Chateaubriand's rivers

François-René de Chateaubriand, c. 1790. Portrait by Anne-Louis Girodet

[Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois-Ren%C3%A9_de_Chateaubriand#/media/File:Fran%C3%A7ois-Ren%C3%A9_de_Chateaubriand_by_Anne-Louis_Girodet_de_Roucy_Trioson.jpg . Portrait from around the time of Chateaubriand's travels in America.]




On the first page of Atala (1801), Chateaubriand describes the once-enormous colony of Nouvelle-France:





La France possédait autrefois, dans l'Amérique septentrionale, un vaste empire qui s'étendait depuis de Labrador jusqu'aux Florides, et depuis les rivages de l'Atlantique jusqu'aux lacs les plus reculés du haut Canada.



Quatres grands fleuves, ayant leur sources dans les même montagnes, divisaient ces régions immenses : le fleuve Saint-Laurent qui se perd à l'est dans let golfe de son nom, la rivière de l'Ouest qui porte ses eaux à des mers inconnues, le fleuve Bourbon qui se précipite du midi au nord dans la baie d'Hudson, et la Meschacebé qui tombe du nord au midi, dans le golfe du Mexique.




[At one time France possessed, in North* America, a vast empire that extended from Labrador to the Floridas, and from the shores of the Atlantic to the remotest lakes of upper Canada.


Four great rivers, having their sources in the same mountains, divided these immense regions: the St Lawrence which debouches to the east in the Gulf of the same name; the river of the West which carries its waters into unknown seas, the Bourbon river which drains from south to north into Hudson Bay, and the Meschacebé which runs from north to south, into the gulf of Mexico.]




*




* l'Amérique septentrionale. "Septentrional" means northern or boreal; its derivation is from the seven stars of Ursa Major/The Plough/Big Dipper. A fairly rare word in English, but common in romance languages. Shakespeare uses it:

Thou art as opposite to every good
As the Antipodes are unto us,
Or as the south to the Septentrion.

(York to Margaret, 3H6 1.4)


*






Chateaubriand  pauses to explain that the last of these four rivers is the Mississippi, the opening scene of his romance.



The St Lawrence retains its name today. The "fleuve Bourbon" evidently means the Nelson River, which drains so much of Canada and the northern USA ; York Factory, at its mouth on Hudson Bay, was once named Fort Bourbon.



The "rivière de l'Ouest" completes the geographical symmetry. The only possible candidate would be the river now named the McKenzie River, which drains a large part of northern Canada into the NW Arctic Ocean. The Vicomte did know about it; he reviewed Alexander McKenzie's travel journals on their first publication in  July 1801, three months after the publication of Atala. But so far as the maps show, Nouvelle-France had never extended so far into north-west Canada as to reach the McKenzie basin.



But anyway, Chateaubriand was never too constrained by reality. What he wanted to suggest here was the four rivers of the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:10-14). [This idea seems to be buried deep in the religious feelings of humanity. The holy Mount Kailash in Tibet guards the headwaters to four great Asian rivers (the Indus, Sutlej, Bramahputra and Ganghara/Ganges).]  In his Atala Nouvelle-France is indeed a kind of Eden, with a dazzling profusion of nature and its own beautiful but too-innocent Adam and Eve.


[Readers of Martin Chuzzlewit may see the association of the mid-west with Eden in an altogether different light.]




In reality, the nearest we can come to Chateaubriand's mythical central mountains is the small city of Hibbing in St Louis County, Minnesota, founded in 1893, 45 years after Chateaubriand's death. Though at the modest elevation of 1,500 feet, it's a triple watershed,  so the rain that falls on  Hibbing runs variously into Hudson Bay, the Gulf of St Lawrence and the Gulf of Mexico.











The spirit of Chateaubriand's emphasis on rivers is right. The largely inland "empire" of Nouvelle-France, which surrounded the much smaller British colonies along the eastern seaboard, was the product of river-exploration. This opened up immense tracts of land to French control. But the control was more on the map than in reality. The total population of French emigrants was barely 10,000. They had, comparatively speaking, very good relations with the native Americans (who were encouraged to apply for French citizenship, on equal terms with native French); compared, that is, with the brutal attitudes of the British and Spanish colonists. I suppose a cynic might argue that the French colonists were respectful more through force of circumstance than their own enlightened attitudes.




At first the battle for control was a proxy war: the Iroquois, fur suppliers to British and Dutch colonies, seeking to wipe out the Algonquians, Hurons and others who traded with France. And when direct conflict came, in 1754-63, Nouvelle-France couldn't hold out against the much more populous colonies of the British. In the course of fifty years the whole "empire" was lost or ceded, the only remnant today being the tiny islands of St Pierre-Miquelon, just off the Newfoundland coast.