THE HEART OF AMERICA
In the little town of St. Die in the east of France there was printed in
the year 1507 a "Cosmographias Introductio"--an introduction to a
forthcoming edition of Ptolemy--in which was included an account of the
journeys of one Amerigo Vespucci, who is credited with the discovery of a
new part of the world--a fourth continent. For this reason, the author
recites, "quarta orbis pars, quam quis Americus invenit, Amerigen quasi
Americi terram, sivi Americam nuncupare licit." And so the name America
(for it was thought proper to give it the feminine form, "cum et Europa et
Asia a mulieribus sua sortitae sint nomina") was probably first pronounced
in the mountain-circled town of St. Die, where the scholars of the Vosges,
shut away from the sea and its greedy rumors of India, conceived more
accurately in their isolation the significance of the western discoveries
and made the new-found shores the edge not of Asia but of another
continent.
Perhaps this new land should have been given some other name; but that it
is futile now to discuss. America it has been these four hundred years and
America it is doubtless always to be. And it is particularly gratifying to
one who has come to care so much for France to find that the name of his
own land--a name most euphonious and delectable to his ears--came of the
christening at the font of the River Meurthe, the beautiful French dame of
St. Die standing by as godmother, and that that name was first whispered
to the world by the trees of the forests of the Vosges, whose wood may
even have furnished the blocks to fashion first its letters. So may we go
back and write this interesting if not important fact of French pioneering
in America.
But let us rehearse to ourselves once more before we separate the epic
sequence of adventure and suffering which tells how much more than a name
France gave to that continent just rising from the seas when the savants
of St. Die touched her face with the baptismal water of their recluse
learning.
Again the "boundless vision grows upon us; an untamed continent; vast
wastes of forest verdure; mountains silent in primeval sleep; river, lake,
and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling with the sky"--the America
not of the imaging of the mountain men of St. Die but of the seeing and
enduring of the seamen of Dieppe and St. Malo and Rochelle and Rouen.
Again Jacques Cartier stands alone within this "shaggy continent," a
thousand miles beyond the banks of the Baccalaos and the Isles of the
Demons. Again for a moment Acadia echoes of the Sorbonne and of Arcadian
poesy. Again the unblenching "preux chevalier" Champlain stands with his
back against the gray cliff of Quebec fighting red and white foe alike,
famine and disease, to keep a foothold in the wilderness, with the sublime
faith of a crusader and the patient endurance of a Prometheus. Again the
zealous but narrow rigor of Richelieu, flowering in his native land in the
learning of the Sorbonne and preparing for him in the new world, as Le
Jeune wrote, a "dazzling crown in heaven," builds by the St. Charles and
the wreckage of Cartier's _Petite Hermine_, the house of Notre Dame des
Anges, the "cradle of the great mission of New France." Again the
fireflies light the meadow altar of Maisonneuve at Montreal on its birth-
night. Again the gray gowns and the black, Le Caron, Brébeuf, Jogues, and
Gamier, enter upon their glorious toils, their bare and sandalled feet,
accustomed to the smooth walks of the convents of Brouage and Rheims and
Paris, begin to climb the rough paths to the west, _ad majorem Dei
gloriam._ Again the swift coureurs de bois, half-savage in their
ambassadorship of the woods, follow the traces of the most ancient road-
makers, the buffalo and deer, and the voyageurs carry their boats across
the portage places. Again the _Griffin_--the winged lion of the lakes--
flies from Niagara to the island in Green Bay, France's precursor of the
million-tonned commerce of the northern seas, but sinks with her cargo of
golden fleece in their blue waters. Again Marquette, the son of Laon,
beholds with joy unspeakable the mysterious "great water," and yet again,
La Salle stands by the lonely sea and cries his proclamation toward the
limitless land.
And, seeing and hearing all this again, we have seen a land as large as
all Europe emerge from the unknown at the evocation of pioneers of France
who stood all or nearly all sooner or later in Paris within three or four
kilometres of the very place in which I sit writing these words. Carder
gave to the world the St. Lawrence River as far as the Falls of Lachine;
Champlain, his Récollet friars and Jesuit priests and heralds of the woods
added the upper lakes; and Marquette, Joliet, La Salle, Tonty, Hennepin,
Radisson, Groseilliers, Iberville, Bienville, Le Sueur, La Harpe, the
Vérendrye--father and sons--and scores of other Frenchmen, many of
forgotten names, added the valley of the river of a hundred thousand
streams, from where at the east the French creek begins, a few miles from
Lake Erie, to flow toward the Ohio even to the sources of the Missouri in
the snows of the Rockies--"the most magnificent dwelling-place"--again to
recall De Tocqueville, "prepared by God for man's abode; the valley
destined to give the world a field for a new experiment in democracy and
to become the heart of America."
I have not been able to write at any length of that part of all this vast
region of France's pioneering and evoking where France is best remembered
--remembered in speech that imitates that which is dearest to France's
ears; remembered in voices that even in the harsh winds of the north keep
something of the mellowness and softness of the south; remembered in the
surnames that recall beautiful trees and fields of perfume and hills of
vines and things of the sea which surrounded their ancestors; remembered
in the appellations of the saints that protect their firesides and their
fortunes; remembered in the names that still cling tenaciously to rivers
and towns of that land which calls Champlain its father--Canada.
A traveller in the lower St. Lawrence Valley might well think himself east
of the Atlantic as he hears the guard on the railway train from Montreal
to Quebec call: St. Rochs, Les Éboulements, Portneuf, Pont Rouge,
Capucins, Mont Louis, Pointe au Chêne; or hears the speech as he walks at
the foot of the gray Rock of Quebec, or even reads the street signs in
Montreal. There are memories there on every side, in their very houses and
habits--yet memories which I fear are beginning to fade with the
allurements of the land of hope to the far west and the northwest of
Canada--the "land of hope," the new frontier of America, now of such
interest to the people of that other valley, the Mississippi, which was
once separated from Canada by no boundaries save watersheds, and these so
low that there was reciprocity of their waters.
But even if I could keep you longer I am thinking that I should have asked
you to spend it where there are fewer memories than in Canada, in the
valley where the old French names, if kept at all, are often obscured in a
new orthography or a different pronunciation. Up in the boundary of waters
between the two lands there is a lighthouse on an island called
"Skilligallee." I was a long time in discovering that this meaningless
euphonic name was but the memory of the Isle aux Galets--the island of the
pebbles. So have the memories been lost in tongues that could not easily
frame to pronounce the words they found when they entered that farther
valley where France's pioneering is almost forgotten, but where France
should be best remembered.
A catalogue (and this book has been little else) of the reasons for such
remembrance has doubtless brought little comfort; indeed, it may have
brought some pain, because the recital of the reasons has but emphasized
the forgetting and accentuated the loss.
But is France not to find, in a fuller consciousness of what has developed
in that valley into which she led Europe, a higher satisfaction than could
have come through the formal relationship of mother and colony, or any
other that could be reasonably conjectured?
For Turgot's prophecy would have some day been realized, and there would
perhaps have been a bitterness where now there is gratitude. I can think
of no series of relations that could have been of more profound and
momentous import in the history of that continent, or that should give
higher satisfaction to France in her thought of America than that which
this summation permits us to recall once more.
France not only christened America; she not only stood first far inside
that continent at the north and furnished Europe proof of its mighty
dimensions; she also gave to this continent, child of her christening, the
richest great valley of the world.
This valley she held in the title of her own claim for more than a century
from the time that her explorers first looked over its brim, held it by
valors and sufferings which would have been gloriously recorded if their
issue had been to keep by those waters the tongue in which they could be
written and sung.
When France did yield it, because of forces outside the valley, not inside
(there was hardly a sound of battle there), she gave it in effect to a new
nation. She shared it with the aboriginal American, she gave it to the
ultimate American. She got her title from the first Americans who, as
Chateaubriand said, called themselves the "Children of Always." She gave
it to those who are beginning to think of it as belonging not to them but
to the new "Children of Always."
By her very valorous holding she taught the fringe of colonies along the
Atlantic the first lessons in union, and she gave them a leader out of the
disciplines of her borders, George Washington, whom in the course of time
she directly assisted with her sympathy and means to make certain the
independence of those same colonies.
He, in turn, in the paths of the Old French War across the Alleghanies,
found by a most singular fate not only the indissoluble bond between the
eastern and the western waters but in those very paths the practical way
to the more "perfect union" of the young nation that was to succeed to
this joint heritage of England and of France.
To its estate of hundreds of millions of acres east of the Mississippi
Napoleon added a half-billion more out of the one-time domain of Louis XIV
and made it possible that the United States should some day develop into a
world-power.
The half-valley, enlarged to its mountain bounds through the influence of
its free soil on those whose feet touched it as pioneers, nourished a
natural democracy founded in the equalities, the freedoms, and the
fraternities of the frontier so vital, so powerful that it became the
dominant nationalistic force in a continent-wide republic. Aided by the
means of communication which a rampant individualism had prepared for it,
it held that republic together, expressing itself most conspicuously in
the democratic soul of Lincoln--who, following La Salle down the
Mississippi, found his high mission to the world--and in the masterful,
resourceful generalship of Grant.
The old French forts have grown into new-world cities, the portage paths
have been multiplied into streets, the trails of the coureurs de bois have
become railroads, and all are the noisy, flaming, smoky places and means
of such an industry and exploitation as doubtless are not to be found so
extensive and so intensive in any other valley of the earth.
A quantitative analysis has led me to present statistics of its production
and manufacture which would seem inexcusably braggart if it were not to
remind the French and my own countrymen that it was the geographical
descendants of France who, out of the wealth of their heritage of France's
bequeathing, untouched from the glaciers and the Indians, were confuting
with their wheat the prophecies of Malthus and making the whole world a
more comfortable and a somewhat brighter place with their iron, their oil,
their reapers, their wagons, and their sewing-machines. It were nothing to
be ashamed of unless that were all.
But a careful qualitative analysis discovers in the life of that valley,
which has been so widely advertised by its purely quantitative output, a
certain idealism that is usually obscured by the smoke of its
individualism.
We have seen it in the grimy ravine by old Fort Duquesne, where, like the
titanium which, in what way no chemist knows, increases the tensile
strength of its steel, this practical idealism gives promise of a
democracy that will stand a greater stress and strain.
We have seen it in the plans for the future of the city that has risen
from the onion field along the Chicago River, where Marquette's spirit
lived in a sick body through a bitter winter.
We have seen it in the setting apart of the white acres in every township
for the training of the child of to-morrow, in the higher school that
stands in thousands of towns and cities throughout the valley, and in the
university supported of every State in that valley, such as that which we
saw beside the falls where Hennepin tells of the Indian sacrificing his
beaver-skin to the river spirit.
And, finally, we have seen the men of to-day, rising to that highest
definition of a people--the invisible multitude of spirits, the nation of
yesterday and of to-morrow--forgetting their interests of the moment,
listening to the men of the universities speaking out of the past, and
planning for the conservation of what they have left to them of the
resources of the land for the "interests of mankind"--the true "Children
of Always."
This, then, is what France has prepared the way for, in one of the vast
regions where she was pioneer in America. Through the venture and the
faith of her sons she won the valley with a past of a million of ages;
through unrecorded valors she held it as her very own for a century, and,
though she lost nominal title to it as a territory, she has a ground-rent
interest in it, real title to a share in its human fruitage, which time
can neither take away nor cloud but only augment.
The social and industrial life which has developed there by mere
coincidence, or of direct cause, is distinctive and peculiar to that part
of the United States which has a French background, though it now has made
itself felt throughout the nation. And, however little in its feature and
language the foreground may seem to take color of it, I shall always
believe that the consecration of the rivers and paths, by explorations and
ministries that were for the most part as unselfish as France's
scholarship is to-day, must in some subtle way have had such a potency as
the catalytic substances which work miracles in matter and yet are beyond
the discerning of the scientist.
An English essayist [Footnote: G. K. Chesterton, "The Fallacy of the Young
Nation," in his "Heretics," pp. 247-266.] has estimated that we of the
United States are no longer young and finds in the fact that we have
produced great artists the intimations of age. The art of Whistler and the
letters of Henry James are to him the "sweet and startling" but
"unmistakable cry of a dying man." But this essayist could not have known
the men of the valley which is the heart of the nation as it is the heart
of the country, the place of its dominant spirits. That valley, so rapidly
exploited of its resources that it has grown ages poorer, is yet virile,
youthful in its faults and its achievements. It has no "fine futility" as
yet, and the cry is not "sweet" though it may be "startling." It is the
shout of a young god, of a Jason driving the bulls in the fields of
Colchis. The attenuations of distance may easily deceive one's ears who
listens from across the ocean and the mountains.
I think it was this same essayist who said that to understand a people one
must study them with the "loyalty of a child" and the patience not of a
scientist but of a poet. I thank him for that, while I excuse his
confounding of sounds that he hears in England from America, and agree
that what we need in that valley to tell its story, to interpret it, is
not a specialist in statistics nor an annalist, not a critic who looks at
the smoke of the chimneys and visits the slaughter-houses only, but a poet
who will have the patience to consult both the statistician and the
annalist, a patient poet with the "loyalty of a child" toward his theme.
EPILOGUE
FRANCIS PARKMAN
THE HISTORIAN OF FRANCE IN THE NEW WORLD
I make the epilogue of this story my tribute to Francis Parkman, who has
in a sense made this all possible for me: first, by reason of the love he
gave me long ago for his New France with its primeval forests, its virgin
prairies, its glistening rivers, its untamed Indians, its explorers, its
gray and black cowls, its coureurs de bois, its stars whose light had
never before looked on a white face; and second, by reason of the mass of
incident and color which he has supplied for the background of the life I
have known in that valley.
On entering a college out in the midst of that region--the middle of the
Mississippi Valley--nearly thirty years ago I was assigned, as my first
important task in English, the reading and criticism of one of Parkman's
books. I think that "The Oregon Trail" was suggested. I read several
volumes, however, but found my interest greatest in "The Pioneers of
France in the New World" and "The Jesuits in North America." What I wrote
I do not now remember (nor do I wish to refresh my memory), but so
persistent was the grip of those graphic relations upon my imagination
that years later, when leaving the presidency of that same college, I
asked to be permitted to take from the library three books (replacing them
with fresher copies): the chapel Bible--from which I had been read to by
my president and professors and from which I in turn had read to
succeeding students--a copy of Spenser's "Faerie Queene"--which my
college's only poet, Eugene Field, had read through--and a volume of
Parkman's on the pioneers of France.
So I take the opportunity to pay my tribute to him who long ago put these
figures on the frontier of my imagination, and who has prevented my ever
speaking in dispassion or without favorable prejudice of them.
When Parkman was leaving America for Paris in 1868, "for medical advice
and research," uncertain as to whether he would ever return to take up his
unfinished story of the American forest, he left in the hands of a friend
a parcel, "not to be opened during his life." It is that parcel, not
opened until twenty-five years later--for Parkman lived to return to
America and to return again to Paris more than once, and then to go back
and finish, after a full half-century of struggle with physical maladies
and infirmities, the last book of the plan virtually sketched fifty years
before, and with a singular felicity of coincidence named "The Half-
Century of Conflict"--it is that parcel which has kept for later
generations his remarkable autobiography.
While on his visits in Paris he was known in a wide circle. As he himself
said in writing to his sisters, "if able to accept invitations," he "would
have had the run of Faubourg St. Germain." I doubt, however, if his
personality is remembered by many, much less that strangely tortured life
which probably gave little mark of its suffering even to those who knew
him best in France.
I therefore recall some of the detail of the years preceding those days
when he appeared in the streets of Paris seeking health, but seeing often
Margry, the "intractable yet kindly keeper" of an important department of
French archives, who had in his secretive keeping documents most precious
to the uses of Parkman.
It is not altogether an agreeable chronicle, this autobiography.
[Footnote: Printed in "Proceedings Massachusetts Historical Society, 1892-
4," series 2, 8:349-360.] It is rather like a "pathological record," and
as totally unlike the pages of his books as can be well imagined. But it
is an essential document.
The first pages of this biography were withheld by him and so removed from
the parcel; the record begins with a general characterization of his
childhood. There is no detail. But there are to be found elsewhere the
memories of others which tell of his boyish enjoyment of the little
wilderness of joyous colors near the school to which he was sent-microcosm
of the greater wilderness in which his body and then his imagination were
to wander through all his mature days till his death. His own chronicle
has forgotten or ignored those elysian days and has not in all its length
a joyful note or a bright color.
This is the summary: His childhood was neither healthful nor buoyant....
Chemical experiment was his favorite hobby, involving a lonely, confined,
unwholesome sort of life, baneful to body and mind.... The age of fifteen
or sixteen produced a revolution; retorts and crucibles were forever
discarded.... He became enamoured of the woods, a fancy which soon gained
full control over the course of his literary pursuits.... He resolved to
confine his homage to the muse of history.... At the age of eighteen (born
in 1823) the plan (to whose execution he gave his long life) was, in its
most essential features, formed. His idea was clear before him, yet
attended with unpleasant doubts as to his ability to realize it to his own
satisfaction.... The task, as he then reckoned it, would require about
twenty years. The time allowed was ample; but here he fell into a fatal
error, entering upon this long pilgrimage with all the vehemence of one
starting on a mile heat. His reliance, however, was less on books than on
such personal experience as should intimately identify him with his theme.
Let me here say that I have found traces of his steps at nearly every site
that I have visited. He had been at Fort St. Louis, at the most important
portages, and at the places where the French forts once stood. His natural
inclinations urged him in the same direction, his thoughts were constantly
in the forest, whose features, not unmixed with softer images, possessed
his waking and sleeping dreams; he was as fond of hardships as he was vain
of enduring them, cherishing a sovereign scorn for every physical weakness
or defect. Moreover, deceived by a rapid development of frame and sinews
which flattered him with the belief that discipline sufficiently unsparing
would harden him into an athlete, he slighted precautions of a more
reasonable woodcraft, tired old foresters with long marches, stopped
neither for heat nor rain, and slept on the earth without a blanket.... He
spent his summer vacations in the woods or in Canada, at the same time
reading such books as he thought suited to help him toward his object....
While in the law school he entered in earnest on two other courses, one of
general history, the other of Indian history and ethnology, studying
diligently at the same time the models of English style.... There
developed in him a state of mental tension, habitual for several years,
and abundantly mischievous in its effects. With a mind overstrained and a
body overtaxed, he was burning his candle at both ends.... A highly
irritable organism spurred the writer to excess.... Labor became a
passion, and rest intolerable yet with a keen appetite for social
enjoyments.... His condition became that of a rider whose horse runs
headlong with the bit between his teeth, or of a locomotive, built of
indifferent material, under a head of steam too great for its strength,
hissing at a score of crevices, yet rushing on with accelerating speed to
the inevitable smash.... Soon appeared, as a sign of mischief, weakness of
sight. Accordingly he went to the Rocky Mountains to rest his failing
vision and to get an inside view of Indian life.... Reeling in the saddle,
he set forth, attended by a Canadian hunter.... Joining the Ogallala
Indians, he followed their wanderings for several weeks. To have worn the
air of an invalid would have been an indiscretion, as he says, since "a
horse, a rifle, a pair of pistols, and a red shirt might have offered
temptations too strong for aboriginal virtue." So he hunted when he could
scarcely sit upright.... To the maladies of the prairies other disorders
succeeded on his return.... Flat stagnation followed, reaching its depth
in eighteen months.... The desire to return to the prairie was intense,
but exposure to the sunlight would have destroyed his sight.... When his
condition was at its worst, he resolved to attempt the composition of the
"History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac," for which he had been collecting
material since his days in college. Suffering from extreme weakness of
sight, a condition of the brain prohibiting fixed attention, and a nervous
derangement, he yet set out upon this labor, using a wooden frame strung
with parallel wires to guide his crayon. Books and documents were read to
him, but never, without injury, for more than a half-hour at a time, and
frequently not at all for days. For the first half-year he averaged six
lines of composition a day. And he wrote, I suppose, at least ten hundred
thousand lines. His health improving, he dictated, pacing a dark garret.
He then entered upon "France in the New World." The difficulties were
incalculable.... Wholly unable to use his eyes, he had before him the task
of tracing out, collecting, indexing, arranging, and digesting a great
mass of incongruous material, scattered on both sides of the Atlantic. He
was unable to employ trained assistants and had to rely mainly on his own
research, though, in some cases, receiving valuable aid of scholars and
others. He used to employ as reader of French a public-school girl wholly
ignorant of French (who, I suppose, gave English pronunciation to all the
words), but with such help and that of members of his own family the work
went on. Then came another disaster--an effusion of water on the knee
which involved a close confinement for two years; and this in turn
resulted in serious nervous disturbance centring in the head. These
extreme conditions of disorder continued for many years.... His work was
wholly interrupted for one year, four years, and numerous short
intervals.... Later the condition of sight so far improved as to permit
reading, not exceeding, on an average, five minutes at one time. By
judicious use this modicum of power was extended. By reading for one
minute and then resting for an equal time the alternate process could be
continued for about half an hour, then, after a sufficient interval,
repeated three or four times a day. Working under such conditions he makes
this report, 1868, of progress: "Most of the material is collected or
within reach; another volume, on the Jesuits of North America, is one-
third written; another, on the French explorers of the Great West, is half
written; while a third, devoted to the checkered career of Comte de
Frontenac, is partially arranged for composition." During this period he
had made many journeys in the United States and Canada for material, and
had been four times in Europe.... He wonders as to the advantage of this
tortoise pace, but says in conclusion that, "irksome as may be the
requirements of conditions so anomalous, they are far less oppressive than
the necessity they involve of being busied with the Past when the Present
has claims so urgent, and of holding the pen with the hand that should
have grasped the sword" (for he was greatly disappointed that he could not
enter the army at the time of the Civil War).
I have made this rather extensive summary of the singular autobiography--
and largely in the author's own words--not to prepare your minds for
lenient judgments of his work, but to inform them of the tenacious purpose
of the man whose infirmities of the knees kept him most of his life from
the wild forest trails and streams and compelled him to a wheel-chair in
gardens of tame roses; whose weakness of the eyes allowed him but
inadequate vision of the splendor of the woods and even robbed him of the
intimacy of books; whose malady of mind kept him ever in terror of devils
more fierce than the inhuman tortures of Jogues and Brébeuf--a tenacious
purpose that wrought its youth-selected, self-appointed work, and so well,
so splendidly, so thoroughly that it needs never to be done again.
One of his friends, in a memoir of Parkman, recalls an observation of
Sainte-Beuve, in his paper on Taine's "English Literature," that has found
its best illustration in what Parkman accomplished in spite of lameness,
blindness, and mental distress: "All things considered, every allowance
being made for general or particular elements and for circumstances, there
still remain place and space enough around men of talent, wherein they can
move and turn themselves with entire freedom. And, moreover, were the
circle drawn round each a very contracted one, every man of talent, every
genius, in so far as he is in some degree a magician and an enchanter,
possesses a secret entirely his own, whereby to perform prodigies within
this circle and work wonders there." [Footnote: "Nouveaux Lundis," vol.
VIII, English translation in "English Portraits," p. 243.]
This autobiography has shown how short was the radius of the circle. The
twelve volumes of his work attest, under Sainte-Beuve's definition, the
degree of his powers of magic and enchantment. Men of strong knees, of
good eyes, and of brains that do not keep them from sleep by night or from
work by day, have travelled over this same field, but of most that they
gathered it may be said: "To no such aureate earth 'tis turned as, buried
once, men want dug up again."
I have sat for days in the Harvard University Library among the books
bequeathed to it by Parkman (being the greater part of the library which
surrounded him in his work--books of history, of travel, and of biography;
books about Indians, flints, and folk-lore; maps and guides-among them
several guides to Paris--only twenty-five hundred volumes in all); but
they are not the material of his magic. His work was not legerdemain,
skilful manipulation, but recreation, and he found the aureate earth in
the forests, on the prairies, and in documents contemporary to his theme.
In a cabinet (bearing in its carving suggestions of the fleur-de-lis) in
the rooms of the Massachusetts Historical Society, I found some of this
precious material, also bequeathed by the historian. Its nature is
suggested in the preface to his "Montcalm and Wolfe." "A very large
amount," he says, "of unpublished material has been used in its
preparation, consisting for the most part of documents copied from the
archives and libraries of France and England. The papers copied for the
present work ["Montcalm and Wolfe"] in France alone, exceed six thousand
folio pages of manuscript, additional and supplementary to the 'Paris
Documents' procured for the State of New York.... The copies made in
England form ten volumes, besides many English documents consulted in the
original manuscript. Great numbers of autograph letters, diaries, and
other writings of persons engaged in the war have also been examined on
this [_i.e._, American] side of the Atlantic."
But even these were as the dry bones in the valley which Ezekiel saw, till
he touched these scattered fragments with his genius.
The process employed by the blind workman is described by Frothingham, one
of his friends: "The manuscripts were read over to him, slowly, one by
one. First the chief points were considered, then the details of the story
were gone over carefully and minutely. As the reading went on, he made
notes, first of essential and then of non-essential. After this he welded
everything together, made the narrative completely his own, infused into
it his own fire, quickened it by his own imagination, and made it as it
were a living experience, so that his books read like personal
reminiscences." [Footnote: "Memoirs of Francis Parkman," in "Proceedings
Massachusetts Historical Society, 1892-4," series 2, 8:555.]
In a book of Parkman memorabilia of various kinds which I found in the
Harvard Library, I happened one day upon a few scraps of paper which
furnish illustration of the first steps of the process--paper on which
were notes made in Parkman's own hand:
"Deserts covered with bones of buffalo and elk"; "No sign of man from Fort
Union to Fort Mackenzie"; "White clay, cactus dried up, grasshoppers";
"Poplars,--wild roses,--gooseberries"; "prairie dogs,--heat,--aridity";
"extraordinary castellated mountains, stone walls,--etc. above Fort
Union"; "in 1832 Blackfeet are said to have killed 58 whites, three years
before, 80"; "Blackfeet do not eat dogs--Blackfeet Societies--beaver traps
lent to Blackfeet"; "wood near Fort Clark chiefly poplar"; "fossils--
terres mauvaises"; "maize cultivated by Mandans"; "catching the war
eagle"; "Mandans etc. agricultural tribes"; "wolf-pits described";
"Exceptional cold Ft. Clark"; "Wolf attacked three women;--wooden carts no
iron"; "Barren Mts. little dells with water,--gooseberries, strawberries,
currants, very few trees, mad river."
But these and many other notes on scraps of blue paper in his hand have
significance only in their translation, transfusion into the color or
detail of some of his wonderful pictures. Somewhere in his books I felt
certain, when reading these notes, I should find those poplars growing on
the plains with wild roses and gooseberry bushes not far away; some day I
should come to the barren mountains and the dells with water, or should
hear the roaring of the mad river and witness the catching of the war-
eagle. Indeed, some of these very notes had entered, as I found, into the
description of that lonely journey of the brothers Vérendrye as they
passed through the bad lands (terres mauvaises of the notes), where the
clay is sometimes white as chalk and the barren, castellated bluffs,
"carved into fantastic shapes by the storms," stand about.
"For twenty days the travellers saw no human being [see note above], so
scanty was the population of these plains. Game, however, was abundant.
Deer sprang from the tall reed grass of the river bottoms; buffalo tramped
by in ponderous columns, or dotted the swells of the distant prairie with
their grazing thousands; antelope approached, with the curiosity of their
species, to gaze at the passing horsemen, then fled like the wind; and as
they neared the broken uplands towards the Yellowstone, they saw troops of
elk (later their bones) and flocks of mountain-sheep. Sometimes, for miles
together, the dry plain was studded thick with the earthen mounds that
marked the burrows of the curious marmots, called prairie dogs from their
squeaking bark. Wolves, white and gray, howled about the camp at night,
and their cousin, the coyote, seated in the dusk of evening upright on the
grass, with nose turned to the sky, saluted them with a complication of
yelpings, as if a score of petulant voices were pouring together from the
throat of one small beast." [Footnote: Parkman, "Half-Century of
Conflict," 2 23, 24.]
It is impossible to know how much of this came from his own actual seeing
(for in his journey over the Oregon trail he had passed near the trail of
the Vérendrye brothers) and how much came from those scraps of color and
incident picked up in his blindness from varied sources; nor is it of
consequence, except as it connotes something of the quality and character
of his genius, for it is all accurate and the brave brothers Vérendrye
move as living men across it. He was able to revivify a dusty document as
well as a personal experience. "To him," as Mr. Barrett Wendell said out
of an intimate acquaintance with him and his work, "a document of whatever
kind,--a state paper, a Jesuit 'relation,' the diary of a provincial
soldier, the record of a Yankee church,--was merely the symbol of a fact
which had once been as real as his own hardships among the western
Indians, or as the lifetime of physical suffering, which never bent his
will." [Footnote: "Proceedings American Academy of Arts and Sciences,
1893-4," 29:439.] I have never read "The Oregon Trail" with the same keen
enthusiasm as his other books, largely, I think, because it is a mere
report of personal adventure and not a composition fused of his
imagination. It is an excellent photograph by the side of a master's
painting.
But all this accuracy of detail, this revivifying of dead Indians,
knights, voyageurs and soldiers, this painting of prairie, forest, and
mountain, was not in itself to put him among the world's great historians.
And, indeed, there are those who, appreciating the artist's skill, have
expressed regret that he gave this skill to no great theme. It is as if he
were (they would doubtless say) writing of the labors of sacrificing
missionaries in Africa, or of colonial administration in Indo-China, or of
forest adventure along the Amazon. In the Boston Public Library I found
that every work of his had duplicate copies in the boys' department. (And
how great the reading is to this day is intimated by my inability one
evening to get a copy of "Pontiac's War," though there were several copies
in the possession of the library. A reserve had finally to be called in.)
But I should say that this double classification intimated rather the
genuine human interest of his story, appealing alike to men and to boys
(as the greatest of human writings do)--a work "for all mankind and for
all time."
But I should go beyond this. His books are not merely of elemental
entertainment. He has seized the most fundamental, far-reaching, and
consequential of themes. He found going on in his forest, of which he set
out to write, not merely flame-lighted scalpings and official rapacities
and picturesque maraudings and quixotic pageants and the like. His theme
was even greater than the mere gathering of all these raids and rapacities
and maraudings and pageants into an informed racial, national struggle for
the possession of a continent. It was nothing less than the grappling, out
on the frontier of the world, between two principles of organized human
life. The forests are so demanding, the incidents so stirring in
themselves, that many have doubtless missed the high theme that expressed
itself there. But that theme possessed its author, and it possesses every
sensitive reader as some fateful, recurring, tragic melody in an opera
full of diverting incident and picturesque figures.
Parkman is more likely to keep his generalizations within the overture,
but frequently one gives summary to an act or scene, so that even he who
comes for entertainment can hardly miss the significance of it all;
though, as Mr. Wendell has said, to borrow again from his, the best, brief
tribute: "Parkman was very sparing of generalization, of philosophic
comment," whether from overconsciousness or from the intrusion of his
malady which forbade long-continued thought. He made the course of events
carry its own philosophy.
Several noble and notable generalizations have, however, already thrust
themselves into these chapters to illustrate his appreciation of the
loftiness of his theme, his candor, and his genuine sympathy with those to
whose ill-fated heroism he gave such "precious testimony."
One has only to associate with the persistent, clearly outlined purpose of
a half-century a realization of the completeness of its achievement to be
stirred, as by the victory not of a fortuitously reckless assault but of a
long, carefully planned campaign.
Among his papers (in the fleur-de-lis cabinet of which I have spoken)
there are the first prophecies: two maps of the Lake George (Champlain)
region drawn by him on the inside of a red portfolio cover, marked 1842,
when he was nineteen years old; and next an odd-covered blank book in
which he began his note-making on the "Old French War," with such notes as
these: "Rights of the two nations"; "When did Marquette make his
discoveries?" "When did La Salle settle?" "Had not the French a right both
of prior discovery and prior settlement?" "The English never settled";
"The letters patent to Louisiana are preposterous, perhaps, but not more
so than the English claim from coasts back of the Mississippi"; "The first
blood was spilt by Washington. Jumonville would seem to have been sent
with peaceful intentions. His orders charged him to attack the French."
The title is written in a strong hand, but before he has half filled the
little book he makes entry that the "French War" is laid aside, for the
time, for the history of "Pontiac's War," and thus the latter part of this
thin note-book grew into "The Conspiracy of Pontiac," and that in turn
became sequel to the whole series of which it also was the promise, a
series of books so closely related that John Fiske speaks of them as "one
book."
The scope, to be sure, is a restricted one. He has two great wildernesses
to cover, but it is a century and a half after the epic narrative begins
before enough people enter to prevent one from keeping track of all of
them. It is as if he were writing the history of man, from the last day of
creation forward, starting with a few transmigrant souls still under the
control of their oversea existence. He begins at the beginning, with not
even a twilight zone of tradition and with a stage "far more primitive
than that which is depicted in the Odyssey or even Genesis." Cartier's
route is as well known as that of the steamship that sailed yesterday
through the "Square Gulf," if the ice permitted, and the incidents of his
first days beyond the gates of the first wilderness have been as
accurately recorded, to say the least, as are yesterday's events yonder in
the morning's papers here. And when his story ends, there are not as many
people in the two great valleys along the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi
as in a good-sized city to-day. But none the less, as I have said, are the
forces (fighting in and through these few representatives of civilization)
age-old and world-important. Never has historian had such fascinating
theme--such "epic theme," says Fiske--"save when Herodotus told the story
of Greece and Persia, or when Gibbon's pages resounded with the marshalled
hosts through a thousand years of change." And Parkman met one of what
Lowell calls "the convincing tests of genius" in the choice of this
subject.
When John Fiske said at the Harvard exercises in memory of Parkman that he
was one of the world's greatest historians, I subtracted something because
of the occasion and the nearness of view. But a year later he is saying of
Parkman's work, in a critical review: "Strong in its individuality and
like to nothing besides, it clearly belongs, I think, among the world's
few masterpieces of the highest rank, along with the works of Herodotus,
Thucydides, and Gibbon." [Footnote: _Atlantic Monthly_, 73:674; "A Century
of Science and Other Essays," p. 264.]
There will never be such a story to write again, for the frontier of
forest and prairie has disappeared. It is now in the midst of cities where
civilizations grapple in their smoke and turmoil. So shall we hold even
more precious his gift and thank Heaven for "sending us such a scholar,
such an artist, such a genius before it was too late to catch the fleeting
light and fix it upon immortal canvas."
Among the writings of Francis Parkman there are a few pages--known not
even to a score of his readers, I suppose--which might very well be
printed in summary of his great work--though they find no place in any
volume--for the symbol they carry of his achievement. These few pages make
a leaflet--a reprint of a paper contributed to the _Botanical Bulletin_ in
1878 by "Francis Parkman, late Professor of Horticulture at the Bussey
Institution," and entitled "The Hybridization of Lilies." In this brief
paper is related the story of Parkman's own attempts, extending through
seven years, to combine certain well-established varieties of lilies, and
especially two superb lilies--the "Speciosum" (_Lancifolium_) and the
"Auratum,"--the pollen of the latter being carried to the deanthered
flowers of the former. The patient, anxious, exquisite care with which he
carried on these experiments suggests the infinite pains with which he
gathered and classified and sifted and weighed his historical material
(his material of "France Speciosum" and of "France Auratum"). The result
of his floral experiment, the wonderfully beautiful flower which he
produced, described in a London horticultural magazine as the "grandest
flowering plant yet introduced into our gardens," and known as the "Lilium
Parkmanni," is suggestive of his achievement in so depicting and defining
that civilization which is symbolized by the lily, the fleur-de-lis, in
its strange, wild, highly colored flowering on the prairies and by the
rivers of Nouvelle France, as to make it for all time identified with his
memory and name. He lived among roses of his own growing, through his
later invalid years, in the outskirts of Boston. He even wrote a book
about roses. But his peculiar triumph (the one flower that lingers in
gardens carrying a memory of him) is a "magnificent" lily. And though he
lived amid the heritages of the English, in the new continent, with fair
mind and most acute and industrious, he has preserved the hybrid heritages
of the French spirit in the American regions--heritages that, save for his
research lighted by imagination, might never have blossomed in the pages
of history.
End of Project Gutenberg's The French in the Heart of America, by John Finley