The French in the Heart of America Part 9

_Forest reserves_ (tracts of forest land permanently reserved from sale).............................. 57,900,000

For national reclaiming purposes............................. 39,911,000

Reserved for public purposes (public buildings, forts, etc.).................................................. 6,700,000

_Indian reservations_........................................ 73,000,000

_Entries pending_............................................ 39,500,000

_Unappropriated public land_................................ 841,872,377

_Total (including Alaska)_................................ 1,852,683,377

By June 30, 1912, homestead entries had increased to 127,800,000 acres; timber and stone entries to 13,060,000 acres; forest reserves to 187,400,000 acres, and there was left 682,984,762 acres, more than half of which was in Alaska; that is, of the billion and a half of acres, exclusive of Alaska, over a billion have been sold to private uses, granted in aid of private enterprises, used for public improvements, appropriated forever to public uses, or given to the support of education.

The controlling motive at the start, I repeat, was revenue. But gradually the people, seeing great tracts of land held unimproved for speculation, seeing the domain of free land narrowing while the pressure of want was beginning to make itself felt east of the mountains, as in Europe, and feeling concerned, as some men of vision did, at the pa.s.sing of the world's great opportunity for the practical realization of man's natural right to the land without disturbing the system in force in older settled communities, the people strove to effect the subordination of revenue to the social good of the frontier and the country at large. By the middle of the century this many-motived feeling had expression in a party platform; that "the public lands-belong to the people and should not be sold to individuals nor granted to corporations, but should be held as a sacred trust for the benefit of the people and should be granted in limited quant.i.ties, free of cost, to landless settlers." [Footnote: Free-Soil Democratic Platform, 1892, p. 12.]

It was ten years before this doctrine became embodied in law over the signature of Abraham Lincoln, but the agitation for its enactment had been active for thirty years, beginning with the cry of a poor printer in New York City, [Footnote: George Henry Evans.] taught of French doctrine, who in season and out kept a.s.serting the equal right of man to land. It was as a voice in the wilderness proclaiming a plan of salvation to the already congested areas on the seash.o.r.e and, incidentally, a means of making the wilderness blossom. He was not then a disciple of Fourier (as many of his a.s.sociates were and he himself had been originally), threatening vested privileges of rights; he did not preach a communistic division of property; he was an individualistic idealist and saw in the opening of this wild, unoccupied land, not to speculators or to alien purchasers, but to actual settlers permitted to pre-empt in quarter-sections (one hundred and sixty acres) and forbidden to alienate it, a means of social regeneration that would not disturb the t.i.tles to property already granted to individuals by the State, and yet would bless all the property-less, for there was enough free land for every landless man who wanted it, and would be for decades if not for centuries beyond their lives, or so he thought. [Footnote: See J. R. Commons, "Doc.u.mentary History of American Industrial Society," VII:287-349.]

A German economist has expressed the view that it was only this movement, so inaugurated, that prevented America from going into socialism. One of our foremost economists in America, in discussing this very subject, begins with these observations:

"The French are a nation of philosophers. Starting with the theory of the rights of man, they build up a logical system, then a revolution, and the theory goes into practice. Next a coup d'etat and an emperor.

"The English are a nation without too much philosophy or logic. They piece out their const.i.tution at the spot where it becomes tight.... They are practical ... unlogical.

"The Americans are French in their logic and English in their use of logic. They announce the universal rights of man and then enact into law enough to augment the rights of property."

The homestead law owed its origin to the doctrine of natural rights, whose transcendental glory faded often into the light of common day during the discussions but still enhaloes a very practical and matter-of-fact statute. Economic reasons, both of eastern and western motive, were gathered under the banner of its idealism, till finally it came to be an ensign not only of free soil for the landless but of free soil for the slaves. The "homestead" movement put an end to slavery, even if within a half century it has exhausted in its generosity the nation's domain of arable land. The voice in the wilderness cried for a legalized natural right that would not disturb vested rights, for an individualism based on private property given without cost, for equality by a limitation of that property to one hundred and sixty acres, and finally for the inalienability from sale or mortgage of that little plot of earth. Thirty years later the natural right to unoccupied land was recognized, individualistic society was strengthened by the great increase in the number of property holders, and inalienability was recognized by the States; but the failure to reserve the free lands to such actual settlers alone and to limit the amount of the holding left the way open for railroad grants, which alone have in two generations exceeded the homestead entries, and for the ama.s.sing of great stretches by a few.

The logic of France, speaking through the voice of that leader and other men such as Horace Greeley, led the later exodus as certainly as her pioneers opened the way for the first American settlers. And though the logic was applied in English fas.h.i.+on, yet it had a notable part in making, as I have just said, the free soil of the Mississippi Valley contribute to the freeing of a whole people in slavery, inside and outside of the valley. That logic learned in France would doubtless have accomplished a conclusion needing less patching and opportunistic repair if the immediate interests of those of the frontiers, those who wanted immediate settlement and development, had not disturbed one of the premises. At any rate, a great and perhaps the last opportunity to carry such doctrines to their conclusions without overturning all social and industrial inst.i.tutions has gone by. A half-billion acres of inalienable farms, all of the same size, trespa.s.sing upon no ancient rights, interspersed with the white blocks held for the education of the children of that free soil, might have furnished an example for all time to be followed or shunned-if, indeed, all acres had been born of the primeval sea and glaciers not only free but equal in size. As it was, some acres were born large and some small, some fruitful and some barren, some with gold in their mouths and some with only the taste of alkali; and only an infinite wisdom could have adjusted them to the unequal capacities of that army of land lackers who declared themselves free and equal, and who, with free-soil banners, advanced to the territory where the squatters became sovereigns and homesteads became castles.

President Andrew Johnson (who as a congressman, in 1852, made the seven- hundred-year prophecy) estimated that a homestead (of one hundred and sixty acres) would increase every homesteader's purchasing ability by one hundred dollars a year; and if (he argued) the government enacted a 30- per-cent duty it would be reimbursed in seven years in the amount of two hundred and ten dollars, or ten dollars more than the cost of the homestead. By such reckoning he reached the conclusion that the homesteaders would defray the expenses of the government for a period of four thousand three hundred and ninety-two years-each homesteader of the nine millions contributing indirectly twenty-four thousand four hundred dollars in seven hundred years and all of them two hundred and nineteen billion six hundred million dollars--a scheme as ingenious, says one, as Fourier's "scheme to pay off the national debt of France with a setting hen." [Footnote: Speech on the bill to encourage agriculture, July 25, 1850. Speeches on the homestead bill, April 29, 1852, and May 20, 1858.]

There are approximately nine million homes (or homes, tenements, and flats) in that domain to-day, and it is quite easily demonstrable that they not only contribute to the support of government, directly and indirectly, far more than the seemingly fantastic estimates of Andrew Johnson suggested but also give to the world a surplus of product undreamed of even in 1850. It is hardly likely that any system of parcelling would have more rapidly developed this vast domain. There is a question as to whether some more logical, conserving, long-viewed policy might not have been devised for the "common good" of the generations that are yet to occupy that valley with the generation that is there and the three or four generations that have already gone. It is that "common good"

that is now engaging the thought of our foremost economists, natural scientists, and public men. Of that I shall speak later.

Here we celebrate merely the fact that there are fifty or sixty million geographical descendants of France living in the midst of the valley at the mouth of whose river La Salle took immediate possession for Louis XIV, but prophetic possession for all the peoples that might in any time find dwelling there.

CHAPTER IX

IN THE TRAILS OF THE COUREURS DE BOIS

"It is a mistake," said one of the statesmen of the Mississippi Valley, Senator Thomas H. Benton, "to suppose that none but men of science lay off a road. There is a cla.s.s of topographical engineers older than the schools and more unerring than the mathematicians. They are the wild animals-- buffalo, elk, deer, antelope, bears-which traverse the forest not by compa.s.s but by an instinct which leads them always the right way-to the lowest pa.s.ses in the mountains, the shallowest fords in the rivers, the richest pastures in the forests, the best salt springs, and the shortest practicable lines between remote points. They travel thousands of miles, have their annual migrations backwards and forwards, and never miss the best and shortest route. These are the first engineers to lay out a road in a new country; the Indians follow them, and hence a buffalo road becomes a warpath. The first white hunters follow the same trails in pursuing their game; and after that the buffalo road becomes the wagon road of the white man, and finally the macadamized road or railroad of the scientific man." [Footnote: Speech on a bill for the construction of a highway to the Pacific, December 16, 1850.]

A hunter of wild sheep in the Rocky Mountains following their trails wonders if they were made a year, five, or ten years ago, and is told by the scientist at his side that they may have been sixteen thousand years old, so long have these first engineers been at work. In some places of Europe, I am told, their fellow engineers, longer in the practice of their profession, have actually worn paths in the rocks by their cus.h.i.+oned feet.

It is a mistake, therefore, we are reminded, to suppose that the forests and plains of the Mississippi Valley were trackless. They were coursed by many paths. If you have by chance read Chateaubriand's "Atala," you will have a rather different notion of the American forests, especially of the Mississippi Valley. "On the western side of the Mississippi," he wrote, "the waves of verdure on the limitless plains (savannas) appear as they recede to rise gradually into the azure sky"; but on the eastern half of the valley, "trees of every form, of every color, and of every perfume throng and grow together, stretching up into the air to heights that weary the eye to follow. Wild vines ... intertwine each other at the feet of these trees, escalade their trunks and creep along to the extremity of their branches, stretching from the maple to the tulip-tree, from the tulip-tree to the hollyhock, and thus forming thousands of grottos, arches and porticos. Often, in their wanderings from tree to tree, these creepers cross the arm of a river, over which they throw a bridge of flowers.... A mult.i.tude of animals spread about life and enchantment. From the extremities of the avenues may be seen bears, intoxicated with the grape, staggering upon the branches of the elm-trees; caribous bathe in the lake; black squirrels play among the thick foliage; mocking-birds, and Virginian pigeons not bigger than sparrows, fly down upon the turf, reddened with strawberries; green parrots with yellow heads, purple woodp.e.c.k.e.rs, cardinals red as fire, clamber up to the very tops of the cypress-trees; humming-birds sparkle upon the jessamine of the Floridas; and bird- catching serpents hiss while suspended to the domes of the woods, where they swing about like creepers themselves.... All here ... is sound and motion.... When a breeze happens to animate these solitudes, to swing these floating bodies, to confound these ma.s.ses of white, blue, green, and pink, to mix all the colors and to combine all the murmurs, there issue such sounds from the depths of the forests, and such things pa.s.s before the eyes, that I should in vain endeavor to describe them to those who have never visited these primitive fields of nature." And when Rene and Atala were escaping through those forests they "advanced with difficulty under a vault of smilax, amidst vines, indigo-plants, bean-trees, and creeping-ivy that entangled our feet like nets.... Bell serpents were hissing in every direction, and wolves, bears, carcajous and young tigers, come to hide themselves in these retreats, made them resound with their roarings." [Footnote: Chateaubriand, "Atala," trans. Harry, pp. 2, 3, 19.]

A trackless, howling wilderness, indeed, if we are to accept this as an accurate description of scenes which, as I have intimated, it is now suspected that Chateaubriand's imagination visited, unaccompanied of his body. But a recent indigenous writer on the valley and its roads--having in mind, to be sure, the forests a little farther north than those in which Atala and Rene wandered--a.s.sures us that they were neither "pathless" nor "howling." He writes that in 1775 (eighteen years before the first white settlement in the State of Ohio) there were probably as many paths within the bounds of that State on which a man could travel on horseback at the rate of five miles an hour as there are railways in that State to-day. And the buffalo paths were-some of them, at any rate--roads so wide that several wagons might have been driven abreast on them--as wide as the double-track railroads. So the Indian farther west had his highways prepared for him by the instincts of these primitive engineers that knew nothing of trigonometry or the s.e.xtant or the places of the stars. [Footnote: Hulbert, "Historic Highways," vol. I, pt. II.]

Nor did these first makers of roads howl or bellow their way over them. On this same authority (Hulbert) I am able to a.s.sure you that the forest paths were noiseless "traces," as they were originally called, in the midst of silences disturbed only by the wind and the falling waters.

Wolves did sometimes howl in the forests or out upon the plains, but it was only in hunger and in accentuation of the usual silence. Neither they nor the bears growled or howled, except when they came into collision with each other, or starvation.

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 Sh.e.l.ley'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 trespa.s.sed 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 m.u.f.fled 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-- pota.s.sium, 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 amba.s.sadors from this kingdom of the sea to the kingdom of the land. They were, as etienne Brule 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. etienne Brule--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 amba.s.sador 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 surpa.s.sed 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 sh.o.r.es 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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.ses, the low portages from valley to valley, the shortest ways and the easiest grades.

One of America's greatest railroad presidents has noted this significant difference between the railroads of Europe and those of America, or at any rate of the Mississippi Valley. In Europe they "took the place of the pack-animal, the stage-coach, the goods-van that crowded all the highways between populous centers," whereas in the Mississippi Valley and beyond they succeeded the pioneer and pathfinder. The railroad outran the settler and "beckoned him on," just as the coureur de bois outran the slower-going migrant and beckoned him on to ever new frontiers. The buffalo, the coureur de bois, the engineer in turn. The railroad, the more modern coureur de bois and coureur de planche, has not served the new-world society merely as a connecting-link between communities already developed.

It has been the "creator of cities." [Footnote: James J. Hill, "Highways of Progress," pp. 235-236.]

Out on those prairies beyond the forests I have seen this general statement of Mr. Hill's ill.u.s.trated. Down from Lake Michigan the first railroad crept toward the Mississippi along the Des Plaines and then the Illinois, where La Salle had seen from his canoe great herds of buffalo "trampling by in ponderous columns or filing in long lines morning, noon, and night." That railroad was a path, not to any particular city but to the water, a path from water to water, a long portage from the lake to the Mississippi and back again.

One day, within my memory, a new path was marked by stakes that led away from that river, off across the prairie, to an uninhabited place which the first engineers had not known--a place of fire, the fields of coal, of which the practical Joliet had found signs on his memorable journey. And so one and another road crossed that prairie (on which I can even now clearly see the first engine standing in the prairie-gra.s.s), making toward the places of fire, of wood, of grain, of meat, of gold, of iron, of lead, till the whole prairie was a network of these paths--and now the "transportation machine" (as Mr. Hill calls it) has grown to two hundred and fifty-four thousand seven hundred and thirty-two miles (in 1911), or about 40 per cent of the world mileage, of which one hundred and forty thousand miles are within the Mississippi Valley, carrying with them wherever they go the telegraph and telephone wires, building villages, towns, and cities-still bringing the fas.h.i.+ons of Paris, as did Perrot, in the paths of the buffalo.

When the surveyors crossed that prairie, treeless except for the woods along the Aramoni River (just back of the Rock St. Louis) and along the Illinois River at the other edge, the wild animals and the Indians had disappeared westward, the prairie ground was broken and planted in patches; fences had begun to appear on the silent stretches; houses stood four to a section, with a one-room schoolhouse every two miles and churches at long intervals. After the construction train ploughed its slow way across that same prairie, in the trail staked by the surveyors, a place was marked for a village; the farmers upon whose land it promised to trespa.s.s wanted each to give it the name of his wife, his queen, as La Salle of his king; but one day a workman, representing the unsentimental corporation, without ceremony nailed a strip of board to a post, with the name "Aramoni," let us say, painted upon it. Wooden buildings, stores, elevators, blacksmith, harness, and shoemaker shops, and the dwellings of those who did the work of the little town, gathered about; in time some of the pioneer settlers leaving their farms to the care of children or tenants moved into the town; the primitive stores were rebuilt in brick; houses of pretentious architecture crowded out of the best sites the first dwellings; and in twenty or thirty years it had become a village of several hundred people: retired farmers or their widows, men of the younger generation living on the income of their farms without more than nominal occupation, and those who buy the produce and minister to the wants of this little community. Most of the villagers and most of the farmers in all the country about have the telephone in their houses and can talk as much as they please with their neighbors at a very small yearly charge. They also keep track of the grain and stock markets by telephone, have their daily metropolitan paper, a county paper, monthly magazines (of which they are the best readers), perhaps a piano or an organ, more likely, now, a phonograph, which reproduces, if they choose, what is heard in Paris or in concerts or the grand opera; reproductions of pieces of statuary or paintings in the Louvre; and either a fast driving horse or an automobile. They are often within easy reach of a city by train, and the wives or daughters know the fas.h.i.+ons of Paris and begin to follow the modes as quickly as local talent can make the adaptations and transformations.

Aramoni is not an imaginary much less a Utopian village. There are thousands of "Aramonis" where the railroads have gone, drawing all the physical conveniences and social conventions after them, where once coureurs de bois followed the buffaloes.

Mr. Hill, whom I have just quoted above, has said: "Next after the Christian religion and the public school the railroad has been the largest single contributing factor to the welfare and happiness of the people of that valley." [Footnote: James J. Hill, "Highways of Progress," pp. 236, 237.]

The first great service of the railroads to the republic, as such, was to make it possible that the people of a territory three thousand miles wide, crossed by two mountain ranges, should be bound into one republic. The waters to the east of the Alleghanies ran toward the Atlantic, the waters west of the Rockies ran toward the Pacific, and the waters between the mountains ran to the Gulf of Mexico. If the great east-and-west railroads had not been built and some of the waters of the Lakes had not been made to run down the Mohawk Valley into the Hudson it is more than probable that there would have been a secession of the men who called themselves the "men of the western waters," a secession of the west from the east, rather than of the south from the north. If the men of this valley had continued men of the "western waters" there would probably have been at least three republics in North America and perhaps as many as in South America.

When Josiah Quincy, a famous son of Ma.s.sachusetts, said for the men of the east in the halls of Congress, "You have no authority to throw the rights and liberties and property of this people into hotchpot with the wild men on the Missouri, nor with the mixed though more respectable race of Anglo- Hispano-Gallo-Americans, who bask on the sands in the mouth of the Mississippi," he was visualizing the men whose interests followed the rivers to another tide-water than that of Boston and New York harbors. The railroads made a real prophecy of his fear that these men of the western rivers would some day be "managing the concerns of a seaboard fifteen hundred miles from their residences, and having a preponderance in the councils," into which, as he contended, "they should never have been admitted." [Footnote: Speech on the bill to admit Orleans Territory into the Union. Annals of Congress, 11th Cong., 3d Sess., 1810-11, pp. 524- 542.]

He was thinking and speaking rather of the southwest than of the northwest, but it was the east-and-west lines of railroad that prevented the vital interest of that northern valley from flowing with the water along parallels of longitude to where the gulf currents would catch its commerce, instead of over the mountains along the sterner parallels of lat.i.tude and in straighter course to Europe.