The French in the Heart of America

by John H. Finley

We cannot be quite sure, when we listen to some recent critics, that Châteaubriand ever saw this great valley. Certainly we who have grown up in it have never found his reindeer and moose about our homes (save in our Christmas-time imaginations). Paroquets that in the woods repeated the words learned of settlers are not of the fauna known to reputable Ohio naturalists, nor have two-headed snakes been found except in the vision of those who see double in their intoxication. The tamarind and the terebinth are not of its forest-trees. But whether or not Châteaubriand visited it in person, his imagination had frequent residence upon the Mississippi and its tributaries. His "Atala" put into French literature a country where many have loved to dwell, though its fauna and flora were not more accurate in some respects than the mineralogy and meteorology of the John Law scheme, known later as the "Mississippi Bubble," that made France wild with excitement once. However, I have recalled the fervid pen of Châteaubriand, not as that of a faunal or floral naturalist, but to have it rewrite these sentences: "Nothing is more surprising and magnificent than this movement and this distribution of the central waters of North America" (whence flows the Mississippi), "a river which the French first descended; a river which flowed under their power, and the rich valley of which," as the translator has rendered it, "still regrets their genius," but, as Châteaubriand doubtless meant it, and as it is better translated, "still grieves for their spirit," their "familiar" ("et dont la riche vallée regrette encore leur génie"). [Footnote: "Travels in America and Italy," 1:72, 73, London, 1828.]

I think that Châteaubriand had accurate instinct in divining the river's grieving for the spirit that (with all the practical genius which now inhabits the valley) is still needed to give an appreciation of that in the valley which lies beyond the counting of statistics or even the glowing rhetoric of the orators of liberty.

Hamlin Garland, reared in that valley, and first known in American letters as the author of remarkable stories of life on a Western farm, "Main Travelled Roads," has recently given expression to this grieving (though he says no word of the French) in an essay on "The Silent Mississippi," published a few years ago. He speaks of the river's bold, blue-green bluffs "looking away into haze," of its golden bars of sand "jutting out into the burnished stream," of its thickets of yellow-green willows, of the splendid old trees and of its glades opening away to the hills (all making a magical way of beauty), only to use it as a background for the statement that "not one beautiful building" is to be seen on its banks "for a thousand miles." There are many towns, but "without a single distinctive building; everything is a flimsy jumble, out of key, meaningless, impertinent, evanescent, too, thanks to climate." "We took a wild land beautiful as a dream," he proceeds, "and we have made a refuse heap. The birds of the trees have disappeared, the water-fowl have gone, every edible creature has vanished. An era of hopeless, distinctive vulgarity is upon us."

I have travelled down the smaller waterways of the valley with like feeling, which, though it has led to no such comprehensive generalization, yet gave me a distinct consciousness of their "grieving," if not for the French, at any rate for the silences that preceded the French, and for their own riparian architecture. The busy towns along the streams I have known have turned their faces from these streams toward the railroads. They have left the riverside to the thriftless men and the truant boys. Stables and outhouses look upon their waters, and the sewers pollute them. And if on some especially eligible bluff better buildings do stand, their owners or builders show no appreciation of what the bluff or river cares for, but reproduce the lines of some pretentious edifice that has no relation, historic or otherwise, to it or to the site. The old mills, with their feet in the water, are almost the only sympathetic structures— especially so when they are in ruins.

I once followed the upper waters of the stream (the Ohio) along which Celoron, of whom I shall speak later, planted his emblems of French possession. He would doubtless care to claim that valley even to-day, though unsightly houses and sheds line it, and pipes and shafts of iron, hastily rigged up and left to rust when done with, run everywhere, and the scum of oil is on the water. The profit of the hour was all that was visible of motive or achievement in that smoky valley, though I know it is not safe to generalize, for miracles have been wrought in that very valley.

A change is coming in many of the towns and cities of both the lesser and the larger rivers. In the town that I knew best, thirty years ago only a few ventured upon the water, and they were the fishermen or rivermen who had not much to do with the community life; now the steam or gasolene launch is making these streams highways of pleasure, and so is bringing them within the daily life of thousands.

Waiting for a boat in St. Louis one beautiful summer morning on the quay, where in Paris I should have found the book-stalls, I saw a Pullman train just starting for New York, and at the water's edge under the stately bridge one tramp "barbering" another. But, reading the morning paper, I found by chance that back in the city there was one man at least, a teacher and artist, who had the old-time French feeling for the grieving river. It was dark before I found him, after my day on a steamboat whose most important passenger, pointed out to me with some apparent pride by the old-time captain, was a brewer, author of a brew more famous in those parts than the artist's river pictures which I saw by candle-light that night in his schoolroom.

The artist had his river studio upon one of the beautiful cliffs which La Salle must have seen when he came out of the Illinois into the Mississippi. And it was within a few miles of that studio, it may be added, that I found, too, one noteworthy exception to Mr. Hamlin Garland's statement concerning riparian architecture.

These are hopeful intimations succeeding the fading of the last traces in that region of the old French days, traces which I found a few hours' journey below St. Louis, in the village of Prairie du Rocher (locally pronounced Prary de Roosh); for Cahokia, where I stopped first, had no mark of the French regime except the "congregation," which was, as the priest told me, two hundred years old. The village had no distinctiveness. But Prairie du Rocher had its own atmosphere and charm. French skies never produced a more glorious August sunset than I saw through the Corot trees of that village, which stands or reclines beneath the cliffs and looks off toward the river that has receded far to the westward. I tried to find the old French records of which I had heard, but there was a new priest who knew not the French; yet I did not need them to assure me that the French had been there. At dawn, after such a peaceful night as one might have in upper Carcasonne, I found my way to the river near which are the ruins of Fort Chartres—all that is left of the greatest French fortress in the Mississippi Valley, the last to yield to man and the last to surrender to nature. The town, Nouvelle Chartres, with all its color and gayety, has become a corn field, and only the magazine of the fort remains, hidden, a gunshot from the river, among the weeds, bushes, vines, and trees.

Fourteen miles below is the site of the oldest French village in the upper valley. But the river was jealous and took it all, foundation and roof, to itself. The charms of old Kaskaskia, the sometime capital of all that region, are "one with Nineveh and Tyre." Not a vestige is left of its first days and only a broken structure or two of its later glory.