_ Again the swift coureurs de bois, half-savage in their
ambassadorship of the woods, follow the traces of the most ancient road-
makers, the buffalo and deer, and the voyageurs carry their boats across
the portage places. Again the _Griffin_--the winged lion of the lakes--
flies from Niagara to the island in Green Bay, France's precursor of the
million-tonned commerce of the northern seas, but sinks with her cargo of
golden fleece in their blue waters. Again Marquette, the son of Laon,
beholds with joy unspeakable the mysterious "great water," and yet again,
La Salle stands by the lonely sea and cries his proclamation toward the
limitless land.
And, seeing and hearing all this again, we have seen a land as large as
all Europe emerge from the unknown at the evocation of pioneers of France
who stood all or nearly all sooner or later in Paris within three or four
kilometres of the very place in which I sit writing these words. Carder
gave to the world the St. Lawrence River as far as the Falls of Lachine;
Champlain, his Recollet friars and Jesuit priests and heralds of the woods
added the upper lakes; and Marquette, Joliet, La Salle, Tonty, Hennepin,
Radisson, Groseilliers, Iberville, Bienville, Le Sueur, La Harpe, the
Verendrye--father and sons--and scores of other Frenchmen, many of
forgotten names, added the valley of the river of a hundred thousand
streams, from where at the east the French creek begins, a few miles from
Lake Erie, to flow toward the Ohio even to the sources of the Missouri in
the snows of the Rockies--"the most magnificent dwelling-place"--again to
recall De Tocqueville, "prepared by God for man's abode; the valley
destined to give the world a field for a new experiment in democracy and
to become the heart of America.
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