THE LACHINE RAPIDS
(CANADA)
DOUGLAS SLADEN
From St. Anne’s to Lachine is not such a very far cry, and it was at Lachine that the great La Salle had his first seigniory. This Norman founder of Illinois, who reared on the precipices of Fort St. Louis the white flag and his great white cross nearly a couple of centuries before the beginnings of the Metropolis of the West, made his beginnings at his little seigniory round Fort Remy, on the Island of Montreal.
The son of a wealthy and powerful burgher of Rouen, he had been brought up to become a Jesuit. La Salle was well fitted for an ecclesiastic, a prince of the Church, a Richelieu, but not for a Jesuit, whose effacement of self is the keystone of the order. To be one step, one stone in the mighty pyramid of the Order of Jesus was not for him, a man of mighty individuality like Columbus or Cromwell, and accordingly his piety, asceticism, vast ambition, and superhuman courage were lost to the Church and gained to the State. So says Parkman....
THE LACHINE RAPIDS.
THE LACHINE RAPIDS.
THE LACHINE RAPIDS.
His seigniory and fort—probably the Fort Remy of which a contemporary plan has come down to us—were just where the St. Lawrence begins to widen into Lake St. Louis, abreast of the famous Rapids of Lachine, shot by somany tourists with blanched cheeks every summer. I say tourists, for, as I have said before, there is nothing your true Canadian loves so much as the off-chance of being drowned in a cataract or “splifficated” on a toboggan slide. It is part of the national education, like the Bora Bora, or teeth-drawing, of the Australian aborigines. The very name Lachine breathes a memory of La Salle, for it was so christened in scorn by his detractors—the way by which La Salle thinks he is going to get to China. A palisade containing, at any rate, the house of La Salle, a stone mill still standing, and a stone barrack and ammunition house, now falling into most picturesque and pitfallish decay—such is Fort Remy, founded nearly two centuries and a quarter ago, when England was just beginning to feel the invigorating effects of a return to the blessings of Stuart rule. This was in 1667, but La Salle was not destined to remain here long. In two years’ time he had learned seven or eight Indian languages, and felt himself ready for the ambition of his life: to find his way to the Vermilion Sea—the Gulf of California—for a short cut to the wealth of China and Japan,—an ambition which resolved itself into founding a province or Colonial Empire for France at the mouth of the Mississippi, when he discovered later on that the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico and not into the Gulf of California.
We cannot follow him in his long connection with the Illinois Indians and Fort St. Louis. We must leave him gazing from the walls of his seigniory across the broad bosom of Lake St. Louis at the forests of Beauharnais andChateauguay (destined afterwards to be Canada’s Thermopylæ) and the sunset, behind which must be a new passage to the South Seas and the treasures of Cathay and Cipango—the dream which had fired the brain of every discoverer from Columbus and Vasco Nuñez downwards.
Nowadays Lachine suggests principally the canal by which the rapids are avoided, the rapids themselves, and the superb Canadian Pacific Railway Bridge, which is a link in the realization of La Salle’s vast idea. Hard by, too, the St. Lawrence opens out into the expanse of Lake St. Louis, dear to Montreallers in the glowing Canadian summer. Seen from the bank, the rapids are most disappointing to people who expect them to look like Niagara. Seen from the deck of the steamer which runs in connection with the morning and evening train from Montreal, they make the blood of the novice creep, though the safety of the trip is evinced by the fact that it is no longer considered necessary to take a pilot from the neighbouring Indian village of Caughnawaga. It is said that, if the steamer is abandoned to the current, it is impossible for her to strike, the scour being so strong; certainly, her engines are slowed; she reels about like a drunken man; right and left you see fierce green breakers with hissing white fillets threatening to swamp you at every minute. Every second thud of these waves upon the sides convinces you that the ship is aground and about to be dashed to pieces. There seems absolutely no chance of getting safely out of the boiling waters, which often rush together like a couple of fountains. Yet, after a few trips, you know that the Captainis quite justified in sitting in his easy chair and smoking a cigarette all through it. It is admirably described in brief by Dawson: “As the steamer enters the long and turbulent rapids of the Sault St. Louis, the river is contracted and obstructed by islands; and trap dykes, crossing the softer limestone rocks, make, by their uneven wear, a very broken bottom. The fall of the river is also considerable, and the channel tortuous, all which circumstances combined cause this rapid to be more feared than any of the others.
“As the steamer enters the rapids the engines are slowed, retaining a sufficient speed to give steerage way, and, rushing along with the added speed of the swift current, the boat soon begins to labour among the breakers and eddies. The passengers grow excited at the apparently narrow escapes, as the steamer seems almost to touch rock after rock, and dips her prow into the eddies, while the turbulent waters throw their spray over the deck.”
On the Cars and Off(London, New York and Melbourne, 1895).
On the Cars and Off(London, New York and Melbourne, 1895).