WESTERN TOWNS AND CITIES THAT HAVE SPRUNG FROM FRENCH PORTAGE PATHS
The old French portage paths were also fruitful of cities on the edge of
the Mississippi Valley, though the growth of these short paths was not--
with one notable exception--as luxuriant as that from the earth enriched
of human blood and bones about the old French forts.
These portages, or carrying paths, which differ from the trails of the
wood runners in that they are but short interruptions of the water paths
and were not designed or laid out, as a rule, by the wild engineers of the
forests and prairies but by human feet, lie across the great highway along
which, before the days of canals, one might have walked dry-shod from the
Atlantic to the Pacific--between the basins of the St. Lawrence and the
Atlantic, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, the Pacific and the Arctic
--a highway which has, however, been trodden by no one probably through
its entire length, for in places it runs over inaccessible peaks of
mountains and winds around the narrowest of ledges. But the paths across
it--those connecting the streams that flow in opposite directions from the
continental watersheds--are like isthmian paths between great oceans--
great dry oceans with watercourses through them.
There were, to be sure, still other portage paths than those across
watersheds, and the most common were those that led around waterfalls or
impassable rapids, such as Champlain and the Jesuits followed on their
journeys up the Ottawa to the Nipissing. It was of such portages that
Father Brébeuf wrote--portage paths passing almost continually by
torrents, by precipices, and by places that were horrible in every way. In
less than five days they made more than thirty-five portages, some of
which were three leagues long. This means that on these occasions the
traveller had to carry on his shoulders his canoe and all his baggage,
with so little food that he was continually hungry and almost without
strength and vigor. [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 8:75-77.]
Another priest tells of a portage occupying an entire day, during which he
climbed mountains and pierced forests and carried, the while, his chapel
and his little store of provisions.
Of whatever variety, however, these portage paths were frequently burying-
grounds. Sometimes altars were erected beside them. They were often places
of encampments, of assemblies, and more often of ambuscades. So it came
about, too, that they were made the places of minor forts or gave occasion
for forts farther on the way. In those precivilized Panama days, the
neutrality of the isthmian paths could not be assured, and so they were
fortified.
Céloron tells of the mending of boats at the end of his Chautauqua
portages, and that statement, with other like incidents, has led one
authority to picture the birches--those beautiful white and golden trees
of the sombre northern woods that gave their cloaks to the travellers who
asked and shivered till they grew others--stripped of their bark where
those paths came down to the streams. He has even imagined primitive
carpenter shops and ovens and huts on these paths where the voyageurs must
stop for repairs, food, and rest--the precursors of garage, road-house,
and hotel.
But on maps in the Bibliothèque Nationale names of portage paths have been
found which assure us that these difficult ways were not without charm to
those early travellers, as they have been to many a wanderer since; for
there was Portage des Roses, where the wild rose brightened the way; and
Portage de la Musique, where the water sang constantly its song in the
solitude. Then there were Portage de la Roche Fendue, Portage des Chênes,
Portage des Perches, Portage Talon, and Portage des Récollets, named in
memory of experiences of men whom the voyageurs wished to recall or to
honor, just as the French give to their streets such names as "Rue des
Fleurs," "Boulevard des Capucines." [Footnote: A. B. Hulbert, "Historic
Highways of America," 7:49.]
The portage paths that became in time most fruitful were generally short,
well-cleared, and deep-furrowed by feet. On three of the most important
and historic of these paths from the basin of the Great Lakes to that of
the Mississippi I have walked with the memories of these precursors; in
one place it was suggested that I should ride in a carriage, but I
refused, feeling that these men must be worshipped on foot. The first of
these portages is that path of which I have already spoken several times
(and which I never tire of letting my imagination travel again), the one
over which Nicolet must have passed from the Fox River into the Wisconsin
River, if he got so far on his way to Muscovy--the path to which Father
Dablon said the way was as through a paradise, but was as hard as the way
to heaven [Footnote: "If the country ... somewhat resembles an earthly
paradise in beauty, the way leading to it may be said to bear some
likeness to the one depicted by our Lord as leading to Heaven."--"Jesuit
Relations" (Thwaites), 55:191.]--the path which the coureurs de bois
Radisson and Groseilliers doubtless followed; the path which La Salle may
have found in those two years of mysterious absence in the valley; the
path Marquette and Joliet and hundreds after them certainly took on their
way from Montreal to the Mississippi or from the Mississippi back to
Montreal. You would not know this narrow strip--not a mile wide--to be a
watershed dividing the continent, the north from the south; you would not
know it for the threshold to the Mississippi Valley. The plain which the
path crosses seems to the eye as level as a table. Undoubtedly before the
tipping of the bed of the lakes the water flowed over this path. Indeed,
La Salle in one of his letters refers to the portaging here of canoes past
an "oak grove and across a flooded meadow." The tree of which he speaks,
with two canoes clumsily drawn upon it by the savages, to mark the
beginning of the portage at the Wisconsin, has gone, but a monument of red
granite now stands there with the names of Marquette and Joliet upon it.
At the other end of the now macadamized "path" there is a little red
bridge that leads across the Fox to where a portage fort grew later into
an important trading-post; but now there is no trace of those monuments of
war and trade. There is a farmhouse on their site whose tenants are in
fear only of drought and early frosts. A canal crosses this little isthmus
and once it interlocked the east and west, the arctic plains with the
subtropic cane fields; but it has given over its work to the railroads,
having served, however, I have no doubt, to water the roots of the
beautiful town that bears the generic name of all those places where
burdens were borne between waters. "Wauona," the Indians called it, more
euphoniously, but with the same significance as "Portage"--in the State
that has taken the name of the river that carried the burdens on to the
Mississippi--Wisconsin. This town has lately crept modestly into our
western literature as "Friendship Village." [Footnote: Zona Gale,
"Friendship Village." Macmillan, New York, 1908.] Except that it has a
more comely setting than most towns of the plains--even of those northern
plains with their restful undulations--and has a brighter, cleaner aspect
--since a light-colored brick is used instead of the red so much in favor
where wood is forbidden by the fire laws--it is a typical western town--
the next size larger than "Aramoni"; and so I must stop here for a moment
where Marquette, son of Rose de la Salle of Rheims, and Joliet, the wagon
maker of Quebec, came up out of the twisting little stream that is still
one of the fountains of the Atlantic.
For none the less is this village, standing beside this fountain (again
more euphoniously called the Kaka-ling or Kaukauna), itself touching the
Atlantic shores and even mingling with currents that reach the European
coasts. There was born in this village the historian [Footnote: Frederick
Jackson Turner.] who has written so well of the rise of that western
country that he has been called to the professorship of American history
at Harvard University, a literal son of the portage, who has rediscovered
the west to the world. And recently all the valley, and other valleys,
too, have been reading the stories of this place of portage (called, as I
have said, "Friendship Village"), written by a young woman whose windows
look out from her home upon the Wisconsin River not many paces from
Marquette's place of embarkation--a true daughter of the portage.
The French, who have given the new continent this portage path out of
Europe into the very heart of America, should read with some gratification
of the more intimate life that dwells there back of and in the midst of
the bustling, tireless, noisy industry of the valley.
"The long Caledonian hills" [the same which La Salle describes], "the four
rhythmic spans of the bridge" [a bridge of iron, not of vines and flowers
such as Chateaubriand describes], "the nearer river, the island where the
first birds build--these teach our windows the quiet and the opportunity
of the home town, its kindly brooding companionship, its doors to an
efficiency as intimate as that of fairy fingers." [Footnote: "Friendship
Village," p. vii, author's note.] And this is but one of thousands of
"home towns" in that great basin, towns with Daphne streets and Queen Anne
houses, and gloomy court-houses and austere churches and miniature
libraries, towns that taper off into suburban shanties, towns that have
in these new bottles, of varied and pretentious shapes, the best wine of
that western world.
The author of "Friendship Village" has vision of the more beautiful towns
into which these towns will some day grow, as yours have grown more
beautiful with age. "All the way," she writes, seeing the sunset from that
same river of the portage as Marquette saw it, "I had been watching
against the gold the jogging homeward of empty carts.... Such a procession
I want to see painted upon a sovereign sky. I want to have painted a giant
carpenter of the village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding
a huge white pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus
capital.... Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising
values and fresco our village libraries with them." [Footnote: Zona Gale,
"Friendship Village Love Stories," p. 47.] That appreciation and
expression of the beautiful is something that the French explorers in that
other world--the valley reached of the pioneers of the seeing eyes and the
understanding hearts--have carried and will continue to carry over those
same portages, to give that virile life of the west some of those higher
satisfactions of which this daughter of the portage is the prophetess.
Another portage path of importance is that which Marquette may also have
trodden, or may even have been carried over by his faithful attendants,
Pierre Porteret and Jacques, on his death journey from the land of the
Illinois to the mission of Michilimackinac, which he did not reach alive--
a journey, the latter part of which was like that of King Arthur borne in
a barge by his faithful knight, Sir Bedivere, to his last resting-place,
the Vale of Avalon. This portage, varying in length with the season from
three to five miles, was the St. Joseph-Kankakee Portage. La Salle, Tonty,
and Hennepin passed over it in 1679 on a less spiritual errand to the same
land whose inhabitants Marquette had tried to instruct in the mystery of
the faith. And it was well worn by adventurous and pious feet in the
century that followed.
What traffic in temporal and spiritual things was here carried over, is
intimated by relics of that century found in the fields not far away,
where for many years a French mission house stood with enough of a
military garrison to invite for it the name "Fort St. Joseph." In the room
of the Northern Indiana Historical Society at this portage there are to be
seen some of these relics, sifted from the dirt and sand: crucifixes,
knives, awls, beads--which I am told are clearly the loot of ancient Roman
cities, traded to the Indians for hides--iron rings, nails, and hinges-
these with flint arrow-heads and axes, relics of the first munitions of
the stone and iron ages out on the edges of civilization.
This portage path between the rivers is now obliterated by railroads,
paved streets, furrows, graves, factories, and dwellings; but down by the
St. Joseph River there stands a withered cedar, perhaps several hundred
years old, which bears scars that are believed to be the blaze marks of
the broad-bladed axes of the French explorers--made to indicate the place
where the portage out of the river began, the place which La Salle missed
when lost in the forest but afterward found, where Father Gabriel made
several crosses, as Hennepin records, on the trees--perhaps these very
marks-and where La Salle left letters for the guidance over the prairie of
those "who were to come in the vessel"--thinking of the captain of the
Griffin who was ordered to follow him to the Illinois on his return.
It is only a little more than a league from this landing at the bend of
the river (which has given the name "South Bend" to the town) across the
"large prairie" to the wet meadows in whose ooze the tortuous Kankakee
River became navigable, in La Salle's day, a hundred paces from its
source, and increased so rapidly in volume that, as he says in a letter,
"in a short time it becomes as broad and deep as the Marne"--the Marne
which he knew in his boyhood and for which any but his iron heart must
have longed.
Charlevoix walked across those unchanged fields of St. Joseph a half
century (1674-1720) after La Salle, and Parkman made the same journey
nearly a century after Charlevoix, finding there what he called "a dirty
little town." To-day a clean, industrious, eager city of over fifty-three
thousand, with a world horizon, as well as a provincial pride, throws its
shadow in the early morning across the path. Through its outskirts I tried
years ago to trace this portage path and there with my companion (who was
always the "Tonty" of my voyages on those western streams), put my boat in
the river and paddled and poled the seventy-five miles down the St. Joseph
River to the lake, where, as I wanted to believe, Marquette had made his
last journey. Hearing, some time after, of the blaze marks on the cedar-
tree, I went again to the portage, and from this old red cedar-tree again
traced the probable course of the French to the fields of corn, or maize,
yellow in the autumn sun that hid the fountains of the Kankakee. This
time, having but little leisure, I rode in an automobile from one end to
the other through and along the path, looking occasionally toward the sky
for air-ships that were due to alight there on their way from Chicago to
New York.
In La Salle's packs, carried over that portage, were blacksmith's tools--
forge, bellows, anvil, iron for nails--and carpenter's and joiner's tools.
One might easily believe that they were left there--such have been the
products of that portage strip, two or three miles wide.
First, there has grown there the largest wagon factory in the world. The
path of the pack and the burden has here produced as its peculiar
contribution to civilization that which is to carry burdens, instead of
the backs of men, the world round.
Second, here stands the world's largest plough factory--a place from which
ploughs are sent to every arable valley that civilization has conquered
and made to feel its hunger.
Third, here spreading its acres, or arpents, of buildings across the high
ground between the two rivers, is the largest factory in the world for the
making of certain parts of the sewing-machine; in every community of any
size in the world it has an agency.
And here, last of all, besides more than a hundred minor industries, is
what is, to my great surprise, said to be the largest toy factory in the
world.
The gift of wagons for the bearing and easing of men's burdens; the gift
of the steel plough that has lifted man from the primitive subsistence of
the hoe; the gift of the shuttle which has released woman from the tyranny
of the needle; the gift of toys to the children of all races; has not this
portage prairie, this meadow of St. Joseph, had some element mixed with
its loam and clay from the spirit of those Gallic precursors of American
energy, something that has given this industry a wider venture, if not
peculiar expression? At any rate, its gifts to its time have been far
beyond common, of the tangible at least; and as to the intangible, the day
that I last spent on this portage an art league was being formed to foster
an interest in art and bring the best examples available to what were, but
a little time ago, dreary meadows half covered with snow and strewn with
skulls and bones of the buffalo. The most modern schools are being
developed and maintained by the public, and the University of Notre Dame
and the College of St. Mary look across the river to this portage field
and city.
One might have passed this portage so difficult to discern, as La Salle
did, and yet have found another way to the lower Mississippi, with a short
portage from this same stream to the Wabash River. A still shorter way
than any of these, and doubtless known to La Salle from his first years of
wanderings in the eastern end of the Mississippi Valley, led from the west
end of Lake Erie up the Maumee and then by portage to the Wabash and the
Ohio. This was the path that Celoron followed homeward on his memorable
plate-planting journey. But the portage was so long that he burned his
shattered canoes near the source of the Miami and was furnished with boats
at the French fort near the headwaters of the Maumee. The hostility of the
Iroquois, as we have seen, made perilous to the French in the earlier days
this path, so important among Indian highways as often to be called the
"Indian Appian Way."
Excepting the portage paths farther up the valley, notably that of St.
Esprit, and important chiefly as fur-trading paths, there remains but one
other historic portage path across the ridge of stone and swamp and
prairie from which are pendent, on the one side, all the silver streams of
the Mississippi Valley and, on the other side, all the Great Lakes and all
the rivers that flow into them.
This remaining path is the tenuous trail through the fields of wild onions
that led from the river or creek called Chicago (the Garlic River--Rivière
de l'Ail) into a stream that still bears a French name but of a
pronunciation which a Parisian would not accept--the Des Plaines. This
path, too, traversed a marsh and flat prairie so level that in freshet the
water ran both ways and was once in the bed of a river that ran from the
lake to the gulf. But it has been hallowed beyond all others of these
trails, for it was beside this portage that Marquette suffered through a
winter, detained there by a serious sickness when on his way to minister
to the Illinois Indians a hundred miles below. His hut was the first
European habitation upon its site--the site of the future city of Chicago.
In a book-shop not a league from where that hut stood I found a volume
valued at its weight in gold [Footnote: Thevenot, "Recueil de Voyages,"
with 2 folding maps and 14 plates, complete. Crown 8vo, white pigskin.
Paris 1682. Contains Marquette's and Joliet's Discoveries in North
America, etc. For an account of the various editions, see "Jesuit
Relations," 59:294-9.] giving the account of the journey in which
Marquette had passed up this portage on the way to Green Bay after the
discovery of the upper Mississippi with Joliet. It tells in its closing
paragraphs of the rich prairies just beyond this portage, but it recites
with greater satisfaction the baptizing of a dying child brought to the
side of his canoe as he was setting out for the mission house. "Had all
this voyage," he said, "caused but the salvation of a single soul I should
deem all my fatigue well repaid, and this I have reason to think. For,
when I was returning, I passed by the Indians of Peoria, where I was three
days announcing the faith, in all their cabins, after which, as we were
embarking, they brought me on the water's edge a dying child which I
baptized a little before it expired, by an admirable providence, for the
salvation of an innocent soul." [Footnote: Shea, "Discovery and
Exploration of the Mississippi Valley," 2d ed., p. 55.]
That was in 1673. It was more than a year before he again entered the
Chicago River, wishing to keep his promise to minister to the Illinois
savages and eager "to do and suffer everything for so glorious an
undertaking." In the "Jesuit Relations" [Footnote: 59:165-183.] the story
of those winter days at the Chicago portage has been kept for all time.
All through January his illness obliged him to stay in the portage cabin,
but early in February he "commenced Novena (Neufuaine) with a mass, at
which Pierre and Jacques [his companions], who do everything they can to
relieve me, received communion--to ask God to restore my health." His
ailment left him, but weakness and the cold and the ice in the rivers kept
him still at the portage until April. On the eve of his leaving for the
Illinois the journal ends with this thoughtful word of the French: "If the
French procure robes in this country, they do not disrobe the savages, so
great are the hardships that must be endured to obtain them." [Footnote:
"Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 59:183.]
In the dusk of an autumn day I went out to find the place where the Novena
had worked the miracle of his healing. As I have already intimated, few of
all the hundreds of thousands there in that great city have had any
consciousness of the background of French heroism and suffering and
prevision in front of which they were passing daily, but I found that the
policemen and the watchmen on the railroad near the river knew at least of
the great black cross which stands by that drab and sluggish water, placed
there in memory of Marquette and Joliet. The bit of high ground where the
hut stood is now surrounded by great looming sheds and factories, which
were entirely tenantless when I found my way through a long unlighted and
unpaved street in the direction of the river. The cross stood, in a little
patch of white, black as the father's cowl, against the night with its
crescent moon. I could not make out the inscription on the river side of
the monument and, seeing a signal-lantern tied to a scow moored to the
bank near by, I untied it and by its light was able to read the tribute of
the city to the memory of the priest and the explorer "who first of known
white men had passed that way," having travelled, as it recites, "two
thousand five hundred miles in canoes in one hundred and twenty days." The
bronze plate bears a special tribute to the foresight of Joliet, but it
commemorates first of all the dwelling of the frail body and valorous soul
of Father Marquette, the first European within the bounds of the city of
Chicago. I wish there might be written on Mississippi maps, in that space
that is shown between the Chicago and the Des Plaines, or the "Divine
River," as it was sometimes called, the words: "Portage St. Jacques." That
were a fitter canonization than to put his name among the names of cities,
steamboats on the lake, or tobaccos, as is our custom in America. The
crescent moon dropped behind the shadows that now line the portage "like a
sombre forest," but it is only a few steps through the darkness back into
the light and noise of the city of more than two million people.
Out of the black loam of this dark portage path fringed by marshes, in the
field of wild onions, the newest of the world's great cities has sprung
and spread with a promise that exceeds any other on the face of the
planet, though within the life of men still living it was but a stretch of
lake shore, a marshy plain with a path from its miniature river or creek
toward the crescent moon.
A metropolis was doubtless predestined on or near the very site of Chicago
by natural conditions and the peopling of the lands to the northwest; but
Louis Joliet was its first prophet. The inscription on the tablet at the
foot of the black cross recites that in crossing this site Joliet
recommended it for its natural advantages and as a place of first
settlement. And he first suggested the lakes-to-the-gulf waterway--a
prospect of which La Salle speaks with disfavor but which over two hundred
years later was in some measure realized.
The "Jesuit Relation" of August 1, 1674, reporting the conversation of
Joliet, who had lost all his precious papers in the Lachine Rapids, makes
this interesting prophecy: [Footnote: Thwaite's edition, 58:105.] "It
would only be necessary to make a canal by cutting through half a league
of prairie, to pass from the foot of the Lake of the Illinois [Michigan]
to the River St. Louis [Mississippi].... A bark [built on Lake Erie] would
easily sail to the Gulf of Mexico. "The monument to him stands by the
canal that has been cut through not merely a league but many leagues
(thirty-eight miles) and lets the waters of Michigan flow southward to the
Illinois. Of this site Joliet is quoted as saying, "The place at which we
entered the lake is a harbor, very convenient for receiving vessels and
sheltering them from the wind;" [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites),
58:107.] and of the prairies back of the harbor: "At first when we were
told of these treeless lands I imagined that it was a country ravaged by
fire, where the soil was so poor that it could produce nothing. But we
certainly observed the contrary, and no better soil can be found, either
for corn, for vines, or for any fruit whatever.... A settler would not
there spend ten years in cutting down and burning the trees; on the very
day of his arrival he could put his plough into the ground, and if he had
no oxen from France, he could use those of this country, or even the
animals possessed by the western savages, on which they ride, as we do on
horses. After sowing grain of all kinds, he might devote himself
especially to planting the vine, and grafting fruit-trees, to dressing ox-
hides, wherewith to make shoes; and with the wool of these oxen he could
make cloth, much finer than most of that which we bring from France. Thus
he could easily find in the country his food and clothing, and nothing
would be wanting except salt; but, as he could make provision for it, it
would not be difficult to remedy that inconvenience." [Footnote: "Jesuit
Relations" (Thwaites), 58:107-9.] If Marquette was the first martyr of the
Illinois, Joliet was the first prophet of that great city of the Illinois.
What he could not foresee was that Lake Michigan would make the Chicago of
to-day not so much by giving it a waterway to the markets of the east and
Europe as by standing as an obstacle in the way of a straight path to the
sea from the northwest fields and so compelling those fertile lands to
send all their riches around the southern end of Lake Michigan. He
overestimated the economic importance, to be sure, of the buffalo. But if
domesticated cattle be substituted for the wild species, he again showed
remarkable prevision of the future of a city which has enjoyed a world
fame by reason of its cattle-market--its stock-yards. [Footnote: Of the
importance of the lakes-to-the-gulf waterway we have already spoken.]
Chicago is a city without a past, save for that glow of adventure which is
almost as hazy as the myths or legends that lie back of Europe. It is just
eighty-one years since it came into existence as a town, [Footnote: August
12, 1833.] and but twenty-eight voters voted for the first board of
trustees of the town; its population was variously estimated at from above
two hundred to three hundred and fifty. As a city, it is seventy-seven
years old, [Footnote: Chartered March 4, 1837.] beginning its legal life
as such with fewer than five thousand people. It was of its first mayor,
William B. Ogden--though some years later than his administration--that
Guizot, looking upon the portrait of his benevolent face, said: "That is
the representative American, who is the benefactor of his country,
especially the mighty West; he built Chicago." But the Chicago which he
administered was but a small town in size. Its officials from treasurer to
scavenger were appointed by the common council and obliged to serve or pay
certain fines. Every male resident over twenty-one was obliged to work
three days each year on the streets and alleys or pay one dollar for each
day. Fire wardens had no compensation except release from jury or military
service. There was at first meagre school provision, [Footnote: The money
derived from the sale of school lands in 1833 was distributed among the
existing private schools which thus became free common schools. Less than
$40,000 was received for lands now worth much more than $100, 000,000.] no
public sanitary provision, no considerable public service of any sort. It
was a neighborly but unsocialized place, where the individual had little
restraint save of his own limitations and his personal love of his
neighbors. What social functions the city performed were self-protective
and not self-improving in motive. For example, fire might not be carried
in the street except in a fire-proof vessel. [Footnote: S. E. Sparling,
"Municipal History and Present Organization of the City of Chicago,"
University of Wisconsin Bulletin, No. 23, 1898.] The aboriginal frog
croaked on the very site of the place where grand opera is now sung.
The city's development was largely left to the haphazard, unrestrained,
but whole-souled, big-hearted, self-confident individualism, such as has
been potent in Pittsburgh. The restrictions were mainly those of the
prohibitory Mosaic commandments. And so this city, increasing its
population by a half-million in each of the last three decades, has come
to stand next to Paris in population and first of all great American
cities in the constructive activity of its civic consciousness and urban
imagination. The city is still smoke-enwrapped (when the wind does not
blow from the lake); its streets run out into prairie dust and mud; its
harbor, of which Joliet spoke in praise, merits rather the disparagement
of La Salle; there are offending smells and sights everywhere. But in the
midst of it all and over it all is moving now, as a healing efficacy in
troubled waters, a spirit of democratic aspiration. What Louis XIV or
Napoleon I or Napoleon III, king and emperors, planned and did, compelling
the co-operation of a people in making the city of Paris more beautiful,
more habitable, that a people of millions out upon the prairies of
Illinois are beginning to do out of their own desire and common treasury.
It is of interest that the sovereign of France who gave her empire of
those great stretches of plain, gave to Paris "those vast reaches of
avenue and boulevard which to-day are the crowning features of the most
beautiful of cities." But it must quicken France's interest further to
know that this first systematic planning for a city, as an organic whole,
by Louis XIV and Colbert, Le Notre and Blondel is now being followed out
on that plain by a self-governing people, who have been making cities for
barely half a century, to bring order and form and beauty, and better
condition of living out of that grimy collection of homes and shops and
beginnings of civic enterprise and great private philanthropies. A great
deal has been already accomplished, such as the widening of the leading
avenue, the addition of acres upon acres to the park space on the lake
shore, the establishment of an efficient small park system; but it is only
the beginning of a scheme that thinks of Chicago as a city that will some
day hold ten millions of people. The prophecy of one statistician (now of
New York) predicts for Chicago a population of thirteen million two
hundred and fifty thousand souls in 1952; [Footnote: Bion J. Arnold,
"Report of the Engineering and Operating Features of the Chicago
Transportation Problem," pp. 95, 96.] and the great railroad builder,
James J. Hill, has estimated that "when the Pacific coast shall have a
population of twenty millions, Chicago will be the largest city in the
world."
The specific plans for its improvement have been developed by a small body
of public-spirited citizens, but they are simply that great urban
democracy thinking and speaking, trying to express itself. It has
developed with less interference or compulsion on the part of the State
than any other great city of America, and now it is moving voluntarily to
the noblest as well as the most practical of improvements.
Under like leading it built the "White City," the ephemeral city of the
World's Fair, in the celebration of the four-hundredth anniversary of the
discovery of America, and that splendid achievement of the black, unkempt
city back of it gave first hint, in the co-operation that made this
possible, of what a community could do and at the same time gathered to it
the teaching of the older cities of the earth from their long striving for
the city beautiful.
The city provides its own water-supply, it lights its streets, it has
recently acquired control of its street-car lines, and every passenger is
notified as a shareholder that 55 per cent of the profits comes into the
city treasury. And now under this inspiration and yet of its own will it
has begun a transformation of itself into the likeness of what it dreamed
in those evanescent buildings and courts and columns and statues and
frescoes out by the opalescent waters of its sea. It saw the reflection of
that "White City" in the lake and then the image of its own workaday face
--and it has not forgotten what manner of city it was.
Remember again that what is and what is promised have come in a lifetime.
Walking in the streets of that city early one morning a few years ago, as
the trains were emptying the throngs who sleep outside along the lake and
out on the prairie, into the canyons made by its tall buildings, I found
myself immediately behind a robust old man, a civil engineer, who was born
before Chicago had a hundred inhabitants. He was much older than the city
whose buildings now reach out miles from the lake (one of its streets
thirty-two miles long) and thirty and forty stories into the air. One
hundred years ago it was the French wilderness untouched. Eighty years ago
most of its citizens bore French names. The portage path has literally
yielded a harvest of streets.
Chicago, the city of the French portage, Chicago, which despite all that
casual visitors see and say of it, was, I contend, best defined by Harriet
Martineau as a "great, embryo poet," moody, wild, but bringing about
results, exulting that he--for he is a masculine poet--has caught the true
spirit of things of the past and has had sight of the depths of futurity.
But it is only now that the brooding poet is coming to express himself in
verses that are recognized for their beauty.
Chicago, the field of the wild onions, threaded by La Rivière de l'Ail,
the place of the shambles, the capital of the golden calf. That is her
fame.
Only recently I read in a book which I found in Paris, written by an
English traveller, that Chicago stands apart from all other cities in that
"her people are really on earth to make money"; that, magnificent as she
is in many ways, chiefly in distances, she is "too busy money-making to
attend to civic improvements" or to have a "keen affection for worthier
things."
I have gone a hundred times in and out of that dirty, unkempt city, swept
only by the winds, one would think, and I know its worst, its physical,
moral, political worst. But if the people there have worshipped the golden
calf in their wilderness, they have now drunk of the dust of their first
image, and I should be disposed to say that nowhere among American cities
is there a keener affection for worthier things showing itself.
Again I shall have to admit that this "affection" is not the spontaneous
expression of the entire democratic community. As in Pittsburgh, a
comparatively few men have voluntarily, and at their own expense,
undertaken to study not only the conditions that make for better and
cheaper travel, more profitable commercial intercourse and greater
productiveness, but for a more wholesome and a higher spiritual existence.
And again it is so with the hope that the great self-governing community
will out of its desire and treasury bring about these conditions.
These few men and women, possessed both by a love of that still uncouth
city and an ideal objectively learned in the days when the "White City"
stood between it and the lakes, have already spent a half-million francs
in study and in making plans--in addition to all the months and years of
volunteer, unpaid service.
The principal items of this great scheme are:
1. The improvement of the lake front.
2. The creation of a system of highways outside the city.
3. The improvement of railway terminals and the development of a complete
traction system for both freight and passengers.
4. The acquisition of an outer park system and of parkway circuits.
5. The systematic arrangement of the streets and avenues within the city,
in order to facilitate the movement to and from the business districts.
6. The development of centres of intellectual life and of civic
administration, so related as to give coherence and unity to the city.
Is there not hope for democracy if in the places of its greatest strain
and stress, in the midst of its fiercest passions, there is a deliberate,
affectionate, intelligent striving toward cities that have been revealed
not in apocalyptic vision but in the long-studied plans of terrestrial
architects and engineers and altruistic souls, such as that of Jane
Addams, cities that to such amphionic music shall out of the shards of the
past build themselves silently, impregnably--if not in a diviner clime, at
any rate in a diviner spirit--on shores and slopes and plains of that
broad valley of the new democracy, conterminous in its mountain boundaries
with New France in America?
A little while ago some workmen who were digging trenches for the
foundations of a new factory or warehouse along that portage path thrust
their spades into a piece of wood buried sixteen feet below the surface.
It was found to be a fragment of a French bateau, lying on one of whose
thwarts was a sword--probably of one who had met his death on the edge of
the portage--a sword with an inscription showing that it probably belonged
to an early French voyageur.
And so again in these relics but newly brought to light I find new words
to remind ourselves that the roots of that mighty, virile, healthiest,
most aspiring of America's great cities are entwined about the symbols of
French adventure and empire in the west--the sword and the boat, and
doubtless there was a crucifix not far away.