that kept its first men in touch with it, it had
finally, in its pioneering, to take to the trails and the forests. And
these runners of the woods were the amphibious ambassadors from this
kingdom of the sea to the kingdom of the land. They were, as Étienne Brûlé
of Champlain's time, the pioneers of pioneers who, often in unrecorded
advance of priest and explorer, pushed their adventurous traffic in French
guns and hatchets, French beads and cloth, French tobacco and brandy, till
they knew and were known to the aboriginal habitants, "from where the
stunted Esquimaux burrowed in their snow caves to where the Comanches
scoured the plains of the south with their banditti cavalry."
They were a lawless lot whom this mission, not only between water and land
but also between civilization and barbarism, "spoiled for civilization."
But they must not be judged too harshly in their vibrations between the
two standards of life which they bridged, making periodical confession to
charitable priests in one, of the sins committed in the other, which,
unforgiven, might have driven them entirely away from the church and into
perdition.
The names of most of these coureurs de bois are forgotten by history
(which is rather particular about the character of those whom it
remembers--other than those in kingly or other high places). But they who
have followed immediately in the trails of these men of the verges have
written these names, or some of them, in places where they are more widely
read than if cherished by history even. Étienne Brûlé--who, as
interpreter, led Le Caron out upon the first western mission--after
following trails and waters for hundreds of miles back of the English
settlements, where the timid colonists had not dared to venture, suffered
the martyrdom of fire, and is remembered in a tempestuous stream in the
west and perhaps in an Indian tribe. The name of Jean Nicolet of Cherbourg
(the ambassador to the Winnebagoes, from the record of whose picturesque
advent in the "Jesuit Relations" the annals of the west really began) has
been given to a path now grown into one of the most populous streets along
the whole course of the Mississippi River--in Minneapolis. And Du Lhut,
the cousin of Tonty, a native of Lyons--a man of "persistent hardihood,
not surpassed perhaps even by La Salle," says Parkman, "continually in the
forest, in the Indian towns, or in the remote wilderness outposts planted
by himself, exploring, trading, fighting, ruling lawless savages, and
whites scarcely less ungovernable," [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p.
274] and crossing the ocean for interviews with the colonial minister,
"amid the splendid vanities of Versailles"--he is remembered for all time
in that city, built up against the far shores of Lake Superior, bearing
his name, Duluth, the city that has taken the place of London in the list
of the world's great harbors. Macaulay's vision of the New Zealander
standing amid the ruins of London and overlooking the mastless Thames
seems to have some realization in the succeeding of a city, founded in the
path of a wood runner, out on the borders of civilization, to one of
London's distinctions among the cities of the world.
"This class of men is not extinct," said Parkman twenty or thirty years
ago; "in the cheerless wilds beyond the northern lakes, or among the
solitudes of the distant west they may still be found, unchanged in life
and character since the day when Louis the Great claimed sovereignty over
the desert empire."
But their mission, if any survive till now, is past. The paths, surveyed
of the beasts and opened by these pioneers to the feet of priests,
explorers, and traders, have let in the influences that in time destroyed
all these forest lovers braved the solitude for. The trace has become the
railroad, and the smell of the gasolene motor is even on the once wild
Oregon trail; for, in general, it has been said of the forest part of the
valley, "where there is a railway to-day there was a path a century and a
quarter ago" (and that means longer ago); and it may be added that where
there was a French trading-post, or fort, or portage, there is a city to-
day, not because of the attraction of the populations of those places for
the prospecting railroad, but because of their natural highway advantage,
learned even by the buffaloes. Not all paths have evolved into railroads,
but the railroads have followed practically all of these natural paths--
paths of the coureurs de bois, instinctively searching for mountain
passes, the low portages from valley to valley, the shortest ways and the
easiest grades.
One of America's greatest railroad presidents has noted this significant
difference between the railroads of Europe and those of America, or at any
rate of the Mississippi Valley. In Europe they "took the place of the
pack-animal, the stage-coach, the goods-van that crowded all the highways
between populous centers," whereas in the Mississippi Valley and beyond
they succeeded the pioneer and pathfinder. The railroad outran the settler
and "beckoned him on," just as the coureur de bois outran the slower-going
migrant and beckoned him on to ever new frontiers. The buffalo, the
coureur de bois, the engineer in turn. The railroad, the more modern
coureur de bois and coureur de planche, has not served the new-world
society merely as a connecting-link between communities already developed.
It has been the "creator of cities." [Footnote: James J. Hill, "Highways
of Progress," pp. 235-236.]
Out on those prairies beyond the forests I have seen this general
statement of Mr. Hill's illustrated. Down from Lake Michigan the first
railroad crept toward the Mississippi along the Des Plaines and then the
Illinois, where La Salle had seen from his canoe great herds of buffalo
"trampling by in ponderous columns or filing in long lines morning, noon,
and night." That railroad was a path, not to any particular city but to
the water, a path from water to water, a long portage from the lake to the
Mississippi and back again.
One day, within my memory, a new path was marked by stakes that led away
from that river, off across the prairie, to an uninhabited place which the
first engineers had not known--a place of fire, the fields of coal, of
which the practical Joliet had found signs on his memorable journey. And
so one and another road crossed that prairie (on which I can even now
clearly see the first engine standing in the prairie-grass), making toward
the places of fire, of wood, of grain, of meat, of gold, of iron, of lead,
till the whole prairie was a network of these paths--and now the
"transportation machine" (as Mr. Hill calls it) has grown to two hundred
and fifty-four thousand seven hundred and thirty-two miles (in 1911), or
about 40 per cent of the world mileage, of which one hundred and forty
thousand miles are within the Mississippi Valley, carrying with them
wherever they go the telegraph and telephone wires, building villages,
towns, and cities-still bringing the fashions of Paris, as did Perrot, in
the paths of the buffalo.
When the surveyors crossed that prairie, treeless except for the woods
along the Aramoni River (just back of the Rock St. Louis) and along the
Illinois River at the other edge, the wild animals and the Indians had
disappeared westward, the prairie ground was broken and planted in
patches; fences had begun to appear on the silent stretches; houses stood
four to a section, with a one-room schoolhouse every two miles and
churches at long intervals. After the construction train ploughed its slow
way across that same prairie, in the trail staked by the surveyors, a
place was marked for a village; the farmers upon whose land it promised to
trespass wanted each to give it the name of his wife, his queen, as La
Salle of his king; but one day a workman, representing the unsentimental
corporation, without ceremony nailed a strip of board to a post, with the
name "Aramoni," let us say, painted upon it. Wooden buildings, stores,
elevators, blacksmith, harness, and shoemaker shops, and the dwellings of
those who did the work of the little town, gathered about; in time some of
the pioneer settlers leaving their farms to the care of children or
tenants moved into the town; the primitive stores were rebuilt in brick;
houses of pretentious architecture crowded out of the best sites the first
dwellings; and in twenty or thirty years it had become a village of
several hundred people: retired farmers or their widows, men of the
younger generation living on the income of their farms without more than
nominal occupation, and those who buy the produce and minister to the
wants of this little community. Most of the villagers and most of the
farmers in all the country about have the telephone in their houses and
can talk as much as they please with their neighbors at a very small
yearly charge. They also keep track of the grain and stock markets by
telephone, have their daily metropolitan paper, a county paper, monthly
magazines (of which they are the best readers), perhaps a piano or an
organ, more likely, now, a phonograph, which reproduces, if they choose,
what is heard in Paris or in concerts or the grand opera; reproductions of
pieces of statuary or paintings in the Louvre; and either a fast driving
horse or an automobile. They are often within easy reach of a city by
train, and the wives or daughters know the fashions of Paris and begin to
follow the modes as quickly as local talent can make the adaptations and
transformations.
Aramoni is not an imaginary much less a Utopian village. There are
thousands of "Aramonis" where the railroads have gone, drawing all the
physical conveniences and social conventions after them, where once
coureurs de bois followed the buffaloes.
Mr. Hill, whom I have just quoted above, has said: "Next after the
Christian religion and the public school the railroad has been the largest
single contributing factor to the welfare and happiness of the people of
that valley." [Footnote: James J. Hill, "Highways of Progress," pp. 236,
237.]
The first great service of the railroads to the republic, as such, was to
make it possible that the people of a territory three thousand miles wide,
crossed by two mountain ranges, should be bound into one republic. The
waters to the east of the Alleghanies ran toward the Atlantic, the waters
west of the Rockies ran toward the Pacific, and the waters between the
mountains ran to the Gulf of Mexico. If the great east-and-west railroads
had not been built and some of the waters of the Lakes had not been made
to run down the Mohawk Valley into the Hudson it is more than probable
that there would have been a secession of the men who called themselves
the "men of the western waters," a secession of the west from the east,
rather than of the south from the north. If the men of this valley had
continued men of the "western waters" there would probably have been at
least three republics in North America and perhaps as many as in South
America.
When Josiah Quincy, a famous son of Massachusetts, said for the men of the
east in the halls of Congress, "You have no authority to throw the rights
and liberties and property of this people into hotchpot with the wild men
on the Missouri, nor with the mixed though more respectable race of Anglo-
Hispano-Gallo-Americans, who bask on the sands in the mouth of the
Mississippi," he was visualizing the men whose interests followed the
rivers to another tide-water than that of Boston and New York harbors. The
railroads made a real prophecy of his fear that these men of the western
rivers would some day be "managing the concerns of a seaboard fifteen
hundred miles from their residences, and having a preponderance in the
councils," into which, as he contended, "they should never have been
admitted." [Footnote: Speech on the bill to admit Orleans Territory into
the Union. Annals of Congress, 11th Cong., 3d Sess., 1810-11, pp. 524-
542.]
He was thinking and speaking rather of the southwest than of the
northwest, but it was the east-and-west lines of railroad that prevented
the vital interest of that northern valley from flowing with the water
along parallels of longitude to where the gulf currents would catch its
commerce, instead of over the mountains along the sterner parallels of
latitude and in straighter course to Europe.
The force of gravity, the temptation of the tropics, the indifference of
the east, the freedom from eastern and puritanical restraints, were all on
the side of a "republic of the western waters" and against that larger,
continent-wide nationalism which now has its most ardent support in that
valley through which the iron shuttles fly from sea to sea, weaving the
waters as strands of color into a unified pattern of sublimer import.
It looks now as if the north-and-south lines were to be strengthened the
world over, as the occupied and exploited north temperate zone reaches
north toward the frigid zone, now grown warmer by the very opening of the
lands to the sun and the long burning of coal, and south toward the
tropics, now made more habitable by the new knowledge of tropical
medicine, and even across the tropics to the sister temperate zone of the
southern hemisphere. [Footnote: I have been told by one who has been
studying conditions in the great northwest fields of Canada that it is now
possible to grow crops there that could not have been grown before the
country was opened and cultivated to the south of them, so much longer
have the frosts been delayed in the autumn.] In the Mississippi Valley,
the gulf ports, fed of river and railroad, are increasingly busy, partly,
to be sure, because they look toward the east-and-west path through
Panama, but partly, too, because they lie between the two temperate zones,
which must inevitably be brought nearer to each other. We cannot imagine
two permanently dissociated or distantly associated temperate
civilizations on this globe, which is becoming smaller every day.
It was inevitable, perhaps, and happily inevitable, that the east-and-west
lines should be well established before the temperate zone should venture
into tropic lotus-lands again, and perhaps it was inevitable that the west
should eventually, even without the help of steam and steel, attach itself
to the east--even by streams of water.
Washington had hardly put off his uniform, after the peace of 1783, when
he was planning for a western trip, and his diary on the third day of that
trip of six hundred and eighty miles shows that his one object was to
obtain information of the nearest and best communication between the
eastern and the western waters. One of the kings of France said, when his
grandson was made king of Spain, "There are no longer any Pyrenees," and
Washington, when he saw the new republic forming, said, in effect, "There
must be no Alleghanies." He expected a canal to erase the mountains, but
the railroad accomplished this gigantic task with but slight aid of water.
And as the railroad tied the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic coast, so
in time, aided of a government that had every reason to be grateful, it
reached across the uninhabited plains, over the Rocky Mountains, which
even the western statesmen said were the divinely appointed barriers, and
across the desert beyond to the Pacific slope and tied it to a capital
which is now nearer to San Francisco than once it was to Boston. A man
from Missouri is speaker of the house in which Josiah Quincy spoke his
provincial fears. A man from the mouth of the Mississippi, the highest
authority in America on the French code, was but a little time ago
appointed as the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States
by a President who was born on the banks of the Ohio; that is, the highest
office in each of the three independent branches of government (the
executive, the legislative, and the judicial) have at one time been filled
by men of the western waters. I am anticipating a fact that belongs to a
later theme, but there is no single fact that can better illustrate the
political service of the paths over which we are to-day travelling.
On the economic consequences we need not now dwell. They have had too
frequent and sufficiently conspicuous illustration in every foreign mind
that knows anything whatever of that valley to make it necessary to insist
in this cursory view upon their great contribution to physical comfort. It
is, however, begun to be felt that in the rapid development and
exploitation of the resources of that valley (made possible only by the
railroads) the future has not been enough in our minds. It was said a few
years ago that there was not money enough in the world to lay track to
take the traffic that the Mississippi Basin offered. The valley wanted to
get everything to market in one generation, indifferent to the fate of
those who should come after-the passes through the mountains being choked
by cars carrying to the coasts crops from increasing acreage of declining
productivity or the products of swiftly disappearing forests or the output
of mines that must soon be exhausted.
Perhaps the railroads are not to be blamed for this decrease in
productivity--a passing phase of our agricultural life, as recent crop
reports show. They are very loudly blamed that they do not carry these
products fast enough or cheaply enough, though, according to a recent
authority, their rates are less on the average than the cost of the French
water traffic.
Nevertheless, their wheels alone have made possible that phenomenal
draining of the riches of the land to the coasts and other shores,
assisting the waters that carry a half-billion tons of soil into the gulf
every year. Perhaps this hurried, panting development has been for the
good of all time, but until recently there has been little or no thought
of that "all time" (as we observed in the policies of land parcelling).
Practically the whole western country has tied itself to a wheel, and so
whatever its happiness and welfare may be, come of or with the wheel. This
territory is capable of self-support; it has still its independent spirit,
bred of the pioneer who lived before the day of wheels; it is responsive
to appeals that stop its restless movement--as the wheel of Ixion when
Orpheus played; but none the less is it an eager, restless, unquiet life,
driven as a wheel, driven by the same hand that urged it into the valley.
No one asks--or few ask--if the wheel brings good or ill. The only concern
is that it shall run as quickly and safely as is humanly and mechanically
possible and shall not discriminate between one shipper and another, one
community and another, one consumer and another. That is the railroad
problem. The wheel has removed watersheds at pleasure, created cities and
fortunes by its presence or its taking thought. But under the new policy
of the government it is not likely that there will ever again be such
ruthless disturbance of nature, or such wild, profuse creation. Democracy,
beginning in that valley, is seeking now a perfect impersonal
transportation machine.
But such a machine will drain quite as effectively the country districts.
The census returns for 1910 show, for example, that in one prosperous
agricultural State, Missouri, just west of the Mississippi, while the
State as a whole showed an increase of 187,000 in ten years, there was a
net decrease of 84,000 in the rural districts. A partial explanation of
the latter statistic is the moving on of farmers to still newer lands;
another, the decline in the size of families; but it is attributable
chiefly to the first statistic, the drift to the city--and to this the
wheels contribute more than any other influence, carrying, as they do, the
glamour or the opportunity of the city life daily before the eyes of the
country boy.
To be sure, these same wheels are lessening, to some extent, the
congestion of the great centres of population, and lightening their
shadows by extending them--spreading them--but none the less are the
shadows spreading faster from the coming of the country to the city than
of the suburbanizing of the city.
This movement is not peculiar to the Mississippi Valley, but it is more
rapid there, perhaps, than in any other great area.
Let me give you an illustration of that demigrating influence. Two years
ago I invited several leaders of great transportation and educational
interests in New York to meet one of their number who, beginning life as a
telegraph operator out beyond the Mississippi, was at the head of one of
the two greatest railroads in the east. Of the guests, one, the president
of another important railroad, was once a farm boy, then a freight
brakeman in that same western State; another, the president of one of the
longest railroads, was the son of a stone-mason out in that valley;
another, the head of the Interborough system of New York, also a prairie-
born boy; another, president of the greatest southern railroad, was born
at the mouth of the Mississippi; and still another, one of the wealthiest
men in the world, was at one time a messenger boy and telegraph operator
just over the mountains on the site of Fort Duquesne. Only one man of the
company of nearly twenty men, assembled without thought of origin, had
been born in New York. All had come from the country or from across the
water, and most of them from the great Mississippi Valley. I speak of this
while discussing the railroad, because it is their paths through the
valley of the French that have made this phenomenon possible.
I have spoken of what the wheel has done in making the permanence of one
republic of such an area a possibility. Nothing save a loose,
heterogeneous confederation could have been practicable without its
unifying service. It is only fair to those who made such gloomy prophecies
in the early days to say that they had no intimation of what steam was
destined to do. When Robert Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, early
in the nineteenth century, on a journey back from the west in a stage-
coach, said that some day steam would drive wagons faster than they were
going in the coach, his fellow passengers thought him a dreamer--a
visionary. But it was only a man of such dreams or visions who in those
days could have seen the possibility which has to-day been realized
through the railroad.
I have spoken of the part which the steam wheel has had in the rapid
development and the exploitation of that great valley which, except for
its pioneering in wild places, might have been seven hundred years, as
Andrew Johnson predicted, in filling up, or at least two or three
centuries.
I have intimated its influence in promoting migration cityward--a movement
as wide as European civilization--but intensified there, where the
inhabitants have not been tied through generations of inheritance or
historic associations to particular fields, where primogeniture has no
observance, and where the traditions are of the wilderness and the visions
are ever of a promised land beyond. The city is on every boy's horizon.
Its glow is in every prairie sky at twilight.
When a boy on those silent plains I had my Horace and my Euripides in the
field. The unattainable eternal cities lent their charm and glory to the
valley whose childhood horizon I had not crossed. But now no country boy
thinks of the ancient or the mediaeval. It is the nearer city and
civilization that impress the imagination. The valedictorian of a class,
graduating as I entered college, told me a few months ago that he was
building a trolley-line in Rome, and that, after all, Falernian wine, of
which we who had never tasted wine out in that vineless region thought as
some drink of the gods, was very bitter.
I have hinted at what the wheel has done, in what it carries, to make all
look alike and think alike and act alike, but there is one supreme service
that must have mention. In that country when travel was slow we had a
representative government. But while we still have the same form, the
wheel has made possible, and so necessary, a more democratic government.
When a representative was weeks in reaching the capital he acted on his
own responsibility in larger measure than now, when his constituency can
reach him every morning. The valley is reached every day, just as the
people in a pure democracy were reached by the ancient stentor. The people
are reserving to themselves more and more of the function of their one-
time representatives, in such measures as the referendum and initiative
intimate, and are trying to secure more accurate representation in such
systems as the direct primary and proportional representation suggest; but
these all are possible only through the aid of the wheel and of what it
has brought. If the improvement of democracy is to come through more
democracy, as some think, then the railroad is an essential agent of
political progress as well as of economic exploitation and social
homogeneity. I am not discussing this thesis but simply showing how
dependent upon this physical agent is the machinery of democracy.
Moreover, mobility is almost an essential quality of the spirit of
democracy, the free way to the farthest horizons, the open road to the
highest position and service. When the atom becomes practically fixed by
its environment, reposeful and stable, stratification sets in. We may or
we may not have then something better.
It may seem to you a far cry from those rough, lawless coureurs de bois to
the mobile but orderly people of that valley to-day. But after an
experience of a few summers ago the distance does not seem so great.
Here is a journal of three days:
In the morning of an August day I was gathering some last data from the
library of one of the greatest, though one of the newest, universities in
the world--a two-hours' journey from where the coureur de bois Jean
Nicolet, in robe of damask, first looked over the edge of the basin, (Not
many years ago I sat there in an assembly of learned men gathered from the
ends of the earth and arrayed in academic robes.) In the afternoon I
walked over that first and most famous of the French portages, but not
content with that, I walked on into the night along the Wisconsin, that I
might see the river as the explorers saw it. However, at midnight I took a
palace car, with such conveniences as even Louis the Great did not have at
Versailles, and woke well up the Mississippi. I spent the day at another
great State university and at dusk set off by the actual trails of the
French coureurs de bois (only by wheels instead of on foot), first through
the woods and along rivers, above Green Bay to the "Soo," then above Lake
Huron and the Nipissing and down the Ottawa River, where I saw the second
day break, and then on past La Salle's seigniory of St. Sulpice, around
Carder's mountain into Montreal, and thence to the Rock of Quebec.
It is a common, unimaginative metaphor in the United States to call the
engine which leads the mighty trains across the country the iron horse;
but it is deserving of a nobler figure. It is the iron coureur de bois,
still leading Europe into America, and America into a newer America.