The French in the Heart of AmericaFinley, John H. (John Huston)
History
The French in the Heart of America
Finley, John H. (John Huston)
Canada -- History -- To 1763 (New France); French -- North America; Mississippi River Valley -- History
There were "two great commemorative monuments that arose to mark the depth
and permanence of the awe" which possessed all who shared the calamities
or witnessed the results of the Tartar migration. One was a "Romanang"--a
"national commemoration, with music rich and solemn," of all the souls who
departed to the rest of Paradise from the "afflictions of the desert"--and
the "other, more durable and more commensurate to the scale of the
calamity and to the grandeur of the national exodus," "mighty columns of
granite and brass," where the exodus had ended in the shadow of the
Chinese wall. The inscription on these columns reads:
By the Will of God,
Here, upon the Brink of these Deserts,
Which from this Point begin and stretch away
Pathless, treeless, waterless,
For thousands of miles, and along the margins of many
mighty Nations,
Rested from their labors and from great afflictions,
Under the shadow of the Chinese Wall,
And by the favor of Kien Long, God's Lieutenant upon
Earth,
The ancient Children of the Wilderness--the Turgote
Tartars--
Flying before the wrath of the Grecian Czar,
Wandering Sheep who had strayed away from the Celestial
Empire in the year 1616,
But are now mercifully gathered again, after infinite sorrow,
Into the fold of their forgiving Shepherd.
Hallowed be the spot forever,
and
Hallowed be the day--September 8, 1771!
Amen.
There have been many expositions of the fruits of the Mississippi Valley's
agriculture and manufacture and mining and thinking and teaching and
preaching and ministering, but there has been no general commemoration
with "music rich and solemn" of those who endured the "afflictions of the
wilderness," though the last of the pioneers will soon have departed to
his rest, for fourteen years ago it was officially declared that there was
no longer a frontier. But mighty columns not of man's rearing stand upon
the farther edge of that western valley, columns of rock rich with gold
and silver and every other precious metal, surmounted, some of them the
year through, with capitals of snow and lacking only the legend:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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