IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN"
In the lower St. Lawrence Valley, among the French Canadians, where France
is best remembered and where the shut-in life is not disturbed by current
events or changing conventions or evanescent fashions, I am told there are
traces in their language of the sea life of their ancestors on the coasts
of Brittany and Normandy. When, for example, a neighbor approaches a
farmhouse on horseback he is asked not to "alight" or to "dismount" but to
"disembark," and he is invited not to "tie" his horse but to "moor" it. It
is as if they were still crying ever in their unconscious memories,
"Thalassa, Thalassa"; as if the very shells of speech still carried the
roar of the ocean which they who hold them to their ears have never seen.
If the language of the upper valley of the St. Lawrence and of the valley
of the Mississippi remembered as distinctly its origin we should
everywhere hear the plash of the oar in all the hospitality of their
settlements. But all such traces have disappeared, or all but disappeared,
in the Mississippi Valley. The only one that comes to me now, as possibly
of the old French days, is one which is preserved in an adage not at all
French but quite characteristic of the independent life that has occupied
the banks of all the rivers: "Paddle your own canoe." Yet even in the
space of one or two generations of agricultural life that, too, is
disappearing, supplanted by a synonymous phrase, borrowed of fields that
have entirely forgotten the primitive days, when men travelled only by
water and lived near the streams: "Hoe your own row."
The first sound of the overmountain migration of which I spoke above was
of the stealthy step of the hunter, yet back of that for a century was the
scarcely audible plash of the paddle and the answering swirl of the water.
But as in overmountain migration the noisy wheel soon followed the foot,
so in the other the noiseless sail followed the swishing paddle.
The city of Paris bears a sailing ship upon her shield, though she sits a
hundred miles or more from the sea. Whatever the significance of that
symbol has been to the people of France, it has a peculiar appropriateness
(probably never realized before) in the fact that the iron, cordage, and
anchors for the first vessel which sailed upon the inland waters of the
new world were carried out from France to the first shipyard, beyond the
mountains, in the midst of the forest, above the mighty Falls of Niagara.
Jason of Thessaly, sailing for the Golden Fleece in Colchis, and braving
the fiery breath of the dragon, did not undertake a more perilous or more
difficult labor than he who bore from the banks of the Seine the equipment
of a vessel in which to bring back to France, as he hoped, the fleece of
the forest and the plain.
We are accustomed to call those who crossed the plains and the Rocky
Mountains for the gold-fields of California nearly two centuries later (in
1849) the Argonautae; but the first American Argonauts went from France,
and they built their _Argo_ on what is now Lake Erie, on the edge of the
Field of the Bulls, near a place, grown into a beautiful city, which now
bears the very name of the wild bull, the "buffalo," and within sound of
the roaring of the dragon that had frightened all earlier explorers. So
accurately do the details of the story of Jason's adventure become
realities to-day! Champlain and others had heard only at a distance the
thunder of the great cataract that was some day to become not only as
docile as the dragon under Jason's taming but as useful as a million
harnessed bulls.
La Salle gathered his ship-carpenters and his ship furniture between his
journeys to Rouen (the place of his birth) and elsewhere for the means of
purchase. But before the winter had come in Normandy his messengers were
out amid the snows and naked forests of Canadian winters in continuance of
that voyage toward the western Colchis.
In the autumn of 1678 a Franciscan friar, Hennepin, set out with two
canoemen, the first solitary figures of the expedition--a gray priest from
the gray Rock of Quebec, in a birch canoe, carrying with him the
"furniture of a portable altar"--a priest who professed a zeal for souls,
but who admitted a passion for travel and a burning desire to visit
strange lands. He relates of himself that, being sent from a convent in
Artois to Calais at the season of herring fishing, he made friends of the
sailors and never tired of their stories. "Often," he says, "I hid myself
behind tavern doors while the sailors were telling of their voyages. The
tobacco smoke made me very sick at the stomach, but nevertheless I
listened attentively.... I could have passed whole days and nights in this
way without eating." [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 133. Hennepin, "A
New Discovery of a Large Country in America," ed. Thwaites, 1:30.]
Along the way up the St. Lawrence he stopped to minister to the habitants
--too few and too poor to support a priest--saying mass, exhorting, and
baptizing. Early in November he arrived at the mission of Fort Frontenac,
which he had two or three years before helped to establish in the wilds.
Soon La Salle's lieutenants, La Motte and Tonty, appeared with most of the
men, and while some were despatched in canoes to Lake Michigan to gather
the buffalo-hides and beaver-skins against the coming of the ship, whose
keel had not yet been laid, the rest (La Motte, Hennepin, and sixteen men)
embarked for the Niagara River, by which the upper lakes empty into Lake
Ontario and the St. Lawrence. After a tempestuous voyage up and across the
lake they reached this river, whose torrent fury, gathered of "four inland
oceans," stopped even the canoes. Then, led of the priest, they toiled up
the cliffs called the "Three Mountains," because, I suppose, of the three
terraces. (Having climbed up the face of the cliffs in winter, with a
heavy camera for my portable altar, and having broken the great icicles
formed by the trickling stream over one of the terraces, in order to make
my way across a narrow ledge to the top of the precipice, I am able to
know what the journey must have meant to those first European travellers.)
Once upon the upper plateau, they marched through the wintry forest and at
length, in "solitude unprofaned as yet by the pettiness of man," they
beheld the "imperial cataract"--the "thunder of water," as the Indians
called it--or, as Hennepin described it, that "vast and prodigious cadence
of water which falls down after a surprising and most astonishing manner,
insomuch that the universe does not afford its parallel, those of Italy
and Switzerland being but sorry patterns." To this priest, Hennepin, we
owe the first description and picture of Niagara, [Footnote: "Four leagues
from Lake Frontenac there is an incredible Cataract or Waterfall, which
has no equal. The Niagara river near this place is only the eighth of a
league wide, but it is very deep in places, and so rapid above the great
fall that it hurries down all the animals which try to cross it, without a
single one being able to withstand its current. They plunge down a height
of more than five hundred feet, and its fall is composed of two sheets of
water and a cascade, with an island sloping down. In the middle these
waters foam and boil in a fearful manner. They thunder continually, and
when the wind blows in a southerly direction the noise which they make is
heard for more than fifteen leagues. Four leagues from this cataract, or
fall, the Niagara river rushes with extraordinary rapidity especially for
two leagues into Lake Frontenac."--Hennepin, "Description of Louisiana,"
pp. 71-73.] probably now more familiar to the world than any other natural
feature of this continent. He has somewhat magnified the height of these
falls, making it five hundred feet in the edition of 1683, and raising it
to six hundred in 1697; but they are impressive enough to acquit him of
intentional falsification and powerful enough to run virtually all the
manufacturing plants in the United States, if they could be gathered
within its easy reach.
As it is, less than 9 per cent of the water that overflows from the four
upper Great Lakes into the lower lake, once known as Lake Frontenac and
now as Ontario, is diverted for utilitarian purposes; it supplies the
Americans and the Canadians almost equally between the two shores five
hundred thousand horse-power. [Footnote: "Under a treaty between the
United States and the British Government only about 25 per cent of the
theoretical horsepower of Niagara Falls can be developed. The estimate of
the minimum amount of power that can be developed on the Niagara River
above and including the Falls is 5,800,000 h.p., and the assumed maximum
is 6,500,000 h.p. The treaty, therefore, limits present possible minimum
development on both sides of the Falls to 1,450,000 h.p. Under the treaty
only five-fourteenths of the power made available thereby belongs to the
United States, its share being reduced by the diversion of water from Lake
Michigan into the Drainage Canal at Chicago. There is thus left at Niagara
Falls only about 518,000 h.p. that can at present be developed on the
American side." About one-half of this total is now developed.--United
States Commissioner of Corporations. Report on water-power development in
the United States. 1912.]
What the conversion of the strength of this Titan (for ages entirely
wasted and for a century after Hennepin only a scenic wonder) means, or
may mean, to industry in the future is intimated in some statistics,
furnished by a recent writer on the Great Lakes, showing the relative cost
per month of a certain unit of power in a number of representative
American cities. [Footnote: "Assuming the maximum power used to be one
hundred horse-power, the number of working hours a day to be ten, and the
'load factor,' or average power actually used, to be seventy-five per cent
of the total one hundred, the cost per month in the cities named is as
[above]."--Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 135.]
Boston $937.50
Philadelphia 839.25
New York 699.37
Chicago 629.43
Cleveland 559.50
Pittsburgh 419.62
Buffalo 184.91
Niagara Falls 144.17
These figures are more significant as one contemplates the diminishing
supply of coal in coming centuries, if not decades. According to the
estimate of a reliable authority the available and accessible coal supply
of the United States will be exhausted at the present rate of exploitation
by the year 2027, and the entire supply by the year 2050.
Such statistics intimate the advantage possessed, perhaps beyond any other
site in America, by the strip of shore on which La Salle's men, from the
banks of the Seine, and Hennepin, the priest from Calais, that December
night in 1678 encamped, building their bivouac fires amid the snows, three
miles above the falls--and so opening to the view of the world a natural
source of power and wealth more valuable than extensive coal-fields or
rich mines of gold or silver.
It was but a great waterfall to La Salle and Tonty and Hennepin--an
impeding, noisy, hostile object. And to the half-mutinous, quarrelsome
workmen (French, Flemings, Italians) it was a demon, no doubt, whose very
breath froze their beards into icicles. It was, in reality, potentially
the most beneficent single, incarnate force bounded by any one horizon of
sky, in that new world, developed by the tipping of the continent a little
to the eastward after the upper lakes had been formed and the consequent
emptying of their waters into the St. Lawrence instead of the Gulf of
Mexico.
In January, 1679, a file of burdened men, some thirty in number, toiling
slowly on their way over the snowy plains and "through the gloomy forests
of spruce and naked oak trees," the priest accompanying with his altar
lashed to his back, reached a favorable spot beside calm water several
miles above the cataract: the site is identified as situate a little way
above the mouth of Cayuga Creek, just outside the village of La Salle, in
the State of New York. There is a stone erected by the local historical
society to mark the spot. When I saw the bronze tablet the inscription was
almost illegible, covered, as it was, with ice and the snow that was at
that very hour falling upon it.
There, began the felling and hewing of trees that were to touch the
farther shores of Michigan. The supplies brought out from Paris had been
lost by the wreck of La Salle's smaller vessel on the way up Ontario, but
enough was saved, or brought by La Salle on his return from Fort
Frontenac, to give this sixty-ton vessel full equipment, for in the spring
she was launched. The "friar pronounced his blessing on her; the assembled
company sang _Te Deum_; cannon were fired; and French and Indians ...
shouted and yelped in chorus as she glided into Niagara." She carried five
cannon and on her prow was carved such a "portentous monster" as doubtless
is to be found among the grotesques of Notre Dame--a griffin (that is, a
beast with the body of a lion and the head, beak, and pinions of a bird),
in honor of the armorial bearings of Count Frontenac.
Through spring and half the summer the vessel lay moored beyond reach of
the Indians but near enough so that Hennepin "could preach on Sundays from
the deck to the men encamped along the bank." When La Salle, who had been
obliged by disasters to go back to Fort Frontenac during the building of
the ship, again appeared above the falls in midsummer, the _Griffin_ was
warped up into the placid lake, and on the 7th of August anchor was lifted
and the fateful voyage was begun.
There was (as when the _Argo_, the "first bold vessel, dared the seas") no
Orpheus standing "high on the stern" and "raising his entrancing strain."
Nor did a throng of proud Thessalians or of "transported demi-gods" stand
round to cheer them off. The naked Indians, their hands over their mouths
in wonderment or shouting, "Gannorom! Gannorom!" alone saw the great boat
move out over the waters without oar or paddle or towing rope. For music
there was only the _Te Deum_ again, sung by raw, unpractised voices, such
as one might hear among the boatmen of the Seine. It was not such music,
at any rate, as that of Orpheus, to make plain men grow "heroes at the
sound." Doubtless no one felt himself a hero. The only intimation of any
consciousness of a high mission comes from Hennepin, who, when the
_Griffin_, some days later, was ploughing peacefully through the straits
that led to the Mer Douce--"verdant prairies, dotted with groves and
bordered with lofty forests" on either side, "herds of deer and flocks of
swans and wild turkeys" within sight, and the "bulwarks plentifully hung
with game"--wrote: "Those who will one day have the happiness to possess
this fertile and pleasant strait, will be very much obliged to those who
have shown them the way."
"Very much obliged"? No, Hennepin! Of the hundreds of thousands who now
pass through or across those straits every year, or of those thousands who
possess its shores, not a hundred, I venture to say, remember "those who
showed the way"! They have even forgotten "that the first European voice
that Niagara ever heard was French"! Ste. Claire!--the name you gave to
the beautiful strait beyond the "Symplegades" of your voyage, in gratitude
and in honor of the day on which your company reached it--has become
masculine in tribute to an American general. If your later praying to that
patron of seamen, St. Anthony of Padua, had not availed to save you from
the peril of the storm and you had gone to death in unsalted water, you
could hardly have been more completely forgotten. One has spoken now and
then lightly of the vow made by your commander, La Salle, to build a
grateful chapel to St. Anthony if your lives were saved during that storm,
forgetting that so long as the Mississippi runs to the sea there will be a
chapel to St. Anthony (St. Anthony's Falls) in which gratitude will be
continually chanted through ages for the preservation of the ship and its
crew to find haven in quiet waters behind Point St. Ignace.
It was there, at St. Ignace that we have seen La Salle, in scarlet,
kneeling before the altar, where Marquette's bones were doubtless by that
time gathered by his devoted savage followers, and it was thence that they
passed on to an island in Green Bay, the goal of their journey.
From that far port the first cargo carried of sails was sent out, bound
for the shore on which the _Griffin's_ timbers had been hewn. That it
never reached harbor of that calm shelter, or any other, we know; but that
loss, once the path was traced in the waters, is hardly of consequence
save as it helped further to illustrate the indomitable spirit of La Salle
and his companions.
What good came to Thessaly or Greece of the yellow peltry that Jason
brought back is not even kept in myth or fable. The mere adventure was the
all. They did not even think of its worth. The goatskin was valueless
except as a proof or token, and the boat _Argo_, though the greatest ship
known to the early myths of Greece, and though dedicated, we are told, to
Neptune at the end of the voyage, became the pioneer of no such mighty
fleet as did the _Griffin_. The list of the Greek ships and commanders in
the Iliad offers but a pygmy analogy. And if you were to go to Buffalo to-
day, near the site of that first shipyard (a little farther away from the
falls), you would know that the successors of La Salle in new _Griffins_
had actually brought back the golden fleece--the priceless fleece, the
fleece of the plains if not of the forests. Day after day its gold is hung
against the sky as the grain is lifted from the ships into elevators which
can store at one time twenty-three million bushels of wheat.
The coasts of the lakes up which the _Griffin_ led the oarless way are
three thousand three hundred and eighty-five miles in length, or,
including those of the lower lake, Frontenac, which was also first touched
of French keels, over four thousand miles. The statistics of the traffic
which has grown in the furrow of that wind-drawn plough would be fatiguing
if they did not carry you to heights of a wider and more exhilarating
view.
We have occupied and apportioned the billion acres of French domain among
sixty million people. Here is an added domain in which no landmarks can be
set--which belongs to all men.
These are a few graphic facts gathered from recent reports and books about
the Great Lakes: [Footnote: Edward Charming and M. F. Lansing, "The Story
of the Great Lakes." Macmillan, New York, 1909. James O. Curwood, "The
Great Lakes." Putnam, New York, 1909. James C. Mills, "Our Inland Seas."
McClurg, Chicago, 1910.]
Nearly as many people live in States that have ports upon those shores as
in France to-day--between thirty-five and forty millions.
The lakes have a tonnage equal to one-third of the total tonnage of North
America. [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 4. "In 1913 the total
tonnage of the Great Lakes was 2,940,000 tons, of the United States
7,887,000 tons."--Report United States Commission of Navigation.]
They have made possible a saving in cost of transportation (and so of
production) of several hundred million dollars in a single year.
[Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 4.]
Only ninety million dollars have been spent by the government for their
improvement in the whole history of their occupation, above Niagara Falls,
[Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 9.] while France in that time
has spent for harbors and waterways alone seven hundred and fifty million
dollars.[Footnote: "Four hundred and fifty million dollars of this total
has been for the improvement and maintenance of the waterways."--Report of
National Waterways Commission, p. 507.] They have been privately
developed.
Six times as much freight passes over these lakes as through the Suez
Canal in a year. [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 6.]
Three thousand five hundred vessels, and more than twenty-five thousand
men are required to move the hundred million tons of freight which every
year would fill a train encircling the globe. [Footnote: Curwood, "The
Great Lakes," pp. 25, 26, and Report of United States Commission of
Navigation, 1913.]
If one were to stand on the shore of that "charming strait," between Erie
and Huron, the Detroit River (which Hennepin so covetously describes,
wishing to make settlement there, until La Salle reminded him of his
"professed passion for exploring a new country"), one would now see a
vessel passing one way or the other every twelve minutes, on the average,
day and night during the eight months of open navigation.
Nor are they small sailing vessels of a few tons' burden, but great
sailless, steam-propelled hulks, carrying from five to ten thousand tons.
So it is no fleet of graceful galleons--half bird, half lion, as the
_Griffin_ was--that have followed in her wake up what Hennepin called "the
vast and unknown seas of which even the savages knew not the end." They
have, in the evolution of nautical zoology, lost beak, wings, and
feathers, and now like a shoal of wet lions, tawny and black, their
powerful heads and long steel backs just visible above the blue water,
they course the western Mediterranean from spring to winter. [Footnote: It
is an intruding and probably whimsical, but fascinating, thought that the
wings of the griffin have become evolved into the air-ships which first
began successfully to fly, in America, near the shores of the lake on
which the Griffin itself was hatched. The Wright brothers were born near
one of those lakes. It is not a far-fetched or labored thought which
pictures that simple, rough-made galleon--very like the model of the ship
on the shield of Paris--as leading two broods across the valley above the
Falls, one of lions that cannot fly and one of sea-birds, hydroplanes,
whose paths are the air, but whose resting-places are the calm water; the
brood of the sea and the brood of the sky, hatched from one nest at the
water's edge.]
The ships of the lion brood are, some of them, five or six hundred feet in
length, and carry eleven thousand tons of cargo. I have seen the skeleton
of one of these iron-boned beasts, and I have been told that eight hundred
thousand rivets go into its creation. And upon hearing this I could not
but hear the deafening clamor caused by La Salle's driving the first nail
or bolt, Father Hennepin declining the honor because of the "modesty of
[his] religious profession."
As to the cargoes that these ships bring back, the story is even more
marvellous. First in quantity is iron ore, forty-seven million four
hundred and thirty-five thousand seven hundred and seventy-one tons in
1912 [Footnote: "Mineral Industry," 21:455.] from the shores of Superior,
where Joliet had made search for copper mines, where Father Allouez--in
the midst of reports of baptisms and masses--tells of nuggets and rocks of
the precious metal, and where has grown up in a few years the "second
greatest freight-shipping port on earth"--a port that bears the name of
that famous French coureur de bois, Du Lhut. Forty-seven millions of tons,
and there are still a billion and a half in sight on those shores, which
have already given to the ships hundreds of millions of their dark
treasure.
After the ore, lumber, one billion one hundred and sixty-five million feet
[Footnote: Monthly Summary of Internal Commerce of the United States,
December, 1911.] in one year (1911); a waning amount from the vanishing
forests that once completely encircled these lakes. Alexander Pope, whose
"Ode on St. Cecilia's Day" I have quoted (and would there were a Homer,
Pope, or Kipling to sing this true legend), speaks of _Argo_ seeing "her
kindred trees descend from Pelion to the Main"--from the mountain to the
sea, where Jason's boat was launched. So, with the departure of the
_Griffin_ from her Green Bay Island, might a prophetic poet have seen her
masts beckoning all the kindred trees to the water, in which one hundred
and sixty billion feet of pine have descended from the forests of Michigan
alone, [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 57.] and that is but one
of the circling States. And there is this singular fact to be added, that
nearly a third of the annual cargo goes to the "Tonawandas," [Footnote:
Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 54.] the "greatest lumber towns" in the
world that have grown up practically on the very site of the shipyard at
the mouth of Cayuga Creek, a little way above the falls.
And after the ore and lumber, grain--the fleece of the fields, immensely
more valuable than that of the forests; one hundred and fifty million
bushels in one year and eleven million barrels of flour--a fortnight's
bread supply for the entire world. [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes,"
p. 49.]
And after ore and lumber and grain, fuel and other bulky necessities of
life.
The casual relation between the pioneer building and journey of the
_Griffin_ and these statistics cannot, of course, be established, but what
no inspired human prophecy could have divined, or even the wildest
dreaming of La Salle have imagined, is as sequential as the history that
has been made to trace all new-world development in the wake of the
caravels of Columbus. The storms of nature and the jealousies in human
breasts thwarted La Salle's immediate ambitions, but what has come into
that northern valley has followed closely in the path of his purposes, the
path traced by his ship built of the trees of Niagara and furnished by the
chandleries of Paris.
The mystery of the vanishing of this pioneer vessel only enhances the
glory of its venture and service--as its loss but gave new foil to the
hardihood of La Salle and Tonty. We can imagine the golden-brown skins
scattered over the blue waters as the bits of the body of the son of the
king of Colchis strewn by Medea to detain the pursuers of the Argonauts.
It was the first sacrifice to the valley for the fleece. In the depths of
these Lakes or on their shores were buried the bones of these French
mariners who, first of Europeans, trusted themselves to sails and west
winds on those uncharted seas.
But this is not the all of the tragic story. The _Griffin_ carried in her
the prophecies of other than lake vessels. She had in her hold on that
fateful trip the cordage and iron for the pioneer of the river ships. So
when she went down she spoke to the waters that engulfed her the two
dreams of her builder and commander: one dream the navigation of the lakes
and the other the coursing of the western rivers.
The Spanish council which decreed long ago that "if it had pleased God
that ... rivers should have been navigable, He would not have wanted human
assistance to make them such" would be horrified by the sacrilege that has
been committed and is being contemplated by the followers of the men of
the _Griffin_.
They have made a canal around the Falls (which Hennepin first saw
breathing a cloud of mist over the great abyss)--a canal that,
supplemented by other canals along the St. Lawrence River, allows vessels
of fourteen-foot draught to go from Lake Erie to Montreal and so on to the
sea. If this achievement were put into the poetry of legend it would show
the outwitting of the dragon.
They have deepened the straits where the _Griffin_ had to wait for
favorable breezes and soundings to pass from Erie to Huron--the
Symplegades (clashing rocks) of the new-world voyage.
They have made canals on either side of the Sault Ste. Marie--the rapids
of the St. Mary's River, by the side of which St. Lusson took formal
possession of all that northern empire and Father Allouez made his
extraordinary address--canals through which sixty-two million tons passed
in 1910 toward the east and south.
They have made and deepened harbors all the way around the shores till
ships two hundred times the size of the _Griffin_ can ride in them.
Yet this is not all. The symbols of La Salle's vision revived in the lakes
memories of the days when their waters ran through the Mississippi Valley
to the gulf--the very course which La Salle's unborn _Griffin_ was to
take.
When the continent tilted a little to the east and in the tilting poured
the water of the upper lakes over the Niagara edge into the St. Lawrence,
that same tilting stopped the overflow down into the Mississippi and the
Gulf of Mexico at the other end of the lakes. But so slight was the
tilting that the water still sweeps over, in places, when the lakes are
high, and sometimes even carries light boats across.
Of late engineers have, in effect, been undoing with levels and scoops and
dredges what nature did in a mighty upheaval. They are practically tipping
the bowls back the other way and so making currents to run down the old
channel toward the gulf through the valleys of the Des Plaines and the
Illinois to the Mississippi.
And so that dream which the dying _Griffin_ spoke to the lake, and the
lake to the rivers in the time of flood--when intercommunication was
possible--is to be realized, except that steam or electricity will take
the place of winds, and screws of sails. [Footnote: Herbert Quick,
"American Inland Waterways," New York, 1909.]
Meanwhile a great battle of the lakes is waging--a battle of levels, it
might better be called, between those, on the one side, who wish to
maintain the grandeur of Niagara much as it was when Hennepin first
pictured it, and with them those who for utilitarian reasons do not wish
its thunderous volume diminished, except, perhaps, for their local uses,
and those also who fear disaster to their harbors and canals all around
the lakes, deepened at great expense, if water is led away toward the
Mississippi; and, on the other side, the public health of millions at the
western end of the lakes and the commercial hopes of other millions in the
Mississippi Valley waiting for the _Griffins_ of the lakes to come with
more generous prices for their produce and bring to their doors what the
rest of the world has now to send to them by the more expensive railroad.
Some day, perhaps, the great upper lake, Superior, will be made a
reservoir where enough water will be impounded in wet seasons for a steady
and more generous supply during the dry seasons; in which event there will
be water enough to keep Niagara in perennial beauty and power, to fill all
the present and prospective harbors and canals to their desired depths and
float even larger fleets of _Griffins_, and, at the same time, have enough
left to make the Mississippi, as the Frenchman who first saw it visualized
it, and as President Roosevelt, two centuries later, expressed it, "a loop
of the sea." [Footnote: Herbert Quick, "American Inland Waterways," New
York, 1909.]
But another amicable battle is on--a battle of the eastern levels--between
the men of the old French valley to the north (_i.e._, the St. Lawrence)
and the men of the old Iroquois valleys to the south, of the Mohawk and
the Hudson. In 1830 a canal was built by the latter from above the Falls
to the navigable Hudson, and with high ceremony a cask of the water of
Lake Erie was emptied into New York harbor as symbol of the wedding of
lake and ocean. Then Canada built her Welland Canal around Niagara and
made canals along the St. Lawrence and channels in the St. Lawrence past
the Lachine Rapids to Montreal, and even made the way from there to the
sea deeper that the growing ocean vessels might come to old Hochelaga. Now
New York has begun deepening the old and almost useless Erie Canal from
seven and nine feet to twelve feet, and to take barges one hundred and
fifty feet long and twenty-five feet beam, with a draught of ten feet, and
Canada is contemplating still deeper channels that will let the ocean
steamers into every port of the Great Lakes. She is even thinking of a
canal that will follow the path of Champlain, up the Ottawa and across the
old portage to Lake Nipissing and thence by the French River into Lake
Huron; and of an alternative course by another of Champlain's paths, from
Ontario across to Huron by way of Lake Simcoe and the Trent River, in
either route avoiding Niagara altogether, paths that would shorten the
water distance by hundreds of miles and bring Europe almost as near to the
shores where Le Caron ministered to the Hurons as to New York City.
It is a rivalry between the old Champlain paths and the La Salle paths,
with just an intimation from those who look far into the future that a new
water path still farther north--of which Radisson gave some premonition--
may carry the wheat of the far northwest from Winnipeg beyond Superior and
beyond the courses of the Mississippi up to Hudson Bay and across the
ocean to European ports, brought a thousand miles nearer.
This is but the merest intimation of the prophetic service of the water
pioneers. And when the prophecy of these pioneers, as interpreted in terms
of steam and locks and dams unknown to them, is fulfilled, it is not
beyond thinking that a captain of a seagoing vessel of ten or twenty
thousand tons from Havre or Cherbourg may some day be calling in deep
voice (as last summer in a room on the twenty-ninth floor of a Chicago
"sky-scraper" I heard a local descendant of the _Griffin_ screeching) for
the lifting of the bridges that will open the way to the Mississippi, the
heart of America.