- PRESIDENT PETER A. DEY (introducing Dr. Reuben Gold Thwaites): Those of you who listened two years ago to the speaker of to-night, and heard the story of the Indian woman who led the Lewis and Clark Expedition through the passes, valleys, and gorges formed by the streams that make the headwaters of the Missouri and of the Columbia, have learned something of the romance of the Rocky Mountains. To-night you have the opportunity to learn something of the romance of the Mississippi Valley. Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to introduce Dr. Reuben Gold Thwaites, Superintendent of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin. THE ROMANCE OF MISSISSIPPI VALLEY HISTORY We may as well acknowledge that only the few read history as a recreation. To the world at large, the picture of the Past will always be dim, save as illumined by the masters of romance. Their presentation is often false in portraiture, incident, perspective facts being more or less distorted to suit the whim of the artist; but, although lacking in accuracy, their tableaux are popularly accepted as true, and so vividly painted are they that historians seek in vain to correct them. The history that lives in our memory, that permanently appeals to our imagination, is in large degree the history portrayed by our novelists and poets. Scotland lives for us in that region of fancy depicted by Burns, the Waverly Novels, and "Kidnapped." Ireland would practically be unknown save for Lever, Moore, and Lover. England will ever be the stage whereon walk the characters of Shakespeare, Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray, Bulwer-Lytton, Wordsworth, and Tennyson. Our France is the land of Dumas, Hugo, Balzac, and Zola. It is the fashion for most historians, devotees as they are of scientific exactness, to decry this tendency of the masses to take their chronicles in the sugar-coated form; they declare that history warped to the purposes of romance is worse than no history at all. But I, for one, am somewhat inclined to differ with my sober-minded colleagues. I see great value in romance as a hand-maiden of history - provided always that the romancer be honest, and adept at his craft. If forsooth John and Mary take not kindly to the history of the historians, then am I quite content that history should serve as a framework for the romance that they will accept. Historians there are, such as Motley, Prescott, Parkman, Gibbon, Macaulay, Guizot, who with lofty imagination and consummate art reconstruct the stage of history, re-dress and re-people it, so that one may contemplate as through an open window the pageant of the Past. The clientèle of chroniclers such as these, is wider than the circle of admiring friends who applaud the thesis of the latest candidate for the doctor's hood. Yet after all, men and women who know well even their Gibbon and their Parkman, constitute a small fraction only of that restricted group of human beings whom we dub "cultured." To the multitude, the "Rise and Fall" either of Rome or of New France is and ever will be caviare. If then we would have awakened in the mind of the man of the street and of the club an intelligent appreciation of the impressive lessons taught by the world's experience, let us welcome right heartily good historical romance, and patriotic verse that has the proper ring. The novelist and the poet being the real teachers of history to the masses, we must needs seek to instruct these inspired interpreters, to direct them to the salient points in our nation's annals, and be exceeding glad that they have the God-given faculty of attractively clothing our dry bones of facts with flesh and blood, and of so endowing them with the breath of life that they walk freely in the market place. In the field of American history, the romantic period of Colonial and Revolutionary life has of late years attracted the attention of many poets and novelists, some of whom reveal genuine power; their works have been eagerly read by hundreds of thousands to whom history as history possesses few charms. The undoubted result has been a general quickening of patriotism, a stirring of the national consciousness. Much of the Atlantic sea-board has now become recognized as a storied land. A steady throng of pilgrims dwells with enthusiasm on scenes associated with the doughty heroes of historical |