Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission. Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
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Soldiers, missionaries, governors of cities, explorers came year after year from the time of Louis XIV, attracted by the chances or the beauty of the unknown and the opportunity of increasing their country's dominions, or of becoming famous, or of instructing souls, and of dying, if death was to be met, bravely and honorably. Very French they were, with all the qualities of their race, and something else, perhaps, some of them, than the qualities.
As they went down the great rivers from the regions of the Canadian lakes to the Mexican sea they gave them French names, and the reading of a map of that epoch reminds one of the century of the Sun King. There he is with all his court, figured in lands, cities, lakes, and rivers. Louisiana bears his own name; Lake Pontchartrain the name of his minister for marine; Fort Duquesne, the name of his famous sailor. There were also the rivers Colbert and Seigneley, better known nowadays as Mississippi and Illinois. One of the Great Lakes had been named after the Duke of Orleans; another, the great Conde, the winner of Rocroy; another after his brother, Prince de Conti; but this last inland sea, as indeed most of the others, soon resumed its Indian name, the homely name of Lake Erie, the Lake of the Cat.
Very French they were, those men—this Father Marquette, who, with Joliet, first beheld the magnificent water that washes your walls, the vast existence of which was then unknown, and who explored it down to the country of the Arkansas; this Robert Cavalier Sieur de la Salle, who had, long before our days, our days' notions of the importance of great commercial routes; whose purpose was to open one to China across this continent at the very spot where your northern lines of railways have opened theirs; who called his first house on American soil La China in order that he might never forget his initial purpose. He died in the quest, but not before he had explored the Mississippi down to its mouth; not before he had ascertained that its source was to the West, and that the river therefore could be used as a guiding thread toward the Pacific; not before he had made the first French settlement in this, your country, and given it a name, which has not been replaced by another, and is its present name of Louisiana.
Long is the roll and great were the hardships. To the same region, with the same object of discovering and improving, came that typical cadet De Gascogne, the Chevalier Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, who, on the 21st of July, 1701, unfurled the French flag at a certain spot where he began the building of a town, now the town of Detroit. He became afterwards governor of Louisiana. Then such men came as Du Tissnet, as the brothers Le Moine de Iberville and Le Moine de Bienville, this last the founder of New Orleans; as Father de Charlevoix, who gave the best account we have of the country, and spoke most wisely about its future; as La Clede, worthier than anyone to be remembered at this day and this place, as he was the founder of your town.
The exploration of the coasts had been comparatively easy, and thousands had attempted it. Settlers from France were the first to try their chance inland; they traveled across a huge continent more unknown then to the civilized world than was in our time the Africa of Livingstone and Stanley. They did it in a cheerful, optimistic spirit that nothing daunted but death. Living as they did in truly "howling wildernesses," there remained yet with them something of the mother country; and that appeared not only in their speech and manners, but in their very attitudes. Charlevoix meets figures of dead men fabricated by Indians. He was glad to find that they were represented with falling arms, from which he concluded that the authors of the trophies had massacred some of their own kin. When Indians killed French people, the figures represented men with their fist on their hip, Versailles fashion.
How could it be otherwise when they lived, some of them, on a settlement owned by a gentleman called d'Artagnan and managed, as was appropriate, by two musketeers. One almost expects the names of those two to have been Porthos and Aramis; but they were d'Artiguidres and De Benac.
And these men recalled their country in more important things than names and attitudes. Cadillac had scarcely given a name to the spot where he meant to create a town than he sent for his wife and younger son. It was to be a town, indeed, with wives and children and family life, and it was so, and it has ever been so since Cadillac willed it. When La Salle was killed in his second journey to the Mississippi in 1687, he had with him his brother and two nephews. The newcomers soon discovered that the region was not the metallic eldorado they had heard of it in Europe, but that it was a matchless agricultural country, and they began cutting the trees and tilling the ground, with none of the modern instruments and helps, no harvesting machines from "Chicago," as the then desert spot was called in their days; no horses, no horned cattle. They led, indeed not in fiction, but in truth—and long before the famous "Mariner of York" was wrecked by the Orinoco River—the life of Robinson Crusoe. Unknown to Europe, far from any neighbors, by the shade of the pathless forest, they tried their best. They died, many of them obscurely, leaving no name to be engraved on the bronze tables of history, but leaving better than a mere name—families, many of which still subsist; better than families—examples of earnestness and endurance, creating a tradition which will never die out, "Rien ne se perd."
The greatness of their difficulties, the scantiness of their means, the wisdom of many of their views are equally striking. More than one did their utmost to teach and improve their Indian neighbor. They forbade at an early date the selling to them of the destructive "fire water." Cadillac did so from the first; the Marquis de Vaudreuil reissued the same orders later. They soon discovered that the northern regions alone could produce wheat enough to feed the whole country, "though it should be quite peopled down to the sea." The question of labor was one of prominent difficulty and importance. Should it be hired labor of freemen or the compulsory labor of the imported negro? On this, one of those early French explorers, Charlevoix, summed up his opinion in the following memorable sentence: "Hired servants should be preferred. When the time of their service is expired they become inhabitants and increase the number of the King's natural subjects, whereas the slaves are always strangers. And who can be assured that by continually increasing in our colonies they will not one day become formidable enemies? Can we depend upon slaves who are only attached to us by fear and for whom the very land where they are born has not the dear name of mother country?"
More striking than all was the observation of a Frenchman who never visited America, except in thought, but saw distinctly its future. When no one yet believed it, that great economist and statesman, Turgot, said: "America one day will be free."
Years went on. The dark shadows and splendid rays of light with which French history is interwoven shone and vanished in their grand and awful alternance. One day the French flag was lowered in Louisiana; that was at the close of the Seven Years War. Another day the same flag was seen on the mast of a small vessel leaving the harbor at Bordeaux and sailing for America. The ship happened to bear the auspicious name of La Victoire, and it bore Lafayette. Then it was the alliance of 1778, and the coming on the same year of the first envoy accredited by any nation to this country, my predecessor, Gerard de Rayneval, a staunch friend of America; then the peace of 1783, when, with the assent of the whole world, to the joy of every French heart, 13 stars shone on the American flag.
France recovered, then, neither Louisiana nor Canada, nor anything. But she never intended it. She won a friend, and such a friend is better than any province.
She was very happy, having exactly fulfilled without change, bargain, or extenuation the task she had mapped out for herself in 1778, when she declared in the alliance treaty that the "direct and essential object of the same was efficaciously to maintain the freedom, sovereignty, and absolute and illimited independence of the United States." The joy was such in Paris at the news of American independence that performances in the theaters were interrupted; the great event was announced, and audiences rose to their feet to cheer the new-born Republic. Festivities were given and colored prints were scattered all over France for the benefit of those who could not be present. Such souvenirs were proudly kept in families. One such came to the remote house of my own parents in the mountains, and it was carefully preserved and I possess it at this day.
France followed her destinies; in 1800 Louisiana was French again; three years later on the spontaneous proposal of the French Republic, not New Orleans alone, not a mere strip of land, but the whole country became forever American.
The treaty signed one hundred years and a day ago had little precedent in history; it dealt with territories larger