WESTERN CITIES THAT HAVE SPRUNG FROM FRENCH FORTS
It is a strange and varied crop that has grown from the leaden plates with
French inscriptions, planted by St. Lusson, La Salle, and Céloron by lakes
and rivers in that western country. The mythical story of the sowing of
Cadmus in the Boeotian field is again rather tame by comparison with a
true relation of what has actually occurred within the memory of a few
generations in a valley as wild when Céloron traversed the course of La
Belle Rivière (the name given by the French to the Ohio, which was known
to the Indians as the "River of the Whitecaps") with his little fleet only
a century and a half ago as was Boeotia when Cadmus set out from Phoenicia
in search of his sister, Europa (that is, Europe), back beyond the memory
of history.
It was a bourgeoning, most miraculous, in those spots of the west, a new
Europa, where soldiers sprang up immediately upon the sowing, like the
sproutings of Cadmus' dragon's teeth, to fight one another and to build
strongholds that should some day be cities, even as Cadmea, the fortress
of the "Spartoi," became the city of Thebes.
So, in this sowing, did France become the mother of western cities, of
Pittsburgh and Buffalo, of Erie, of St. Louis, of Detroit and New Orleans,
of Peoria and St. Joseph, and still other cities whose names have never
been heard by the people--of France--even as Phoenicia, in the wanderings
of her adventurous son, Cadmus, became the mother of Thebes and the
godmother of Greek culture and of European literature. Palamedes and
Simonides added some letters to the alphabet brought, according to
tradition, by Cadmus to Greece, and Cadmus suffered the doom of those who
sow dragon's teeth, as France has suffered, but still is his name kept in
the memory of every school child; and so should be remembered those who
planted the lead plates and sowed the teeth that sprang into the "Spartoi"
of a new civilization.
Of the sowing of St. Lusson at the "Soo" and La Salle at New Orleans we
have spoken. Long later (1749), the first of whom we have record after La
Salle, another French sower went forth to sow along the rivers close to
the foot of the Alleghany Mountains--Céloron de Bienville, Chevalier de
St. Louis. It is of his sowing that the main cities have sprung, for he
planted a plate of "repossession" at the entrance of every important
branch of the Ohio and fastened upon trees sheets of "white iron" bearing
the arms of France. Chief among them is Pittsburgh, which stands on the
carboniferous site of Fort Duquesne like the prow of a vessel headed
westward, a place which Céloron is believed to have had in mind when he
wrote in his journal, "the finest place on La Belle Rivière"--what was
then a wedge of wild black land lodged between two converging streams that
drained all the slope of the northern Alleghanies being now the foundation
of the world's capital of a sterner metal than lead--scarred with fires
and smothered with smoke from many furnaces, two of which alone, it has
been estimated by some one, have poured forth enough molten iron in the
last thirty years to cover with steel plates an inch thick a road fifty
feet wide stretching from the Alleghany edge of the valley not merely to
the mouth of the Ohio but on to the other mountain border, where all
dreams of a way to the western sea were ended.
And this highway of plates across the empire of New France gives but
suggestion of the meagerest fraction of the fruitage of the planting of
the leaden plates or the grafting of the arms of France upon the trees
along the Ohio--forty pounds of iron, it has been estimated by one graphic
statistician, for every man, woman, and child on the globe to-day,
[Footnote: H. N. Casson. United States produces thirty million tons
annually, Pennsylvania eleven and a quarter million. "Mineral Resources,"
1912.] and I do not know how much tin. And, in a sense, all from a small
box or crate of plates made of lead--six, eight, or more in number, eleven
inches long, seven inches wide, and one eighth of an inch thick, and
engraved with an inscription--one of which was found not long ago, by some
lads, protruding from the bank of one of the tributary rivers! The
inscription ran (in translation):
"Year 1749, in the reign of Louis XV., King of France, We, Céloron,
commanding the detachment sent by the Marquis De la Galissonière,
Commander General of New France, to restore tranquillity in certain
villages of these cantons, have buried this plate at [here is inserted the
name of the tributary at its confluence with the Ohio] this [date] as a
token of renewal of possession heretofore taken of the aforesaid river,
Ohio, of all streams that fall into it, and all lands on both sides to the
sources of the aforesaid streams, as the preceding Kings of France enjoyed
it, or ought to have enjoyed it, and which they have upheld by force of
arms and by treaties, notably by those of Ryswick, Utrecht, and Aix la
Chapelle."
And with these plates (to be buried at the confluences of the important
rivers along the way) were carried sheets of tin--of white iron--on which
the arms of France had been stamped, to be nailed to trees above the
places of the plates.
"As the Kings of France enjoyed it, or ought to have enjoyed it"--what a
blight of regret was in the very seed that in its flower of to-day makes
one wish for some delicate beauty or subtle fragrance that is not there,
because the Kings of France did not let France enjoy it.
One can but pause here again, as I have paused many, many times in the
preparation of these chapters, to ask what would have been the result if
France had but chosen as Portia's successful suitor in Shakespeare's
"Merchant of Venice" when he was confronted with the caskets of gold,
silver, and lead--had but chosen "to owe and hazard all for lead," instead
of deciding as did the Prince of Morocco, the other suitor, that "a golden
mind stoops not to shows of dross"--if France had hazarded all for the
holding and settling of those regions whose worth was symbolized in those
unpromising pieces of lead planted in the fertile soil of Louisiana,
Michigan, and Ohio along the watercourses, rather than in the caskets of
gold and silver sought among the mountains--if Louis XV, throwing dice at
Versailles in the valley of the Seine, as Parkman describes him, with his
piles of louis d'or before him, and the princes and princesses, dukes and
duchesses and courtiers about him, had but followed the advice of Marquis
de la Galissonnière, the humpbacked governor-general of Canada, who
furnished Céloron with his leaden seeds and appointed the place of the
sowing--if Louis XV had but answered his Canadian governor's prayer and
sent French peasants where the plates were buried, or had even let those
who wanted to flee to that valley, as they would have fled by tens of
thousands, preferring the hardships and privations of the pioneer to the
galleys, the dungeons, or the gallows--then "Versailles" in that valley of
the Ohio would not be merely what it is, a ward or township in a city that
bears the name of a British statesman.
"Or, if soldiers had been sent!" Parkman, approaching the great valley in
imagination with Céloron, from the north, exclaims, "the most momentous
and far-reaching question ever brought to issue on this continent was:
'Shall France remain here or shall she not?' If by diplomacy or war she
had preserved but the half or less than half of her American possessions,
then a barrier would have been set to the spread of the English-speaking
races, there would have been no Revolutionary War and, for a long time at
least, no independence." [Footnote: Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," p. 5.]
(Which but emphasizes what I have said as to the part, the negative part
as well as the positive, France conspicuously and unconsciously played in
the making of a new nation.)
If "the French soldiers left dead on inglorious continental battle-fields
could," as Parkman says, "have saved Canada, and perhaps made good her
claim to the vast territories of the West," [Footnote: Parkman, "Montcalm
and Wolfe," p. 41.] could they after all have done more for the world than
those who, in effect, sacrificed their lives on glorious western battle-
fields for the United States?
A little way back I spoke of the first expedition looking toward that
valley from the Atlantic side of the Alleghanies--the expedition of the
"Knights of the Golden Horseshoe"--and of its vain threats. In 1748 a
company of still wider horizon was formed in Virginia, George Washington's
father being a member of it. It was known as the Ohio Land Company and
derived its transmontane rights through George II from John Cabot, an
Italian under English commission, who may have set foot nearly two
centuries before somewhere on the coast of North America below Labrador,
and from a very expansive interpretation of a treaty with the Indians at
Lancaster, Pa., in 1744, the trans-Alleghany Indians protesting, however,
not less firmly than the French, that the lands purchased by the English
under that treaty extended no farther toward the sunset than the laurel
hills on the western edge of the Alleghanies.
News of this Virginia corporate enterprise was willingly carried, it is
surmised, by jealous Pennsylvanians and hostile French, till it reached
Montreal, and so it was that Céloron was despatched with his little
company to bury "Monuments of the Renewal of Possession" by France.
It was a significant and rather solemn, but most picturesque, processional
that this chevalier of St. Louis led from Montreal through one thousand
two hundred leagues of journey by water and land to the mouth of the Miami
River and back. There are no hilarious songs in this prelude such as were
heard from the crests of the Blue Ridge when Spotswood's horsemen came up
from the other side. It has to me the atmosphere and movement of some
Greek tragedy, though one writer likens it to mediæval mummery. Perhaps it
is only a knowledge of its import and the end that makes it sombre and
grave despite the beautiful setting to this prelude which one may read to-
day in the French archives. So full of portent and color it is that I
wonder no one has woven its incidents, slight as they are, into French
literature or into that of America.
"I left Lachine on the 15th of June," begins Céloron's journal, [Footnote:
Margry, 6:666.] now in the Département de la Marine, in Paris, "with a
detachment formed of a captain, eight subaltern officers, six cadets, an
armorer, twenty men of the troops, one hundred and eighty Canadians, and
nearly thirty savages--equal number of Iroquois and Abenakes." They filled
twenty-three canoes in a procession that was halted by shipwreck, by heat,
by lack of rain and by too much rain, by difficult portages, and damage to
the canoes.
Over a part of their first portage from Lake Erie I walked one night years
ago through a drenching rain, such as they endured in the seven days in
which they were carrying their canoes and baggage up those steep hills
through the then dense forest of beech, oak, and elm, to the waters of
Lake Chautauqua, where now many thousands gather every summer, from
children to white-haired men and women, to study history, language,
sciences, cooking, sewing, etc., and to attend conferences daily.
But the expedition then was often stopped by savages who ran away to avoid
the excessive speechmaking and lecturing of these old-world orators,
conferenciers; and the ears and eyes of the auditors who did not run away
were opened by strings of wampum, though they were often too little moved
by the love of their father Onontio and his concern lest the English
should make themselves masters and the Indians their victims.
There is in a Paris library a map of this expedition made by the hand of
Père Bonnecamps, who signs himself "Jesuitte Mathematiciant." He kept a
diary, [Footnote: Translation in "Jesuit Relations," ed. Thwaites, vol.
69. "Account of the voyage on the Beautiful River made in 1749 under the
direction of Monsieur de Céloron."] also preserved in Paris, in which
there has crept some of the sombreness of that narrow, dark valley (now
filled with oil-derricks) surrounded by mountains sometimes so high as to
let them see the sun only from nine or ten o'clock in the morning till two
or three in the afternoon. And across the mountains one may hear even to-
day the despairful, yet appealing, voice of Céloron, speaking for the
great Onontio: "My children," he says, "since I have been at war with the
English I have learned that that nation has seduced you; and, not content
with corrupting your hearts, they have profited by my absence from the
country to invade the land which does not belong to them and which is
mine.... I will give you the aid you should expect from a good father....
I will furnish you traders in abundance if you wish them. I will send here
officers if that please you--to give you good spirit, so that you will
only work in good affairs.... Follow my advice. Then the sky will always
be beautiful and clear over your villages." [Footnote: Margry, 6: 677.]
"My father," said the spokesman for the savages at another council, "we
pray you have pity on us; we are young men who cannot reply as the old men
could; what you have said to us has opened our eyes [received gifts],
given us spirit, we see that you only work with good affairs.... [The
great Onontio in Paris is playing all the while in Paris with the louis
d'or.] Examine, my father, the situation in which we are. If thou makest
the English to retire, who give us necessaries, and especially the smith
who mends our guns and hatchets, we would be without help and exposed to
die of hunger and of misery in the Belle Rivière. Have pity on us, my
father, thou canst not at present give us our necessaries. Leave us at
least for this winter, or at least till we go hunting, the smith and some
one who can help us. We promise thee that in the spring the English will
retire." [Footnote: Margry, 6:683.]
And so the expedition passed on from river to river, from tribe to tribe,
planting plates and making appeals to the savages, down the Ohio to the
Miami, up the Miami, stopping at the village of a chief known as La
Demoiselle, thence by portage to the French settlement on the Maumee, and
so back to Lake Erie. Then came the fort builders in their wake, and so
the "Spartoi," the soldiers, almost literally sprang from the earth of the
sowing of the plates.
At one place (the place where the Loups prayed for a smith) they found a
young Englishman with a few dozen workmen building a stockade, but they
sent him back beyond the mountains over which he had come and built upon
its site Fort Duquesne--the defense of the mountain gate to the great
valley--here with a few hundred men on the edge of a hostile wilderness to
make beginning of that mighty struggle which was to end, as we know, on
the river by which Cartier and Champlain had made their way into the
continent.
It is a fact, remarkable to us now, that the first to bring a challenge
from behind the mountains to that brave and isolate garrison sitting in
Fort Duquesne at the junction of the water paths, was Washington ("Sir
Washington," as one chronicler has written it), not Washington the
American but Washington the English subject, major in the colonial
militia, envoy of an English governor of Virginia, Dinwiddie, who, having
acquired a controlling interest in the Ohio Company, became especially
active in planning to seat a hundred families on that transmontane estate
of a half-million acres and so to win title to it.
"So complicated [were] the political interests of [that] time that a shot
fired in America [was] the signal for setting all Europe together by the
ears," wrote Voltaire, [Footnote: Voltaire, "The French in America" in his
"Short Studies in English and American Subjects," p. 249.] and "it was not
a cannon-shot" that gave the signal but, as Parkman said, "a volley from
the hunting pieces of a few backwoodsmen, commanded by a Virginia youth,
George Washington." [Footnote: Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," 1:3.]
We must stop for a moment to look at this lithe young English colonist,
twenty-one years of age, standing on the nearest edge of the French
explorations and claims and the farthest verge of English adventure, on
the watershed twenty miles from Lake Erie, and requesting, in the name of
Governor Dinwiddie and of the shade of John Cabot, the peaceable departure
of those French pioneers and soldiers, who, as the letter which the young
colonel bore stated, were "erecting fortresses and making settlements upon
the the river [Ohio] so notoriously known to be the property of the Crown
of Great Britain."
The edge of the Great Lakes' basin is only a little way, at the place
where he stood, from the watershed of the Mississippi River. A little
farther up the shore, where Celoron made portage, it is only six or eight
miles across, and here it is but a little more, and the "height of land"
is hardly noticeable. The French built a fort on a promontory in the lake
--a promontory almost an island--Presque Isle; and there, where the waters
begin to run the other way, that is, toward the gulf, they built still
another which they called Le Boeuf, an easier portage than the Chautauqua.
From the former fort the city of Erie, a grimy, busy manufacturing city,
has grown. The latter has produced only a village, on whose weed-grown
outskirts the ruins of a fort still look out upon the meadow where the
little stream called "French Creek" starts, first toward France, in its
two-thousand-mile journey to the gulf that lies in the other direction.
For twenty miles I followed the stream one day to where it became a part
of Céloron's river-in imagination calling the French back to its banks
again, but finding them slow to come, for that part of the valley seemed
not particularly attractive. It is a little farther down the lake that the
vineyards fill all the shore from the lake to the watershed. And in that
very country I have often wondered at the miracle which raised from one
bit of ground the corn and the pumpkin, and from another the vine and
filled its fruit with wine.
The one-eyed veteran, Legardeur de St. Pierre, the commander of Fort Le
Boeuf, asked Washington, in rich diplomatic sarcasm, to descend to the
particularization of facts, and the lithe figure disappeared behind the
snows of the mountains only to come again across the mountains in the
springtime with sterner questioning. There was then no talk of Cabot or La
Salle, of Indian purchase or crown property. Jumonville may have come out
from Duquesne for peaceable speech, but Washington misunderstood or would
not listen. A flash of flint fire, a fresh bit of lead planted in the hill
of laurel, a splash of blood on the rock, and the war for the west was
begun.
What actually happened out on the slope of that hill will never be
accurately known; but, though Washington was only twenty-two years old
then, "full of military ardor" and "vehement," he could not have been
guilty of wilful firing on men of peaceful intent.
It doubtless seemed but an insignificant skirmish when Washington attacked
Jumonville near Pittsburgh, and it is now remembered by only a line or two
in our histories and the little cairn of stones "far up among the mountain
fogs near the headwaters of the Youghiogheny River," which marks the grave
of Jumonville.
Washington, the major of colonial militia in the Alleghany Mountains, the
scout of a land company, has been entirely forgotten in Washington, the
father of a nation; but Jumonville, the French ensign with no land-scrip,
fighting certainly as unselfishly and with as high purpose, is not
forgotten in any later achievement. That skirmish ended all for him. But
let it be remembered even now that he was a representative of France
standing almost alone, at the confluence of all the waters for hundreds of
miles on the other slope of the Alleghanies, in defense of what other men
of France had won by their hardihood.
I heard a great audience at the Academy applaud the brave endurance of
French priests and soldiers in Asia. Some day I hope these unrenowned men
who sacrificed as much for France in America will be as notably
remembered. There is a short street in Pittsburgh that bears Jumonville's
name--a short street that runs from the river into a larger street with
the name of one of his seven brothers, De Villiers, Coulon de Villiers,
who hastened from Montreal, while another brother hastened from the
Illinois to avenge his death.
But the cairn on the hillside has grown to no high monument. Mr. Hulbert,
who has written with filial pen of the valley, says that occasionally a
traveller repairs a rough wooden cross made of boards or tree branches and
planted among the rocks of the cairn. [Footnote: A. B. Hulbert, "The Ohio
River," pp. 44, 45.] But on a recent visit to the grave out in that
lonesome ravine, I found that a permanent tablet had been placed there
instead of this fragile cross.
I must leave to your unrefreshed memories the exploits of Beaujeu and
Braddock, of Contrecoeur and Forbes, blow up Fort Duquesne of the past,
and come into the city of to-day, for I wish to put against this
background this mighty city where it is often difficult to see because of
the smoke.
The French, as we are well aware, came to their forts by water. Quebec,
Frontenac, Niagara, Presque Isle, the Rock St. Louis, St. Joseph,
Chartres, and many others stood by river or lake. But the going was often
slow. Céloron (whose name is often spelled Céleron but would seem not to
deserve that spelling) was fifty-three days in making his water journey
from Montreal to the site of Pittsburgh. But a Céloron of to-day may see
the light of the Bartholdi statue in New York harbor at ten o'clock by
night and yet pass Braddock's field in the morning (before the time that
Bonnecamp said the sun came up in the narrow valley of the Belle Rivière),
and have breakfast at the Duquesne Club in time for a city day's work. It
was about as far from Paris to Marseilles in 1750 as it is to-day from
Paris to Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh is the front door of the valley of La Salle, as we now know the
valley, and the most important door; for the tonnage that enters and
leaves it by rail and water (177,071,238 tons in 1912 for the Pittsburgh
district) exceeds the tonnage of the five other greatest cities of the
world [Footnote: R. B. Naylor, address before the Ohio Valley Historical
Association (quoted in Hulbert, "Ohio River," pp. 365-6).] and is twice
the combined tonnage of both coasts of the United States to and from
foreign ports--which is probably due to the fact that so much of its
traffic is not in silks and furs but in iron and coal. And the multitudes
of human beings that pass through it are comparable in number with the
migrant tonnage and inanimate cargoes; for Pittsburgh is "the antithesis
of a mediaeval town"; "it is all motion;" "it is a flow, not a tank." The
mountains, once impenetrable barriers that had to be gone about, have been
levelled, and in the levelling the watersheds, as we have seen, have been
shifted. One who sees that throng pass to-day back and forth, to and from
the valley and the ocean, must know that there are no Alleghanies in our
continental topography, as Washington saw and as Webster stated there
could not be in our politics. If one makes the journey from the ocean in
the night, one may hear, if one wakes, the puffing of two engines, as in
the Jura Mountains, but there will be nothing else to tell him that the
shaggy Alleghany Mountains have not been cast into the midst of the sea--
nothing except the groaning of the wheels.
The Indians near Pittsburgh, I have said, prayed the messenger of Onontio
that they might keep their English smith--and the prayer seems to have
been abundantly answered, for Pittsburgh appears at first to be one vast
smithy, so enveloped is it in the smoke of its own toil, so reddened are
its great sky walls by its flaming forges, so filled is the air with the
dust from the bellows, and so clangorous is the sound of its hammers. It
is a city of Vulcans--a city whose industry makes academic discussions
seem as the play of girls in a field of flowers. It is not primarily a
market-place, this point of land, one of the places where the French and
English traders used to barter guns, whiskey, and trinkets for furs. It is
a making place--a pit between the hills, where the fires of creation are
still burning.
Céloron and his sombre voyage had been in my mind all day, as I sat in a
beautiful library of that city among books of the past; but in the
evening, as Dante accompanied by Virgil, I descended circle by circle to
the floor of the valley--with this difference, that it was not to a place
of torment but to the halls of the swarth gods of creation, those great,
dim, shadowy sheds that stretch along the river's edge. Into these, men of
France, has your Fort Duquesne grown--mile on mile of flame-belching
buildings, with a garrison as great as the population of all New France in
the day of Duquesne.
The new-world epic will find some of its color and incident there--an epic
in which we have already heard the men of France nailing the sheets of
"white iron" against the trees of the valley of La Belle Rivière. And as I
saw the white-hot sheets of iron issuing from those crunching rollers,
driven by the power of seven thousand horses, I felt that the youth with
the stamping iron should have put a fleur-de-lis upon each with all his
other cabalistic markings, for who of us can know that any metal would
ever have flowed white from the furnaces in that valley if the white-metal
signs of Louis XV had not first been carried into it?
In each of these halls there pass in orderly succession cars with varied
cargoes; red ore from the faraway hills beyond Superior, limestone
fragments from some near-by hill, and scrap of earlier burning. These, one
by one, are seized by a great arm of iron, thrust out from a huge moving
structure that looks like a battering-ram and is operated by a young man
about whom the lightnings play as he moves; and, one by one, they are cast
into the furnaces that are heated to a temperature of a thousand degrees
or more. There the red earth is freed of its "devils," as the great
ironmaster has named the sulphur and phosphorus--freed of its devils as
the red child was freed of his sins by the touch of holy water from the
fingers of Allouez out in those very forests from which the red ore was
dug--and comes forth purified, to be cast into flaming ingots, to be again
heated and then crushed and moulded and sawed and pierced for the better
service of man.
In the course of a few minutes one sees a few iron carloads of ore that
was a month before lying in the earth beyond Superior transformed into a
girder for a bridge, a steel rail, a bit of armor-plate, a beam for a sky-
scraper--and all in utter human silence, with the calm pushing and pulling
of a few levers, the accurate shovelling by a few hands, the deliberate
testing by a few pairs of experienced eyes.
Here is the new Fort Duquesne that is holding the place of the confluence
of the rivers and trails just beyond the Alleghanies, and this is the
ammunition with which that begrimed but strong-faced garrison defends the
valley to-day, supports the city on the environing hills and the
convoluted plateau back of the point, spans streams the world around,
builds the skeletons of new cities and protects the coasts of their
country.
There are many others in that garrison, but these makers of steel are the
core of that city, in which "the modern world," to use the words of one of
our first economists, "achieves its grandest triumph and faces its gravest
problem" [Footnote: John R. Commons, in _Survey_, March 6, 1909, 1:1051.]
--the "mighty storm mountain of capital and labor."
I quote from this same economist a comprehensive paragraph descriptive of
its riches: "Through hills which line these [confluent] rivers run
enormous veins of bituminous coal. Located near the surface, the coal is
easily mined, and elevated above the rivers, much of it comes down to
Pittsburgh by gravity. There are twenty-nine billion tons of it, good for
steam, gas or coke. Then there are vast stores of oil [seven million five
hundred thousand gallons annually] natural gas [of which two hundred and
fifty million feet are consumed daily], sand, shale, clay and stone, with
which to give Pittsburgh and the tributary country the lead of the world
in iron and steel, glass, electrical machinery, street-cars, tin plate,
air-brakes and firebrick." [Footnote: J. R. Commons, "Wage Earners of
Pittsburg," in _Survey_, March 6, 1909, 21:1051-64.]
And to all this natural bounty the national government has added that of
the tariff and of millions spent in river improvements, while Europe has
contributed raw labor already fed to the strength of oxen and often
already developed to highest skill. It was a young chemist trained in
Europe who conducted me through the mills, explaining all the processes in
a perfect idiomatic speech, though of broken accent.
The white-hot steel ingot swinging beneath a smoky sky is a sign of the
contribution of France through Pittsburgh to civilization, not merely the
material but the human contribution. The ingot, a great block of white-hot
steel, is the sign of her labor, which has assembled the scattered
elements of the valley and, in the fierce heat of natural and unfed fires,
has compounded them into a new metal that is something more than iron,
more valuable than gold. But it is only another sign, too, of forces that
have assembled from all parts of the earth, men represented in the varied
cargoes that are poured by a seemingly omnipotent hand into those
furnaces--red-blooded men, and with them slag that has gone through the
fires of older civilizations.
Here, let me say again, is being made a new metal; this no one can doubt.
It is not merely a melting and a restamping of old coin with a new
superscription, a new sovereignty--a composite face instead of a personal
likeness--it is the making, as I have said in other illustrations and
metaphors, of a new race.
If I had an instinct of human character, such as the intuitive sense of
the fibre and tension of steel possessed by the man who watches the
boiling in the furnaces and who, from time to time, puts aside his smoked
glasses and looks at the texture of a typical bit of his metal, or who
stands at the emptying of the furnace into the ladle and directs the
addition of carbon or magnesium to bring his output to the right
constituency, I could tell you what strains and stresses this new people
would stand. As it is, I can only make a surmise, perhaps not more
valuable than yours.
The makers of steel were concerned only to get the primacy in steel. Human
character was of concern only as it made better steel and more of it. They
took the red ore where they could get it richest in iron and cheapest, and
they took red-blooded labor where they could get it strongest--sinewed,
clearest-eyed, and cheapest. "There are no able-bodied men between the
ages of sixteen and fifty years left in my native town," said a Servian
workman in the mills. "They have all come to America. The agricultural
districts and villages of the mid-eastern valleys of Europe are sending
their strongest men and youths, nourished of good diet and in pure air,
stolid and care-free, into that dim canyon-Servians, Croatians,
Ruthenians, Lithuanians, Slovaks, with Italians, Poles, and Russian Jews."
[Footnote: P. Roberts, "The New Pittsburg," in _Charities and the
Commons_, January 2, 1909, 21:533. See also J. A. Fitch, "The Steel
Workers," New York, 1910.] It is from Slavs and mixed people of the old
European midland, says one, "where the successive waves of broad-headed
and fair-haired peoples gathered force and swept westward to become Celt
and Saxon, and Swiss and Scandinavian and Teuton," the old European
midland with its "racial and religious loves and hates seared deep, that
the new immigration is coming to Pittsburgh to work out civilization under
tense conditions"--not with that purpose, to be sure, but with that
certain result. The conscious purposes have been expressed in the tangible
ingots, the wages they have offered them in their hot hands, and the
profits. The civilization has been incidental.
There is developing, however, an effort in the midst of this "dynamic
individualism" to make both the new and the old immigration work out
"civilization." This individualism was prodigal, profligate, at first. But
it has learned thrift; it by and by came to burn its gas over and over; it
made the purifying substances go on in a continued round of service; it
became more mindful of human muscles and bones and eyes and ears; it took
the latest advice of experts, but for steel's sake, not civilization's.
Mr. Carnegie, when a manufacturer there, found 90 per cent of pure iron in
the refuse of his competitor, it is said. This he bought under long
contract and worked over in his own mills. His neighbor's waste became a
part of his fortune. And the result of that discernment and thrift is now
furnishing an analogue for the conscious utilization of other waste--waste
of native capacity of the steel-worker for happiness and usefulness.
Mr. Carnegie has indeed led the way in the establishment of libraries, art
galleries, museums, institutes of training and research out of what were
but waste if spent as some millionaires spend their profits. All these
things upon the hills are by-products of the steel-mills down in the
ravine. In every luminous ingot swung in the mills that were his, there is
something toward the pension of a university professor out in Oregon,
something for an artist in New York or Paris, something for an astronomer
on the top of Mount Wilson, something for the teacher in the school upon
the hill, something for every library established by his gift.
What is now making itself felt, however, is a desire to get the wage
element in the ingot as thriftily, as efficiently, as nobly converted and
used to the last ounce as is the profit element. There has been in the
past a masterful individualism at work. Now there is a masterful
aggressive humanism beginning to make itself felt, comparable in its
spirit with the masterful venturing of the French explorers or the
masterful faith of the French missionaries, that promises to constrain the
city "to the saving and enhancing of individual and collective human
power," even as the French missionaries tried to constrain the great fur-
trading prospects of France to the saving of human souls.
The attempt to realize an urban paradise is becoming a conscious purpose
as this extract made from a report made to a city-plan committee of a
Pittsburgh commission will indicate:
"A third undeveloped asset in the Pittsburgh waterfront is its value for
recreation and as an element of civic comeliness and self-respect. One of
the deplorable consequences of the short-sighted and wasteful
commercialism of the later nineteenth century lay in its disregard of what
might have been the æsthetic byproducts of economic improvement; in the
false impression spread abroad that economical and useful things were
normally ugly; and in the vicious idea which followed, that beauty and the
higher pleasures of civilized life were to be sought only in things
otherwise useless. Thus the pursuit of beauty was confounded with
extravagance.
"Among the most significant illustrations of the fallacy of such ideas are
the comeliness and the incidental recreation value which attach to many of
the commercial water fronts of European river ports, and it is along such
lines that Pittsburgh still has opportunity for redeeming the sordid
aspect of its business centre.
"Wherever in the world, as an incident of the highways and wharves along
its river banks, a city has provided opportunity for the people to walk
and sit under pleasant conditions, where they can watch the water and the
life upon it, where they can enjoy the breadth of outlook and the sight of
the open sky and the opposite bank and the reflections in the stream, the
result has added to the comeliness of the city itself, the health and
happiness of the people, and their loyalty and local pride. This has been
true in the case of a bare paved promenade, running along like an elevated
railroad over the sheds and tracks and derricks of a busy ocean port, as
at Antwerp, in the case of a tree-shaded sidewalk along a commercial
street with the river quays below it, as at Paris and Lyons and hundreds
of lesser cities; and in the case of a broad embankment garden won from
the mud banks by dredging and filling, as at London."
I had great difficulty in finding a bookstore in Pittsburgh. Some day that
idealistic condition which makes the Seine so dear to thousands who know
its every mood, and so dear both to the wise and the ignorant, may obtain
on La Belle Rivière.
This is but one item of a planning for the future of this city which
thinks not merely of its beautifying and of the pleasure of its people in
their leisure, but of all conditions which affect the health, convenience,
education, and general welfare of the whole district--that region once
called the "black country," of which Pittsburgh was the "dingy capital"--
one of the regions where the French were pioneers.
I have spoken of this as the "taking thought" of a democratic community.
More accurately, a body of one hundred volunteer citizens, disposing
themselves in fourteen different committees (including those on rapid
transit, industrial accidents, city housing, and public hygiene), have
undertaken all this labor of constructive planning at their own expense
(based upon a series of investigations made by endowed researchers), but
with the hope of creating a public opinion favorable to their plans, which
look to the establishment by the democratic community of "such living and
working conditions as may set a standard for other American industrial
centres." [Footnote: Olmsted, F. L., "Pittsburgh, Main Thoroughfares and
the Down-Town District." Pittsburgh Civic Commission, 1910. _Survey_,
February 4, 1911, 25:740-4.]
No such thorough and systematic study of existing city conditions has been
made anywhere else in America. It is quite as scientific as the scholarly
studies of buried cities, only immensely more complex and difficult.
Knowing itself and possessed of an unconquerable spirit, it seems likely
now that Pittsburgh will win back the beautiful site which Céloron
remarked when he passed down La Belle Rivière--a site which even "Florence
might covet"--and will make it a city that will deserve to keep always the
other part of the name of the sower of the leaden plates--Bienville.
A pillar of cloud stands over the city by day and a pillar of fire by
night. They have together shown the way out of the wilderness. It now
remains to be seen whether the highest things of men's longing will have
realization, in giving that "dynamic individualism" a social ideal with
distinct, practicable working plans.
Pittsburgh stands on the edge of the valley of the new democracy. It has
put its plates along every path. There is hardly a village of any size
from the Alleghanies to the Rockies that it has not laid some claim to by
its strips of steel. There is hardly a stream of any size that it has not
claimed by a bridge. It has, indeed, the spirit of Céloron, in other body,
still planting monuments of France's renewal of possession, wherever the
steel rails and girders and plates from the Pittsburgh mills have been
carried. And Pittsburgh is but one of the renewed cities which encompass
the eastern half of the valley where once stretched the chain of French
forts futile in defense but powerful in prophecy.
When we see the American city, even through the eyes of Walt Whitman, that
poet of democracy, it seems a desperate hope that is left her: "Are there,
indeed, men here in the city," he asks, "worthy the name? Are there
athletes? Are there perfect women to match the generous material
luxuriance? Is there a pervading atmosphere of beautiful manners? Are
there crops of fine youths and majestic old persons? Are there arts worthy
freedom and a rich people? Is there a great moral and religious
civilization--the only justification of a great material one? Confess that
to severe eyes, using the moral microscope upon humanity, a sort of dry
and flat Sahara appears, these cities crowded with petty grotesques,
malformations, phantoms, playing meaningless antics. Confess that
everywhere, in shop, street, church, theatre, barroom, official chair, are
pervading flippancy and vulgarity, low cunning, infidelity--everywhere the
youth puny, impudent, foppish, prematurely ripe--everywhere an abnormal
libidinousness, unhealthy forms, male, female, painted, padded, dyed,
chignon'd, muddy complexions, bad blood, the capacity for good motherhood
decreasing or deceas'd, shallow notions of beauty, with a range of
manners, or rather lack of manners (considering the advantages enjoy'd)
probably the meanest to be seen in the world." [Footnote: "Democratic
Vistas," in his "Complete Works," pp. 205, 206.]
But it is no such desperate hope that the cities we have seen spring from
French fort and portage keep in their hearts. It is not even a confession
that one would have to make to-day in the American cities which Whitman
had in mind in his gloomy, foreboding vision. I have seen on the streets
of one of the Whitman cities [Footnote: New York City.] those same
grotesques, malformations, and meaningless antics, that flippancy and
vulgarity and cunning, that foppishness and premature ripeness, that
painted, bad-complexioned, bad-mannered, shallow-beautied humanity; but
touching, as I have had opportunity to touch, three of the great agencies
of its aspirations--its philanthropies, its literature, and its schools--I
know that no body of five million people, whether huddled in tenements or
scattered over plain and mountain and along rivers and seas, has with more
serious or sacrificing purpose aspired, though constantly disturbed in its
prayers, its operations, by people of every tongue, nearly a million
strong, who are emptied at her port every year from Europe and Asia,
besides the hundreds of thousands who come up from the country. There
are public schools, for example, in certain parts of that city where there
is not a child of American parentage. There is one, in particular, which I
visit frequently and which I call the "oasis" in the desert of humanity
(Walt Whitman's Sahara), where two or three thousand children are
gathered, literally from the plains of Russia, the valleys of Italy, and
other parts of Europe--for these were their ancestral homes, though they
come immediately from the swarming streets and dimly lighted, ill-smelling
tenements of New York--and there, aspiring under the hopeful teaching of
the city, I have heard them, boys and girls together, sing, with all the
joy and cleanliness of shepherd children, of a leading in green pastures
and by still waters.
But to come back to the cities in the valley of Nouvelle France, there is
no note of else than hope there. Mistakes, disappointments, crudities,
infidelities? Yes, but the mistakes, disappointments, crudities, failures
of youth--youth of strong passions and love of play but of a masterful
will that a generous nature has so much encouraged and aided as to obscure
its limitations.
A few rods from the Carnegie Library and Museum of Art and Concert Hall in
Pittsburgh is a baseball field, where a million people or more come in the
course of the season to see trained men play an out-of-door game (and if
it chanced that the President of the United States were visiting the city,
he might be seen there accompanied by his secretary of state or the
president of a great university). In Chicago I found the whole city, young
and old, united in its interest in the results of the "game" of the day
before or the prospects of the next. When games are played for the great
championship pennant the city virtually takes a holiday.
But that is the spirit of youth in those overgrown, awkward cities that
are only now beginning to be self-conscious and seriously purposeful in
doing more than the things conventionally and for the most part selfishly
done by cities generally. In the conjugation of their busy, noisy life
they do not often use the past tense, never the past-perfect, and they
have had for the most part little concern as to the future, except the
rise in real-estate values and the retaining of markets. When in
Pittsburgh I asked a prominent man, of French ancestry, why the people did
not keep from the destroying hand of private enterprise the site of old
Fort Duquesne (the fecund plot from which the great city had grown), and
he said it was all they could do to keep the little blockhouse that
remained of Fort Pitt, filling a space a few yards square. What claim has
the past as against the needs of industry in the present? That was the
attitude of that grimy individualism born in "barefoot square" or in "slab
alley," in the land of smoke and flame and "rusty rivers."
And the future? Well, the voice of the French priest and of those
ministers of his own and other faiths that have followed in his footsteps
is still heard there crying of the world to come.
Several years ago on my way into that valley, on one of those fast trains
that tie the east and west together, we came shrieking, thundering down
the mountain slopes in the dusk of the day, past Jumonville's grave, past
Braddock's field, past miles on miles of glowing coke-ovens, past acres
upon acres of factories with their thousands of lighted windows, past
flaming towers and chimneys into the midst of the modern babel, the tops
of whose buildings were hidden in smoke, when suddenly, above the noise
and clangor of whistles and wheels, I heard the rich, deep voice of a
cathedral bell telling that the priest was still at the side of the
explorer and trader and the iron coureur de bois.
It is not, however, of the celestial but of the terrestrial future that I
am permitted to speak.
For, as I intimated, these young cities of the west, only a half-century
old as cities--children by the side of Paris, London, Rome--are beginning
seriously to take thought of the morrow, not simply of multiplying their
numbers nor of sending their multitudes back to the country but of giving
them prospect and promise of a better, more comfortable, more wholesome
life, capable of a higher individual and collective development within the
city. For while cities have been preached against since the time when
Jonah cried against Nineveh, and while cities have perished and have been
buried, even as Nineveh, the generic city, the assembling of gregarious
men, continues and increases.
The census returns for 1910 for the American cities show, so far as I
noticed, scarcely a single loss of population in the last ten years
[Footnote: Cities with losses of population in the decade are Galveston,
Texas: 37,389 in 1900, 36,981 in 1910; Chelsea, Mass.: 34,072 in 1900,
32,452 in 1910; St. Joseph, Mo.: 102,979 in 1900, 77,403 in 1910.] and a
large gain for nearly every city of the middle west. It is prophesied that
before long one-half of the people of the United States will be living in
cities, and there is the more distant prospect that the urban population
will be two-thirds of the whole. [Footnote: In 1910 46.3 per cent resided
in communities classed by the census as urban, and 55.1 per cent in cities
and incorporated or unincorporated villages.]
It is hopeless to try to turn that tide away from the cities except to
suburban fields. So the great problem of that valley is to improve the
cities, since from them are to be the issues of the new life, since they
are, indeed, the hope of democracy.
I have thought it of significance that the envisioned place of ultimate
celestial felicity-seen though it was by a man in the solitude of a cave
in an island of the Mediterranean (the place which the civilized world has
dimly hanging over it, whenever it looks away from its tasks and into the
beyond)--is not a lotus-land, not an oasis of spring and palm, not a
stretch of forest and mountain, not even a quiet place by a sea of jasper,
but a place of many tenements--a city, a perfect city to be sure, let down
ultimately from the skies, with walls of precious stones--and no zone for
Kipling's "Tomlinsons" about it--with gates whose octroi officials keep
out whatever makes an abomination or a lie, but which are open to the east
and west, the north and south, that the kings of earth may bring their
glory and honor into it--a city whose streets are clean and smooth--a city
that has flowing through it a river of pure water, on whose banks grow
trees whose leaves are for the healing of the nations.
The obvious thing to do, since, good or bad, the country is emptying its
population into the cities, since we cannot go back through the gates of
Eden into the garden paradise of Genesis, is to go toward the city of the
Apocalypses, not, to be sure, as the Oriental mind of John saw it, paved
and walled with precious stones and gold, but made as beautiful as the
Occidental taste and architectural skill will permit, as comfortable as
Occidental standards demand, and as sanitary as the mortal desire for
immortality can with finite wisdom make it.
I was speaking some time ago of a painting I once saw, in illustration of
the death of Eve, which represented her as on a journey in her haggard old
age, accompanied by Cain (whose son built the first city in a wilderness),
and as pausing in the journey on a height of ground, pointing toward a
little cluster of trees in the distance, and saying to her son: "There was
Paradise." But paradise is not to be realized by the masses of men in the
return of man to the forests. The healing trees and the river are to be
carried to the city.