CHAPTER XII

WESTERN TOWNS AND CITIES THAT HAVE SPRUNG FROM FRENCH PORTAGE PATHS

The old French portage paths were also fruitful of cities on the edge of the Mississippi Valley, though the growth of these short paths was not— with one notable exception—as luxuriant as that from the earth enriched of human blood and bones about the old French forts.

These portages, or carrying paths, which differ from the trails of the wood runners in that they are but short interruptions of the water paths and were not designed or laid out, as a rule, by the wild engineers of the forests and prairies but by human feet, lie across the great highway along which, before the days of canals, one might have walked dry-shod from the Atlantic to the Pacific—between the basins of the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi, the Pacific and the Arctic —a highway which has, however, been trodden by no one probably through its entire length, for in places it runs over inaccessible peaks of mountains and winds around the narrowest of ledges. But the paths across it—those connecting the streams that flow in opposite directions from the continental watersheds—are like isthmian paths between great oceans— great dry oceans with watercourses through them.

There were, to be sure, still other portage paths than those across watersheds, and the most common were those that led around waterfalls or impassable rapids, such as Champlain and the Jesuits followed on their journeys up the Ottawa to the Nipissing. It was of such portages that Father Brébeuf wrote—portage paths passing almost continually by torrents, by precipices, and by places that were horrible in every way. In less than five days they made more than thirty-five portages, some of which were three leagues long. This means that on these occasions the traveller had to carry on his shoulders his canoe and all his baggage, with so little food that he was continually hungry and almost without strength and vigor. [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 8:75-77.] Another priest tells of a portage occupying an entire day, during which he climbed mountains and pierced forests and carried, the while, his chapel and his little store of provisions.

Of whatever variety, however, these portage paths were frequently burying- grounds. Sometimes altars were erected beside them. They were often places of encampments, of assemblies, and more often of ambuscades. So it came about, too, that they were made the places of minor forts or gave occasion for forts farther on the way. In those precivilized Panama days, the neutrality of the isthmian paths could not be assured, and so they were fortified.

Céloron tells of the mending of boats at the end of his Chautauqua portages, and that statement, with other like incidents, has led one authority to picture the birches—those beautiful white and golden trees of the sombre northern woods that gave their cloaks to the travellers who asked and shivered till they grew others—stripped of their bark where those paths came down to the streams. He has even imagined primitive carpenter shops and ovens and huts on these paths where the voyageurs must stop for repairs, food, and rest—the precursors of garage, road-house, and hotel.

But on maps in the Bibliothèque Nationale names of portage paths have been found which assure us that these difficult ways were not without charm to those early travellers, as they have been to many a wanderer since; for there was Portage des Roses, where the wild rose brightened the way; and Portage de la Musique, where the water sang constantly its song in the solitude. Then there were Portage de la Roche Fendue, Portage des Chênes, Portage des Perches, Portage Talon, and Portage des Récollets, named in memory of experiences of men whom the voyageurs wished to recall or to honor, just as the French give to their streets such names as "Rue des Fleurs," "Boulevard des Capucines." [Footnote: A. B. Hulbert, "Historic Highways of America," 7:49.]

The portage paths that became in time most fruitful were generally short, well-cleared, and deep-furrowed by feet. On three of the most important and historic of these paths from the basin of the Great Lakes to that of the Mississippi I have walked with the memories of these precursors; in one place it was suggested that I should ride in a carriage, but I refused, feeling that these men must be worshipped on foot. The first of these portages is that path of which I have already spoken several times (and which I never tire of letting my imagination travel again), the one over which Nicolet must have passed from the Fox River into the Wisconsin River, if he got so far on his way to Muscovy—the path to which Father Dablon said the way was as through a paradise, but was as hard as the way to heaven [Footnote: "If the country … somewhat resembles an earthly paradise in beauty, the way leading to it may be said to bear some likeness to the one depicted by our Lord as leading to Heaven."—"Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 55:191.]—the path which the coureurs de bois Radisson and Groseilliers doubtless followed; the path which La Salle may have found in those two years of mysterious absence in the valley; the path Marquette and Joliet and hundreds after them certainly took on their way from Montreal to the Mississippi or from the Mississippi back to Montreal. You would not know this narrow strip—not a mile wide—to be a watershed dividing the continent, the north from the south; you would not know it for the threshold to the Mississippi Valley. The plain which the path crosses seems to the eye as level as a table. Undoubtedly before the tipping of the bed of the lakes the water flowed over this path. Indeed, La Salle in one of his letters refers to the portaging here of canoes past an "oak grove and across a flooded meadow." The tree of which he speaks, with two canoes clumsily drawn upon it by the savages, to mark the beginning of the portage at the Wisconsin, has gone, but a monument of red granite now stands there with the names of Marquette and Joliet upon it. At the other end of the now macadamized "path" there is a little red bridge that leads across the Fox to where a portage fort grew later into an important trading-post; but now there is no trace of those monuments of war and trade. There is a farmhouse on their site whose tenants are in fear only of drought and early frosts. A canal crosses this little isthmus and once it interlocked the east and west, the arctic plains with the subtropic cane fields; but it has given over its work to the railroads, having served, however, I have no doubt, to water the roots of the beautiful town that bears the generic name of all those places where burdens were borne between waters. "Wauona," the Indians called it, more euphoniously, but with the same significance as "Portage"—in the State that has taken the name of the river that carried the burdens on to the Mississippi—Wisconsin. This town has lately crept modestly into our western literature as "Friendship Village." [Footnote: Zona Gale, "Friendship Village." Macmillan, New York, 1908.] Except that it has a more comely setting than most towns of the plains—even of those northern plains with their restful undulations—and has a brighter, cleaner aspect —since a light-colored brick is used instead of the red so much in favor where wood is forbidden by the fire laws—it is a typical western town— the next size larger than "Aramoni"; and so I must stop here for a moment where Marquette, son of Rose de la Salle of Rheims, and Joliet, the wagon maker of Quebec, came up out of the twisting little stream that is still one of the fountains of the Atlantic.

For none the less is this village, standing beside this fountain (again more euphoniously called the Kaka-ling or Kaukauna), itself touching the Atlantic shores and even mingling with currents that reach the European coasts. There was born in this village the historian [Footnote: Frederick Jackson Turner.] who has written so well of the rise of that western country that he has been called to the professorship of American history at Harvard University, a literal son of the portage, who has rediscovered the west to the world. And recently all the valley, and other valleys, too, have been reading the stories of this place of portage (called, as I have said, "Friendship Village"), written by a young woman whose windows look out from her home upon the Wisconsin River not many paces from Marquette's place of embarkation—a true daughter of the portage.

The French, who have given the new continent this portage path out of Europe into the very heart of America, should read with some gratification of the more intimate life that dwells there back of and in the midst of the bustling, tireless, noisy industry of the valley.

"The long Caledonian hills" [the same which La Salle describes], "the four rhythmic spans of the bridge"

The author of "Friendship Village" has vision of the more beautiful towns into which these towns will some day grow, as yours have grown more beautiful with age. "All the way," she writes, seeing the sunset from that same river of the portage as Marquette saw it, "I had been watching against the gold the jogging homeward of empty carts…. Such a procession I want to see painted upon a sovereign sky. I want to have painted a giant carpenter of the village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding a huge white pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus capital…. Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising values and fresco our village libraries with them." [Footnote: Zona Gale, "Friendship Village Love Stories," p. 47.] That appreciation and expression of the beautiful is something that the French explorers in that other world—the valley reached of the pioneers of the seeing eyes and the understanding hearts—have carried and will continue to carry over those same portages, to give that virile life of the west some of those higher satisfactions of which this daughter of the portage is the prophetess.

Another portage path of importance is that which Marquette may also have trodden, or may even have been carried over by his faithful attendants, Pierre Porteret and Jacques, on his death journey from the land of the Illinois to the mission of Michilimackinac, which he did not reach alive— a journey, the latter part of which was like that of King Arthur borne in a barge by his faithful knight, Sir Bedivere, to his last resting-place, the Vale of Avalon. This portage, varying in length with the season from three to five miles, was the St. Joseph-Kankakee Portage. La Salle, Tonty, and Hennepin passed over it in 1679 on a less spiritual errand to the same land whose inhabitants Marquette had tried to instruct in the mystery of the faith. And it was well worn by adventurous and pious feet in the century that followed.

What traffic in temporal and spiritual things was here carried over, is intimated by relics of that century found in the fields not far away, where for many years a French mission house stood with enough of a military garrison to invite for it the name "Fort St. Joseph." In the room of the Northern Indiana Historical Society at this portage there are to be seen some of these relics, sifted from the dirt and sand: crucifixes, knives, awls, beads—which I am told are clearly the loot of ancient Roman cities, traded to the Indians for hides—iron rings, nails, and hinges- these with flint arrow-heads and axes, relics of the first munitions of the stone and iron ages out on the edges of civilization.

This portage path between the rivers is now obliterated by railroads, paved streets, furrows, graves, factories, and dwellings; but down by the St. Joseph River there stands a withered cedar, perhaps several hundred years old, which bears scars that are believed to be the blaze marks of the broad-bladed axes of the French explorers—made to indicate the place where the portage out of the river began, the place which La Salle missed when lost in the forest but afterward found, where Father Gabriel made several crosses, as Hennepin records, on the trees—perhaps these very marks-and where La Salle left letters for the guidance over the prairie of those "who were to come in the vessel"—thinking of the captain of the Griffin who was ordered to follow him to the Illinois on his return.

It is only a little more than a league from this landing at the bend of the river (which has given the name "South Bend" to the town) across the "large prairie" to the wet meadows in whose ooze the tortuous Kankakee River became navigable, in La Salle's day, a hundred paces from its source, and increased so rapidly in volume that, as he says in a letter, "in a short time it becomes as broad and deep as the Marne"—the Marne which he knew in his boyhood and for which any but his iron heart must have longed.

Charlevoix walked across those unchanged fields of St. Joseph a half century (1674-1720) after La Salle, and Parkman made the same journey nearly a century after Charlevoix, finding there what he called "a dirty little town." To-day a clean, industrious, eager city of over fifty-three thousand, with a world horizon, as well as a provincial pride, throws its shadow in the early morning across the path. Through its outskirts I tried years ago to trace this portage path and there with my companion (who was always the "Tonty" of my voyages on those western streams), put my boat in the river and paddled and poled the seventy-five miles down the St. Joseph River to the lake, where, as I wanted to believe, Marquette had made his last journey. Hearing, some time after, of the blaze marks on the cedar- tree, I went again to the portage, and from this old red cedar-tree again traced the probable course of the French to the fields of corn, or maize, yellow in the autumn sun that hid the fountains of the Kankakee. This time, having but little leisure, I rode in an automobile from one end to the other through and along the path, looking occasionally toward the sky for air-ships that were due to alight there on their way from Chicago to New York.

In La Salle's packs, carried over that portage, were blacksmith's tools— forge, bellows, anvil, iron for nails—and carpenter's and joiner's tools. One might easily believe that they were left there—such have been the products of that portage strip, two or three miles wide.

First, there has grown there the largest wagon factory in the world. The path of the pack and the burden has here produced as its peculiar contribution to civilization that which is to carry burdens, instead of the backs of men, the world round.

Second, here stands the world's largest plough factory—a place from which ploughs are sent to every arable valley that civilization has conquered and made to feel its hunger.

Third, here spreading its acres, or arpents, of buildings across the high ground between the two rivers, is the largest factory in the world for the making of certain parts of the sewing-machine; in every community of any size in the world it has an agency.

And here, last of all, besides more than a hundred minor industries, is what is, to my great surprise, said to be the largest toy factory in the world.