The French in the Heart of America | Page 3

northern portals of the American
continent, on the cliffs of the Saguenay, or on that Rock of Quebec
which saw the first vessel of the French come up the river and
supported the last struggle for formal dominion of a land which the
French can never lose, _except by forgetting_: "Again their ghostly
camp-fires seem to burn, and the fitful light is cast around on lord and
vassal and black-robed priest, mingled with wild forms of savage
warriors, knit in close fellowship on the same stern errand. A 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. Such was the domain
which France conquered for Civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in
the shade of its forests, priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of
ancient barbarism. Men steeped in antique learning, pale with the close
breath of the cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives,
ruled savage hordes with a mild, parental sway, and stood serene before
the direst shapes of death. Men of courtly nurture, heirs to the polish of
a far-reaching ancestry, here, with their dauntless hardihood, put to
shame the boldest sons of toil." [Footnote: Parkman: "Pioneers of
France in the New World." New library edition. Introduction, xii-xiii.]
These are the regions we are to explore, and these are the men with
whom we are to begin the journey.

CHAPTER II
FROM LABRADOR TO THE LAKES
We shall not be able to enter the valley of the Mississippi in this
chapter. There is a long stretch of the nearer valley of the St. Lawrence
that must first be traversed. Just before I left America in 1910 two men

flew in a balloon from St. Louis, the very centre of the Mississippi
Valley, to the Labrador gate of the St. Lawrence, the vestibule valley,
in a few hours, but it took the French pioneers a whole century and
more to make their way out to where those aviators began their flight.
We have but a few pages for a journey over a thousand miles of stream
and portage and a hundred years of time. I must therefore leave most of
the details of suffering from the rigors of the north, starvation, and the
Iroquois along the way to your memories, or to your fresh reading of
Parkman, Winsor, Fiske, and Thwaites in English, or to Le Clercq,
Lescarbot, Champlain, Charlevoix, Sagard, and others in French.
The story of the exploration and settlement of those valleys beyond the
cod-banks of Newfoundland begins not in the ports of Spain or
Portugal, nor in England, but in a little town on the coast of France,
standing on a rocky promontory thrust out into the sea, only a few
hours' ride from Paris, in the ancient town of St. Malo, the "nursery of
hardy mariners," the cradle of the spirit of the West. [Footnote: After
reaching Paris on my first journey, the first place to which I made a
pilgrimage, even before the tombs of kings and emperors and the
galleries of art, was this gray-bastioned town of St. Malo.]
For a son of France was the first of Europeans, so far as we certainly
know, to penetrate beyond the tidewater of those confronting coasts,
the first to step over the threshold of the unguessed continent, north, at
any rate, of Mexico. Columbus claimed at most but an Asiatic
peninsula, though he knew that he had found only islands. The Cabots,
in the service of England, sailing along its mysterious shores, had
touched but the fringe of the wondrous garment. Ponce de Leon, a
Spaniard, had floundered a few leagues from the sea in Florida
searching for the fountain of youth. Narvaez had found the wretched
village of Appalache but had been refused admission by the turbid
Mississippi and was carried out to an ocean grave by its fierce current;
Verrazano, an Italian in the employ of France, living at Rouen, had
entered the harbor of New York, had enjoyed the primitive hospitality
of what is now a most fashionable seaside resort (Newport), had seen
the peaks of the White Mountains from his deck, and, as he supposed,
had looked upon the Indian Ocean, or the Sea of Verrazano, which has

shrunk to the Chesapeake Bay on our modern maps and now reaches
not a fiftieth part of the way to the other shore.
It was a true son of France who first had the persistence of courage and
the endurance of imagination to enter the continent and see the gates
close behind him--Jacques Cartier, a master pilot of St. Malo,
commissioned of his own intrepid desire and of the jealous ambition of
King Francis I to bring fresh tidings of