Читать книгу French Canada and the St. Lawrence - J. Castell Hopkins - Страница 7

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If the French sailors seeking new, unknown lands in far Cathay, or the French explorers planting roots in the soil of a vast new continent, more deeply and more firmly than they knew, had deliberately sought the most splendid setting in the world for dominion and settlement they could have found none greater than that of New France as it slowly grew around and beyond Quebec with the St. Lawrence at its feet. Cartier and Champlain and De Roberval, and the stream of French voyageurs and trappers, soldiers and priests, noblemen and gentlemen and peasants, who traversed the waters of the great river in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, saw no such scene as would be witnessed today with all its familiar sights and accompaniments of civilization and commerce. The greatness and the gloom, the grandeur and the grace, the sternness and the silence of the majestic river were as nature had produced them.

There were long miles of lofty cliffs surmounted by dark forests which echoed from time to time the wail of the wolf or the war-song of the savage; there were the icy blasts and more icy water, the fierce storms and white snow-clad shores of the river faced by men fresh from the sunny slopes of France; there were the marvelous and gloomy portals of the Saguenay, the varied scenery at the mouths of other great rivers as they poured from unknown inland reservoirs into the St. Lawrence; there was the exquisite beauty of the summer and autumn seasons when the shores revealed something of nature’s wooded charm and beauty and the river itself showed graces all its own, crowned by a solemnity and mystery which must have proved an inspiration of courage and strength to the early adventurer or explorer.

Gradually, as exploration and adventure, war and settlement, trade and mission effort, impressed themselves upon this land of mountain, forest and wilderness which lay on either side of the St. Lawrence, knowledge of its geographical and physical features came in limited form to the rulers and pioneers at Quebec and Montreal. It is, however, doubtful if they ever knew, with any exactness, the details which are possessed today. They would have deemed it impossible that the five great inland seas of which they caught glimpses or the shores of which they partially explored in birch-bark canoes, could have a total area of 94,660 square miles; that the vast waterway up which, in part, their tiny ships first sailed could traverse, from the western end of Lake Superior to the Gulf as it widened into the ocean, a distance of 2,384 miles; that the lesser rivers opening into the greater one could drain various lakes immense in themselves though small in comparison with the St. Lawrence system—the Saguenay 100 miles long and the St. Maurice 400 miles, draining Lake St. John; the Ottawa 750 miles long, draining Lake Timiskaming; the Richelieu, 75 miles in length, coming from Lake Champlain and the St. Francis, the Mississagi, the Nepigon, the Pigeon, and many more. To realize that the immense system of waterways which they were tentatively exploring contained more than one-half the fresh water in the world; to think of the Great Lakes as a Mediterranean Sea set in the midst of a continent with shores skirted only by parties of wandering Indians; to understand that all these vast bodies of water were united and were really parts of one river rising in a little many-named stream which fell into Lake Superior; to see into the dim future and find the St. Lawrence proving to a greater Canada what the Nile was to ancient Egypt; to dream of it as crowded with river, lake and ocean steamers carrying supplies for many millions of people and bearing on its bosom a tonnage of commerce greater than that of the equally far-off Suez Canal; would have been, indeed, to possess the qualities of a prophet greater than those of the birth-time of Christianity.

French Canada stood in early days merely as a geographical expression, which involved much or little as the tide of exploration and occupation, of French and English warfare, passed up and down the center and coasts of the continent. There was a time when French dominion reached across America and clasped hands with the Acadians, when marks of ownership and possession were planted down the Mississippi and Ohio Valleys to the Gulf of Mexico and the French of Quebec were brought into touch with the French pioneers of Louisiana. But that was New France glorified and, for a moment, almost attaining the heights of Richelieu’s imperial dream and Frontenac’s hope. Usually, in these periods of early struggle it included Quebec and Acadia and the main portion of the Ontario of today with an ill-defined and changing region which stretched for some distance into what are now the Central American States—a territory sometimes held and sometimes lost, but as to which hope was not abandoned until the final victory of the English on the Heights of Abraham.

The French Canada of the past century, the country which had grown out of its fluctuating conditions of pioneer settlement and warfare into one of settled boundaries and fewer external difficulties, was a region of 350,000 square miles and so remained until 1912, when the vast Ungava territory was added to it. It was bounded on the north by Hudson’s Bay, only accessible through a wilderness which has remained more or less unknown up to the present time, and by Ungava, of which much the same may be said; on the west by Upper Canada or Ontario; on the east and south by the River and Gulf of St. Lawrence, the Province of New Brunswick and the States of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine—touching on the extreme northeast the Labrador territory of Newfoundland. For 550 miles along the gulf and north side of the river, up to the mouth of the Saguenay, the country is mountainous, bold and rugged in outline with many rivers, and a scenery more picturesque than beautiful; for 200 miles from the mouth of the Saguenay up to the St. Maurice River and toward Lake Ontario there is, on the north shore, an alternation of mountain and lowland, of slighter elevations and undulating valleys, of beautiful scenery and rich agricultural resources. South of the river the heights and hills which skirt the shores from the Gaspé headland upwards resemble in appearance the Laurentian range to the north, but are further away from the river and leave room in modern days for delightful glimpses of towns and villages and a beautiful farming country.

The St. Lawrence comes down to the gulf under various names. From the little River St. Louis it pours through the great inland sea of Lake Superior and the St. Mary’s River, with its crowded canals, into Lake Huron; thence, in another outflow, through the St. Clair and Detroit Rivers to Lake Erie and from there by the Niagara River and its wonderful falls, to Lake Ontario. From Lake Ontario, for 750 miles, it rolls to the gulf and the ocean under its own historic name and is never less than a mile in width. As it broadens and deepens into beautiful lakes or narrows and shallows into restless rapids; as it sweeps past cliffs crowned with verdure or great natural ridges capped with dense forests; as these break frequently to reveal fertile valleys and a rolling country, or rise into rugged and yet exquisitely picturesque embodiments of nature such as the heights of Quebec; there comes the thought that here, indeed, is a fitting entrance to a great country, an adequate environment for the history of a romantic people, a natural stage-setting for great events and gallant deeds.

Though greater than any other Canadian river, the St. Lawrence was, and is, a natural type and embodiment of them all. Sweeping in its volume of water, sometimes wild and impetuous, never slow or sluggish, on its way to the sea; ever changing in its currents and rapids and waterfalls, its lakes and incoming river branches; passing through varied scenery yet always preserving in its course a degree of dignity which approaches majesty; it reveals a combination of volume and vastness, beauty and somberness which make it in more senses than one the father of waters on this continent—“the great river without an end,” as an Indian once described it to Cartier.

The gulf into which the river broadens is more or less a land-locked sea, deep and free from reef or shoal, running 500 miles from north to south and 243 from east to west. In its center lies the once lonely and barren Isle of Anticosti; not far from Gaspé Bay, two miles out at sea, lies La Roche Percé, a gigantic pile of stone with perpendicular walls forming, in certain conditions of the weather, a marvelous combination of colors outlined against the blue sky and emerald sea. In this rock there is now an opening broken by the unceasing dash of the waves; according to Denys there were at one time three great arches, and seventy years before his time Champlain stated that there was only one but that one big enough for a ship to sail through; in still earlier days Indian legends describe its connection with the shore.

Percé Village and Rock, Shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence

Let us at this stage look lightly at some of the geographical and associated conditions as we pass slowly up the St. Lawrence from its mouth, and try to see what manner of region this is which has witnessed so much of romance and has brought together and kept together the new and the old—the Europe of three centuries ago and the America of today. From Percé and its memories of a naval battle in 1776, when two American ships were sunk, we pass along a shore devoted with undying allegiance to codfish and possessing at Mount Ste. Anne one of the finest scenic views in eastern Canada. At Gaspé, the chief place in the Peninsula—the furthest point of Quebec on the south shore of the St. Lawrence—there are abundant salmon and fruitful inland fields. Here Cartier once landed, took possession of vast unknown regions for the King of France and erected a cross thirty feet high which flew the fleur-de-lis, also, as a mark of ownership; near here, Admiral Kirke defeated a large French fleet. Then comes Cape Gaspé with its towering rampart of sandstone, nearly 700 feet high, and many succeeding miles of rocky walls and lofty cliffs. Near Cape Chatte, another English and French naval fight took place, and near here, also, runs into the St. Lawrence the Matane River, famous for its trout and salmon, while the great river itself stretches thirty-five miles across to its northern shores.

Thence, one goes up the river to Tadousac, the ancient village on the north shore, which nestles at the black jaws of the Saguenay and seems unafraid of all the majesty and mystery of the scene, of all the weird tales and fables which centuries have woven around it, of the dark depths which go down into the bowels of the earth and of shores which are bleak, inaccessible and perpendicular walls of soaring rock. A little higher up on the other side of the St. Lawrence are Rivière du Loup and Cacouna—the latter a fashionable summer resort perched on a rocky peninsula many feet above the water. Back on the north shore is Murray Bay—the Malle Baie of Champlain, now famous for its fishing and bathing. Not far up the river, which here is fifteen miles wide, are the picturesque village and mountain of Les Éboulements with Isle aux Coudrés and its mediæval population out in the center of the river. As the modern traveler passes on up to Quebec City he realizes something of what scenery is in Canada. On the north, for a time, there is visible a region of splendid vistas, a country of volcanic origin where rocks and mountains seem to roll into one another and commingle in the wildest fantasies of nature’s strangest mood.

Then comes Cap Tourmente, towering 2,000 feet from the water’s edge, and other massed piles of granite jutting out into the river, with the Isle of Orléans green and beautiful in the sunlight, with the St. Lawrence jewel-bright and showing glimpses of the white curtain of Montmorenci Falls in the distance, with the naked, somber heights of the Laurentides to the north. Everywhere, indeed, along the north shore, from far down on the Labrador coast up to Cap Tourmente, there is this wall of mountains, like a sea of rolling rocks, cleft here and there by such recesses as Murray Bay or the Saguenay. Everywhere, also, are footprints of the early explorers. Here Cartier landed, there Champlain camped, here De Roberval is supposed to have disappeared forever between the wide walls of the Saguenay, there Pont-Gravé or Chauvin left traces of adventurous exploits.

At Quebec there looms up the sentinel on the rock which overlooks all the pages of Canadian history and still stands as the most picturesque and impressive city of the new world. Here, on one side of the mile-wide river stand the green heights of Lévis; on the other are the grand outlines of Cape Diamond, crowned with the ramparts of Quebec and now embodying age and power as the graces of the Chateau Frontenac represent modern luxury and business. In the neighborhood of this once famous walled city lie the Falls of Montmorenci and the historic shrine of Ste. Anne de Beaupré; a succession of villages typical of the life of the old-time habitants and redolent of mediæval Europe; ruins of famous chateaux embodying memories of history and politics, love and laughter, tragedy and crime.

Passing from Quebec up the river to Montreal, the mouth of the Chaudière is seen with its splendid falls in the distance and the valley through which Benedict Arnold marched his disastrous expedition to the hoped-for capture of Quebec. At Pointe-aux-Trembles, further on, there took place several encounters between French and English. Three Rivers stands at the mouth of the St. Maurice, which rises, with the Ottawa and the Saguenay, in a maze of lakes and streams hundreds of miles to the north. In the city lie varied historic memories running back to 1618 and including masses of legend and romantic tradition. Not far from here the St. Lawrence widens into Lake St. Peter and just above it the Richelieu pours its waters into the greater stream, and at this point stands Sorel where in 1642 a fort was built by M. de Montmagny.

Montreal, with its modern population of 500,000 people, rests at the meeting-place of the new and the old. It combines in itself the great and sometimes rival interests of church and commerce, the customs and methods of the English and French races, the streets and narrow passages of the past with the great financial thoroughfares and buildings of the present. It stands at a point where all the commercial and business ideals of English Canada meet and press upon the traditions, practices and policy of French Canada; it preserves itself by combining these varied interests and maintaining a center of wealth, commerce and transportation, while, so far as its French population is concerned, remaining devoted to racial instincts and loyal to one religious faith.

From this commercial metropolis of Canada, crowned by Mount Royal and faced by a distant view of other mountains on the American side, the St. Lawrence—crossed here by the Victoria Bridge, which was long thought to be an eighth wonder of the world—forms itself into rapids which must have caused tribulations and sorrow and many portages in pioneer days and which are now relieved by canals and chiefly utilized for the benefit of tourists. Here are the beautiful Cascade Rapids with waves flashing high over rocky masses; the Cedars, where close in shore the green foliage sweeps down to meet the turbulent waters; the Long Sault, which is the most strenuous and inspiring of all; the Galoups, where the water first awakens to the situation and begins to writhe and foam in an anger which grows with the rocks it feeds upon. Near the blue waters of Lake St. Francis lies the battlefield of Chateauguay where De Salaberry and his French Canadians defeated an American army; near Morrisburg, farther up the river, lies Chrysler’s Farm, the scene of another victory of Canadian volunteers and British regulars. Soon after this a stretch of forty miles is entered where rest the famous Thousand Islands of scenic history—in reality 1,800 of them—and here the river enters the Province of Ontario and soon comes to its home in Lake Ontario, where it loses identity in the vast water expansions of the center of the continent.

Around and about the other great rivers of the Province—streams which in volume of water and splendors of scenery might themselves rank with the historic rivers of Europe—there lies a varied country with traditions and records and memories which are attractive to the visitor, interesting to the student and important in the making of Canada. The Ottawa runs into Lake St. Louis—one of the many widened waters of the St. Lawrence—from the northwest and mixes its dark colors, drawn from the pine and fir-clad hills along its course, with the lighter blue of the greater river. In the old days of the French régime it was the chief path of the fur trade and the site of the future capital of Canada. Where Ottawa on the Ontario side and Hull on the Quebec side now join and merge into an important center of population and business the Iroquois and the Algonquins had many a hostile encounter. At this point another and better known Chaudière Falls pour over a great pile of rock and afford a picturesque background for the great city, while the river rolls on between the solid forest-crowned Laurentian hills, in many a rushing rapid, and with wide reaches containing varied islets. Today its chief traffic is lumber carried in great fleets of roomy barges; in the olden days it was known for the many French boatmen along its course, who inspired the famous Canadian boating song of Thomas Moore:

Faintly as tolls the evening chime,

Our voices keep tune and our oars keep time.

Soon, as the woods on the shore look dim,

We’ll sing at St. Anne’s our parting hymn.

Row, brothers, row! the stream runs fast,

The rapids are near and the daylight’s past.

For some distance the Ottawa is the boundary line of the two provinces; into it runs a wild and turbulent river called the Gatineau, which drains a great extent of country and possesses near its mouth seven miles of fiercely rushing rapids; La Lièvre, a little farther down, is a much smaller branch, yet it has a course of several hundred miles. On the Ottawa itself the next points are the well-known Chateau of Montebello and town of L’Orignal, with the beautiful mountain-girt Lake Comandeau in the distance running into the Ottawa through the River Kinonge. The historic Pass of the Long Sault, the lake of Two Mountains, the village of Rigaud, known for its place in Rebellion records, and Oka, famous for its modern Indians and an old-time Trappist monastery, follow, and then the river splits into three mouths and loses itself in the Father of Canadian Waters.

The Richelieu and the St. Francis run into the St. Lawrence on the south not very far below Montreal. Along the former river lie places historic in name and in fact, such as Varennes and Fort Chambly, Contrecœur and Verchères—reminiscent of the days when the mouth of this river was the Iroquois gateway and the Carignan-Sallières regiment guarded the approaches to Ville Marie or Montreal. Through the fertile and yet mountainous Eastern Townships—once the almost sole possession of English-speaking settlers—these two rivers carry life to the people and richness to the soil. Beautiful lakes abound—Memphramagog, Megantic, Brome, Massawippi and many another; magnificent mountain scenery is there, such as the Heights of Belœil, Yamaska, Mannoir and Boucherville; throughout a whole succession of counties in this region fertile soil and beautiful scenes, lakes and rivers, mountain heights and valleys—all seem mixed up in one attractive whole.

Along the north shore of the St. Lawrence, from Montreal to Three Rivers and the St. Maurice, is a country of settled, level, plain-like characteristics marked by many small towns and villages bearing the saintly nomenclature which so greatly interests American tourists and is so typical of French Canada and marked also by the long, narrow fields which are so characteristic of the habitants. Above the roaring Falls of La Tuque the country along the upper reaches of the St. Maurice was supposed only a few years ago to be a wilderness of little value—the home of lumbermen, Indians and trappers. As in the Lake St. John region (a sportsman’s paradise far north of the St. Lawrence and drained by the somber, silent Saguenay), the rapid development of recent years has found in all this country much of value in natural resources, in fertility and in commercial possibilities.

On the St. Maurice are the Shawinigan Falls, so remarkable for their beauty even in this country of cataracts, for the play of colors on the shifting waters, for the peculiar variations and complications of the road traversed by the boiling, foaming, furious river as it conquers the obstacles in its way. At and around Lake St. John there is a vast country covered with primeval forests—trackless, tangled woods which hold myriads of dainty lakes hidden in their midst and shelter varied forms of bird and animal life. Here roam the majestic moose and the proud caribou, here are stately solitudes and rippling waters, here are lofty mountains and all the charm of a magnificent unbroken forest. Into this glorious wilderness the railway had to come, but the scenery along its course is still characteristic of the country—still free from too much civilization. Lake St. John itself is a splendid inland sea of turbulent, saucy-looking, uncertain waters—peaceful and polished on the surface at one moment, stormy and savage at the next.

Around and below the City of Quebec there is one of the most beautiful and characteristic portions of French Canada. Ste. Anne de Beaupré, for its traditions and reputation and religious interest, deserves many pages of description and will certainly have some at a later stage. Here the whole country breathes peace and contentment; the history of past warfare and sanguinary Indian conflict seems inappropriate to such a region; the habitant lives a life which looks like a leaf from rural Normandy in some forgotten century. Much more might be said of many places and of myriad incidents in French Canada’s geography or record, but this chapter is only a summarized picture of conditions. Chicoutimi, the seat of a city at the mouth of the river of the same name, where it pours its waters into the Saguenay from Lake Kenogami, after a precipitous course of seven falls and a continuous series of rapids, might be mentioned. Much could be said of the beautiful Isle of Orléans opposite Quebec, or of the various smaller isles which dot the St. Lawrence up and down with spots of verdure—breaks in the vastness of water and sky and lofty, piled-up masses of rugged rock. Kamouraska, Rimouski, Bic, Matane and many other towns or villages along the shores of the St. Lawrence are picturesque and clad with a mantle of history or romance to those who delve deeply below the surface of things. Sherbrooke, in the Eastern Townships country, Lennoxville, Farnham and other places bring back memories of early days when the St. Francis was a waterway from New England to Quebec, while the deep chasm of the Coaticook winds in and out of a richly prosperous region.

Geologically this country of the French Canadian is of intense interest. It reaches back into the most ancient period of the world’s evolution; it was a later product of titanic changes and movements of the earth’s surface. The grinding, crushing flow of great masses of ice from the Arctic regions had potent force in creating the vast basin of the St. Lawrence; upheavals of a volcanic character are obvious around Montreal, are clearly marked in the Lake St. John region, are found in the Laurentian ranges; evidence of earthquakes comes to us from within historic ages. Of the mountains in the Eastern Townships country, where the elemental struggles of geological antiquity must have been violent beyond description, Jesuit records at St. Francis describe an earthquake of September 5, 1732, so powerful as to destroy a neighboring Indian village. The better-known disturbance of 1663 along the lower St. Lawrence lasted for months and resulted in continuous landslides and a series of convulsions. The St. Lawrence was said to have run white as milk for a long distance because of the hills and vast masses of sand which were thrown into it, ranges of hills disappeared altogether, the forests, according to an Indian description, became as though they were drunk, vast fissures opened in the ground, and the courses of streams were changed. The whole of the Mount Royal region and valley shows clear evidences of volcanic action.

These latter disturbances were, however, only episodes in geologic ages of formation; there are no signs of a continuing character. Forever, so far as finite vision can see, the mighty piles of the Laurentian and other ranges of this part of the continent will stand as memorials of still more mighty world-movements, as a somber environment for the history of the Indians and the early struggles of the French Canadian people, and as solemn witnesses of the civilization which has now taken possession of this inherited greatness and hopes in its own fleeting, fitful, fighting way to build upon and refine and cultivate nature’s splendid storehouse for its own purposes and the advancement of its people.