WASHINGTON: THE UNION OF THE EASTERN AND THE WESTERN WATERS
We have followed the French explorers and priests as pioneers through the
valleys of the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi to the
gulf and the Rocky Mountains. But there remains one further conquest, a
conquest of their adventurous imaginations only, for none of their
adventurous or pious feet ever travelled over the valley lying south of
the St. Lawrence watershed and east of the Alleghanies, though they were
probably the first of white men to see those peaks rising in the north of
what is now New England, known as the White Mountains.
Standing on the summit of one of the White Mountains a few summers ago, I
was shown a dim little indentation of the sky at the northwest which I was
told was Mont Real. And since seeing that I have imagined Jacques Cartier
in 1535 looking off to the southeast, when his disappointed vision of the
west had tired his eyes, and catching first sight of these dim
indentations of his sky, the White Mountains, which the colonists from
England did not see until a century later and then only from their ocean
side.
But whether the master pilot from the white-bastioned St. Malo saw them or
not, we have record that Champlain in his exploration of the Atlantic
coast did discern their peaks upon his horizon; and so we may think of the
French as the discoverers not merely of the northern and western valleys,
of the Adirondacks, in whose shadows Champlain and Brule and Father Jogues
fought with the Iroquois and suffered torture, and of the snow-capped
Rockies at whose feet Chevalier de la Vérendrye was obliged to turn back,
but also of the tops of the white hills near the Atlantic coast, which I
have often seen lighted at sunrise while the lower slopes and valleys were
in darkness or shadow--hills touched by the French, as by that rising sun,
only at their tops and by the trails of their eyes.
For the moment those mountains stand upon the horizon as the symbol of the
only part of North America east of the Rockies which the French pioneers
did not possess before others by the trails of their feet or the paths of
their boats. Verrazano of Dieppe had sailed along the Atlantic shore
front, but so, perhaps, had Cabot. Ribaut had been "put to the knife" in
Florida, but it was the knife of a Spaniard whose compatriots had been
there before Ribaut. Étienne Brûlé had wandered all the way from Canada
into Pennsylvania along the sources and upper waters of the Atlantic
streams, but the colonists of other nations were sitting huddled at the
mouths of the streams. And Father Jogues had endured the torturing portage
from the shores of Lake George to the Mohawk, but the Dutch were by that
time there to succor him from the Iroquois. Only with their eyes had the
French beheld first of Europe the America of the eastern waters, whose
inhabitants, when they came to put on uniform and fight for its
independence, called themselves "Continentals," as if their little hem of
the garment were the continent.
One wonders--if to little purpose--what would have been the consequence if
De Monts, whom Champlain accompanied to America in 1604, had planted his
little colony at some place farther south in his continental grant made by
Henry IV, stretching, as it did, all the way from what is now Philadelphia
to the St. Lawrence--if, for example, he had anchored off the Island of
Manhattan, as well he might have done, five years before Hudson came up
the harbor in the _Half Moon_, had settled there instead of on the sterile
island of Ste. Croix in the Bay of Fundy, where, amid the "sand, the
sedge, and the matted whortleberry bushes," the commissioners to fix the
boundaries between the United States and Canada discovered in 1793--nearly
two centuries later--the foundations of the "Habitation de l'isle Ste.
Croix" that the French had built in the gloom of the cedars. Or if, when
the scurvy-stricken colony left that barren site, they had followed
Champlain to the mouth of the Charles, la rivière du Guast--the site of
Cambridge or Boston--or even to the Bay St. Louis--which is remembered in
Champlain's journal as the place where the friendly Indians showed him
their fish-hooks made of barbed bone lashed to wood, but which has become
better known as Plymouth Bay where the Pilgrims landed fifteen years
later--there instead of Port Royal, where even Lescarbot's "Ordre de Bon-
Temps" could not overcome the evil reports in France concerning a
"churlish wilderness"! Or if Champlain, instead of seeking later the Rock
of Quebec--whose rugged charms he could not forget even in the presence of
the site of Boston or in the streets of Paris--had laid the foundations of
his faith and his courage on the Susquehanna, for example! In any one of
these contingencies there might have been a more prosperous Acadia. New
England might conceivably have become Nouvelle France, and New York City
might be bearing to-day the name of a seventeenth-century French prince.
An idle conjecture, but it does, I think, help us to appreciate the happy
destiny (or by whatever name the sequence of events may be called) not
that kept France out of that narrow Atlantic-coast strip but that put her
in a position to become the power that should in a very true sense force
the jealous, many-minded colonies of that strip into a union, make
possible the erection of that feeble union into a nascent nation, give it,
though under certain compulsion, territory to become a world-power, and
finally furnish it, if grudgingly, with a great western, overmountain
domain in which to develop a democratic and a nationalistic spirit strong
enough to hold a continent-wide people in one republic. These services,
intended and unintended, negative and positive, grudging and voluntary,
performed, however, all in unsurpassed sacrifice and valiance not only of
the explorers and priests but of the exiled soldiers, intimate how, out of
all the misery of finding the northern water gate and keeping it and
following the northern waterway and fortifying it, came the harvests--even
if France did not gather them into her own granaries--of those who "sow by
all waters."
We might not have had some of the institutions we do have if Champlain or
Poutrincourt had anticipated the English Pilgrims at Plymouth, but we
might still be a colony or a cluster of republics, even with all that we
have got by way of those and other English migrants, except for these
hardy men who kept battling with the ice and snow and water and famine at
the north.
But what I wish to emphasize here--and I am much indebted to the young
western historian Mr. Hulbert, for this view--is that France, struggling
to keep the empire of her adventure and faith in the northern and western
valleys of America, gave to the world George Washington. She made him, all
unconsciously to be sure, first in war. She saved him, consciously, from
the fate of an unsuccessful rebel. And she made it possible for him to be
first in peace. These are all defensible theses, however much or little
credit France may deserve in her purposes toward him.
Up in those same White Mountains there rises one that bears his name,
taller than the rest. It stands in a presidential range that has no
rivalling peak. A singular felicity in the naming of the neighboring
mountains has given the name Lafayette to the most picturesque of all.
There are well-known and much-travelled trails to the austere peak of
Mount Washington. There is even a railroad now. Doubtless no mountain in
America is known in its contour to more people, though there are many of
loftier height and of more inviting slopes.
So the outlines of the life of Washington are known more widely than those
of any other American. The trails to the height of his achievement and
genius have doubtless been learned in the histories of France. And asking
my readers to travel over one of those well-worn trails again, I can offer
no better reason than that I may on the way call attention to objects and
outlooks that should be of special interest to the eyes of a company of
men and women whose geographical or racial ancestors gave us him in giving
us the west.
Washington was born a British colonist. His great-grandfather settled in
Virginia at about the time that La Salle was making his way up the St.
Lawrence to the seigniory of St. Sulpice above the Lachine Rapids. His
father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were frontiersmen, farmers, or
planters. He had himself the discipline of the plantation, but he learned
surveying and had also the sterner experiences of its frontier practice.
Then came his appointment at nineteen as an adjutant-general of colonial
militia in Virginia and with that office the still sterner disciplines
beyond the frontier, where France was tutor, without which tuition he
would doubtless have become and remained a successful colonial Virginia
planter and general of militia.
I have estimated that all the young men in America of approximately
Washington's age at that time could probably have been gathered into the
Roman colosseum back of the Pantheon; at any rate, into an American
university stadium. They could have been reached by the voice of one man.
(Which will intimate how small America was--one-fourth the size of Paris
when he was born, one-half the size of Paris when he became a major of
militia.)
They were practically all country-born. There were, indeed, no great
cities in which to be born. New York was little more than a town with only
eight or nine thousand inhabitants; and Boston, the largest city at that
time, had but thirteen thousand in the year 1732. They were men, as
Kipling says of the colonials in the Boer War, who could "shoot and ride."
And Washington was a strong athletic youth of fiery passions, which, given
free rein, would have made him a successful Indian chief. (Indeed, the
Indians admired him and called him Ha-no-da-ga-ne-ars--"the destroyer of
cities"--and at last admitted him, as a supreme tribute, to their Indian
paradise, the only white man found worthy of such canonization.) But,
rugged, country-born men though they were, it was in no such neighborly
democracy as Lincoln knew that they were bred. Washington had his slaves,
his coat of arms, and the occupations and leisures and pleasures, so far
as the frontier would permit, of an English gentleman. And it is no such
slouchy, shabbily dressed figure as Lincoln's that Washington presents. I
saw a few years ago a letter in Washington's own hand, in which he gave
directions to the tailor as to the number of buttons that his coat should
have, the shape of its lapel, and the fit of its collar. He was most
insistent upon the conventions, though if such an assembly had been held,
as I have suggested, of the young men from the eastern waters, there would
have been no such uniformity of costume as now makes an audience of men in
America, or in Europe, so monotonously black and white.
These young men did not dress alike; they did not spell alike.
Washington's letters show that he did not even spell consistently with
himself. And that first man of the eastern waters to follow the French in
establishing a settlement on the western waters, Daniel Boone, left this
memorial of his orthography on a tree in Kentucky: "C-I-L-L-E-D A B-A-R."
They did not dress alike, they did not spell alike, they did not think
alike. It was a great, and it must have seemed a hopeless, motley of men
who were all unconsciously to lay the foundations of a new national
structure.
They were all of immigrant ancestors, and most of them of most recent
immigrant ancestry, or of foreign birth. Though much more homogeneous in
their lineage than the present immigration, they had not the unifying
agencies that now keep Maine and Florida within a few minutes of each
other by telephone or a few hours by rail.
But there were in all, immigrants and sons of immigrants, hardly more in
number than now enter that same land as aliens in one or two years. I
spoke a few years ago at a dinner of the descendants of the _Mayflower_
and was told that they numbered in all the country, as I recall, about
three thousand--three thousand descendants in three hundred years of a
hundred colonists, half of whom perished in the first winter; which leads
one to wonder what the land of the _Mayflower_ and the nation of George
Washington will be in three hundred years, when the descendants of each
shipload of immigrants of to-day will have increased in like ratio. From a
single steerage passenger cargo, of the _Lusitania_ or _Mauretania_, let
us say, we shall have twenty, thirty, or forty thousand Lusitanians or
Mauretanians as descendants; and from a single year's immigration thirty
millions. The descendants of the colonial ships will be lost in this
mighty new progeny of the ships of Europe and will numerically be as
negligible as the North American Indian is in our census today.
But to come back to Washington: the appointment of the stripling as
adjutant-general with rank of major was two years after the humpbacked
Governor Galissonnière had sent Celoron down the Ohio on that historic
voyage of plate-planting, the news of which had finally reached the ears
of the governor of Virginia, who with many planters of Virginia
(Washington's family included) had a prospective interest in lands along
that same river. Then came the word through Indian and trader (the only
long-distance telephones of that time) that forts were beginning to grow
where the plates had been planted.
It was then that the young farmer, surveyor, soldier, just come of age,
was chosen to carry a message to the commander of the nearest French fort
in the valley--Fort Le Boeuf, which I have already described--about
fifteen miles from Lake Erie on the slight elevation from which the waters
begin to flow toward the Mississippi. The commander was Legardeur de St.
Pierre, a one-eyed veteran of wars, but recently come from an expedition
out across the valley toward the Rockies.
Parkman has made this picture of the momentous meeting of France and
America in the western wilderness, which in its peopling has kept only a
single tree of those forests, a tree pointed out to me as the Washington
tree, though it, too, may have come with the migrants:
"The surrounding forests had dropped their leaves, and in gray and patient
desolation bided the coming winter. Chill rains drizzled over the gloomy
'clearing,' and drenched the palisades and log-built barracks, raw from
the axe. Buried in the wilderness, the military exiles [Legardeur and his
garrison] resigned themselves as they might to months of monotonous
solitude; when, just after sunset on the eleventh of December, a tall
youth [and he was only an inch shorter than Lincoln, six feet three
inches] came out of the forest on horseback, attended by a companion much
older and rougher than himself, and followed by several Indians and four
or five white men with packhorses. Officers from the fort went out to meet
the strangers; and, wading through mud and sodden snow, they entered at
the gate. On the next day the young leader of the party, with the help of
an interpreter, for he spoke no French [a deficiency which he laments with
greatest regret later in life], had an interview with the commandant and
gave him a letter from Governor Dinwiddie. St. Pierre and the officer next
in rank, who knew a little English, took it to another room to study it at
their ease; and in it, all unconsciously, they read a name destined to
stand one of the noblest in the annals of mankind, for it introduced Major
George Washington, Adjutant-General of the Virginia Militia." [Footnote:
Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," 1:136-7.]
At the end of three days the young British colonial officer of militia
started on his perilous journey homeward, having been most hospitably
entertained by the one-eyed veteran, bearing on his person a letter which
St. Pierre and his officer had been the three days in preparing. The
brave, courteous, soldierly lines of the frontier deserve to be heard to-
day both in France and America:
"I am here by Virtue of the Orders of my General; and I entreat you, Sir,
not to doubt, one Moment, but that I am determined to conform myself to
them with all the Exactness and Resolution which can be expected from the
best Officer.... I don't know that in the Progress of this Campaign [of
repossession] anything passed which can be reputed an Act of Hostility or
is contrary to the Treaties which subsist between the two Crowns.... Had
you been pleased, Sir, to have descended to particularize the Facts which
occasioned your Complaints I should have had the Honor of answering you in
the fullest, and, I am persuaded, most satisfactory Manner."
In the spring the two hundred canoes which Washington saw moored by the
Rivière aux Boeufs carried the builders of Fort Duquesne and a garrison
for it down La Belle Rivière, and a little later is heard the volley of
the Virginia backwoodsmen up on the Laurel ridges a little way back from
Duquesne, the volley which began the strife that armed the civilized
world--the backwoodsmen commanded by the Virginia youth, George
Washington.
It is in that lonely ravine up among the ridges which I have described in
an earlier chapter that the union of the eastern and western waters began.
And there should be a monument beside Jumonville's to keep succeeding
generations mindful of the mighty consequence of what happened then.
This fray of the mountains was one of the most portentous of events in
American history. It was not only the grappling of two European peoples
and two systems of government out upon the edges of the civilized world--
the stone-age men assisting on both sides--a fray in which Legardeur de
St. Pierre, Coulon de Jumonville, and de Villiers, his avenging brother,
were France, and Washington was England. It was the beginning of the
making of a new nation, of which that tall youth, who found the whizzing
of bullets a "charming sound," was to be the very cornerstone.
He was here having his first tuition of war. De Villiers let him march
back from Fort Necessity unharmed, when he might, perhaps, have ended the
career of this young major in the great meadows where they fought "through
the gray veil of mists and rain." Washington was taught by France, in
these years of border warfare--for he went four times over the mountains--
he was spared by France in the end to help take from France the title of
the west, or so it seemed when, in 1763, the war which his command had
begun was ended in the surrender of that vast domain to England. But we
know now that the struggle had other issue.
The steep path of the years when the colonies were taught their first
lessons of federation by their common fear of the French and their allies,
led by the tall young man who emerged from the woods back of Fort Le Boeuf
and later assisted by the moral and pecuniary sympathy of France, by the
presence of her ships along their menaced coasts, by the counsels of her
admirals and generals, and by the marching and fighting of her soldiers
side by side with theirs, you know. It is a path so marked by memorials as
to need no spoken word. Only one vista in this trail of gloom with
overhanging clouded sky need detain us a moment. It lets us see Benjamin
Franklin rejoicing in Paris after the news of the surrender of Burgoyne at
Saratoga in 1777. We see Beaumarchais rushing away from Franklin's
lodgings in Passy to spread the good news, and in such mad haste that he
upset his carriage and dislocated his arm. And when we next look out from
the path we see the British soldiers passing in surrender between two
lines drawn up at Yorktown, the American soldiers on one side with
Washington at their head, and on the other the French soldiers under Count
Rochambeau.
Washington and Legardeur de St. Pierre at Fort Le Boeuf, Washington and
Rochambeau at Yorktown! You have been told again and again that except for
the France of Rochambeau the War of Independence would probably have
failed and that the colonies would have remained English colonies. But let
us remember that except for the France of Legardeur de St. Pierre there
would probably not have been, as Parkman says, a "revolution"; and by the
France of Legardeur I mean the spirit of France that had illustration in
his lonely, exiled watching of the regions won by her pioneers.
The French man-of-war _Triumph_ brought to Philadelphia in May of 1783 the
treaty of Paris. In the December following General Washington said
farewell to his officers and returned to Mount Vernon, his estate on the
Potomac. There he was busied through the next few months in putting his
private affairs in order, in superintending the reparation of his
plantation, and in receiving those who came to him for counsel or to
express their gratitude. It was as a level bit of the mountain trail from
which the traveller catches glimpses of a peaceful valley. And that is all
that the traveller usually sees.
But there is a farther view. From that level path one can see over the
Alleghanies the great valley so familiar to our eyes from other points of
view, stretching toward the Mississippi.
In the autumn of 1784 (eight months after his farewell to the army)
Washington leaves his home, as it appears, to visit some lands which he
had acquired as one result of his earlier and martial trips out beyond the
Laurel Hills. He had title to forty thousand acres beyond the mountains.
He had even purchased the site of this first battle in the meadows, where
he had built Fort Necessity and where he was himself captured by the
French, but from which he was permitted to go back over the mountains with
his flags flying and his drums beating. A "charming field of encounter" he
called the place in his youthful exuberance before the battle in 1753.
"Much Hay may be cut here When the ground is laid down in Grass; and the
upland, East of the Meadow is good for grain," he wrote in his
unsentimental diary, September 12, 1784. For over the mountains he went
again on what was thought but a trip of personal business. But on the
third day of the journey, September 3d, he writes, incidentally, as
explaining his desire to talk with certain men: "one object of my journey
being to obtain information of the nearest and best communication between
the Eastern and Western Waters." And as he advances this becomes the
possessing object.
Here are a few extracts from that diary still preserved in his own hand
which give the intimation of a prescience that should in itself hold for
him a grateful place in the memory of the west and of a concern about
little things that should bring him a bit nearer to our human selves:
_September 6_. "Remained at Bath all day and was showed the Model of a
Boat constructed by the ingenious Mr. (James) Rumsey for ascending rapid
currents by mechanism.... Having hired three Pack horses to give my own
greater relief...."
_September 11._ "This is a pretty considerable water and, as it is said to
have no fall in it, may, I conceive, be improved into a valuable
navigation...."
_September 12._ "Crossing the Mountains, I found tedious and fatieguing
[_sic_].... In passing over the Mountains I met numbers of Persons and
Pack horses ... from most of whom I made enquiries of the nature of the
Country...."
_September 13._ "I visited my Mill" [a mill which he had had built before
the Revolution]....
_September 15._ "This being the day appointed for the Sale of my moiety of
the Co-partnership Stock many People were gathered (more out of curiosity
I believe than from other motives). My Mill I could obtain no bid for...."
_September 19._ "Being Sunday, and the People living on my Land,
apparently very religious" [these were Scotch-Irish who had squatted on a
rich piece of land patented by Washington], "it was thought best to
postpone going among them till to-morrow...."
_September 20._ "I told them I had no inclination to sell; however, after
hearing a good deal of their hardships, their Religious principles (which
had brought them together as a society of Ceceders [_sic_]) and
unwillingness to seperate [_sic_] or remove; I told them I would make them
a last offer...."
_September 22._ "Note--In my equipage Trunk and the Canteens--were Madeira
and Port Wine--Cherry bounce--Oyl, Mustard--Vinegar--and Spices of all
sorts--Tea, and Sugar in the Camp Kettles (a whole loaf of white sugar
broke up about 7 lbs. weight).... My fishing lines are in the
Canteens...."
_September 23._ "An Apology made to me from the Court of Fayette (thro'
Mr. Smith) for not addressing me."
The Cheat at the Mouth is about 125 y'ds wide--the Monongahela near d'ble
that--the colour of the two Waters is very differ't, that of Cheat is dark
(occasioned as is conjectured by the Laurel, among which it rises, and
through which it runs) the other is clear, & there appears a repugnancy in
both to mix, as there is a plain line of division betw'n the two for some
distance below the fork; which holds, I am told near a Mile.--the Cheat
keeps to the right shore as it descends, & the other the left.
_September 25._ "At the crossing of this Creek McCulloch's path, which
owes its origen [_sic_] to Buffaloes.... At the entrance of the above
glades I lodged this night, with no other shelter or cover than my cloak &
was unlucky enough to have a heavy shower of Rain."
_September 26._ "We had an uncomfortable travel to one Charles Friends,
about 10 miles; where we could get nothing for our horses, and only boiled
Corn for ourselves."
_October 1._ "I had a good deal of conversation with this Gentleman on the
Waters, and trade of the Western Country."
_October 4._ "I breakfasted by Candlelight, and Mounted my horse soon
after daybreak. I arrived at Colchester, 30 Miles, to Dinner; and reached
home before Sun down." [Footnote: A. B. Hulbert, "Washington and the
West," pp. 32-85.]
In this revelation of Washington out of the laconic misspelled entries of
his diary we have not only a most human portrait but an intimation of his
practical far-seeing statesmanship. He looms even a larger figure as he
rides through the fog of the Youghiogheny, for there he appears as the
prophet of the eastern and western waters. In his vision the New France
and the New England are to be indissolubly bound into a New America. He
had written Chevalier de Chastellux from Princeton, October 12, 1783,
after a return from the Mohawk Valley, that he could not but be struck by
the immense extent and importance "of the vast inland navigation of these
United States," that should bring that great western valley into
communication with the east, and that he would not rest contented until he
had explored that western country and traversed those lines which have
given bounds to a new empire. And as he comes back over the Alleghanies
from this journey of six hundred and eighty miles on the same horses he
writes: "No well-informed mind need be told how necessary it is to apply
the cement of interest to bind all parts together by one indissoluble
band." And the indissoluble band is the smooth road and the navigable
stream or canal. [Footnote: A. B. Hulbert, "Washington and the West," p.
100.]
England and France had both restrained western migration, and the young
provincial republic was doubtless of no mind to encourage it, so far as it
then knew its mind. But Washington had a larger, wiser view than any other
except Franklin, and even Franklin was not ardent for the canals.
Washington was thinking, some will say, of the trade that would come over
those paths; and so he was, but it was not primarily for his own
advantage, not for the trade's sake, but for the sake of the weak little
confederation of States for which he had ventured all he was and had.
He was (as my old professor of history in Johns Hopkins was the first to
point out [Footnote: Herbert B. Adams, "Washington's Interests in Western
Lands," in _Johns Hopkins University Studies._ Third series, No. I,
1885.]) the first to suggest the parcelling of the western country into
"free, convenient, and independent governments," and here he appears the
first not to speculate about but to seek out by fording streams and
climbing mountains a practical way to a "more perfect union," and not
merely for those jealous States lying along the Atlantic and within reach
of its commerce, but for all the territory and people of their new
heritage.
And singularly enough this very journey led not only to the establishment
of those paths between the east and west, the national road, the canals
reaching toward the sources of the rivers, and ultimately the trans-
Alleghany railroad, but to the making of that unmatched document, the
Constitution of the United States. And in this wise:
Washington called the attention of Virginia and Maryland to the importance
of opening a communication between the Potomac and James and the western
waters. He writes to Lafayette of being at the meeting of the Maryland
Assembly in that interest. [Footnote: John Pickell, "New Chapter in the
Early Life of Washington in Connection with the Narrative History of the
Potomac Company, 1856," pp. 133-4.] These two States appointed
commissioners to confer concerning this and other matters. Their
recommendations resulted in the calling of a more widely representative
convention, and this in turn in the convening of a body to revise the
entire federal system.
So this peaceful journey of the warrior over the mountains to the great
meadows and down into the tangled ravines of West Virginia became not only
the prophecy of the indissoluble bond between the east and west; it became
the first step in that movement which led the original States themselves
into that more perfect union.
The sequence, which did not occur to me until I read recently the diary of
that trans-Alleghany journey, gives Washington a new, if a homelier,
majesty.
Napoleon the Great has spoken his praise of Washington as a general. Many
of our own historians agree that it is very doubtful if without Washington
the struggle for independence would have succeeded. Other men were
important. He was indispensable. This intimates the occasion we have for
gratitude that the commander of the French let him march out of Fort
Necessity in 1754.
The world has for a century been repeating the eulogies that have outlived
the invective of his day--and that are only now becoming humanized by the
new school of historians who will not sacrifice facts to glowing periods.
Washington is now more of a human being and less of a god than the
Washington whom Lincoln found in Weems's "Life."
Yet with all the humanizing is he the austere, rugged, inaccessible
mountain, its fiery passions hidden, its head above the forests. And so
will he stand in history the justest of men, a man of highest purity of
purpose and of greatest practical wisdom; but, if as a mountain, then as
one that hides somewhere in its slopes such a path as we have learned to
know in our journeys over this course, a portage path between two great
valleys which its summit has blessed, for he was as a portage path between
the eastern and western waters, between the institutions of New England
and the fleur-de-lis fields of Nouvelle France.
I have visited the unmarked field where Fort Le Boeuf once stood, by
French Creek, the field where "the most momentous and far-reaching
question ever brought to issue on this [American] continent" [Footnote:
Parkman, "Montcalm and Wolfe," 1:4.] was put by the stripling Washington
to the veteran Legardeur de St. Pierre.
I have, in my worship of the great general, followed through the rain and
sleet of a winter's night and in the mud of a country road his famous
march from the crossing of the Delaware to Trenton, made in that December
night of 1776 when the struggle seemed most hopeless.
And I have been in the place in which--as to at least one historian--he
seems to me the most of a man and the most of a prophet, even the most of
a god, out in the glades and passes, the rains and fogs, of the
Alleghanies, fording the streams and following the paths of buffalo and
deer in an attempt to find a way between the east and west.