The Mentor, No. 35,
The Story of America in Pictures:
The Contest for North America

The Mentor

“A Wise and Faithful Guide and Friend”

THE STORY OF AMERICA IN PICTURES
THE CONTEST FOR NORTH AMERICA

By ALBERT BUSHNELL HART
Professor of Government, Harvard University

The whole round world is now open. Gone is the pleasure of finding new lands, sighting strange mountains, floating down mysterious rivers, and meeting unknown races of men. After Mt. Everest is climbed by some daring mountaineer, and after an airship lands on the highest peak of Mt. McKinley, what will be left for the seeker of novelty? Where can you now find a river or mountain range or tribe certified never before to have been seen by white men?

That rich pleasure was enjoyed in the fullest measure by the explorers in North America; in fact, they enjoyed it so much that they kept it alive for four centuries. For a good two hundred and fifty years the English at intervals battered their way into Hudson Bay, and Davis Strait, and the Arctic deserts, trying to smash a route through the ice, around to the north of Asia and Europe. Nearly three centuries passed after De Soto reached the lower Mississippi before Lieutenant Pike found its source in its native lair. As late as 1880 no man, white or red, knew the passes across the Canadian Rockies; and to this day only three boat parties have ever gone through the length of the canyon of the Colorado.

In the work of opening up North America the French surpassed the English: if no bolder, they were more adventurous. From the lower St. Lawrence they held a direct route into the interior, which flanked the two great obstacles to western exploration; namely, the Six Nations of the Iroquois and the Alleghany Mountains. It is hard to say which was the firmer wall against English discovery.

FRENCH ADVENTURE

If we were only French, we could weep at the splendid story of French discovery, as compared with the final collapse of the French empire on the continent of North America. The French were the first to find the St. Lawrence; first to see each one of the Great Lakes; first to spread exaggerated ideas about Niagara Falls—where, according to Mark Twain, the hack fares in his time were so much higher than the falls that the visitor did not perceive the latter. They were first to be awestruck at the site of the future city of Chicago; first to reach the Mississippi; first to be stopped by the Falls of St. Anthony, which unfortunately were not at that time subject to conservation; first to navigate the Mississippi; first to see the Rocky Mountains; first to cross from Lake Superior to Hudson Bay. What a fate, to be the star actors in so many first performances, and then not to appear at all in the last act! What a destiny for the earliest explorers of our country!

One reason why the French secured early control of the interior was that they had an astonishing gift of living on the country. When Stanley crosses the Dark Continent, or Amundsen penetrates the White Continent, he carries great quantities of stores with him; but Champlain, and Marquette, and La Salle went light. The Frenchmen paddled their canoes along with their Indian friends, lived on game and Indian corn, found much to engage and interest them, and were always ready for a joyous fight. Frenchmen know how to draw the pleasures of life out of unpromising surroundings.

FOUNDING OF QUEBEC

The French made their first permanent settlement at Quebec in 1608; but the English had then been in Jamestown a year. From the first the continent was too small to hold two such boisterous, expanding, and conflict-loving people. Captain Argall in 1613 opened the ball by capturing the little Jesuit settlement at Flying Mountain on Mount Desert. From that time, for just a hundred and fifty years, the two nations were sparring with each other.

For many years this warfare was hedged in, because mountains, woods, and savages filled up a broad belt of territory between the English coast settlements and the St. Lawrence. But in war, as in the chivalric game of football, when you cannot break through the center, you play round the ends. Hence in every one of the six regular wars, besides various local squabbles, there was always fighting between French and English in Nova Scotia, or the Islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, or along that river. In 1613 the English captured Port Royal on the Bay of Fundy, and again in 1690 and 1710,—it became almost a habit,—in 1670 they broke into Hudson Bay; in 1745 and 1758 they mastered Louisburg; and in 1759 took Quebec.

LA SALLE

The most gallant figure in this century and a half is the chevalier Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, who had all the pluck and endurance of his Norman ancestors. He was educated by the Jesuits; but preferred the life of a seignior on the frontier of Canada. There he heard tales of a river starting somewhere near the Great Lakes and following so long a course that he guessed it must be the Colorado. From that time he became a still hunter for the Mississippi River. He built the Griffin, the first vessel ever seen on Lake Erie. Apparently he found the Ohio, and decided that that was not the advertised stream; and before he could get to the Mississippi it had been discovered by the priest Marquette and the Indian trader Joliet, while Father Hennepin went up the great stream to the falls.

La Salle had larger plans than to see new countries and float on strange rivers: he wanted to occupy that region for his sovereign and friend, Louis XIV, Le Grand Monarque. Early in 1682 he reached what the recorder of that expedition calls “the divine river, called by the Indians Checagou.” With him was that picturesque figure Tonti, “the man with the iron hand”—and his artificial member was no tougher and more enduring than his iron heart.

February 6, 1682, the expedition reached what they called “the River Colbert,” and six leagues lower they passed the mouth of the Missouri. There they registered the first protest against the St. Louis water supply; for that stream, they said, “is full as large as the River Colbert, into which it empties, troubling it so that from the mouth the water is hardly drinkable.” The Indians entertained him with the fiction that by going up the Missouri ten or twelve days he would come to a mountain, beyond which was the sea with many ships.

La Salle was the man who put the French into the Mississippi Valley, and thus gave them possession of the two finest regions in North America,—the whole watershed of the St. Lawrence, including the Great Lakes, and the whole watershed of the Mississippi. How many different craft have followed after his canoes,—a keel boat containing Aaron Burr and his misfortunes; a flat boat, with Abraham Lincoln stretching his long arms over the steering oar; the Belle of St. Louis racing the Belle of Memphis, cramming sugar and hams into the furnace, and, just as she pulled abreast of her rival, blowing up in most spectacular style; and Porter’s gunboats, driving past Vicksburg and exchanging broadsides with the batteries on the heights! Little did La Salle know that he was opening up a highway for a nation not yet born!

ENGLISH CLAIMS

Where were the English all this time? Did their Indian friends tell them nothing about great rivers full of crocodiles, and crook-backed, woolly oxen, and mountains of gold? After 1664 they held the whole coast from the St. Croix River to the Savannah River; but it took them a long time simply to reach the edge of the Mississippi Valley. Two adventurous men, Thomas Batts, and the German, John Lederer, wormed their way through the confused mountains of western Virginia, and Batts reached the New River about 1671,—“a pleasing but dreadful sight to see, mountains and hills piled one upon another.” They took possession of “all the territories thereunto belonging” for his Majesty Charles II. Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania all had charters reaching west of the mountains; but they knew better than to try to pick up territory from under the lodge poles of the ferocious Iroquois. The English seemed to lack the discoverer’s spirit, which can be satisfied only, as the colored preacher puts it, “by unscrewing the inscrutable.” John Endicott thought he was as heroic as Marco Polo, when he went up the Merrimac River to Lake Winnepesaukee, and there cut his initials on a rock; and Governor Alexander Spotswood of Virginia felt very proud of himself when in 1716 he conducted a party of gentlemen on horseback across the mountains into the valley of the Shenandoah, which was still a long way from the Mississippi Basin.

The French riveted their claim on the Mississippi by sending out a colony in 1699, which soon after founded the town of New Orleans, on the high bluff fourteen feet above the sea level of the nearby Lake Pontchartrain. They made many settlements; such as Detroit, and St. Joseph, and Green Bay, Vincennes, Kaskaskia, and Natchez. They set up trading posts among the Indians; they buried lead plates along the banks of the Ohio River, bearing the arms of the king,—they had a clear claim to the two enormous river valleys.

What was a clear claim? The Indians thought they had a clear claim, and warlike tribes like the Iroquois and the Creeks fought for that conviction. The English claimed the Mississippi Valley because they wanted it, and took advantage of the four international wars of the eighteenth century to make that claim good by further right of conquest. After the second war, by the treaty of Utrecht, in 1713, the first territory was clipped off from the French possessions; Acadia (Nova Scotia) passed to the English, and with it they acquired whatever the French claims had been to Newfoundland and Hudson Bay. At the end of the third war, in 1748, they were holding Louisburg; but gave it back. Then in 1754 came the great struggle of the French and Indian War, in which the English attacked the French on the upper Ohio, on Lake Ontario, at Louisburg, and finally at Quebec, all with triumphant success. The Canadian French were outnumbered five or six times to one in America, and their home government had its hands full with European and naval wars, and could not help them.

FRONTIER WARFARE

All this fighting was not according to the nice, formal, observe-the-laws-of-war methods, such as are now followed between civilized nations: it was more like a campaign in the Balkans, or the amenities of the Zulus in Africa. Europeans were not particularly gentle in their warfare. The early colonies were planted when the Thirty Years’ War was raging in Germany, a war in which the unoffending peasants expected both sides to rob them of their little property, and then to torture them because they had no more to give. The Indians were not the only race that found pleasure in inflicting awful suffering on other human beings. The cultivated English colonists and the French trappers and hunters were not above taking scalps on occasion; and, though they did not torture their prisoners, allowed their Indian allies to indulge themselves in that amusement.

The French were better wood fighters than the English, and throughout these struggles had a disagreeable habit of raiding English settlements. Twice they captured villages within a day’s march of sacred Boston. Their most spectacular achievement was the raid upon Deerfield in 1704, upon which an epic poem might be written. Depict the French and Indians stealing two hundred miles through the frozen wilderness; the Puritans in Deerfield trusting to their stockade; the sudden dash at dawn; the shots, cries, screams; the Indians chopping away with their hatchets at Parson Williams’ front door, till they made a loophole through which to fire at the family; the file of captives quickly marshaled for the terrible northward trail; the valiant little band from Hatfield pursuing the Indians, many times their number, and getting a bad licking; the wrath and fear of all New England at this appearance of the fearful enemy!

The people of Haverhill, Massachusetts, have put up a statue to a militant woman named Hannah Dustin, who, when carried away a captive, had the sweet thought to brain half a dozen of her captors, and so get home again with her children. Had there been more Hannah Dustins, there would have been fewer French raids!

In all these wars the English colonists excelled as fighting seamen. We may still be proud of William Phipps and his levy of colonial forces, who took Port Royal in 1690. Who shall envy him his well earned title of Sir William, and his fair brick house on Green Lane, Boston? Think of the New England men, aided by a small British fleet, sallying out in 1745 to attack Louisburg, the proudest fortress in the western world,—laying siege to it, digging trenches before it, complimenting it with bombshells, and compelling it to surrender! That was worth a score of Deerfields!

The world has agreed to give the palm of picturesqueness in warfare to the capture of Quebec in 1759 by Wolfe’s English fleet and army. Modern critics tell you that nothing could be easier; that anybody can make his way up the steep footpath in Wolfe’s Cove. But Montcalm, the French commander, as brave a man and as skilled a warrior as you could find, did not think it likely that a British army would find its way to the Plains of Abraham at the top. Still, he realized, when his little army came out of the strongly fortified town, and offered battle, that the French empire in America was at stake. The battle of Quebec was a stage battle,—soldiers arriving in alarms and incursions, and both commanders fighting like heroes till they fell covered with wounds. Quebec was a battle that makes a man glad of being what he is, whether French or English.

Four years earlier the French took their chance to defeat an army and kill a British general. Somebody has said that it was a hard fate for a brave military officer to go down to history known only through “Braddock’s Defeat.” The trouble with Braddock was that he was an Englishman, bigoted, obstinate, know-it-all, but brave to his heart’s core; and his march up through the wild country was managed with great skill. Braddock was a good officer; for on that fateful day he recognized and gave responsibility to a better officer, young George Washington. The French had been on the point of fleeing from Fort Duquesne, and as a last desperate chance came out, faced the invader, and defeated him.

THE INDIAN’S FATE

“If the pitcher fall on the rock, the pitcher shall be broken; and if the rock fall on the pitcher, the pitcher shall be broken.” So runs the Eastern proverb, and it applies to the fate of the Indian throughout the wars of the French and English. Every time an Indian tribe fought with either side it was sharpening an arrow that would be directed against itself.

For a long time the Indian astutely played off one foreign nation against the other; but after the French were excluded the only Great Father left to the poor Indian was his Majesty King George III—God bless him! The French loved the Indians, in both a flowery and an actual way; but the English would neither protect them nor marry them. Hence the outbreak under Pontiac, after the Northwest had been turned over to England. He was one of the greatest of his race. He might have said, as one of his brethren did say to an Anglo Saxon potentate, “I am a man; and you are another.” This was one of the few attempts in America to combine the Indian tribes and to attack the whites all along the line. When Pontiac failed there was nothing for it but to yield.

Even the Iroquois gave in and learned to eat out of the hand of Sir William Johnson of Johnson Hall; and they made the treaty of Fort Stanwix with the English in 1768, generously giving lands they had never possessed. That was fatal for the Six Nations; for they got so addicted to Great Father George III that they stood by him when the Revolution broke out. That gave to Patriot General Sullivan the chance to march into their own country in 1779, and to break to pieces the only American third power that ever tried to stand neutral between the French and the English.

Editorial

When the plan of The Mentor Association was in its formative state a prominent educator said, “Your principle, ‘Learn One Thing Every Day,’ is good. Stick to it. Don’t give too much in a single number. There are four things that I regard essential to the success of your plan. They are: Make your matter simple, make it interesting, be sure that it is correct and authoritative, and last, don’t give too much at a time. The mental fare that you serve to your many readers should be frugal. If not, mental indigestion will follow.”

We have had that good advice in mind in all of our work. Some of our readers have asked us why we do not exhaust a subject in one number of The Mentor. Our answer is that, in no case, could we exhaust a subject in a single number, and, in most cases we would exhaust the reader. We give as much on any subject as will interest the reader, and as much as he can conveniently retain in mind.

Just in the way of illustration: In the issue of September 29th, “Beautiful Buildings of the World,” Professor Clarence Ward describes the Alhambra. Mr. Dwight L. Elmendorf also tells about this celebrated Moorish palace in the issue of September 15th. A large volume could be written on the Alhambra without exhausting all that is interesting in it. But a large volume would be more than most people would care to read. The bare facts about the Alhambra could be told in a brief encyclopedic article. But that would be dry and, to many, uninteresting. In The Mentor Mr. Elmendorf describes the Alhambra as an experienced traveler and observer sees it. Professor Ward, with the cultivated eye of a student of architecture, appraises the Alhambra as a beautiful building. Two well-informed men tell about the same subject, each from his own point of view. The result is a fuller and more satisfying impression. And later on, in considering the historic palaces of the world, the Alhambra may again be considered from another point of view.

In this way the light of information is brought to bear on a subject from various sides, and the reader is brought with fresh interest to the subject several times, and can view it in its different aspects. We want all the members of The Mentor Association to appreciate the breadth of this plan, for it will make clear to them the reason why some important subjects are at present merely touched upon in The Mentor. We want our members to know the plan that we are building up in a simple, constructive way, under the advice of the wisest educators. And we want our members to feel a share in this constructive work.

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