The French in the Heart of America

by John H. Finley

Standing on the summit of one of the White Mountains a few summers ago, I was shown a dim little indentation of the sky at the northwest which I was told was Mont Real. And since seeing that I have imagined Jacques Cartier in 1535 looking off to the southeast, when his disappointed vision of the west had tired his eyes, and catching first sight of these dim indentations of his sky, the White Mountains, which the colonists from England did not see until a century later and then only from their ocean side.

But whether the master pilot from the white-bastioned St. Malo saw them or not, we have record that Champlain in his exploration of the Atlantic coast did discern their peaks upon his horizon; and so we may think of the French as the discoverers not merely of the northern and western valleys, of the Adirondacks, in whose shadows Champlain and Brule and Father Jogues fought with the Iroquois and suffered torture, and of the snow-capped Rockies at whose feet Chevalier de la Vérendrye was obliged to turn back, but also of the tops of the white hills near the Atlantic coast, which I have often seen lighted at sunrise while the lower slopes and valleys were in darkness or shadow—hills touched by the French, as by that rising sun, only at their tops and by the trails of their eyes.

For the moment those mountains stand upon the horizon as the symbol of the only part of North America east of the Rockies which the French pioneers did not possess before others by the trails of their feet or the paths of their boats. Verrazano of Dieppe had sailed along the Atlantic shore front, but so, perhaps, had Cabot. Ribaut had been "put to the knife" in Florida, but it was the knife of a Spaniard whose compatriots had been there before Ribaut. Étienne Brûlé had wandered all the way from Canada into Pennsylvania along the sources and upper waters of the Atlantic streams, but the colonists of other nations were sitting huddled at the mouths of the streams. And Father Jogues had endured the torturing portage from the shores of Lake George to the Mohawk, but the Dutch were by that time there to succor him from the Iroquois. Only with their eyes had the French beheld first of Europe the America of the eastern waters, whose inhabitants, when they came to put on uniform and fight for its independence, called themselves "Continentals," as if their little hem of the garment were the continent.

One wonders—if to little purpose—what would have been the consequence if De Monts, whom Champlain accompanied to America in 1604, had planted his little colony at some place farther south in his continental grant made by Henry IV, stretching, as it did, all the way from what is now Philadelphia to the St. Lawrence—if, for example, he had anchored off the Island of Manhattan, as well he might have done, five years before Hudson came up the harbor in the Half Moon, had settled there instead of on the sterile island of Ste. Croix in the Bay of Fundy, where, amid the "sand, the sedge, and the matted whortleberry bushes," the commissioners to fix the boundaries between the United States and Canada discovered in 1793—nearly two centuries later—the foundations of the "Habitation de l'isle Ste. Croix" that the French had built in the gloom of the cedars. Or if, when the scurvy-stricken colony left that barren site, they had followed Champlain to the mouth of the Charles, la rivière du Guast—the site of Cambridge or Boston—or even to the Bay St. Louis—which is remembered in Champlain's journal as the place where the friendly Indians showed him their fish-hooks made of barbed bone lashed to wood, but which has become better known as Plymouth Bay where the Pilgrims landed fifteen years later—there instead of Port Royal, where even Lescarbot's "Ordre de Bon- Temps" could not overcome the evil reports in France concerning a "churlish wilderness"! Or if Champlain, instead of seeking later the Rock of Quebec—whose rugged charms he could not forget even in the presence of the site of Boston or in the streets of Paris—had laid the foundations of his faith and his courage on the Susquehanna, for example! In any one of these contingencies there might have been a more prosperous Acadia. New England might conceivably have become Nouvelle France, and New York City might be bearing to-day the name of a seventeenth-century French prince.

An idle conjecture, but it does, I think, help us to appreciate the happy destiny (or by whatever name the sequence of events may be called) not that kept France out of that narrow Atlantic-coast strip but that put her in a position to become the power that should in a very true sense force the jealous, many-minded colonies of that strip into a union, make possible the erection of that feeble union into a nascent nation, give it, though under certain compulsion, territory to become a world-power, and finally furnish it, if grudgingly, with a great western, overmountain domain in which to develop a democratic and a nationalistic spirit strong enough to hold a continent-wide people in one republic. These services, intended and unintended, negative and positive, grudging and voluntary, performed, however, all in unsurpassed sacrifice and valiance not only of the explorers and priests but of the exiled soldiers, intimate how, out of all the misery of finding the northern water gate and keeping it and following the northern waterway and fortifying it, came the harvests—even if France did not gather them into her own granaries—of those who "sow by all waters."

We might not have had some of the institutions we do have if Champlain or Poutrincourt had anticipated the English Pilgrims at Plymouth, but we might still be a colony or a cluster of republics, even with all that we have got by way of those and other English migrants, except for these hardy men who kept battling with the ice and snow and water and famine at the north.

But what I wish to emphasize here—and I am much indebted to the young western historian Mr. Hulbert, for this view—is that France, struggling to keep the empire of her adventure and faith in the northern and western valleys of America, gave to the world George Washington. She made him, all unconsciously to be sure, first in war. She saved him, consciously, from the fate of an unsuccessful rebel. And she made it possible for him to be first in peace. These are all defensible theses, however much or little credit France may deserve in her purposes toward him.

Up in those same White Mountains there rises one that bears his name, taller than the rest. It stands in a presidential range that has no rivalling peak. A singular felicity in the naming of the neighboring mountains has given the name Lafayette to the most picturesque of all. There are well-known and much-travelled trails to the austere peak of Mount Washington. There is even a railroad now. Doubtless no mountain in America is known in its contour to more people, though there are many of loftier height and of more inviting slopes.

So the outlines of the life of Washington are known more widely than those of any other American. The trails to the height of his achievement and genius have doubtless been learned in the histories of France. And asking my readers to travel over one of those well-worn trails again, I can offer no better reason than that I may on the way call attention to objects and outlooks that should be of special interest to the eyes of a company of men and women whose geographical or racial ancestors gave us him in giving us the west.

Washington was born a British colonist. His great-grandfather settled in Virginia at about the time that La Salle was making his way up the St. Lawrence to the seigniory of St. Sulpice above the Lachine Rapids. His father, grandfather, and great-grandfather were frontiersmen, farmers, or planters. He had himself the discipline of the plantation, but he learned surveying and had also the sterner experiences of its frontier practice. Then came his appointment at nineteen as an adjutant-general of colonial militia in Virginia and with that office the still sterner disciplines beyond the frontier, where France was tutor, without which tuition he would doubtless have become and remained a successful colonial Virginia planter and general of militia.