Chapter 10

The Spanish invasion of America, now, as we recall its story, big with pathos and remorse, the pathos predominating, now that the last rag of a province has been torn from their feeble hands,--the evacuation of Havana, with its sorry pomp of exhuming Columbus's dust, is one of the saddest sights history has called men to look upon. Columbus, a foreigner, gave Spain a New World; and foreigners of still another blood have taken away what by right never belonged to Spanish sovereignty. Just as this fate is, we can but feel the immense pathos of the Spanish evacuation of the New World. French discoverers hugged the rivers, as by some deep affinity. Spaniards, conversely, made march without thought of riverways. They were accustomed to deserts in their own land, and feared them not in a remote hemisphere. They swarmed in the desert. Nothing daunted them. Spain's best blood poured into the New World, a fact which doubtless accounts, in part, for the devitalized energies and genius of this mother country of their birth and hopes and initiative. "Florida" is a Spanish tide-mark. "St. Augustine" is a gravestone of history, marking the mound where lies the dust of the first permanent colony planted in America. The Spaniard headed toward the southern provinces of America, as the Englishman to the east, and the Frenchman to the north and central provinces. Spain held southward. Though the colony of Florida was retained till, in the year 1819, the subtle diplomacy of John Quincy Adams added this peninsula of flowers to the Union of States, it had no aggressive value as a basis of discovery or colonization. The base of Spanish operations was Mexico, the fair land of their conquest. Spain exploited her energies in Mexico and Peru. She was mad with a lust for gold. Her galleons made these lands bankrupt. But Spaniards dared to lose themselves in desert or forests. The discovery and conquest of Peru is mad with turbulent courage and adventure. This we can not deny; and the discovery of the Amazon by a brother of Pizarro is a story to thrill a sluggard into a sleepless waking. We see these heroic days, and forgive much of Spanish misrule and avarice. De Soto, crowding through jungles of undergrowth and miasms, through tribes of hostile men, though stimulated by the wild lust for gold, is for all a brave chapter in the world's biography; and to see him buried in the massive river he discovered is to make other than the tender-hearted weep. To see on the map of the Union "Llano Estacado" is to give, as it were, the initials of heroic names. Spain, which staked these plains, will walk across them no more. They did this service for others. Were they fine-fibered enough to feel these losses, the sorrow we feel for their exit would be intensified; but their centuries of misrule have certified to their all but utter lack of any finer sentiment or sense of high responsibility. Give them what honor we may. Recall their departed glory, and let it light the sky, if only for a moment, like a flash of lightning. Spaniards were little less given to naming their settlements "Saint" than the French. From Mexico, up the long Pacific Coast, they affixed names which will remain perpetually as the sole memorial that once these banished dons held sway in the United States. These names cluster in the Southern United States, touching immediately on their chief dependency, Mexico; but are still in evidence farther away, though growing scanter, as footprints in a remote highway. Rio Grande, Del Norte, Andalusia, and the charming name affixed to a charming mountain range, Sierra Nevada,--how these names rehabilitate a past! Nevada and Andalusia! One needs little imagination to see the flush that gathered on the dusky cheek of the old Spanish discoverer when he calmed, in part, his homesickness by giving his wanderings the name of the dear home from which he came, and kindled his pride into a fire, like the conflagration of mountain pines, by telling the New World the names of his ancestral land. But his "San" and "Santa" are frequent as tents upon a battle-field when the battle is spent. "Corpus Christi"--how Spanish and Catholic that is! San Antonio, Santa Fe, Cape St. Lucas. In Florida: Rio San Juan, Ponce de Leon, Cape San Blas, Hernando, Punta Rosa, Cerro de Oro, are indicative of the growing communities in that peninsula after the invasion located at St. Augustine. But of all the parts of the United States, New Mexico is most honeycombed with Spanish locatives. Passing that way, one seems not to be in America, but in Spain. Spain is everywhere. Their names are here strewn thick as battle soldiers sleeping on the battle-field: Las Colonias, Arayo Salado, Don Carlos Hill, Cerillos, Dolores, San Pambo, Canon Largo, Magdalene Mountains, San Pedro. Thence these names creep up into Utah, though there they are never numerous: Santa Clara, Escalante Desert, Sierra Abaja; and farther north, reaching to all but hand-clasp with the French Du Chasne River, is San Rafael River. St. Xavier, San Miguel, Santa Monica, Santa Cruz, San Francisco, San Gabriel,--can you not in these names hear the Spanish languishing speech and see the Jesuit pioneer? Eldorado, Sacramento, El Paso, Los Angeles, are footprints of the Spanish discoverer. And Cape Blanco, in far-away Oregon, probably represents the farthest campfire of the Spanish march. In his area the don was indefatigable. De Soto marched like a conqueror. Coronado found his way into Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado. La Junta, in Kansas, may mark the subsidence of the wave of Spanish invasion, and Kansas was part of the kingdom of "Quivera." Eugene Ware, the Kansas poet, who, under the _nom de plume_ of "Ironquill," has written graceful and musical poems, has told of Coronado's excursion into this now populous and fertile region:

QUIVERA

"In that half-forgotten era, With the avarice of old, Seeking cities he was told Had been paved with yellow gold, In the kingdom of Quivera--

Came the restless Coronado To the open Kansas plain, With his knights from sunny Spain; In an effort that, though vain, Thrilled with boldness and bravado.

League by league, in aimless marching, Knowing scarcely where or why, Crossed they uplands drear and dry, That an unprotected sky Had for centuries been parching.

But their expectations, eager, Found, instead of fruitful lands, Shallow streams and shifting sands, Where the buffalo in bands Roamed o'er deserts dry and meager.

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 space. 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 wishing 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 compass, 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 shoreless 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 noblest 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 shore 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 Washington 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 (pronounce 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 Assumption, 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, butte, 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 shifting 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, assertions 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, Middlesex, New Kent, Sussex, Southampton, Surrey, Isle of Wight, King and Queen, Anne, Hanover, Caroline, King William, Princess, Prince George, Charles City, are names which tell of sturdy 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, Essex, 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, Middlesex, 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 Massachusetts 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 passed 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 illustrate 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.