The French in the Heart of America

by John H. Finley

And there were not even birds to give cheer to the gloom of these black forests, whose tree tops were knitted together by vines, but had no undergrowth, since the sun could not reach the ground. "The birds of the forest came only with the white man." There were parrots in Kentucky, and there were in Ohio pigeons and birds of prey, eagles and buzzards, but the birds we know to-day and the bees were later immigrants from lands that remembered Aristophanes or the hills of Hymettus, or that knew Shelley's skylark or Keats's nightingale or Rostand's tamer fowls or Maeterlinck's bees.

Even if we allow to the forests Chateaubriand's color in summer and the clamor in times of terror—color and clamor which only a keen eye and ear would have seen and heard—we cannot longer think of them as pathless, if inhabited by those ancient pathmakers, the buffalo, deer, sheep. And, naturally, when the Indian came, dependent as he was upon wild game, he followed these paths or traces made and frequented by the beasts—the ways to food, to water, to salt, to other habitats with the changing seasons. The buffalo roads and the deer trails became his vocational trails—the streets of his livelihood. And as his enemy was likely to find him by following these traces, they became not only the paths of peace but the paths of war. When the red man trespassed upon the peaceful trails of his enemy, he was, in an American idiom, "on the war-path."

Then in time the European trader went in friendly search of the Indian by these same paths, and they became the avenues of petty commerce. As street venders in Paris, so these forest traders or runners went up and down these sheltered paths, as dark in summer as the narrowest streets, only they went silently, though they were often heard as distinctly in the breaking of twigs or in their muffled tread by the alert ears of the Indians as the musical voices of these venders are heard in the city. And the places where these traders put down their cheap trinkets before their dusky patrons grew into trading-posts, prophetic of future cities and towns.

Such were the paths by which the runners of the woods, the French coureurs de bois, first emerged—after following the watercourses—upon the western forest glades and the edges of the prairies and astonished the aboriginal human owners of those wild highways that had known only the soft feet of the wolf and fox and bear, the hoofs of the buffalo and deer, and the bare feet or the moccasins of the Indians (the "silent shoes," as I have seen such footgear advertised in Boulevard St. Germain).

It has been said by a chemist of some repute that man came, in his evolution, out of the sea; that he has in his veins certain elements— potassium, calcium, magnesium, sodium—in the same ratio in which they appeared in the water of the Pre-Cambrian ocean. Whether this be true or not, one stage of human development carries marks of the forest, and from that period "having nothing but forest knowledge, forest dreams, forest fancies, forest faith," as an American writer has said, man emerges upon the plains of history.

So, though the French civilization still smells and sounds of the sea, and followed the streams that kept its first men in touch with it, it had finally, in its pioneering, to take to the trails and the forests. And these runners of the woods were the amphibious ambassadors from this kingdom of the sea to the kingdom of the land. They were, as Étienne Brûlé of Champlain's time, the pioneers of pioneers who, often in unrecorded advance of priest and explorer, pushed their adventurous traffic in French guns and hatchets, French beads and cloth, French tobacco and brandy, till they knew and were known to the aboriginal habitants, "from where the stunted Esquimaux burrowed in their snow caves to where the Comanches scoured the plains of the south with their banditti cavalry."

They were a lawless lot whom this mission, not only between water and land but also between civilization and barbarism, "spoiled for civilization." But they must not be judged too harshly in their vibrations between the two standards of life which they bridged, making periodical confession to charitable priests in one, of the sins committed in the other, which, unforgiven, might have driven them entirely away from the church and into perdition.

The names of most of these coureurs de bois are forgotten by history (which is rather particular about the character of those whom it remembers—other than those in kingly or other high places). But they who have followed immediately in the trails of these men of the verges have written these names, or some of them, in places where they are more widely read than if cherished by history even. Étienne Brûlé—who, as interpreter, led Le Caron out upon the first western mission—after following trails and waters for hundreds of miles back of the English settlements, where the timid colonists had not dared to venture, suffered the martyrdom of fire, and is remembered in a tempestuous stream in the west and perhaps in an Indian tribe. The name of Jean Nicolet of Cherbourg (the ambassador to the Winnebagoes, from the record of whose picturesque advent in the "Jesuit Relations" the annals of the west really began) has been given to a path now grown into one of the most populous streets along the whole course of the Mississippi River—in Minneapolis. And Du Lhut, the cousin of Tonty, a native of Lyons—a man of "persistent hardihood, not surpassed perhaps even by La Salle," says Parkman, "continually in the forest, in the Indian towns, or in the remote wilderness outposts planted by himself, exploring, trading, fighting, ruling lawless savages, and whites scarcely less ungovernable," [Footnote: Parkman, "La Salle," p. 274] and crossing the ocean for interviews with the colonial minister, "amid the splendid vanities of Versailles"—he is remembered for all time in that city, built up against the far shores of Lake Superior, bearing his name, Duluth, the city that has taken the place of London in the list of the world's great harbors. Macaulay's vision of the New Zealander standing amid the ruins of London and overlooking the mastless Thames seems to have some realization in the succeeding of a city, founded in the path of a wood runner, out on the borders of civilization, to one of London's distinctions among the cities of the world.

"This class of men is not extinct," said Parkman twenty or thirty years ago; "in the cheerless wilds beyond the northern lakes, or among the solitudes of the distant west they may still be found, unchanged in life and character since the day when Louis the Great claimed sovereignty over the desert empire."

But their mission, if any survive till now, is past. The paths, surveyed of the beasts and opened by these pioneers to the feet of priests, explorers, and traders, have let in the influences that in time destroyed all these forest lovers braved the solitude for. The trace has become the railroad, and the smell of the gasolene motor is even on the once wild Oregon trail; for, in general, it has been said of the forest part of the valley, "where there is a railway to-day there was a path a century and a quarter ago" (and that means longer ago); and it may be added that where there was a French trading-post, or fort, or portage, there is a city to- day, not because of the attraction of the populations of those places for the prospecting railroad, but because of their natural highway advantage, learned even by the buffaloes. Not all paths have evolved into railroads, but the railroads have followed practically all of these natural paths— paths of the coureurs de bois, instinctively searching for mountain passes, the low portages from valley to valley, the shortest ways and the easiest grades.