From the former fort the city of Erie, a grimy, busy manufacturing city,
has grown. The latter has produced only a village, on whose weed-grown
outskirts the ruins of a fort still look out upon the meadow where the
little stream called "French Creek" starts, first toward France, in its
two-thousand-mile journey to the gulf that lies in the other direction.
For twenty miles I followed the stream one day to where it became a part
of Celoron's river-in imagination calling the French back to its banks
again, but finding them slow to come, for that part of the valley seemed
not particularly attractive. It is a little farther down the lake that the
vineyards fill all the shore from the lake to the watershed. And in that
very country I have often wondered at the miracle which raised from one
bit of ground the corn and the pumpkin, and from another the vine and
filled its fruit with wine.
The one-eyed veteran, Legardeur de St. Pierre, the commander of Fort Le
Boeuf, asked Washington, in rich diplomatic sarcasm, to descend to the
particularization of facts, and the lithe figure disappeared behind the
snows of the mountains only to come again across the mountains in the
springtime with sterner questioning.
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