The French in the Heart of America

by John H. Finley

Pierre Boucher (governor of Three Rivers in 1653-8 and 1662-7) thus mentions the mineral products of Canada, in his "Histoire veritable et naturelle de la Nouvelle France" (Paris, 1664), chap. 1: "Springs of salt water have been discovered, from which excellent salt can be obtained; and there are others, which yield minerals. There is one in the Iroquois Country, which produces a thick liquid, resembling oil, and which is used in place of oil for many purposes."—"Jesuit Relations," 8:289.] If we assume that the fields have all been discovered and that the present rate of exploitation is to continue, the supply of petroleum will be exhausted by 1935 (twenty-one years), or, if the present production goes on without increase, in ninety years (i.e., eighty-six years), [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 48] and that of natural gas in twenty-five years (i. e., twenty-one years from 1914). [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 56.]

Iron, the metal which the Indians worshipped as a spirit when they first saw it in the hands of the French, a substance so precious that their name for it meant "all kinds of good," has, too, been taken with feverish haste from its ancient places. Joliet and Marquette saw deposits of this ore near the mouth of the Ohio in 1673, but it was a century and a half before the harvesting of this crop, down among the rocks for millions of years before, began. And now, if no new fields are found and the increased use goes on at the rate of the last three decades, all the available high- grade ore will have become pig iron and steel billets, bridges, battle- ships, sky-scrapers, and locomotives, and all kinds of goods, within the next three decades. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 68.]

The forests of the United States—the forests primeval, with the voice of whose murmuring pines and hemlocks Longfellow begins his sad story of the Acadians—contained approximately one billion acres, [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 210.] a region not conterminous with, but almost as large as, the Mississippi Valley. Of that great, tempering, benign shadow over the continent, tempering its heat, giving shelter from its cold, restraining the waters, there is left about 65 per cent in acreage and not more than one-half the merchantable timber—five hundred million acres gone in a century and a half. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 210.]

And as to the land itself—the land first symbolized in the tuft of earth that St. Lusson lifted toward the sky that day in 1671 at Sault Ste. Marie, when he took possession of all the land between the seas of the north and west and south—in the first place, the loss each year from erosion is six hundred and ten million cubic yards. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 307, quoted from W. J. Spillman, "Report National Conservation Commission," 3:257-262.] This is, of course, inconsiderable in a short period but in a long period of years means a mighty loss of nourishing soil. With this loss is that of nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus, things of which the farmer had not even heard the names a few years ago. The yield of farms in the United States during the last forty years does not show a decreased average, but it must be remembered that in this period there have been brought under cultivation new and virgin acres, which have in their bountiful yield kept up the general average. One authority says that, taking the country by regions and by districts and considering what has actually happened, he is led to the conclusion that the fertility of the soil for 50 per cent of our country has been lessened. [Footnote: Van Hise, p. 299.]

The significance of these facts lies in the desire of the people to know the truth and seek a remedy.

In a sense the public domain has been exhausted. The pick of the land has been pre-empted, occupied. But if it is to grow with all its crops, and to put forth with all its products such a public spirit as this, France will have given to America a treasure infinitely more valuable than the land itself which her explorers gave to Europe and the world.

The beaver, which the French regarded as the first opulence of the valley, remains only as a synonym for industry, one of the States being called the "Beaver State," perhaps in memory of the beaver days but now in characterization of the beaverlike activity of its people. The hide of the buffalo which La Salle showed in Paris is now almost as great a curiosity in the valley as it was in Paris in 1680. Wild beasts now slink only in the mountains' margins. Domestic animals, natives of distant lands, live about the dwellings of men.

Even the streams of water that bore the French into the valley have dwindled, many of them, or are in despair and tears, between shallows and torrents, longing for the forests, it is said by the scientists—longing for the days of the French, the poet would put it. So are the rivers crying, "In the days of Père Marquette"—the days of the "River of the Immaculate Conception." And so are the prophets of science crying as the prophets of inspiration cried of old: O valley of a hundred thousand streams, O valley of a million centuries of rock and iron and earth, O valley of a century of man! The riches of the gathering of a million years are spent in a day. Baldness has come upon the mountains, as upon Gaza of old. The trees have gone down to the waters. The iron has flowed like blood from the hills. The fire of the ground is being given to the air. The sky is filled with smoke. The soil is being carried into the sea; it's precious dust of nitrogen and phosphor blown to the ends of the earth. The fresh lands are no more. There are no mines to be had for the asking. The frontier has become as the centre, the new as the old.

But it is not a hopeless prophecy—an unconstructive, pessimisstic, lamentation. The way of reparation is made clear.

If I were to speak only of what has been done under the inspiration of that prophecy, I should have little that is definitely measurable to present, but in making a catalogue of the averting advice of that prophecy, I am giving intimation of what will in all probability be done. For the people of that valley are not wittingly going to give their once fertile lands as stones, even to the sons of others who ask for bread, nor their streams as serpents of pestilence to those who ask for fish.