On the next day the commissioners walked about Buffalo (‘Pretty shops. French goods’) and slightly modified their first impressions of the Indians: ‘Some of them have a look of our peasants – with a savage tint however – a Sicilian tint. Not an Indian woman tolerable.’46 Their curiosity revived. Their first plan had been to go from Buffalo to Niagara, but they had a hankering for the wild, the untamed West, which had receded before them ever since they left Albany; and now on the dockside at Buffalo they found a small steamboat, the Ohio, bound for Detroit. Obeying an impulse which they had previously acknowledged to nobody but themselves, they booked a passage on her: it would only take a day or two, they were told.
It was an uncomfortable voyage. Nobody knew who they were, so for the first time in America they were treated with no more consideration than anyone else, let alone deference. It rained all the time, and Lake Erie was so large and turbulent that Tocqueville was seasick again. The journey took twice the time they had been promised (‘Quarrel with the captain’), but at last the weather cleared, and they approached Detroit in the afternoon of 22 July. Nearby, across the narrow eastern channel of the river, was the Canadian shore and the settlement of Fort Malden, looking, in Tocqueville’s opinion, like a Norman village. On the bank stood a British soldier, ‘in that uniform which the field of Waterloo has made so famous’ – a Scottish Highlander, kilt and all. On the water, to the left of the ship, was a birch-bark canoe with two naked Indians aboard, fishing; their skins were gaudily painted, and they had rings through their noses.47
Tocqueville was enchanted by this contrast between savagery and civilization, but he was not yet in a position to understand its tragic symbolism. The Indians and the Highlander were the doorkeepers of a ghost world, once living; what Richard White has taught us to call the Middle Ground.48 Its fate had been settled in the long wars waged in the forty years between the outbreak of the American Revolution and the battle of New Orleans; like its great forests it was condemned, and waiting for execution at the hands of the Yankee pioneers; but for a moment it could still be discovered, and Tocqueville had arrived at that moment. Detroit was the heart of the pays d’en haut, the back country of the former colony of New France; the region where, for nearly two centuries, empires, tribes and villages had bloodily rivalled each other for control of the trade in beaver fur; where peoples mingled and cultures changed each other; the domain of Onontio, as the Indians named the French governor of Quebec (they called themselves his children). In the next three weeks Tocqueville and Beaumont would visit some of the domain’s most important places: Saginaw, Sault Sainte-Marie, Michilimackinac, Green Bay; they travelled deep into the past, but they never lost the sense that they would soon return to the present, where the Middle Ground was doomed.
‘We were curious to see entirely savage country,’ said Beaumont, ‘to reach the farthest limits of civilization. We thought that there we could find some entirely barbarous Indian tribes.’ He did not yet realize that the influence of the Middle Ground, which was both an epoch and a region, had by now reached and transformed almost all the nations of North America, certainly all those which he had time to meet. ‘Furthermore, we wanted to see how newcomers in these very remote lands went about establishing themselves.’49 To themselves (and to us) their aspiration seems reasonable enough, but once again they discovered that on the frontier of settlement no-one could enter into the fine feelings of Romantic tourists. ‘You wanna see the woods? They’re right in front of you.’* To get the information they needed, they went to the land-office and pretended to be prospective settlers, or at least land-speculators.50 This created no surprise: more than 5,000 pioneers had already come through Detroit that summer, mostly heading westward towards the St Joseph river, which debouches into Lake Michigan. Few or none of them were yet heading northwards; so northwards Tocqueville and Beaumont would go. They decided to aim at Saginaw, some eighty miles north-by-north-west of Detroit, and on 23 July, having hired two horses and added very necessary mosquito nets and a compass to their other equipment, they set off. (Beaumont drew a spirited sketch of Tocqueville mounted, wearing a large straw hat and holding an Indian pipe – possibly a calumet.)51
They were away for a week. They broke their journey at Pontiac and Flint River (now the city of Flint), spent two nights at Saginaw, and returned as they came. During that time they saw plenty of the wild, wet woods; of settlers, of Indians, and of the prairie; but such a bald statement gives no idea of the significance of the trip to Tocqueville. For that we have to turn to his own account, Quinze Jours dans le Désert,* which he began to write up from his rough notes as soon as he could. Incomplete, and never finally revised, it is nevertheless the strongest expression of his Romanticism, and decisive evidence of his continuing development as a writer. Like the Voyage au Lac Oneida it is the same sort of thing as the Voyage en Sicile, but all superfluities have been dropped, the material is more tightly organized and, above all, the literary design is stronger and simpler. When it was finally published, after Tocqueville’s death, Sainte-Beuve commended it as, among other things, a corrective to the chateaubrianesque, ‘giving us, in very good prose, what Chateaubriand first rendered, in bold, sublime strokes, as poetry’,52 and that is certainly true: Tocqueville himself felt that Chateaubriand had painted the American forest in false colours, and tried to correct him;53 but today a reader is more likely to be struck by the degree to which Tocqueville himself attempts the sublime.
His central purpose, absolutely characteristic of his mind, is to describe and explain the three social groups that he encountered on the journey – Indians, traders and settlers, which he does with the precision, detail and quiet humour of a born observer; but the dominant trait of the piece is the travellers’ wonderment as they venture further and further into the forest. It is like the story of a dream, the more so as much of the description concerns travel at night. On the second day an Indian appeared from nowhere and loped along the trail at their heels, easily keeping up with the horses and never speaking, though sometimes smiling brilliantly. What on earth was he doing? He was carrying a fine gun; eventually a stray settler in the woods explained to them that it had probably been given to him by the English, for use against the Americans, and that the Indian was returning from the annual ceremony where such presents were bestowed, like the drunken Iroquois they had seen at Buffalo (in this way, it may be observed, the customs of the Middle Ground were still maintained). Night fell, ‘serene but freezing’. Tocqueville and Beaumont briefly lost each other, because Tocqueville could not help lingering beside a stream for a few minutes to enjoy the ‘sublime horror’ of the silent night-wood. Presently they came to a log-cabin where, instead of a watchdog, there was a bear on a chain; when they asked the settler for forage for their horses he went out and started mowing his grass by moonlight. Next day, as the faint trail plunged into the ever more silent and tangled forest, Tocqueville felt awed, as he had during a calm in mid-Atlantic. As the noonday sun shone down he heard a long sigh from deep among the trees, a distant, drawn-out, plaintive cry, the last effort of a dying wind. Afterwards everything round him sank back into a silence so deep, an immobility so complete, that he had to use one of his favourite phrases to describe its effect: his soul was pierced ‘by a kind of religious terror’. The dreamlike feeling is even more marked in the description of their arrival at Saginaw. At about midnight they emerged from the forest onto a wide dim prairie. Their Indian guide, whom they had taken on at Flint River, announced them with a wild howl, which was answered from a distance; five minutes later they found themselves on the banks of a river. Presently the silence was broken by a slight noise, and a dug-out canoe grounded at their feet, paddled by, it appeared, another Indian; but as Tocqueville stepped into the canoe the boatman warned him to be careful – not only speaking in French, but with a Norman accent. Tocqueville could hardly believe his ears, and the effect was even odder when, as the pirogue moved back across the water (Tocqueville’s tired horse swimming behind) Ch
aron began to sing:
Entre Paris et Saint-Denis
Il était une fille ...
The boatman was a bois-brûlé, a half-breed: Tocqueville had met his first child of the pays d’en haut. As he waited for Beaumont the full moon began to rise, the waters of the river sparkled, and he could not see the paddle of the black canoe as it approached again: it suggested a Mississippi alligator coming to seize its prey.54
It was all deeply thrilling, to be cherished as a lifelong memory. They were back in Detroit by 31 July, oppressed by the thought that it was now exactly a year since the revolution which had uprooted them. They remembered the din and smoke of the street-fighting; as a result the forest seemed more silent and sombre than ever. They could not help wanting to explore further. They discovered that a pleasuresteamer, the Superior, was about to set off for Lake Michigan and that there were still a couple of berths which they might occupy. Appeasing their consciences by a hasty visit to the local jail, where they found nothing of interest, they booked themselves aboard and were off on another excursion. This one lasted for nearly a fortnight.
The Superior was enormous, carrying 200 passengers. It is possible to think that, up to this point, Beaumont and Tocqueville had been rather casual about the new technology which was bearing them so rapidly about so much of America, but such an attitude was no longer possible when the Superior, with them on board, became the first steamboat to reach the gate of the upper lakes, Sault Sainte-Marie and Michilimackinac. The Indians were stupefied when they saw her, their canoes swarmed about her sides on the water. Beaumont sympathized: ‘even for a European these great steam-driven vessels are undeniably among the marvels of modern industry.’55 The Frenchmen found their company somewhat mixed, but their charm and good manners veiled their reserve: they were thought delightful, especially by the ladies, whom Beaumont deemed unenticing. Miss Clemens, at forty, was too old, Miss Thomson too silly, and Miss Macomb was in the charge of an uncle who took against our friends. Nevertheless, when the Superior got to Sault Sainte-Marie, Tocqueville, Beaumont and the ladies ventured in a canoe onto Lake Superior, and no-one was too proud to dance on deck when the ship’s band struck up in the evenings. In this way Beaumont came to hear the ‘Marseillaise’ for only the second time in his life – the first had been during the July Days. For the oddity of the thing he got out his flute and played variations on an air by Rossini against the background of a beautiful starry night, the vast silent forest, and the fires of an Indian encampment ashore.56
It will be seen that the atmosphere on the Superior was not that of Saginaw, but still there were plenty of opportunities for serious study. A Catholic priest, Father Mullon, on his way to controvert the Presbyterians at Michilimackinac (‘All the sects agree in hating Catholics, but the Presbyterians are the only ones who are violent’) poured forth his pride in the Indians he had converted, but his most important contribution to the commissioners’ education was his insistence on the value of completely disentangling the Church from the State. He conceded that Catholic priests in Europe thought differently, but if they came to America, he said, they would soon change their minds. The less that priests had to do with politics, the greater was the power of religious ideas. This chimed with what they had been told by every other priest they had met in America, and Beaumont, remembering the disastrous results of the alliance between throne and altar in France, was tempted to agree with them.57
The friends were penetrating deeper and deeper into Indian country, and at every port of call learned something more about the natives. Their respect, liking and pity for the Indians steadily increased. At Fort Gratiot on the Saint Claire river Tocqueville witnessed a war-dance, and was rather shocked: ‘Handsome men. Dancing to pass the time and earn some money. We gave them a shilling [sic]* ... Horrible to see. What degradation’; but a few days later he was on the easiest terms with a Chippewa chief who greatly admired Tocqueville’s waterproof gun: ‘The fathers of the Canadians [i.e. the French] are great warriors!’ Tocqueville in return admired two feathers which the chief wore in his hair: when he was told with a smile that they had been won for killing two Sioux he begged that he might be given one to show in the country of the great warriors, a request immediately granted with a mighty handshake.58 Tocqueville and Beaumont sadly gave up any idea of reaching a country untouched by European civilization, though they snatched eagerly at rumours of happy hunting-grounds in the far West, where the Indians still used bows and arrows and where there was an extraordinary abundance of game, and of Prairie du Chien on the Mississippi, ‘a place considered as neutral territory where the different nations meet in peace’ (a last relic of the Middle Ground). But although the tribes did not, apparently, foresee their ruin, it was inevitable.59 Something else was inevitable too. Tocqueville wrote to his father:
The immense stretch of country which we have just travelled through offers no remarkable sights, mere plains covered with forest. This lake without a single sail upon it, its shore as yet showing no trace of human presence, the eternal forest which surrounds it, all that, I assure you, is not just great in poetry. It is the most extraordinary sight I have ever seen in my life. These lands which are, as yet, nothing but one immense wood, will become one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world. I can say so without being in the least a prophet. Nature has done everything ... Nothing is lacking but civilized man; and he is at the door.60
It was a visionary moment, but yet again Tocqueville succumbed to distraction. Among the fascinating details that he and Beaumont learned about the pays d’en haut was the story that still, even in the most distant wildernesses, Indians automatically greeted Europeans by saying Bonjour.61 The friends were overwhelmed by this and all the other traces they were encountering of the former French empire in North America. It was something quite unexpected. Since 1763, when the treaty of Paris ceded Canada to the British, the metropolitan French had known nothing and wanted to know nothing of the colonists whom they had abandoned. Tocqueville and Beaumont had been no different from anyone else. But ever since they reached Saginaw they had been coming across evidence of what had been – and they were beginning to feel the pull of what still was – the thriving French community of Lower Canada. They became ever more eager to go there.
First they had to return via Detroit to Buffalo, where on 17 August they found letters waiting for them; then they set out again immediately for Niagara, with somewhat impaired enthusiasm. Tocqueville, replying to his mother, assured her that he was delighted to hear from her so often; writing tired her, so ‘your letters are doubly dear to me, knowing what they cost you.’ But at Buffalo they had also found European newspapers, from which they gathered that civil war was perhaps about to erupt in France, or at least a pro-Bourbon rising in the Vendée; as if that were not bad enough in itself, there was a personal anxiety as to what such young hotheads as Kergorlay and Hippolyte de Tocqueville might be up to.62 Tocqueville was somewhat distressed and ashamed to be admiring a waterfall in America when so many of his friends might be running into trouble at home. On the other hand, what a waterfall! They reached Niagara at night, and though they could see nothing, they had heard its thunder from miles away. And when on the morrow, a day of fine weather, they went to look, they were, said Tocqueville, at a loss for words, though like everyone who says that they poured out their descriptions. The falls, said Tocqueville, surpassed everything that Europeans had written about them. This was another hit at Chateaubriand: Beaumont explicitly dismissed François-René’s description as inadequate, except for his assertion that the great fall was ‘une colonne de l’eau du déluge’. Tocqueville was especially struck by the great rainbow in the spray over the Horseshoe Falls, and still more by its appearance at night, in the light of the moon. He stood on a pinnacle above the chasm, water roaring all round him, and reached the highest point of his Romanticism: ‘Nothing can equal the sublimity of the view from that point’ except possibly the dangerous venture behind the fall, when the whole river seeme
d to be plunging down onto his head. But his peculiar angle of observation did not desert him. He wrote to his friend Dalmassy, another colleague of the Versailles parquet, that if he wanted to see Niagara in its glory he must hurry: in less than ten years the Americans would be putting a sawmill at its foot. For his part, Beaumont was called back to earth by the unwelcome attentions of Miss Clemens, their companion of the Superior: she dogged his footsteps until he was driven into actual incivility in a vain attempt to get rid of her. He thought she should be called ‘la folle de Niagara’.63
On to Canada, where they spent some ten days. This visit was the last and most complete distraction from the purposes of their journey, whether penitentiary or political. In the end it never yielded more than a note to the Ancien Régime,64 and need not be chronicled at any length; but it vividly illustrated one aspect of Tocqueville and Beaumont’s And indeed, Niagara Falls are nowadays chiefly used for hydro-electric power. characters. They were delighted to find French people doing so well in the New World, even if they were burdened by a foreign yoke; and they did all they could to unearth evidence that one day soon the Canadiens would rise up successfully against British rule. By now they were practised observers, and the account of Canada in their letters and notes is full of life and interest; but the predominant impression left is that they had fallen in love with the country and made sure of seeing everything in the light that best supported their infatuation.
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