Part 5 (2/2)

Back to scenes more trite, yet tragic, Marched the knights with armor'd steeds; Not for them the quiet deeds; Not for them to sow the seeds From which empires grow like magic.

Never land so hunger-stricken Could a Latin race remold; They could conquer heat or cold-- Die for glory or for gold-- But not make a desert quicken.

Thus Quivera was forsaken; And the world forgot the place Through the lapse of time and s.p.a.ce.

Then the blue-eyed Saxon race Came and bade the desert waken.”

In Colorado, El Moro, Las Animas, and Buena Vista are credentials of Spanish occupancy, the last-named place being, so far as I have been able to trace, the farthest camp marked by a name in the Colorado district. They all sought gold, and having failed to find the thing for which they made their quest, ran back, like a retiring wave.

Coronado and Eldorado are suffused with Spanish life, like a woman's cheek with blushes when her lover comes. Over scorching deserts, and along the western coasts of America, the Spaniard toiled, nor halted till the soft Spanish speech mingled with the swift, ejaculatory utterance of the far French frontier. For this search of theirs we bless them, and shall always be glad they left their nomenclature to mind us of what this now wrecked people had achieved.

And our geography is sown thick with reminiscences of the French occupancy of America. Now he is a total foreigner in this realm he helped so largely to discover. Not Acadia was more bereft of the French after their sad banishment than our America is of French rule.

New Orleans has its creole.

In Quebec, of all American cities, you seem most in the old French _regime_. The names above the business blocks would make you believe that what you had read of the battle of Quebec was a myth, and that Wolfe truly died and Montcalm lived to celebrate a victory; but when you climb to the fortress, it is the Englishman's speech you hear, and the English colors you see floating on the heights. The French empire is melted away like snows of winter in the month of June. But those now remote days, profligate of valor, when French trapper and discoverer, fearless as Eric the Bold, fought their way along lake and river, over plain and mountain, with fierce Indian and fiercer winter,--those remote days are on us once more, when we forget our history and read our geography. There may be no new France in contemporaneous American history, but in contemporaneous geography there is. The French discoverer fires the imagination. I confess to wis.h.i.+ng I might have tramped by his side through the dense forests; have sailed in his canoe on lake and stream; have plodded with him, by oar or sail, over the Great Lakes; have joined with him in portage; have been boon companion with La Salle on his journey to the sea on the wide and majestic Mississippi; have consorted with Pere Marquette. Few American histories will do more to raise the temperature of one's blood than Parkman's story of the French occupancy of North America.

And one reason why Gilbert Parker's ”An Adventurer of the North” and ”Pierre and his People,” books vivid with a boundless freedom and heroism, hold attention and gather force in one's spirit is, that they unconsciously, yet truly, carry us back to those bold days when such episodes were not the exception, but the rule. Pioneering appeals, in some degree, to us all; and in Frenchmen were such resiliency of spirit, such abandon to adventure, as that they stand as typical explorers. Who would not have been alongside Hennepin when he, on a snowy winter day, first of all Europeans, saw thunder-voiced Niagara?

The English colonies seized, fortified, and held domain in small compa.s.s, and guarded it against the world; but this was not the French idea. They spread over a continent, as a sea might have done. The light step of Mercury belonged to the French colonizer. He loved to roam wherever untrod wastes beckoned. Englishmen in America did little discovering; Frenchmen did much. They crossed the continent, and would have done so had it been twice the breadth it was. I have already shown how some of our commonest words in Western speech are of this origin. While England hugged the Atlantic seaboard, Frenchmen had navigated the Great Lakes, had sailed the Mississippi to the Gulf, had set the seal of their names on the land they had traversed, had gone in to the sh.o.r.eless interior of the Far West; and to this day you can track the old hunter to the Pacific Coast by the reminiscent names he has left behind. The continent was his home. To him we owe much more than we shall ever pay; but to recall the debt we owe him may serve to make a wider margin to our own life at least. The vast extent of this pioneer work of France may be seen by recalling that the battle of Quebec gave England undisputed sway over what is now known as British America, and what in the history of the United States was known as ”the Territory of the Northwest.” This came from those by a single treaty.

One defeat cost them an empire. Nor was this all their territory.

This treaty of 1763 gave England only French acquisitions east of the Mississippi and north of the Great Lakes, but left French America, west of that river and south of the lakes, intact, which shows how the common consent of nations accorded to French valor in exploration the bulk of the North American continent. Essentially chivalrous, the French explorer proved the knight-errant among American discoverers.

By the treaty of 1803, Napoleon ceded 1,171,931 square miles to the United States, a tract eight times as large as France itself. France, by rights acquired by discoveries, owned about two-thirds of the continent of North America, and to-day owns not so much as would supply burial room for a child! Saxon as I am, I confess I can not go to Montreal or Quebec, nor look upon the regal St. Lawrence, without a sort of Indian Summer regret filling my sky. The French as explorers were magnificent.

And Frenchmen in those days of their discoveries were eminently devout, either in fact or in habits of thought--sometimes one, sometimes both--as may be inferred from the religiosity of the names they so often gave the places of their discovery. In some instances, this fact is to be explained by recalling that Jesuits were the explorers; but matters conspired to one effect, namely, starring the path of their discoveries by ”saints,” as with the Spaniards, as has been mentioned.

From the St. Lawrence, which is the n.o.blest stream on which my eyes have ever rested, to the old Saint Louis at the Mississippi's mouth, it seems a march of palmers; for at every halt they planted a fleur de lis and a cross. In this nomenclature, despite ourselves, is a witchery, under whose spell I plead guilty to falling. On the Atlantic side of Newfoundland is Notre Dame Bay, while beside the island northward the majestic St. Lawrence mingles the lakes with the sea. Toil your way up the river, as in the long ago the discoverers did, and see on either sh.o.r.e the sacred names: St. Charles, St. Johns, St. Paul's Bay, and on and on, across or through the continent, St. Mary's, St. Joseph, St.

Paul, St. Louis. So the voyager made journey. Lake Champlain tells the inroad of a brave French discoverer. Au Sable chasm answers for it that here, on this black water, the ubiquitous voyager has floated.

Vermont and Montpelier say, ”Remember who has been here.” Detroit (the strait) is a tollgate for the French highway. Marquette, Joliet, La Salle, wake from the dead a trinity of heroic discoverers. Than La Salle, America never had a more valorous and indefatigable explorer.

Hennepin minds us of the discoverer of Niagara. Sault Ste. Marie, Eau Claire, St. Croix River, the Dalles, are old camp-grounds of these wanderers. In Indiana, Vincennes is one of the oldest French settlements; Terre Haute (high ground) and La Porte are sign-manuals of sunny France. St. Joseph, in Missouri, and Des Moines (swamp land), in Iowa, and the name of a beautiful river in Kansas, Marais des Cygnes (the river of swans), tell the trail of the old French trapper. Where has he not been? Going farther westward, find in Wyoming the Belle Fourche River; in Idaho are St. Joseph Creek, and Coeur d'Alene Lake, and Lake Pend d'Oreille; in Was.h.i.+ngton are The Little Dalles, and in Oregon, The Dalles; and in Utah, the Du Chasne River. Thus we have tracked the French across the continent, from the St. Lawrence to the Pacific. What travelers they were! But southward, along the great River, there we come, not into scattering communities, but into a veritable New France. Their names monopolize geography. Scan a map of Louisiana, and see how populous it is with French patronymic locatives.

New Orleans (p.r.o.nounce it New Or-le-ans, and hear French pride rising in the word) is there, and St. John Baptist; Baton Rouge, and Thibodeaux, and Prudhomme, and a.s.sumption, and Calcasieu, and Saint Landry, and Grand Coteau, and scores besides, tell how surely Louisiana was a land peopled from the French kingdom and for the French king, and, as those who discovered and those who settled fondly thought, forever. So evanescent are the plans of men! The word ”bayou,” so common in the regions neighboring the Mississippi, is a French word.

Prairie, b.u.t.te, bayou, three terms in perpetual geography of this Western World, are bequests of a departed people. The farthest west and south I have tracked the French discoverer in a name is in Nebraska, where they are identified in the name of the River Platte.

La Plata is the Spanish form, as will be seen to the south--say in Texas--and here in the north is the French imprint in Platte, that wide but shallow stream, flowing over its beds of s.h.i.+fting sands. Verily, the French _regime_ in America was more than fiction. The names it left will keep an eternal remembrance.

And the English came, and seeded down a land with their ideas, language, laws, literature, political inclinations, and homestead names. Those early emigrants, though refugees from oppressive misrule, loved England notwithstanding. Of her they dreamed, to her they clung, from her they imported sedate and musical names for their new homes this side the sea. New England was the special bailiwick for such sowing, though Virginia partakes of this seed and harvest. The rich old English names, having in them so much history and memory,--how good to see them on our soil! Those early colonists were not original, nor particularly imaginative, but loyal lovers they were; and to give to their home here the name attaching to their home there was pledge of fidelity to dear old England. In Virginia, one will find what he can not find in New England, namely, a.s.sertions of loyalty to English princes; for the Puritans were never other than stanch friends of liberty, a thing which grew upon the citizens of the Old Dominion by degrees, and by slow degrees besides. They were loyalists and royalists. This, New England was not, and could not be. The Old Dominion's name, Virginia, and its first colony, Jamestown, bear attestation to this loyalty of which mention is made, though the State's name was given by that lover of Queen Elizabeth and lover of America, Sir Walter Raleigh. Berkeley recalls that querulous old loyalistic governor of Virginia, that fast believer in the divine right of kings and of himself; Westmoreland, Middles.e.x, New Kent, Suss.e.x, Southampton, Surrey, Isle of Wight, King and Queen, Anne, Hanover, Caroline, King William, Princess, Prince George, Charles City, are names which tell of st.u.r.dy believers in kings. No such mark can be found in the English colonies to the north. To England they were attached, but not to English kings. Bath, York, Bedford, Ess.e.x, Warwick, and time would fail to tell this story through. In Maryland you may note this transplanted England too: Somerset, Saulsbury, Cecil, Annapolis, Calvert, and St. Mary's, betraying the Roman Catholic origin of the colony, as do Baltimore, Saulsbury, Northampton, and Marlborough. Who can doubt the maternity of such names as these?

Now turn face toward New England, and find old England again: Berwick, Shapleigh, Boston, Litchfield, Clearfield, Norfolk, Springfield, New Britain, Hampton, Middles.e.x, Fairfield, Windham, East Lynne, Roxbury, Kent, Cornwall, Bristol, Enfield, Stafford, Woodstock, Buckingham, Stonington, Fair Haven, Taunton, Barnstable, Falmouth, Middlebury, Bedford, Dartmouth, Pomfret, Abington,--but why extend the list, musical as it is with the home days and the home land? But name Plymouth, because it shows the tenacity of English loyalty to England; for though the Mayflower, with her Puritans, might not have an English port from which to set sail for a New World, they do yet name their landing-haven after the English harbor. Blood is thicker than water when the instincts are consulted. Seeing these names, we can not mistake where we are. This is as certainly English as the Pacific-coast line was Spanish and the Mississippi Valley French.

These Englishmen imported names as well as populations. And I, for one, like them and their names; for they abound in suggestion. Who settled Connecticut and Ma.s.sachusetts we know from these locatives we have read and for the names they brought; and for the liberty and religion they sailed with across the seas, we remember them and love them.

There are miscellaneous names, telling their tale, not of race occupancy, but of who or what has pa.s.sed this way, of beast, or bird, or event, or man, which have left impress on geography,--things we do well to study, and which will always lend a sort of enchantment and vivacious interest to the pages of travel or geography. The villages along a railroad are thus often of captivating interest. The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, for instance, may ill.u.s.trate this point.

Its name has interest of no common sort. Atchison is named after a famous pro-slavery advocate, who came to Kansas, with his due quota of ”border ruffians,” for the avowed purpose of making Kansas a slave State. Topeka is an Indian name; Santa Fe is a Spanish landmark, tall as a lighthouse builded on a cliff. At the Missouri line is Kansas City, so named because this metropolis is created by Kansas. The metropolis is in Missouri; but is made rich and great by Kansas men and products. Kansas has not a large city in its borders, because this Kansas City has engrossed the great business interests of a great Commonwealth. The metropolis of Kansas, in other words, is in the State of Missouri, and the name is as strict a speaking of truth as an apostle could have commanded.

Pa.s.sing along the line, find Holliday, so named from the projector of a part of this railroad line; on is De Soto, always thrillingly historic; farther is Eudora (a word of Greek genesis, and meaning a good gift, though likely enough he who christened this village may have known as little of Greek as a kitten); on is Lawrence, named for a famous anti-slavery agitator and philanthropist of Ma.s.sachusetts--for Lawrence is a New England colony, as is Manhattan, farther up the Kansas River, familiarly known as the ”Kaw,” which is the leading river of Kansas; here is Lecompton, which keeps alive the memory of Lecompte, the Indian chief; then comes Tec.u.mseh, as clearly an Indian name as the former; then Topeka, the capital of Kansas, and wearing an Indian sobriquet; then comes Wakarusa (Indian, meaning ”hip deep,” the depth of the stream in crossing); then Carbondale, so called because of the coal deposits which created the village; then Burlingame, a beautiful hamlet, wearing a famous name; then Emporia, a city of traffic, so dubbed for reason of thinking it a famous trade center in the earlier days; Barclay, named for the famous Quaker apologist, because this village is a Quaker colony; Nickerson, for one of the original promoters of this railroad; Great Bend, referring to a great bend the Arkansas River makes at this place; p.a.w.nee Rock, from a local rallying-point of the p.a.w.nees when this was an Indian hunting-ground; Garden City, so named because, by irrigation, this locality was redeemed from comparative barrenness; Granada, and Las Animas, and La Junta, reminiscent words from the Spanish march into Kansas; Puebla, clearly designating that strange people whose cliff dwellings are at this hour one of the rarest studies in American archaeology. On another branch of this same road: Olathe, an Indian name; Ottawa; Algonquin, for ”trader,” Chanute, from an Indian chief, who was a local celebrity; Elk Falls, referring to those days when this river (the Elk) was famous for that species of graceful motion called the elk; farther are Indian Chief and White Deer, names of evident paternity. I have taken this time to run along this railroad line so as to show the possibilities in this direction anywhere. To learn to read history from the stations as we pa.s.s is surely an art worth learning. In pa.s.sing across the continent I have found it as if a guide had prepared that way before us. The natural history of a region may thus be read without resorting to a book. Count the fauna: Eagle River, Bald Eagle, Buffalo Lake, Great Bear Lake, Salmon Falls, Snake River, Wolf Creek, White Fish River, Leech Lake, Beaver Bay, Carp River, Pigeon Falls, Elkhorn, Wolverine, Crane Hill, Rabbit b.u.t.te, Owl, Rattlesnake, Curlew, Little Crow, Mullet Lake, Clam Lake, Turtle Creek, Deerfield, Porcupine Tail, Pelican Lake, Kingfisher, Ravens' Spring, Deer Ears, Bee Hill, Fox Creek, White Rabbit--can any one mistake the animals haunting these places in earlier days? Trapper's Grove tells a story we feel, but need not rehea.r.s.e. So, descriptive words in vegetation, or person, or characteristic, what volumes are contained in them! Crystal River, Little Muddy, Elm Creek, Mission Creek (a stream on which was an Indian mission), Calumet, Table Rock, Crab Orchard, Elm Creek, Lost River (the river lost in the sand), Soldier Creek, Battle Creek, Corn Creek, Spring Lake, Hackberry, Cottonwood Falls, Sand Hills, Poplar Hill, Cold Springs, Oak Hill, Cavalry Creek, Bluff Creek, Peace Creek, Cedar Bluff, Council Bluffs, Punished Woman's Lake, Highbank Creek, Big Knife, Black River, Cypress Creek, Black Raven, Brier Creek, Big Lick, Laurel, Hurricane Inlet, Dead Man's Bay, Pine Hill, Magnolia, Mountain Meadow, Medicine Woods, Rush Creek, Salt Plain, Saline River, Lava Bed, Wild Horse, Sinking Creek, Nameless, Gra.s.sy Trail (in the desert), Azure Cliffs, Miry Bottom, Sand Dune Plateau, Grouse Creek,--these are names as communicative of secrets as a child. Heath, Rock Lake, Wood Lake, Grand Prairie, Lily Creek, Swift Falls, Calamus River, Evergreen Lake, Lone Tree (a prairie locality), Spring Bank, Fort Defiance, Pontiac, Smoky Hill River (these hills are always as if smoky),--what a light these names shed on the region in which they occur!

And you can recapitulate American history in its most salient details from a reading of our geography. Great names stay, and will not be gone. As moss clings to the rock, so do great memories cling to localities. Nature conspires to keep ill.u.s.trious men from death.

Witness such names as follows: Lincoln (General Lincoln of Revolutionary fame), Madison, Pulaski (the brave Pole who fought for our freedom), Webster, Sumner, Henry (Patrick), Jackson (doughty general and President), Breckinridge, Hanc.o.c.k (signer of the Declaration of Independence), Lafayette, Clay, Pocahontas, Calhoun, Randolph, Monroe, Franklin, Jefferson, Clark (the explorer), Douglas (the ”Little Giant”), Adams, Whitman (the Presbyterian missionary, who saved to the United States Was.h.i.+ngton and Oregon, by a heroic episode which deserves the perpetual grat.i.tude of those States), Custer (the general slain in Indian warfare), Union (to commemorate the preservation of our Union), Benton (Thomas H., of Missouri, whose daughter was wife of General John C. Fremont), Lewis and Clark (discoverers), Garfield, Kane (Arctic explorer), Lincoln (the emanc.i.p.ator), Polk, Houston, Lee (General Robert E.), Tyler, Van Buren, Scott (General Winfield, of the Mexican War), Pike (the discoverer of Pike's Peak), Marshall (Chief-Justice), Berkely, Hamilton (Alexander, our first lord of the Treasury), Gadsden (he of ”the Gadsden Purchase”), Marion, Sumter (both of Revolutionary fame), Carteret, Columbus, Stanton, Colfax, Greeley, Chase, Sherman, Seward, Fillmore, Harlan (Senator), Butler (Ben), Johnson (obstreperous ”Andy”), Grant (our chiefest military hero), Polk (General), Brown (John Brown, of Ossawatomie), Thomas (General), Sheridan, Wallace (General), St. John (Prohibitionist, Republican governor of Kansas), Lane (Jim Lane, of Kansas), McPherson and Sedgewick (both Union generals), Case, Dallas, Boone, DeKalb, McDonough, Schuyler, DeWitt, Putnam, Kossuth, Hanc.o.c.k, Palo Alto, Cerro Gordo (reminders of the Mexican War), Clayton (of the Clayton-Bulwer Treaty), Emmet, Fremont, Taylor (President), Warren (General), Clinton (DeWitt), Audubon, Story (Chief-Justice), Buchanan, St. Clair, Montcalm, Kosciusko, Steuben, Tippecanoe,--to be acquainted with these names is to possess knowledge of the virtual makers of America in the range of statesmans.h.i.+p and military achievement.

One other item completes this tabulation. The aborigine of America, the Indian, has left ”his mark” across and through this Nation. He never, in any true sense, owned this continent. He hunted and fought across it. He swept by, like gusts of winter wind. He staid here, he did not live here. Possession implies more than occupancy; it implies improvement, industry, habitations, cities, destiny, as worked out by sweat of toil. But this American Indian, who, in honor, never possessed the territory, and has left no ruins of cities built by his cunning and perseverance, nor codes, nor literature, has left us names of lake, and stream, and mountain, and city. This stolid Indian, though you would scarcely think it of him, had, in common with other nomad and untutored peoples, poetic instincts. Their names, like those of the Hebrews, had meanings, and were picturesque and beautiful, sometimes, oftentimes, bewitchingly so. Some words have a music, liquid as the whip-poor-will's notes heard in woodlands climbing a mountain side. Minnehaha, ”laughing water”--does not the word seem laughing, like a falling stream? I once heard a distinguished philologist say that, of all the rhythmic words he had hit upon in any tongue, Winona was most exquisite. Surely it is not musical, but music. See the pomp of names, like an Indian war march begun: Athabasca, Wyoming, Tahoe, Niobrara, Mohawk, Sioux City, Nemaha, Hiawatha, Seneca, Chippewa, Chicago, Saskatchewan, Pepacton (”meeting of waters”), Winnepeg, Cheyenne, Manitoba, Pen.o.bscot, Narragansett, Chicopee, Manhattan, and a host besides, a numberless procession.

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