The Discovery of the Great West

By FRANCIS PARKMAN, Author of “ Pioneers of France in the New World,” etc. Boston: Little, Brown, & Co.

WHOEVER makes a sentiment or a thought spring up where none had been, merits the honor we are supposed to pay him who makes a stalk of wheat grow in a place wild before : we are not sure but he ministers to a higher need, and is entitled to a greater regard : at any rate it is with a grateful feeling that we view labors like those of Mr. Parkman in the field—if we ought not to say the prairie — of New World history. The area which he has brought under cultivation, and the thoroughness with which he has done his work, are both surprising; annals hitherto impossible to general knowledge or sympathy are cleared for our pleasure ; vast waste spaces of discovery and adventure are reclaimed from the dry local records and the confusion and contradiction of the original chroniclers, and made delightful to the mind. It is true that Mr. Parkman has dealt chiefly with the characters and actions of a race that lends itself kindlier than ours to the purposes of dramatic and picturesque narration ; but we are not the less to applaud his success or to thank him for his good work, because they were not achieved among the tougher and knottier fibres of our own annals. It would be difficult, upon any theory, to refuse to enjoy his books, and we should own to having found in this one the charm of a romance, if romances were not really so dull as to afford no fit comparison for any piece of veritable history not treating too exclusively of affairs of state. And the story of the “ Discovery of the Mississippi ” is almost wholly one of personal character and adventure, with a man of the grandest purposes for its hero and chief figure, while it is at the same time true to the general spirit of Louis Fourteenth’s magnificent era of civil and religious intriguing, unscrupulous ambition, corruption, and all kinds of violence and bad faith.

Mainly, the history is the account of the life and death in the New World of that wonderful Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle, who, to the many qualities of courage, endurance, and perseverance necessary for a career of discovery and adventure, added a certain harshness and coldness, an antipathetic hauteur, which made enemies of most men powerful enough to second his enterprises, would not let him gain the hearts of those under him, and forbade him to be the successful founder of a state or even a triumphant explorer. He was among the first to dream of the discovery of the Mississippi and an empire on its shores, but it was the priest Marquette and the trader Joliet who first saw the great river after De Soto. La Salle conceived the idea of a French-Indian state in the West, which should resist the invasions of the English and the Iroquois on one hand, and on the other bar the progress of the Spaniards ; but his plan was a failure, except in the small measure in which its execution rested upon his lieutenant Tonty, the one white man who cherished for him the unswerving admiration and devotion of the savages: provided finally with ships and men and arms from France for the ascent of the Mississippi, he was pursued by disaffection and envy and treachery, failed to strike the mouth of the river, and, leaving a wretched half of his followers to waste in Texas, started northward with the rest in search of the fatal stream, and before he could find it was miserably murdered by one of his men. Yet with all his defects, and in spite of his almost incessant defeats, La Salle rarely fails to inspire the reader with the sympathy which his comrades never felt for him ; and we see as they could not what a superb and admirable soul he was, — undejected by any calamity, and of steadfast and grand designs. “ He belonged,” as our author says, “ not to the age of the knight-errant and the saint, but to the modern world of practical study and practical action. He was the hero, not of a principle nor of a faith, but simply of a fixed idea and a determined purpose. As often happens with concentred and energetic natures, his purpose was to him a passion and an inspiration ; and he clung to it with a certain fanaticism of devotion. It was the offspring of an ambition vast and comprehensive, yet acting in the interest both of France and of civilization. .... In the pursuit of his purpose, he spared no man, and least of all himself He bore the brunt of every hardship and every danger; but he seemed to expect from all beneath him a courage and endurance equal to his own, joined with an implicit deference to his authority. Most of his disasters may be ascribed, in some measure, to himself; and Fortune and his own fault seemed always in league to ruin him. It is easy to reckon up his defects, but it is not easy to hide from sight the Roman virtues that redeemed them. Beset by a throng of enemies, he stands, like the King of Israel, head and shoulders above them all. He was a tower of adamant, against whose impregnable front hardship and danger, the rage of man and of the elements, the southern sun, the northern blast, fatigue, famine, and disease, delay, disappointment, and deferred hope, emptied their quivers in vain. That very pride, which, Coriolanuslike, declared itself most sternly in the thickest press of foes, has in it something to challenge admiration. Never, under the impenetrable mail of paladin or crusader, beat a heart of more intrepid mettle than within the stoic panoply that armed the breast of La Salle. To estimate aright the marvels of his patient fortitude, one must follow on his track through the vast scene of his interminable journeyings, those thousands of weary miles of forest, marsh, and river, where, again and again, in the bitterness of battled striving, the untiring pilgrim pushed onward towards the goal which he was never to attain. America owes him an enduring memory ; for in this masculine figure, cast in iron, she sees the heroic pioneer who guided her to the possession of her richest heritage.”

Next him in grandeur is his faithful friend Tonty, the Gallicized Italian, who held his fort in Illinois, and kept up the tradition of La Salle’s name and power among the wild tribes, while misfortune and malice were wronging both among his own countrymen ; but, besides Tonty and some of the missionaries, there are few among the distinctly drawn persons of the long tragedy which appeal favorably to us. The good Father Hennepin certainly does not; and no one, after Mr. Parkman’s study of his writings and character, can fail to recognize him as one of the idlest and most marvellous of liars. Indeed, Mr. Parkman has as great good luck with portraits of the rogues and desperadoes as with those of the heroes; and he is as forcible and graphic in depicting the squalor and misery of the life the adventurers found and led in the great unknown West, as the nobler aspects of it. Perhaps it is not possible or even desirable to restore a perfect image of the past; but all of Mr. Parkman’s books, while they cannot ease our consciences as to the way in which we have got rid of the Indians, leave the fondest sentimentalist without a regret for their disappearance. They were essentially uninteresting races in themselves, and became otherwise only through contact and relation with civilized men. For any merely æsthetic purpose, even, how much more useful are the coureurs de bois, the French deserters and settlers who took to savage life, than the savages themselves ! In this book Mr. Parkman paints the life of our Southern tribes in no more attractive colors than he has done that of the Iroquois ; though it is curious to note the difference of the two. The Indian as he was found southward grew more and more gregarious; dwelt in vast lodges holding many families, and in populous villages ; submitted himself to more despotic chiefs ; and approached the Mexicans in religion as well as in polity, by offering human sacrifices to his gods.

Those who are familiar with our author will justly expect from him an effective presentation of all great natural characteristics in the vast scene of his story. The descriptive passages all seem to us more than usually good, and there is an entire sympathy between them and the tone of the narrative. A certain feeling of desolation creeps over the reader in contemplating those pictures of idle wealth and unenjoyed beauty, which harmonizes perfectly with the sentiment produced by the spectacle of great aspiration and endeavor thwarted by means so pitiful and motives so base.