French Influence on the Mid-West

The French influence on the Middle West was "scarcely perceptible" despite their having been in the Mid-West from "the third quarter of the seventeenth century, when La Salle appeared on the Ohio and Marquette on the Mississippi, till a hundred years later, when the English took possession of the country to the east of the latter river." Their towns in "Upper Louisiana--Detroit, Kaskaskia, Cahokia, Vincennes, St. Genevieve, St. Louis, and a few others--[were] effectually isolated from the mother country, [...]. Nor was the French element which endured through the American pioneer period to contribute much of importance to cultural achievement. From the time of the earliest settlements, there had taken place in many quarters a process of assimilation to savage life. Unlike the English and their descendants, the French mingled easily with the Indians, usually maintaining friendship and social intercourse. The contrast between the backwoodsman of French descent and the pioneer of English stock affords an insight into two racial phenomena: the Frenchman, always more quick to adapt himself to his environment, succumbed to the charm of savage life; the Englishman, uncompromising and stolid, ended by conquering the wilderness. Intermarriage between French and Indians was common. And, as this process of amalgamation proceeded, the men of French descent became closely identified with the savages, not only in sympathies, but in their pursuits. [...] While the American settlers prospered, the French were generally dull and indolent, and, consequently, poverty-stricken and ill-conditioned. Discouragement, apathy, and wretchedness prevailed in the towns of the latter. [...] The economic failure of their towns was supposed by some to be partly attributable to their misfortunes under American rule; but their poverty at an earlier date, as well as during the period of American control, is shown by the nicknames which were given to several of them by the inhabitants themselves [...] St. Louis, for example was called Paincourt [short of bread]; and the neighboring village of Carondelet was known as Vide Poche [empty pocket]" (The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier, Vol. 1, Ralph Leslie Rusk, 6-8).

However, I would take exception to the point about lack of French influence. There may not have been any marked influence of French culture on the American in the 18th c., with the exception of the architecture of the houses in towns such as Vincennes, but the language of the Ojibwe, Ojibwemowin, took the French word for 'hello' and incorporated it into their language as boozhoo. Furthermore, French was usually the foreign language studied in many American high schools in the 20th c.   

11 August, 2021

Strange, troubling dream last night. I was wandering in a foreign landscape, aimlessly wandering. I was jabbering away in an unintelligible speech, a colloquy I was holding with myself and knew not even the gist of, for how could I? The words landed on deaf ears, my deaf ears, or the interlocuter's. It was not even my voice. For all I knew it could have been ojibwemowin. I reached a destination pointed out to me by a man with an exaggerated gesture in that direction. I wound up in a building like a hotel through the parking garage entrance. I darted by a man, as if I was a fish in an aquarium passing a fellow inmate, and so only got a glimpse of him, vaguely Filipino. There was an elevator and a long curving corridor, like the streets of Sacramento. I had been in this corridor before, in another dream. I got on the elevator fully knowing that I would not get anywhere. A man, an actor in Hollywood, whose name I have forgotten, was on the elevator. We got off it and I followed him through a dark lobby and headed towards the back. I gazed at his back, and then I woke up.

Dreams are like the pale cabbage butterflies flying against the windshield as I drove through the desert of southern California on the way to Phoenix, hundreds of them. On impact they disintegrated against the glass, leaving their chitinous ichor.