CHAPTER XIX
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.