AMERICAN PATRIOTIC PROSE

PART I

THE STREAMS OF AMERICAN LIFE

PATHS OF THE PIONEERS

JOHN H. FINLEY

[Long before the Mayflower had landed at Plymouth Rock, the French had made settlements on the St. Lawrence in Canada and were laying claim to all the land as far south as the Delaware River. They later crossed the Great Lakes and established trading-posts and forts and missions on the Mississippi. They were, however, mainly soldiers, traders, and religious zealots. They did not clear farms and build houses, as did the English who pushed westward through the Alleghanies.

Even before the Revolution, adventurous English hunters and trappers had begun to move westward. Daniel Boone and men of his type had gone through the Cumberland gap into Kentucky, and later moved on to Missouri "to get more elbow room," as Boone said. After the Revolution, Sevier and Shelby, who had defeated the British at King's Mountain in 1780, led some of their old soldiers into Tennessee and Kentucky. Into what was known as the Northwest Territory extending west from Pittsburgh and along the north bank of the Ohio River poured settlers from Pennsylvania, New York, and New England. Many old soldiers of the Revolution were paid off in land instead of money for their services in the army. Alexander Hamilton, Washington's great Secretary of the Treasury, replenished the empty money chests of the nation by the sale of these lands to settlers. Washington himself bought large tracts in Ohio.

These early settlers were more than soldiers or trappers or missionaries; they were the founders of States. Some of them later

sent back their sons to the East as Presidents of the Nation. From this region between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi River have come Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Johnson, Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, McKinley, and Taft. In the Civil War it produced men of very high rank. To the Union army it sent Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan, and to the Confederacy it gave Albert Sidney Johnston, Hood, and Beauregard.]

THERE1 is a class of topographical engineers "older than the schools," "more unerring than mathematicians." They are the wild animals which traverse the forests not by compass but by instinct, find the easiest paths to the lowest passes in the mountains, to the shallowest fords, to the richest pastures, to the salt licks. . . . It is a mistake, therefore, we are reminded, to suppose that the American forests and plains were trackless before men came. They were coursed by many paths.

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 buffaloes and deer, and the bare feet or the moccasins of the Indians.

The French followed the streams which kept them in touch with the sea. But they had finally, in their pioneering, to take to the trails and the forests. And these runners-of-thewoods were 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 inhabitants, "from where the stunted Eskimos

1 From The French in the Heart of America; copyright, 1915, by Charles Scribner's Sons.

2 Coureur de bois [koo-rûr' de buä']. A French or half-breed trapper and hunter of western North America, especially of Canada.

burrowed in their snow caves to where the Comanches scoured the plains of the south with their banditti cavalry."

"This class 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 by 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 they loved and braved the solitude for. The trace has become the railroad, and the smell of the gasoline motor is even on the 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 to the prospective 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 most of these natural paths-paths of the coureurs de bois, of those instinctively searching for mountain passes, of low portages from valley to valley, the shortest ways and the easiest grades. . . . It is a common, unimaginative metaphor to call the engine which leads the mighty trains across the country the iron horse, but it is deserving of a nobler figure. It is the iron coureur de bois still leading Europe into America, and America into a newer America. . . . 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.

Washington had hardly put off his uniform, after the peace of 1783, when he was planning for a Western trip, and his diary

on the third day of that trip of six hundred and eighty miles shows that his one object was to obtain information of the 66 'nearest and best communication between the Eastern and the Western waters." He expected the canal to erase the Alleghanies from the map, but the railroad accomplished this gigantic task, with only slight aid of water. And as it tied the Mississippi Valley to the Atlantic Coast, so in time, aided by a government that had every reason to be grateful, it reached across the uninhabited plains, over the Rocky Mountains, which even Western statesmen said were the divinely appointed barriers, across the desert beyond, to the Pacific Slope, and tied it to a capital which is now nearer to San Francisco than once that capital was to Boston. A man from the Missouri River1 is, as I write, Speaker of the House. . . . A man from the mouth of the Mississippi, the highest authority in America on the French code, is the Chief-Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. And he was appointed by a President who was born on the banks of the Ohio, discovered also by the French, and named La Belle Rivière. That is, the highest office in each of the three coördinate branches of government (the judical, the legislative, and the executive) are filled by men of the Western waters. And there is no single fact that can better illustrate the political significance of the paths over which the French were pioneers.

THE BLENDING OF RACES 3

HENRY VAN DYKE

OUR American stock is the product of a happy mixture. The Puritan strain in our American social life is too well known to need description. Personal independence, religious intensity, ethical earnestness mitigated by commercial activitythis strain has made its mark deep on our American history. 1 Mr. Champ Clark. 2 Mr. Taft. 3 From Essays in Application; copyright, by Charles Scribner's Sons.

The Dutch influence has not been so deep, but perhaps it has been broader. Free education and religious toleration came to this country from Holland. The Quakers could not live in the air of New England in the seventeenth century, but they found the atmosphere of New Amsterdam more hospitable. William Penn, who set the example of giving to the consciences of others the same freedom that he claimed for his own, had a Dutch mother. Religious liberty (which, take it all in all, is the most precious possession of America) is a watchword translated from the Dutch. It was William of Orange who put it in immortal language when he said, "Conscience is God's province." The Cavalier influence has been a strain of grace, of dignity, of amenity; a sentiment of chivalry; a feeling of national pride and honor permeating all of our social life; and it has actually been one of the most powerful factors in consolidating the Republic. In the Federal Convention, "the Virginia plan" first held forth the idea of a strong nation as distinguished from a loose confederation. It was around the personal character of Washington that all the scattered forces of possible American citzenship first centred and crystallized. Without that great soldier-cavalier the colonies hardly could have freed themselves; without that greater citizen-cavalier the states never could have united themselves.

The streams that have entered into our American life come from springs very wide apart from the Puritans whom James I was persecuting, and from the courtiers whom he was patronizing; from the Dutchmen whom Charles II was fighting, and from the Covenanters whom he was trying to convert at the pistol's point; from the Scotchmen who had captured the north of Ireland, and from the Huguenots who had been driven out of the south of France.

Yet with all these differences of ancestral stock, Americans have a common and undivided heritage of ancestral ideals. They are the fruits of that underlying unity of convictions, hopes, and purposes which made our forefathers one people. A