The river, seemingly sentient, and still French, as I have said, soon
swept away the site of the village outside the fort; and when the English
had begun to look upon this as their permanent headquarters in the
northwest--this fort, which Captain Pittman had reported to be the best-
built fort in America--the still hostile river rose one night, and with
its "resistless flood" tore away a bastion and a part of the river wall,
then moved its channel away, and left the fort a mile inland.
The magazine still stands, or did a little time ago when I visited the
site and found it nearly hidden by the trees, bushes, and weeds--all that
is visibly left of the old French domain--and not far away, hidden at the
foot of a hill, lies, as I have said, the village of Prairie du Rocher, "a
little piece of old France transplanted to the Mississippi" a century and
a half ago and forgotten.
It was on Champlain's cliff and beneath Cartier's Mount Royal that the
unequal contest for the possession of America ended, where it began--a
contest whose story, as Parkman says, in a sense demeaning his own great
contribution, "would have been a history, if faults of constitution and
the bigotry and folly of rulers had not dwarfed it to an episode.
Pages:
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189