The French in the Heart of America

by John H. Finley

But the future battle-fields are perceived to lie toward the sources, at the eaves, as it were, of the watersheds, the headwaters of its tributaries as well as its own. No deepening, embanking, straightening, canalization of the river is to be permanently effective until all danger of flood can be removed.

Wandering among those tributaries, seeing the trickling fountains of several of them, watching the timid stream in the naked, deforested fields (not knowing quite which way to go, east or west, north or south), I have been strongly appealed to by the plan of impounding in reservoirs these first waters, whose freedom (no longer restrained in youth by the sage forests) makes them libertines and wantons in the distant valleys below.

Such impounding has successful inauguration in five small reservoirs now in operation on the headwaters of the Mississippi out of forty-two planned. An ambitious plan for controlling the turbulent Ohio by a system of from seventeen to forty-three reservoirs at an estimated cost of from twenty to thirty-four millions of dollars has been suggested by Mr. M. O. Leighton of the United States Geological Survey, and received indorsement from the Pittsburgh Flood Commission, the Dayton Flood Commission, and the National Waterways Commission. These would suffice to keep the lawless waters within temperate bounds in the spring and to give more generous navigable currents in the summer and autumn. Against the great expense of such a project is set the tremendous possibilities in the development of water-power. Of the theoretical sixty millions of horse-power in the current of the Mississippi, it is estimated that about six and a half millions can be economically developed throughout the year, while twelve millions could be developed during six months or more without storage reservoirs. An adequate system of reservoirs might double or treble these totals, while a million or two would be immediately available to begin the payment of the debt, and more of the strength would be harnessed to that purpose in time. So, it is urged, the river would be made to meet the expense of its own conquest. [Footnote: See reports of the National Conservation Commission in 1909; National Waterways Commission, 1912; Report Commissioner of Corporations on Water-Power Development in the United States, 1912; J. L. Mathews "Remaking the Mississippi," Boston, 1909.]

And once that is done the river may be straightened, shortened, deepened, leveed, and made a docile, reliable carrier of commerce. It may then be compelled to a respect for cities and government signals and wharfs and mills. And the astute suggestion of the practical Joliet for the canalization of its waters, may be realized in the safe passage not merely of boats but of stately, giant, ocean-sized vessels from the Great Lakes to the gulf.

A hundred years ago (1809) one Nicholas Roosevelt, commissioned of Robert Fulton (the inventor of the steamboat) and others, was sent to Pittsburgh to build the first steamboat to be launched in western waters. So confident was this young man of the success of steamboat navigation of the Ohio and Mississippi that, on his journey of inspection, he purchased coal-mines along the way and arranged to have the coal piled up on the river bank against the time of its need by boats whose keels had not been laid and whose existence even depended upon the approval of eastern capitalists. It suggests the prevision of the nephew, Theodore Roosevelt, in making provision for the coaling of ships in the east long before the Spanish War was in sight. I was on the Marquette-Joliet portage the very day that this same nephew was predicting with like confidence to the people of St. Louis that the Mississippi would be deepened till from the lakes to the gulf it should be a course for seagoing vessels. Champlain suggested the Panama Canal three hundred years before its building. Joliet, in 1673, suggested the lakes-to-the-gulf ship waterway, [Footnote: Margry, 1:268.] and by the three-hundredth anniversary, perhaps, it will be completed.

I made a journey in 1911 that began at the first settlements of the French in Nova Scotia, touched the Bay of Chaleur and the lower St. Lawrence, and then followed the French water paths all the way to the mouth of the Mississippi, where the master of pilots, a descendant of France, carried me out into the Gulf of Mexico. Starting back before dawn in a little boat, I saw, just as the sun was coming up over the swamps where the river begins to divide, the hulk of a great seagoing vessel against the morning sky. It seemed then a gloomy apparition; but as I think of it now it was rather the presage of the new commerce than the ghost of that which has departed.

That the Valley of a Hundred Thousand Streams—streams that together touch every community of any size from the Alleghanies to the Rockies—streams whose waters all find their way sooner or later into the Mississippi—will ever give up battle till the great water itself is conquered, no one who knows the determined people in that valley will ever question. The sixty million people will not be resisted permanently by the sixty million horses of the river, though the strength of the horses be driven by all the clouds that the gulf sends up the valley to its aid. Some day the great, free River Colbert will run vexed of impenetrable, unyielding walls to the sea. Its "titanic ambition for quiet flowing" down this beautiful, gently sloping valley to the gulf (which, as one has said, "has been its longing through ages") will have been turned to human ministry. The spirit of the great water will have become as patient, as thoughtless of its own wild comfort or ambitions as that of the priest who dedicated it to the honor of the mother of the most patient of men.

CHAPTER VI

THE PASSING OF NEW FRANCE AND THE DREAM OF ITS REVIVAL

The readers who have through these chapters been companions of Champlain, La Salle, Joliet, Marquette, and others in the discovery of the mighty rivers and the conquest of the mighty vastnesses of the new world will have, if they continue, yet before them even harder and more disheartening ventures, as La Salle himself had that April day in 1682, when he turned from the column which he had planted in sight of the Gulf of Mexico, four thousand miles from the Cape of Labrador, and began to drive his canoes up the river which he had traced forever, if too tortuously, on the maps of the earth.