How little the life of those settlements was disturbed is intimated by what occurred in one of the Illinois villages—that about Fort Chartres. The venerable and beloved commander, Louis St. Ange de Belle Rive, had upon the first formal surrender ascended the Mississippi River and crossed to the Spanish territory, where the foundations of the city of St. Louis were being laid, but the British officer in command at Fort Chartres dying suddenly, and there being no one competent to succeed him, St. Ange returned to his old post, restored order, and remained there until another British officer could reach the fort. The habitants were accustomed "to obey, without question, the orders of their superiors…. (They) yielded a passive obedience to the new rulers…. They remained the owners, the tillers of the soil." [Footnote: Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," 1:38, Alleghany edition.] And one of the last acts of the Continental Congress and the first of the new Congress, under the Constitution, was to provide for an enumeration of these French settlers and for the allotment to them of lands in this valley where they had been the sole owners.
Many of the French habitants were not of pure blood. The French seldom took women with them into the wilderness. They were traders, trappers, and soldiers. They married Indian wives, untrammelled, as President Roosevelt says, "by the queer pride which makes a man of English stock unwilling to make a red-skinned woman his wife, though anxious enough to make her his concubine." [Footnote: Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," 1:41.]
They were under ordinary circumstances good-humored, kindly men, "always polite" [Footnote: "Winning of the West," 1:45.]—in "agreeable contrast" to most frontiersmen—religious, yet fond of merrymaking, of music and dancing; and while, as time went on, they came to borrow traits of their red neighbors and even to forget the years and months (reckoning time, as the Indians did, from the flood of the river or the ripening of strawberries), still they kept many valuable and amiable qualities, to be merged eventually in the new life that soon swept over their beautiful little villages. Of the coming of a strange, new, strenuous life, a stray English or American fur trader gave them occasional presentment, as it were, the spray of the swelling, restless sea of human spirits, beating against the mountain barriers and flung far inland.
In the early part of the eighteenth century an English governor of the colony of Virginia, Alexander Spotswood, had led a band of horsemen known afterward as his "Knights of the Golden Horseshoe," with great hilarity, "stimulated by abundance of wine, champagne, rum," and other liquors, over the Blue Ridge Mountains, a part of the Alleghany Range, to the Shenandoah. He had talked menacingly of the French who held the valley beyond, had encouraged the extension of English settlements to break the line of French possessions, and had formed a short-lived Virginia-Indian company to protect the frontier against French and Indian incursions. This expedition was a visible challenge. With his merry company he buried a record of his "farthest west" journey in one of the bottles emptied en route and then went back to tidewater. That was the end of his adventure; little or nothing came of his "flourish" except the extension of the Virginia frontier to the Blue Ridge Mountains. Only traders and trappers ventured farther or even so far during the next three or four decades, and they were a "set of abandoned wretches," or so a later governor characterized them, though Parkman mentions some exceptions, and I wish to believe there were more, since one of them, I find, carried my own name far into that country on his trading and hunting expeditions among and with the Indians.
Searching, a few years ago, the files of a paper published early in the nineteenth century on the edge of this wilderness, which was already calling itself the Western World—a paper, one of the first of the myriad white leaves into which the falling forests have been converted and scattered thick enough to cover every square foot of the valley—I happened upon this record, surprised as if a bit of the transmontane sea spray had touched my own face on the Mississippi: "That delightful country" (Kentucky), it ran, "from time immemorial had been the resort of wild beasts and of men only less savage, when in the year 1767 it was visited by John Finley and a few wandering white men from the British colony of North Carolina, allured by the love of hunting and the desire of barter with the Indians. The distance of this country from populous parts of the colonies, almost continuous wars, and the claims of the French had prevented all attempts at exploration."
I seize upon this partly because, having succeeded to the name of this hunter and trader, who entered the valley just as St. Ange was yielding Fort Chartres to the English and crossing the Mississippi, I am able to show that my own ancestral sympathies while dwelling on the frontiers were not with the French. But I quote it chiefly because he was a typical forerunner, a first frontiersman.
Like the coureur de bois Nicolas Perrot, of exactly a century before, he was only the dawn of the light—the light of another day, which was beginning to appear in the valley. For it was he who led Daniel Boone to the first exploring and settling of that wilderness south of the Ohio, which, to quote further from the paper called the Western World, [Footnote Western World, published at Frankfort, Ky., 1806-8, by John Wood and Joseph M. Street.] had a soil "more fat and fertile than Egypt"— and was the place where "Pan, if he ever existed, held dominion unmolested of Ceres or Lucinia."
Such was the almost soundless beginning of what soon developed into a mighty "processional," its rumblings of wagons and shoutings of drivers on land and blowing of conches on the rivers increasing, accompanied by the sound of rushing waters, the cry of frightened birds, and the thunders of crashing trees. First came this silent hunter and fur trader, almost as stealthy as the Indian in his movements; then the pale, gaunt, slow- moving, half hunter, half farmer, too indolent to disturb the wilderness from which he got a meagre living, planting his meagre crops among the girdled trees of withered foliage, which he did not take the trouble to cut down; then the backwoodsman, sallow as his immediate predecessor from the shade of the forest, who with his axe made a little clearing, built a "shack," turned his cattle into the grass that had grown for centuries untouched, and let his pigs feed on the acorns; then the more robust agriculturist who aggressively pushed back the shadows of the forest, planted the wilderness with seeds of a magic learned in the valleys of Europe and Asia, put up the fences of individualistic struggle, and built his log cabin, the wilderness castle, the birthplace of the new American; then the speculator and promoter (the hunter and explorer of the urban occupation); and finally in their wake the builders of mills and factories and cities—drab, smoky, vainglorious, ill-smelling, bad-architectured centres of economic activity, fringed with unoccupied, unimproved, naked areas, plotted and held for increment, earned only by risk and privation.
This processional, "this gradual and continuous progress of the European race toward the Rocky Mountains," says the vivid pen of De Tocqueville, "has the solemnity of a providential event. It is like a deluge of men, rising unabatedly and driven daily onward by the hand of God." [Footnote: "Democracy in America," ed. Gilman, 1:512.]
The story of this anabasis has been told in hundreds and thousands of fragments—the anabasis that has had no katabasis—the literal going up of a people, as we shall see, from primitive husbandry and handicraft and a neighborly individualism, to another level, of machine labor, of more comfortable living, and of socialized aspiration.