The French in the Heart of America

by John H. Finley

Nor is there any other trace, so far as I could learn, anywhere down the winding stream till one reaches New Orleans. The red sun-worshippers in their white garments—familiar of old to the French—even they have followed their divinity toward its setting, and only among those with African shadows in their faces do they still sing, as I have heard, of the "brave days of D'Artaguette." The monuments do not remember beyond the bravery and carnage of the Civil War, or at farthest beyond the War of 1812. I was myself apprehended for a foreign spy one day while I was searching too near to the guns of a present fort for more ancient monuments.

The great river and some of its tributaries have a commerce, but it is of an inanimate and unappealing kind. They no longer draw the throngs daily to the wharfs as in the days of the glory of the steamboat. Everybody is in too much of a hurry to travel by water.

An old Mississippi River steamboat captain [Footnote: George B. Merrick, "Old Times on the Upper Mississippi," Cleveland, A. H. Clark Co., 1909.] has written a reminiscent book, in which he tells with sorrow of the departed majesty and glory of the river, the glamour remaining only in the memories of those who knew the river sixty years or more ago. He laments the passing of that mighty fleet, destroyed by the very civilization that built it—a civilization which cut down the impounding forests and so removed the great natural dams which must in time be replaced by artificial ones if the rivers are ever to run full again in the dry seasons and not overflow in the wet. It is that day of the Mississippi that is best known in our literature. Mark Twain has put forever on the map of letters (where the Euphrates, the Nile, the Ilyssus, the Tiber, the Seine, the Thames long have been) the Mississippi, the river which the French first traced upon the maps of geography. So we are especially indebted to the French for Mark Twain, who began his career as a "cub" pilot on the river which in turn gave him the name by which the world is ever to know him.

It was he who once wrote of this river: "The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with every reperusal." [Footnote: "Life on the Mississippi," pp. 82-83.]

When I was entering the English Channel on my way to Havre, the captain showed me what varied courses must be taken at different hours and different days to gain full advantage of tide and current and yet avoid all danger. But, as this Mississippi River pilot has observed, it is now a comparatively easy undertaking to learn to run these buoyed and lighted ship channels; it was then quite another matter to pilot a steamboat in the Mississippi or Missouri, "whose alluvial banks cave and change constantly, whose snags are always hunting up new quarters, whose sand- bars are never at rest, whose channels are forever dodging and shirking, and whose obstructions" had fifty years ago to be "confronted in all nights and all weathers without the aid of a single lighthouse or a single buoy." [Footnote: "Life on the Mississippi," p. 86.] And yet that man, who came to know, in age, the courses of human emotions the world over, could, as a young man, shut his eyes and trace the river from St. Louis to New Orleans, and read its face as one "would cull the news from a morning paper."

It was for years a wish of mine that when Mark Twain should come to die, he should lie not in an ordinary sepulchre of earth but in the river which he knew so well and loved, and of whose golden days he sang. I wished that the river might be turned aside from its wonted channel, as the River Busentinus for the interment of Alaric, and then, after his burial there, be let back into it again, that he might ever hear the sonorous voice of its waters above him, and, perhaps, now and then the call of the leadsman overhead, crying the depth beneath, as he himself in the pilot-house used once to hear the call "Mark Twain" from the darkness below. So it was a disappointment to me that when the world followed him to his grave it was to a little patch of earth outside the valley, beyond the reach of even the farthest tributary of the Mississippi.

The great river has been the course of one empire and the scene of many. Spain, France, England, and the United States have each claimed its mastery, as we have seen or shall see. The Germans once dreamed of a state on its banks, but could not agree as to the locality (Minnesota or Texas), so variedly tempting was the fertility of its upper and its lower waters. The sons of the Norsemen are now tilling the land around its sources. Indeed, it has now upon its banks and within the reach of its myriad streams a babel of earth's races, although the river has not, as the River of the Lotus Flower, conformed them to one uniform type.

We are beginning now to realize more keenly that the river has yet to be conquered. It has yielded complete sovereignty to no people. It has made light of the emblems of empire. It has even ignored the white, channel- marking signals of the government that now exercises lordship over all the land it drains. Its untamed spirit flaunts continual challenge in the face of all men. It has had in derision the building of cities and towns. One town, for example, has been left to choose between being left high and dry five miles from water, or of meeting the fate of old Kaskaskia. And though the town has already thrown a million dollars to the river, as if to some unappeased god, the river is merciless. One town and another have been ostracized or destroyed, their wharfs left far inland or carried away to some commerceless bayou. The sentiment I have regarding the river makes it difficult to excuse its infidelity toward one little French town in particular, St. Genevieve. I can do so only by assuming that the river has cared less for its later inhabitants than it did for those who gave it name. It has laughed at the embankments on which hundreds of millions have been spent by nation, state, and private enterprise to keep its flood in restraint. Shorn of its trees, as Samson of his long hair, it has pulled down the pillars of man's raising into its own destroying waters. In 1912 a space nearly two and a half times the size of the State of New Jersey was devastated. [Footnote: Seventeen thousand six hundred and five square miles.] In 1913 the loss in a single year was one hundred and sixty million dollars. [Footnote: One hundred and sixty-three million, U. S. Weather Bureau estimate.] In the last thirty years it is estimated the loss has been a half of a billion, and it would have been immensely greater, of course, if the river had not been given unchallenged freedom of great, unclaimed swamps. And yet the river has never at any one time massed its great army of waters. At one time it has been the Ohio, at another the Missouri, and then the Red that it has sent against the fortifications. If all these streams were to be brought in flood at once the lower valley would be swept clean.

So it is no martial simile that I am using. It is a real battle that is continuously on. The gaunt sharp-shooter, pacing the embankment with Winchester in hand to shoot any burrowing confederate of the river, a rat, or mole, is a real and not an imaginary figure. And the battles that have been fought along its course are as play by the side of those yet to be waged before it is subdued by man.

It is fitly the War Department of the government that has been watching its every movement, that has set the signals on its fitful tide, and that has recorded its every shift for years as if it were an animate enemy. Its changing area, velocity, discharge—items of infinite permutations—are all noted and analyzed. But the war department of the government is still almost as powerless to control the river as the Yazoo farmer who watches its changing moods, not by instruments but by the movement of an eddy in his own hidden bayou. The battle is with floods, shallows, and erosion, but it is essentially a battle with floods, for not until their strongholds are taken, controlled, is the complete conquest assured. It was control of the mouth of the river that seemed so important in early days. The effort to obtain that led ultimately to the purchase of Louisiana (that is, the west bank of the river) from the French by the United States. It was the confirmation of that security of navigation which gave the battle of New Orleans its high significance. Then the mouth (thus obtained) was found too shallow for the demands of commerce, and there followed what some one with poetic instincts has called the battle of the shoals, a battle in which General Eads, who had bridged the river at St. Louis, compelled the river by means of jetties to run deeper and carry heavier burdens.