ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, November 3, 1996 TAG: 9611040002
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: new river journal
SOURCE: ROBERT FRIES
Two weeks ago today, I was standing on a rocky shore at the very edge of North America. The chill wind that blew along that coastline on Cape Breton Island sent my thoughts thousands of miles and 250 years away, back to frontier days in the New River Valley.
There was a limitless depth to the cold, gray Atlantic Ocean, which helped to form a palette for the imagination. You could visualize the mid-1750s and all the backwoods mayhem that ensued as the Europeans and the American Indians struggled for control of the New World.
The scene would include a wide tableau of events, from tall sailing ships firing cannon broadsides at coastal fortresses to war-painted Indians attacking the log stockades in the wilderness of Western Virginia.
All of that might seem long ago and far away under ordinary circumstances. But a visit to a place called Louisbourg made it seem immediate and real.
Canadians refer to Louisbourg as the Williamsburg of their country. Like the former capital of Virginia, Louisbourg is a reconstructed city set in colonial days. It is located on the northeastern tip of Nova Scotia, and during its brief heyday it was the third-busiest seaport in North America, trailing only Boston and Philadelphia.
Unlike those places, Louisbourg was a French city constructed entirely within fortifications. Soldiers and citizens lived there between 1713 and 1760, guarded by bristling cannons that poked their business ends out of ports built into the high walls of the bastion.
But Louisbourg seemed like a chip on the shoulder of France's American ambitions. So the English and New Englanders knocked it off, twice besieging and capturing the city in the mid-18th century.
After the second capitulation, the visitors reduced Louisbourg to rubble and left the desolate site to fir trees, sphagnum moss and grazing sheep.
That's how it remained until the 1960s. Hard times struck isolated Cape Breton Island when the coal mines that fueled the local economy began to close. The Canadian government decided to rebuild part of Louisbourg as a tourist magnet.
It was an ambitious and expensive undertaking, with archeologists operating just ahead of the construction crews. The reconstructed town is only a fraction of the original's size, but the new buildings are faithfully designed and placed to recreate Louisbourg in 1744.
During the tourist season, Louisbourg is populated by guides in period dress, each assuming the personage and history of someone who actually lived there at the time. There are soldiers and kitchen maids and laborers, barracks, taverns and gardens.
By the time my group arrived in mid-October, they were all gone along with the season of paying visitors. We saw the town and fort depopulated, or at night by the light of a lantern, and somehow that seemed more appropriate for what is essentially a ghost town.
Our mission was to follow the movement of armies as they landed in harbors near the town and laid siege to it. Their military footprints remain - even 250 years later - along the coast and deep within the balsam-scented forest. If you look diligently enough you can find stone foundations of blockhouses or the softly rounded earthen remains of entrenchments or gun positions.
This sort of field detective work never fails to engage my imagination, more so than witnessing the re-enactment of a military event. Standing in the forest, we read contemporary historical accounts of how the local Micmac Indians were confederates of the French at Louisbourg. I thought of how this story was simultaneously played out far down the Atlantic Coast, on the Appalachian frontier.
The same jostling for control of the New World brought the French, Indians and settlers into bloody conflict here, at Drapers Meadow near present-day Blacksburg in 1755, and at Fort Vause near Shawsville a year later.
The Drapers Meadow attack by a band of Shawnee Indians killed four settlers and created the epic Long Way Home ordeal of Mary Draper Ingles, who was carried into captivity. At Fort Vause, a small army of 200 French Canadians and Shawnees captured the fort during a fierce battle that cost an estimated 40 lives.
Despite these local victories, the larger war went against the French and Indians, with the English winning control of the continent and access to its interior. Not long after, the steady tide of westward settlement began to roll through the New River Valley along the Wilderness Road.
Up in Nova Scotia, the English victory made refugees of the residents of a land the French settlers called Acadia. Their expulsion led many far away to the arms of cousins along the lower Mississippi River. Thus the "Acadians" became the '"Cajuns" and the legend of another displaced heroine, named Evangeline, was born.
When you care about history, you can conjure up the past more readily and see connections to the present that not everyone else might. It can make the world a smaller place and encapsulate time.
That's why I like it, and why, standing on a windy coastline a long way from the New River Valley, it occurred to me that had Louisbourg withstood invasion, we might be speaking French with a Southern accent.
Parlez-vous francais, y'all?
LENGTH: Medium: 92 linesby CNB