The French in the Heart of America

by John H. Finley

They have deepened the straits where the Griffin had to wait for favorable breezes and soundings to pass from Erie to Huron—the Symplegades (clashing rocks) of the new-world voyage.

They have made canals on either side of the Sault Ste. Marie—the rapids of the St. Mary's River, by the side of which St. Lusson took formal possession of all that northern empire and Father Allouez made his extraordinary address—canals through which sixty-two million tons passed in 1910 toward the east and south.

They have made and deepened harbors all the way around the shores till ships two hundred times the size of the Griffin can ride in them.

Yet this is not all. The symbols of La Salle's vision revived in the lakes memories of the days when their waters ran through the Mississippi Valley to the gulf—the very course which La Salle's unborn Griffin was to take.

When the continent tilted a little to the east and in the tilting poured the water of the upper lakes over the Niagara edge into the St. Lawrence, that same tilting stopped the overflow down into the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico at the other end of the lakes. But so slight was the tilting that the water still sweeps over, in places, when the lakes are high, and sometimes even carries light boats across.

Of late engineers have, in effect, been undoing with levels and scoops and dredges what nature did in a mighty upheaval. They are practically tipping the bowls back the other way and so making currents to run down the old channel toward the gulf through the valleys of the Des Plaines and the Illinois to the Mississippi.

And so that dream which the dying Griffin spoke to the lake, and the lake to the rivers in the time of flood—when intercommunication was possible—is to be realized, except that steam or electricity will take the place of winds, and screws of sails. [Footnote: Herbert Quick, "American Inland Waterways," New York, 1909.]

Meanwhile a great battle of the lakes is waging—a battle of levels, it might better be called, between those, on the one side, who wish to maintain the grandeur of Niagara much as it was when Hennepin first pictured it, and with them those who for utilitarian reasons do not wish its thunderous volume diminished, except, perhaps, for their local uses, and those also who fear disaster to their harbors and canals all around the lakes, deepened at great expense, if water is led away toward the Mississippi; and, on the other side, the public health of millions at the western end of the lakes and the commercial hopes of other millions in the Mississippi Valley waiting for the Griffins of the lakes to come with more generous prices for their produce and bring to their doors what the rest of the world has now to send to them by the more expensive railroad.

Some day, perhaps, the great upper lake, Superior, will be made a reservoir where enough water will be impounded in wet seasons for a steady and more generous supply during the dry seasons; in which event there will be water enough to keep Niagara in perennial beauty and power, to fill all the present and prospective harbors and canals to their desired depths and float even larger fleets of Griffins, and, at the same time, have enough left to make the Mississippi, as the Frenchman who first saw it visualized it, and as President Roosevelt, two centuries later, expressed it, "a loop of the sea." [Footnote: Herbert Quick, "American Inland Waterways," New York, 1909.]

But another amicable battle is on—a battle of the eastern levels—between the men of the old French valley to the north (i.e., the St. Lawrence) and the men of the old Iroquois valleys to the south, of the Mohawk and the Hudson. In 1830 a canal was built by the latter from above the Falls to the navigable Hudson, and with high ceremony a cask of the water of Lake Erie was emptied into New York harbor as symbol of the wedding of lake and ocean. Then Canada built her Welland Canal around Niagara and made canals along the St. Lawrence and channels in the St. Lawrence past the Lachine Rapids to Montreal, and even made the way from there to the sea deeper that the growing ocean vessels might come to old Hochelaga. Now New York has begun deepening the old and almost useless Erie Canal from seven and nine feet to twelve feet, and to take barges one hundred and fifty feet long and twenty-five feet beam, with a draught of ten feet, and Canada is contemplating still deeper channels that will let the ocean steamers into every port of the Great Lakes. She is even thinking of a canal that will follow the path of Champlain, up the Ottawa and across the old portage to Lake Nipissing and thence by the French River into Lake Huron; and of an alternative course by another of Champlain's paths, from Ontario across to Huron by way of Lake Simcoe and the Trent River, in either route avoiding Niagara altogether, paths that would shorten the water distance by hundreds of miles and bring Europe almost as near to the shores where Le Caron ministered to the Hurons as to New York City.