The French in the Heart of America

by John H. Finley

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.