Third, here spreading its acres, or arpents, of buildings across the high ground between the two rivers, is the largest factory in the world for the making of certain parts of the sewing-machine; in every community of any size in the world it has an agency.
And here, last of all, besides more than a hundred minor industries, is what is, to my great surprise, said to be the largest toy factory in the world.
The gift of wagons for the bearing and easing of men's burdens; the gift of the steel plough that has lifted man from the primitive subsistence of the hoe; the gift of the shuttle which has released woman from the tyranny of the needle; the gift of toys to the children of all races; has not this portage prairie, this meadow of St. Joseph, had some element mixed with its loam and clay from the spirit of those Gallic precursors of American energy, something that has given this industry a wider venture, if not peculiar expression? At any rate, its gifts to its time have been far beyond common, of the tangible at least; and as to the intangible, the day that I last spent on this portage an art league was being formed to foster an interest in art and bring the best examples available to what were, but a little time ago, dreary meadows half covered with snow and strewn with skulls and bones of the buffalo. The most modern schools are being developed and maintained by the public, and the University of Notre Dame and the College of St. Mary look across the river to this portage field and city.
One might have passed this portage so difficult to discern, as La Salle did, and yet have found another way to the lower Mississippi, with a short portage from this same stream to the Wabash River. A still shorter way than any of these, and doubtless known to La Salle from his first years of wanderings in the eastern end of the Mississippi Valley, led from the west end of Lake Erie up the Maumee and then by portage to the Wabash and the Ohio. This was the path that Celoron followed homeward on his memorable plate-planting journey. But the portage was so long that he burned his shattered canoes near the source of the Miami and was furnished with boats at the French fort near the headwaters of the Maumee. The hostility of the Iroquois, as we have seen, made perilous to the French in the earlier days this path, so important among Indian highways as often to be called the "Indian Appian Way."
Excepting the portage paths farther up the valley, notably that of St. Esprit, and important chiefly as fur-trading paths, there remains but one other historic portage path across the ridge of stone and swamp and prairie from which are pendent, on the one side, all the silver streams of the Mississippi Valley and, on the other side, all the Great Lakes and all the rivers that flow into them.
This remaining path is the tenuous trail through the fields of wild onions that led from the river or creek called Chicago (the Garlic River—Rivière de l'Ail) into a stream that still bears a French name but of a pronunciation which a Parisian would not accept—the Des Plaines. This path, too, traversed a marsh and flat prairie so level that in freshet the water ran both ways and was once in the bed of a river that ran from the lake to the gulf. But it has been hallowed beyond all others of these trails, for it was beside this portage that Marquette suffered through a winter, detained there by a serious sickness when on his way to minister to the Illinois Indians a hundred miles below. His hut was the first European habitation upon its site—the site of the future city of Chicago.
In a book-shop not a league from where that hut stood I found a volume valued at its weight in gold [Footnote: Thevenot, "Recueil de Voyages," with 2 folding maps and 14 plates, complete. Crown 8vo, white pigskin. Paris 1682. Contains Marquette's and Joliet's Discoveries in North America, etc. For an account of the various editions, see "Jesuit Relations," 59:294-9.] giving the account of the journey in which Marquette had passed up this portage on the way to Green Bay after the discovery of the upper Mississippi with Joliet. It tells in its closing paragraphs of the rich prairies just beyond this portage, but it recites with greater satisfaction the baptizing of a dying child brought to the side of his canoe as he was setting out for the mission house. "Had all this voyage," he said, "caused but the salvation of a single soul I should deem all my fatigue well repaid, and this I have reason to think. For, when I was returning, I passed by the Indians of Peoria, where I was three days announcing the faith, in all their cabins, after which, as we were embarking, they brought me on the water's edge a dying child which I baptized a little before it expired, by an admirable providence, for the salvation of an innocent soul." [Footnote: Shea, "Discovery and Exploration of the Mississippi Valley," 2d ed., p. 55.]
That was in 1673. It was more than a year before he again entered the Chicago River, wishing to keep his promise to minister to the Illinois savages and eager "to do and suffer everything for so glorious an undertaking." In the "Jesuit Relations" [Footnote: 59:165-183.] the story of those winter days at the Chicago portage has been kept for all time. All through January his illness obliged him to stay in the portage cabin, but early in February he "commenced Novena (Neufuaine) with a mass, at which Pierre and Jacques [his companions], who do everything they can to relieve me, received communion—to ask God to restore my health." His ailment left him, but weakness and the cold and the ice in the rivers kept him still at the portage until April. On the eve of his leaving for the Illinois the journal ends with this thoughtful word of the French: "If the French procure robes in this country, they do not disrobe the savages, so great are the hardships that must be endured to obtain them." [Footnote: "Jesuit Relations" (Thwaites), 59:183.]
In the dusk of an autumn day I went out to find the place where the Novena had worked the miracle of his healing. As I have already intimated, few of all the hundreds of thousands there in that great city have had any consciousness of the background of French heroism and suffering and prevision in front of which they were passing daily, but I found that the policemen and the watchmen on the railroad near the river knew at least of the great black cross which stands by that drab and sluggish water, placed there in memory of Marquette and Joliet. The bit of high ground where the hut stood is now surrounded by great looming sheds and factories, which were entirely tenantless when I found my way through a long unlighted and unpaved street in the direction of the river. The cross stood, in a little patch of white, black as the father's cowl, against the night with its crescent moon. I could not make out the inscription on the river side of the monument and, seeing a signal-lantern tied to a scow moored to the bank near by, I untied it and by its light was able to read the tribute of the city to the memory of the priest and the explorer "who first of known white men had passed that way," having travelled, as it recites, "two thousand five hundred miles in canoes in one hundred and twenty days." The bronze plate bears a special tribute to the foresight of Joliet, but it commemorates first of all the dwelling of the frail body and valorous soul of Father Marquette, the first European within the bounds of the city of Chicago. I wish there might be written on Mississippi maps, in that space that is shown between the Chicago and the Des Plaines, or the "Divine River," as it was sometimes called, the words: "Portage St. Jacques." That were a fitter canonization than to put his name among the names of cities, steamboats on the lake, or tobaccos, as is our custom in America. The crescent moon dropped behind the shadows that now line the portage "like a sombre forest," but it is only a few steps through the darkness back into the light and noise of the city of more than two million people.
Out of the black loam of this dark portage path fringed by marshes, in the field of wild onions, the newest of the world's great cities has sprung and spread with a promise that exceeds any other on the face of the planet, though within the life of men still living it was but a stretch of lake shore, a marshy plain with a path from its miniature river or creek toward the crescent moon.