The French in the Heart of America

by John H. Finley

CHAPTER X

IN THE WAKE OF THE "GRIFFIN"

In the lower St. Lawrence Valley, among the French Canadians, where France is best remembered and where the shut-in life is not disturbed by current events or changing conventions or evanescent fashions, I am told there are traces in their language of the sea life of their ancestors on the coasts of Brittany and Normandy. When, for example, a neighbor approaches a farmhouse on horseback he is asked not to "alight" or to "dismount" but to "disembark," and he is invited not to "tie" his horse but to "moor" it. It is as if they were still crying ever in their unconscious memories, "Thalassa, Thalassa"; as if the very shells of speech still carried the roar of the ocean which they who hold them to their ears have never seen.

If the language of the upper valley of the St. Lawrence and of the valley of the Mississippi remembered as distinctly its origin we should everywhere hear the plash of the oar in all the hospitality of their settlements. But all such traces have disappeared, or all but disappeared, in the Mississippi Valley. The only one that comes to me now, as possibly of the old French days, is one which is preserved in an adage not at all French but quite characteristic of the independent life that has occupied the banks of all the rivers: "Paddle your own canoe." Yet even in the space of one or two generations of agricultural life that, too, is disappearing, supplanted by a synonymous phrase, borrowed of fields that have entirely forgotten the primitive days, when men travelled only by water and lived near the streams: "Hoe your own row."

The first sound of the overmountain migration of which I spoke above was of the stealthy step of the hunter, yet back of that for a century was the scarcely audible plash of the paddle and the answering swirl of the water. But as in overmountain migration the noisy wheel soon followed the foot, so in the other the noiseless sail followed the swishing paddle.

The city of Paris bears a sailing ship upon her shield, though she sits a hundred miles or more from the sea. Whatever the significance of that symbol has been to the people of France, it has a peculiar appropriateness (probably never realized before) in the fact that the iron, cordage, and anchors for the first vessel which sailed upon the inland waters of the new world were carried out from France to the first shipyard, beyond the mountains, in the midst of the forest, above the mighty Falls of Niagara.

Jason of Thessaly, sailing for the Golden Fleece in Colchis, and braving the fiery breath of the dragon, did not undertake a more perilous or more difficult labor than he who bore from the banks of the Seine the equipment of a vessel in which to bring back to France, as he hoped, the fleece of the forest and the plain.

We are accustomed to call those who crossed the plains and the Rocky Mountains for the gold-fields of California nearly two centuries later (in 1849) the Argonautae; but the first American Argonauts went from France, and they built their Argo on what is now Lake Erie, on the edge of the Field of the Bulls, near a place, grown into a beautiful city, which now bears the very name of the wild bull, the "buffalo," and within sound of the roaring of the dragon that had frightened all earlier explorers. So accurately do the details of the story of Jason's adventure become realities to-day! Champlain and others had heard only at a distance the thunder of the great cataract that was some day to become not only as docile as the dragon under Jason's taming but as useful as a million harnessed bulls.

La Salle gathered his ship-carpenters and his ship furniture between his journeys to Rouen (the place of his birth) and elsewhere for the means of purchase. But before the winter had come in Normandy his messengers were out amid the snows and naked forests of Canadian winters in continuance of that voyage toward the western Colchis.

In the autumn of 1678 a Franciscan friar, Hennepin, set out with two canoemen, the first solitary figures of the expedition—a gray priest from the gray Rock of Quebec, in a birch canoe, carrying with him the "furniture of a portable altar"—a priest who professed a zeal for souls, but who admitted a passion for travel and a burning desire to visit strange lands. He relates of himself that, being sent from a convent in Artois to Calais at the season of herring fishing, he made friends of the sailors and never tired of their stories. "Often," he says, "I hid myself behind tavern doors while the sailors were telling of their voyages. The tobacco smoke made me very sick at the stomach, but nevertheless I listened attentively…. I could have passed whole days and nights in this way without eating." [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 133. Hennepin, "A New Discovery of a Large Country in America," ed. Thwaites, 1:30.]

Along the way up the St. Lawrence he stopped to minister to the habitants —too few and too poor to support a priest—saying mass, exhorting, and baptizing. Early in November he arrived at the mission of Fort Frontenac, which he had two or three years before helped to establish in the wilds. Soon La Salle's lieutenants, La Motte and Tonty, appeared with most of the men, and while some were despatched in canoes to Lake Michigan to gather the buffalo-hides and beaver-skins against the coming of the ship, whose keel had not yet been laid, the rest (La Motte, Hennepin, and sixteen men) embarked for the Niagara River, by which the upper lakes empty into Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence. After a tempestuous voyage up and across the lake they reached this river, whose torrent fury, gathered of "four inland oceans," stopped even the canoes. Then, led of the priest, they toiled up the cliffs called the "Three Mountains," because, I suppose, of the three terraces. (Having climbed up the face of the cliffs in winter, with a heavy camera for my portable altar, and having broken the great icicles formed by the trickling stream over one of the terraces, in order to make my way across a narrow ledge to the top of the precipice, I am able to know what the journey must have meant to those first European travellers.) Once upon the upper plateau, they marched through the wintry forest and at length, in "solitude unprofaned as yet by the pettiness of man," they beheld the "imperial cataract"—the "thunder of water," as the Indians called it—or, as Hennepin described it, that "vast and prodigious cadence of water which falls down after a surprising and most astonishing manner, insomuch that the universe does not afford its parallel, those of Italy and Switzerland being but sorry patterns." To this priest, Hennepin, we owe the first description and picture of Niagara, [Footnote: "Four leagues from Lake Frontenac there is an incredible Cataract or Waterfall, which has no equal. The Niagara river near this place is only the eighth of a league wide, but it is very deep in places, and so rapid above the great fall that it hurries down all the animals which try to cross it, without a single one being able to withstand its current. They plunge down a height of more than five hundred feet, and its fall is composed of two sheets of water and a cascade, with an island sloping down. In the middle these waters foam and boil in a fearful manner. They thunder continually, and when the wind blows in a southerly direction the noise which they make is heard for more than fifteen leagues. Four leagues from this cataract, or fall, the Niagara river rushes with extraordinary rapidity especially for two leagues into Lake Frontenac."—Hennepin, "Description of Louisiana," pp. 71-73.] probably now more familiar to the world than any other natural feature of this continent. He has somewhat magnified the height of these falls, making it five hundred feet in the edition of 1683, and raising it to six hundred in 1697; but they are impressive enough to acquit him of intentional falsification and powerful enough to run virtually all the manufacturing plants in the United States, if they could be gathered within its easy reach.

As it is, less than 9 per cent of the water that overflows from the four upper Great Lakes into the lower lake, once known as Lake Frontenac and now as Ontario, is diverted for utilitarian purposes; it supplies the Americans and the Canadians almost equally between the two shores five hundred thousand horse-power. [Footnote: "Under a treaty between the United States and the British Government only about 25 per cent of the theoretical horsepower of Niagara Falls can be developed. The estimate of the minimum amount of power that can be developed on the Niagara River above and including the Falls is 5,800,000 h.p., and the assumed maximum is 6,500,000 h.p. The treaty, therefore, limits present possible minimum development on both sides of the Falls to 1,450,000 h.p. Under the treaty only five-fourteenths of the power made available thereby belongs to the United States, its share being reduced by the diversion of water from Lake Michigan into the Drainage Canal at Chicago. There is thus left at Niagara Falls only about 518,000 h.p. that can at present be developed on the American side." About one-half of this total is now developed.—United States Commissioner of Corporations. Report on water-power development in the United States. 1912.]

What the conversion of the strength of this Titan (for ages entirely wasted and for a century after Hennepin only a scenic wonder) means, or may mean, to industry in the future is intimated in some statistics, furnished by a recent writer on the Great Lakes, showing the relative cost per month of a certain unit of power in a number of representative American cities. [Footnote: "Assuming the maximum power used to be one hundred horse-power, the number of working hours a day to be ten, and the 'load factor,' or average power actually used, to be seventy-five per cent of the total one hundred, the cost per month in the cities named is as [above]."—Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 135.]

Boston $937.50
Philadelphia 839.25
New York 699.37
Chicago 629.43
Cleveland 559.50
Pittsburgh 419.62
Buffalo 184.91
Niagara Falls 144.17

These figures are more significant as one contemplates the diminishing supply of coal in coming centuries, if not decades. According to the estimate of a reliable authority the available and accessible coal supply of the United States will be exhausted at the present rate of exploitation by the year 2027, and the entire supply by the year 2050.

Such statistics intimate the advantage possessed, perhaps beyond any other site in America, by the strip of shore on which La Salle's men, from the banks of the Seine, and Hennepin, the priest from Calais, that December night in 1678 encamped, building their bivouac fires amid the snows, three miles above the falls—and so opening to the view of the world a natural source of power and wealth more valuable than extensive coal-fields or rich mines of gold or silver.

It was but a great waterfall to La Salle and Tonty and Hennepin—an impeding, noisy, hostile object. And to the half-mutinous, quarrelsome workmen (French, Flemings, Italians) it was a demon, no doubt, whose very breath froze their beards into icicles. It was, in reality, potentially the most beneficent single, incarnate force bounded by any one horizon of sky, in that new world, developed by the tipping of the continent a little to the eastward after the upper lakes had been formed and the consequent emptying of their waters into the St. Lawrence instead of the Gulf of Mexico.

In January, 1679, a file of burdened men, some thirty in number, toiling slowly on their way over the snowy plains and "through the gloomy forests of spruce and naked oak trees," the priest accompanying with his altar lashed to his back, reached a favorable spot beside calm water several miles above the cataract: the site is identified as situate a little way above the mouth of Cayuga Creek, just outside the village of La Salle, in the State of New York. There is a stone erected by the local historical society to mark the spot. When I saw the bronze tablet the inscription was almost illegible, covered, as it was, with ice and the snow that was at that very hour falling upon it.

There, began the felling and hewing of trees that were to touch the farther shores of Michigan. The supplies brought out from Paris had been lost by the wreck of La Salle's smaller vessel on the way up Ontario, but enough was saved, or brought by La Salle on his return from Fort Frontenac, to give this sixty-ton vessel full equipment, for in the spring she was launched. The "friar pronounced his blessing on her; the assembled company sang Te Deum; cannon were fired; and French and Indians … shouted and yelped in chorus as she glided into Niagara." She carried five cannon and on her prow was carved such a "portentous monster" as doubtless is to be found among the grotesques of Notre Dame—a griffin (that is, a beast with the body of a lion and the head, beak, and pinions of a bird), in honor of the armorial bearings of Count Frontenac.

Through spring and half the summer the vessel lay moored beyond reach of the Indians but near enough so that Hennepin "could preach on Sundays from the deck to the men encamped along the bank." When La Salle, who had been obliged by disasters to go back to Fort Frontenac during the building of the ship, again appeared above the falls in midsummer, the Griffin was warped up into the placid lake, and on the 7th of August anchor was lifted and the fateful voyage was begun.

There was (as when the Argo, the "first bold vessel, dared the seas") no Orpheus standing "high on the stern" and "raising his entrancing strain." Nor did a throng of proud Thessalians or of "transported demi-gods" stand round to cheer them off. The naked Indians, their hands over their mouths in wonderment or shouting, "Gannorom! Gannorom!" alone saw the great boat move out over the waters without oar or paddle or towing rope. For music there was only the Te Deum again, sung by raw, unpractised voices, such as one might hear among the boatmen of the Seine. It was not such music, at any rate, as that of Orpheus, to make plain men grow "heroes at the sound." Doubtless no one felt himself a hero. The only intimation of any consciousness of a high mission comes from Hennepin, who, when the Griffin, some days later, was ploughing peacefully through the straits that led to the Mer Douce—"verdant prairies, dotted with groves and bordered with lofty forests" on either side, "herds of deer and flocks of swans and wild turkeys" within sight, and the "bulwarks plentifully hung with game"—wrote: "Those who will one day have the happiness to possess this fertile and pleasant strait, will be very much obliged to those who have shown them the way."

"Very much obliged"? No, Hennepin! Of the hundreds of thousands who now pass through or across those straits every year, or of those thousands who possess its shores, not a hundred, I venture to say, remember "those who showed the way"! They have even forgotten "that the first European voice that Niagara ever heard was French"! Ste. Claire!—the name you gave to the beautiful strait beyond the "Symplegades" of your voyage, in gratitude and in honor of the day on which your company reached it—has become masculine in tribute to an American general. If your later praying to that patron of seamen, St. Anthony of Padua, had not availed to save you from the peril of the storm and you had gone to death in unsalted water, you could hardly have been more completely forgotten. One has spoken now and then lightly of the vow made by your commander, La Salle, to build a grateful chapel to St. Anthony if your lives were saved during that storm, forgetting that so long as the Mississippi runs to the sea there will be a chapel to St. Anthony (St. Anthony's Falls) in which gratitude will be continually chanted through ages for the preservation of the ship and its crew to find haven in quiet waters behind Point St. Ignace.

It was there, at St. Ignace that we have seen La Salle, in scarlet, kneeling before the altar, where Marquette's bones were doubtless by that time gathered by his devoted savage followers, and it was thence that they passed on to an island in Green Bay, the goal of their journey.

From that far port the first cargo carried of sails was sent out, bound for the shore on which the Griffin's timbers had been hewn. That it never reached harbor of that calm shelter, or any other, we know; but that loss, once the path was traced in the waters, is hardly of consequence save as it helped further to illustrate the indomitable spirit of La Salle and his companions.

What good came to Thessaly or Greece of the yellow peltry that Jason brought back is not even kept in myth or fable. The mere adventure was the all. They did not even think of its worth. The goatskin was valueless except as a proof or token, and the boat Argo, though the greatest ship known to the early myths of Greece, and though dedicated, we are told, to Neptune at the end of the voyage, became the pioneer of no such mighty fleet as did the Griffin. The list of the Greek ships and commanders in the Iliad offers but a pygmy analogy. And if you were to go to Buffalo to- day, near the site of that first shipyard (a little farther away from the falls), you would know that the successors of La Salle in new Griffins had actually brought back the golden fleece—the priceless fleece, the fleece of the plains if not of the forests. Day after day its gold is hung against the sky as the grain is lifted from the ships into elevators which can store at one time twenty-three million bushels of wheat.

The coasts of the lakes up which the Griffin led the oarless way are three thousand three hundred and eighty-five miles in length, or, including those of the lower lake, Frontenac, which was also first touched of French keels, over four thousand miles. The statistics of the traffic which has grown in the furrow of that wind-drawn plough would be fatiguing if they did not carry you to heights of a wider and more exhilarating view.

We have occupied and apportioned the billion acres of French domain among sixty million people. Here is an added domain in which no landmarks can be set—which belongs to all men.

These are a few graphic facts gathered from recent reports and books about the Great Lakes: [Footnote: Edward Charming and M. F. Lansing, "The Story of the Great Lakes." Macmillan, New York, 1909. James O. Curwood, "The Great Lakes." Putnam, New York, 1909. James C. Mills, "Our Inland Seas." McClurg, Chicago, 1910.]

Nearly as many people live in States that have ports upon those shores as in France to-day—between thirty-five and forty millions.

The lakes have a tonnage equal to one-third of the total tonnage of North America. [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 4. "In 1913 the total tonnage of the Great Lakes was 2,940,000 tons, of the United States 7,887,000 tons."—Report United States Commission of Navigation.]

They have made possible a saving in cost of transportation (and so of production) of several hundred million dollars in a single year. [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 4.]

Only ninety million dollars have been spent by the government for their improvement in the whole history of their occupation, above Niagara Falls, [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 9.] while France in that time has spent for harbors and waterways alone seven hundred and fifty million dollars.[Footnote: "Four hundred and fifty million dollars of this total has been for the improvement and maintenance of the waterways."—Report of National Waterways Commission, p. 507.] They have been privately developed.

Six times as much freight passes over these lakes as through the Suez
Canal in a year. [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 6.]

Three thousand five hundred vessels, and more than twenty-five thousand men are required to move the hundred million tons of freight which every year would fill a train encircling the globe. [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," pp. 25, 26, and Report of United States Commission of Navigation, 1913.]

If one were to stand on the shore of that "charming strait," between Erie and Huron, the Detroit River (which Hennepin so covetously describes, wishing to make settlement there, until La Salle reminded him of his "professed passion for exploring a new country"), one would now see a vessel passing one way or the other every twelve minutes, on the average, day and night during the eight months of open navigation.

Nor are they small sailing vessels of a few tons' burden, but great sailless, steam-propelled hulks, carrying from five to ten thousand tons.

So it is no fleet of graceful galleons—half bird, half lion, as the Griffin was—that have followed in her wake up what Hennepin called "the vast and unknown seas of which even the savages knew not the end." They have, in the evolution of nautical zoology, lost beak, wings, and feathers, and now like a shoal of wet lions, tawny and black, their powerful heads and long steel backs just visible above the blue water, they course the western Mediterranean from spring to winter. [Footnote: It is an intruding and probably whimsical, but fascinating, thought that the wings of the griffin have become evolved into the air-ships which first began successfully to fly, in America, near the shores of the lake on which the Griffin itself was hatched. The Wright brothers were born near one of those lakes. It is not a far-fetched or labored thought which pictures that simple, rough-made galleon—very like the model of the ship on the shield of Paris—as leading two broods across the valley above the Falls, one of lions that cannot fly and one of sea-birds, hydroplanes, whose paths are the air, but whose resting-places are the calm water; the brood of the sea and the brood of the sky, hatched from one nest at the water's edge.]

The ships of the lion brood are, some of them, five or six hundred feet in length, and carry eleven thousand tons of cargo. I have seen the skeleton of one of these iron-boned beasts, and I have been told that eight hundred thousand rivets go into its creation. And upon hearing this I could not but hear the deafening clamor caused by La Salle's driving the first nail or bolt, Father Hennepin declining the honor because of the "modesty of [his] religious profession."

As to the cargoes that these ships bring back, the story is even more marvellous. First in quantity is iron ore, forty-seven million four hundred and thirty-five thousand seven hundred and seventy-one tons in 1912 [Footnote: "Mineral Industry," 21:455.] from the shores of Superior, where Joliet had made search for copper mines, where Father Allouez—in the midst of reports of baptisms and masses—tells of nuggets and rocks of the precious metal, and where has grown up in a few years the "second greatest freight-shipping port on earth"—a port that bears the name of that famous French coureur de bois, Du Lhut. Forty-seven millions of tons, and there are still a billion and a half in sight on those shores, which have already given to the ships hundreds of millions of their dark treasure.

After the ore, lumber, one billion one hundred and sixty-five million feet [Footnote: Monthly Summary of Internal Commerce of the United States, December, 1911.] in one year (1911); a waning amount from the vanishing forests that once completely encircled these lakes. Alexander Pope, whose "Ode on St. Cecilia's Day" I have quoted (and would there were a Homer, Pope, or Kipling to sing this true legend), speaks of Argo seeing "her kindred trees descend from Pelion to the Main"—from the mountain to the sea, where Jason's boat was launched. So, with the departure of the Griffin from her Green Bay Island, might a prophetic poet have seen her masts beckoning all the kindred trees to the water, in which one hundred and sixty billion feet of pine have descended from the forests of Michigan alone, [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 57.] and that is but one of the circling States. And there is this singular fact to be added, that nearly a third of the annual cargo goes to the "Tonawandas," [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 54.] the "greatest lumber towns" in the world that have grown up practically on the very site of the shipyard at the mouth of Cayuga Creek, a little way above the falls.

And after the ore and lumber, grain—the fleece of the fields, immensely more valuable than that of the forests; one hundred and fifty million bushels in one year and eleven million barrels of flour—a fortnight's bread supply for the entire world. [Footnote: Curwood, "The Great Lakes," p. 49.]

And after ore and lumber and grain, fuel and other bulky necessities of life.

The casual relation between the pioneer building and journey of the Griffin and these statistics cannot, of course, be established, but what no inspired human prophecy could have divined, or even the wildest dreaming of La Salle have imagined, is as sequential as the history that has been made to trace all new-world development in the wake of the caravels of Columbus. The storms of nature and the jealousies in human breasts thwarted La Salle's immediate ambitions, but what has come into that northern valley has followed closely in the path of his purposes, the path traced by his ship built of the trees of Niagara and furnished by the chandleries of Paris.

The mystery of the vanishing of this pioneer vessel only enhances the glory of its venture and service—as its loss but gave new foil to the hardihood of La Salle and Tonty. We can imagine the golden-brown skins scattered over the blue waters as the bits of the body of the son of the king of Colchis strewn by Medea to detain the pursuers of the Argonauts. It was the first sacrifice to the valley for the fleece. In the depths of these Lakes or on their shores were buried the bones of these French mariners who, first of Europeans, trusted themselves to sails and west winds on those uncharted seas.

But this is not the all of the tragic story. The Griffin carried in her the prophecies of other than lake vessels. She had in her hold on that fateful trip the cordage and iron for the pioneer of the river ships. So when she went down she spoke to the waters that engulfed her the two dreams of her builder and commander: one dream the navigation of the lakes and the other the coursing of the western rivers.

The Spanish council which decreed long ago that "if it had pleased God that … rivers should have been navigable, He would not have wanted human assistance to make them such" would be horrified by the sacrilege that has been committed and is being contemplated by the followers of the men of the Griffin.

They have made a canal around the Falls (which Hennepin first saw breathing a cloud of mist over the great abyss)—a canal that, supplemented by other canals along the St. Lawrence River, allows vessels of fourteen-foot draught to go from Lake Erie to Montreal and so on to the sea. If this achievement were put into the poetry of legend it would show the outwitting of the dragon.

They have deepened the straits where the Griffin had to wait for favorable breezes and soundings to pass from Erie to Huron—the Symplegades (clashing rocks) of the new-world voyage.

They have made canals on either side of the Sault Ste. Marie—the rapids of the St. Mary's River, by the side of which St. Lusson took formal possession of all that northern empire and Father Allouez made his extraordinary address—canals through which sixty-two million tons passed in 1910 toward the east and south.

They have made and deepened harbors all the way around the shores till ships two hundred times the size of the Griffin can ride in them.

Yet this is not all. The symbols of La Salle's vision revived in the lakes memories of the days when their waters ran through the Mississippi Valley to the gulf—the very course which La Salle's unborn Griffin was to take.

When the continent tilted a little to the east and in the tilting poured the water of the upper lakes over the Niagara edge into the St. Lawrence, that same tilting stopped the overflow down into the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico at the other end of the lakes. But so slight was the tilting that the water still sweeps over, in places, when the lakes are high, and sometimes even carries light boats across.

Of late engineers have, in effect, been undoing with levels and scoops and dredges what nature did in a mighty upheaval. They are practically tipping the bowls back the other way and so making currents to run down the old channel toward the gulf through the valleys of the Des Plaines and the Illinois to the Mississippi.

And so that dream which the dying Griffin spoke to the lake, and the lake to the rivers in the time of flood—when intercommunication was possible—is to be realized, except that steam or electricity will take the place of winds, and screws of sails. [Footnote: Herbert Quick, "American Inland Waterways," New York, 1909.]

Meanwhile a great battle of the lakes is waging—a battle of levels, it might better be called, between those, on the one side, who wish to maintain the grandeur of Niagara much as it was when Hennepin first pictured it, and with them those who for utilitarian reasons do not wish its thunderous volume diminished, except, perhaps, for their local uses, and those also who fear disaster to their harbors and canals all around the lakes, deepened at great expense, if water is led away toward the Mississippi; and, on the other side, the public health of millions at the western end of the lakes and the commercial hopes of other millions in the Mississippi Valley waiting for the Griffins of the lakes to come with more generous prices for their produce and bring to their doors what the rest of the world has now to send to them by the more expensive railroad.

Some day, perhaps, the great upper lake, Superior, will be made a reservoir where enough water will be impounded in wet seasons for a steady and more generous supply during the dry seasons; in which event there will be water enough to keep Niagara in perennial beauty and power, to fill all the present and prospective harbors and canals to their desired depths and float even larger fleets of Griffins, and, at the same time, have enough left to make the Mississippi, as the Frenchman who first saw it visualized it, and as President Roosevelt, two centuries later, expressed it, "a loop of the sea." [Footnote: Herbert Quick, "American Inland Waterways," New York, 1909.]

But another amicable battle is on—a battle of the eastern levels—between the men of the old French valley to the north (i.e., the St. Lawrence) and the men of the old Iroquois valleys to the south, of the Mohawk and the Hudson. In 1830 a canal was built by the latter from above the Falls to the navigable Hudson, and with high ceremony a cask of the water of Lake Erie was emptied into New York harbor as symbol of the wedding of lake and ocean. Then Canada built her Welland Canal around Niagara and made canals along the St. Lawrence and channels in the St. Lawrence past the Lachine Rapids to Montreal, and even made the way from there to the sea deeper that the growing ocean vessels might come to old Hochelaga. Now New York has begun deepening the old and almost useless Erie Canal from seven and nine feet to twelve feet, and to take barges one hundred and fifty feet long and twenty-five feet beam, with a draught of ten feet, and Canada is contemplating still deeper channels that will let the ocean steamers into every port of the Great Lakes. She is even thinking of a canal that will follow the path of Champlain, up the Ottawa and across the old portage to Lake Nipissing and thence by the French River into Lake Huron; and of an alternative course by another of Champlain's paths, from Ontario across to Huron by way of Lake Simcoe and the Trent River, in either route avoiding Niagara altogether, paths that would shorten the water distance by hundreds of miles and bring Europe almost as near to the shores where Le Caron ministered to the Hurons as to New York City.

It is a rivalry between the old Champlain paths and the La Salle paths, with just an intimation from those who look far into the future that a new water path still farther north—of which Radisson gave some premonition— may carry the wheat of the far northwest from Winnipeg beyond Superior and beyond the courses of the Mississippi up to Hudson Bay and across the ocean to European ports, brought a thousand miles nearer.

This is but the merest intimation of the prophetic service of the water pioneers. And when the prophecy of these pioneers, as interpreted in terms of steam and locks and dams unknown to them, is fulfilled, it is not beyond thinking that a captain of a seagoing vessel of ten or twenty thousand tons from Havre or Cherbourg may some day be calling in deep voice (as last summer in a room on the twenty-ninth floor of a Chicago "sky-scraper" I heard a local descendant of the Griffin screeching) for the lifting of the bridges that will open the way to the Mississippi, the heart of America.