YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

AMERICAN HISTORY AND ITS
GEOGRAPHIC CONDITIONS

AMERICAN HISTORY
AND ITS
GEOGRAPHIC CONDITIONS

BY

ELLEN CHUECHILL SEMPLE

WITH MAPS

' So much is certain : history-
lies not near but in nature "
Cam, Ritteb

BOSTON AND NEW YOKK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
ilfte Bitintfibe ptc^, Cambri&ge
1903

COPYRIGHT 1903 BY ELLEN CHURCHILL SEMPLE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Published October, iqo3

TO MY MOTHER
WHO HAS ALWAYS GIVEN TO HER CHILDREN
AND DEMANDED FROM THEM
THE BEST

CONTENTS

CHAFTEB

PAGE
I. The Atlantic States of Europe the Discoverers
and Colonizers of America  1
JJLJ The Rivers of North America in Early Explora
tion and Settlement  19
y IIL, The Influence of the Appalachian Barrier upon
^ — ' Colonial History  36
IV. The Westward Movement in Relation to the Phy
siographic Features of the Appalachian System 52
V. Geographical Environment of the Early Trans-
Allegheny Settlements  75
VI. The Louisiana Purchase in the Light of Geo
graphic Conditions  93
VII. Geography of the Atlantic Coast in Relation to
the Development of American Sea Power . . . 114
VIII. Geography of Sea and Land Operations in the
War of 1812  134
IX. Spread of Population in the Mississippi Valley as
affected by Geographic Conditions  150
X. Geographic Control of Expansion into the Far
West : the Southern Routes  178
XI. Expansion into the Far West by the Northern
Trails  201
XII. Growth of the United States to a Continental
Power Geographically Determined  226
XIII. The Geography of the Inland Waterways . . . 246
XIV. The Geography of the Civil War  280
XV. Geographical Distribution of Immigration . . . 310
\XVI. Geographical Distribution of Cities and Industries 337
XVII. Geographical Distribution of Railroads .... 367
XVIII. The United States in Relation to the American
Mediterranean  397
XIX. The United States as a Pacific Ocean Power . . 420

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PAOE
Map of North Atlantic Basin  4
Map of Great LakeS Portages  28
Mohawk Valley and Lake Champlain  41
Trans-Allegheny Trails  54
Trans-Allegheny Settlements in 1790  71
Map of Distribution of Population in 1810  108
Niagara River, 1812-14  140
Map of Distribution of Population in 1820 (colored) . . . 152
Map of Distribution of Population in 1840 (colored) . . . 154
Trans-Rocky Trails  . 180
Map of Virginia Rivers and Shenandoah Valley . . . 290
Map showing Foreign Population (colored)  312
Map showing Location of One Hundred and Sixty Citles 340
Per Cent, of Population in Cities having at least Twenty-
five Hundred Inhabitants ....  345
Map showing Staple Products  368
Map of Alaskan Coal-fields  426

AMERICAN HISTORY AND ITS
GEOGRAPHIC CONDITIONS

CHAPTER I

THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE THE DISCOVERERS
AND COLONIZERS OF AMERICA
The most important geographical fact in the pasti
history of the United States has been their location on j
the Atlantic opposite Europe ; * and the most important I
geographical fact in lending a distinctive character to j
their future history will probably be their location on the j
Pacific opposite Asia.
Till the end of the fifteenth century Europe was
dominated by her position as part of the continental
triad of the Eastern Hemisphere. In spite of her long,
indented coast line and considerable maritime develop
ment, hers was mainly coastwise navigation, not oceanic ;
and her sea travel was everywhere supplemented on the
great routes by land travel up or down river valleys
and across deserts or steppes. Herself a country of the
temperate zone, she sought the tropical products of
the Orient. Thither the way was easy, for the Indian
Ocean stretched out two welcoming arms, the Red Sea
and the Persian Gulf, towards the Mediterranean, while
the Tigris and Euphrates rivers rested their light finger

2 THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE
touch on the highlands of Armenia near the basin of
the Euxine. Moreover, into the Mediterranean Eu
rope dropped a fringe of peninsulas, which gave her
ample contact with its waters. Thus, for the easy
going trade of the middle ages, communication with
the Orient was in general satisfactory. The Mediterra
nean was an open highway ; and to the east, if the
Suez route was temporarily blocked, more goods came
by way of the Euphrates and Antioch, or by Trebizond
and the Black Sea ; or the silks and teas of China could
be deposited at Batum, the eastern port of the Euxine,
after a long journey across the highlands of Central
Asia, down the valley of the Oxus, across the Caspian
Sea, and along that deep furrow between the Great
Caucasus and the Anti-Caucasus mountains which forms
a natural highway to the Black Sea.
But wherever a water route is interrupted by a land
barrier, as in the isthmuses of Panama and Suez; or
where a continuous water route is constricted to a nar
row passway, as in the Strait of Gibraltar, the English
Channel between Calais and Dover, the Bosphorus, the
Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, and the Straits of Malacca,
we find points of strategic importance which give to
their masters the power to tie up the arteries of travel.
Now any one who knows how to look at a map can see
that the eastern coast region of the Mediterranean from
Antioch to Alexandria partakes of the nature of an
isthmus, while Constantinople is in a position to block
the Trebizond and Batum routes. With the Saracen
conquest of Egypt and Syria in the seventh and eighth
centuries, European trade with the Orient was cut ofE

THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE 3
from the southern routes and was forced to rely on
the Bosphorus passway alone, until the crusades again
opened up the roads through Syria and Egypt. But
the day came when all three of these strategic positions
were held by the Ottoman Turks, a power with whom
it was fruitless either to fight or to reason. Europe
gazed longingly, despairingly towards the old avenues
to the Orient, whither her face had been set so long ; '
then reluctantly, at first almost hopelessly, she looked
towards the Atlantic, on which hitherto her back had
been turned, and asked the momentous question whether
the ocean could afford a route down the path of the
setting sun to the Indies and Cathay.
Thus was initiated the westward movement. It was
participated in by all the Atlantic nations of Europe
and by only these ; in it the maritime powers of the
inland basins took no share. Land-locked seas have
always been the nurseries of maritime development, but
nurseries they have remained. In the fifteenth century
Europe could boast two groups of genuine sea powers,
the Italian cities in the Mediterranean and the Hanse
towns in the North Sea and the Baltic, each the product
of its geographical environment, born of the union of
great inland routes of trade with the indented coast
of a tideless sea.2 But with the effort to discover ocean
routes to the Orient began what has been called the
Atlantic period in history, in contrast to the Mediterra
nean period which preceded it. Then there came upon
the scene of history other maritime powers, trained in
a severer school of seamanship, accustomed to look out
upon the landless horizon of the Mare Tenebrosum,

4 THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE
yet heirs to all the knowledge of navigation and cos
mography their Mediterranean neighbors could give
them, stimulated and guided by Florentine and Genoese
and Venetian map makers, pilots, and sea captains.
These nations had the start in the race towards the
west ; and when they realized that the new Occident
was not the old Orient, their geographical position gave
them the best opportunities the earth could offer for
wealth and dominion. Why this was so an analysis of
the geographical features of the Atlantic will make clear.
West of the Dark Continent and the Light Conti
nent lies a long body of water whose area is only one half
that of the Pacific, though its drainage basin is more
than double that of the larger ocean. The Atlantic,
by the gigantic tendrils of its rivers, lays hold upon
the Rockies and the Andes, the plains of Central Russia
and the highlands of Abyssinia, and hence draws to
itself by mere force of gravity the trade from the heart
of the bordering continents. Its shape is approximately
that of the letter ' S,' the stricture in the middle, formed
, by the approach of Cape St. Roque and the Sierra Leone
coast of Africa, dividing the ocean into two well-defined
basins. On the northern basin, which Europe faces,
nature has bestowed all her favors. Though 3600 miles
wide at its broadest part between Morocco and Florida, ;
between Norway and Greenland it contracts to less
than half that width and has therefore only limited
contact with the chilling waters of the Arctic Ocean.
In contrast to the smooth contour of the South Atlantic,
the northern basin has countless indentations great
and small, is bordered by vast land-locked seas, like the

go0 750 60° 45° 300 150 0°

•

:'»*

o

¦»OTi|jyl

^

,-'¦-'

NORTH ATLANTIC BASIN

THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE 5
Mediterranean, the Baltic with the gulfs of Bothnia
and Finland, the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of St. Lawrence,
and Hudson Bay, which carry the ocean into the interior
of the continents and lay upon the bordering lands the
vivifying touch of the sea.
The Atlantic as a whole has a coast-line of 55,000
miles, as long as that of the Pacific and Indian oceans
taken together. This is due almost entirely to its numer
ous inlets, for it is island poor. The countries whose
shores it washes have the ample contact with the sea
which leads to a seafaring life ; but except in its great
inlets, like the Mediterranean, it lacks the islands which
early tempt to bold maritime enterprise. It is a signifi
cant fact that the ocean was first crossed in its narrow
est part, in the only place .where the islands are grouped
like distant stepping-stones from shore to shore. The
Northmen early became acquainted with the Hebrides,
Orkneys, Shetlands, and Faroes, from which they passed
to Iceland, thence to Greenland, and thence to New
foundland or Cape Breton Island and the continent of
America. Lured to the ocean by the outlying islands,
bred to the sea by their deep-running fiords and their
steep mountains, which denied them more than a narrow
foothold upon the land, on the sea also they were forced
to eke out by fisheries the slender subsistence which the
country afforded. Only the small deposit plains of gravel
and sand at the heads of the fiords yielded level surface
for agriculture, while conditions of climate further
limited the products of the soil. When we consider
that Norway to-day has only 2300 square miles, or less
than three per cent, of her area 3 under cultivation as

6 THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE
grainfields and meadow land, we can realize that in the
early centuries, with their primitive systems of hus
bandry, population must soon have pressed upon the
limits of subsistence. It is the tendency of all people
thus placed on a narrow hem of land between mountain
and sea to establish maritime colonies, even where a
warmer climate makes nature more generous.4 Phoeni
cians and Greeks dotted the Mediterranean coasts with
their settlements,' and Malays are to be found to-day in
every part of eastern Asia ; while the Northmen planted
themselves on every available coast and island, and swept
the shores of Europe from the White Sea to the Black.
Their daring voyages were possible because their vessels
were stronger and swifter than the Spanish and Portu
guese caravels of five centuries later. In this sea-born
genius for shipbuilding they suggest the Haida Indians
of the Queen Charlotte Islands, who make their canoes
on what a sailor would call beautiful lines, and in them
venture out a thousand miles into the open Pacific.5
But the colonizing enterprises of the Northmen in the
ninth and tenth centuries were too numerous and scat
tered, the climatic conditions of Vinland too harsh for
a small and remote settlement in the midst of hostile
Indians, and the population of the mother country too
sparse to produce any lasting results from these early
transoceanic voyages. Hence the effective discovery of
America had to wait for five centuries, to be made
by nations further south, to whom better conditions of
climate and soil had given larger populations, and who
also enjoyed ample contact with the sea, but who faced
the broadest stretch of the Atlantic and made their

THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE 7
voyages into the vast unknown. But they too were
led across the threshold of the ocean by a few outlying
islands. The nearer groups of the Madeira and Canaries
had been known for centuries, though we hear of an
expedition sent out in 1341 by Alphonso IV. of Portu
gal to rediscover the Fortunate Islands (Canaries). The
Azores, a thousand miles west of Portugal, seem to have
been visited first in 1147 by an Arabian navigator, who
set out on his voyage of discovery from the port of
Lisbon, at that time the Moorish stronghold of power
and commerce. From 1346 they appear upon the maps
of Europe, and seem to have had chance visitors from
that time till their so-called rediscovery in 1431 by one
of the expeditions of Prince Henry of Portugal. The
long voyages to all these remote islands educated the
timid sailor of the fifteenth century in maritime enter
prise. Only the group of the Canaries belonged to
Spain, but it was#fortunately situated within the belt of
the northeast trade winds, and on the twenty-eighth
parallel, which happened to be also the latitude of the
northern end of Cipango, according to its supposed lo
cation in the western Atlantic as set down in Toscanelli's
map. Since the lack of chronometers in the fifteenth
century made the calculation of longitude very inaccu
rate, it was the custom for navigators to sail due north
or south to the parallel of their proposed destination
and then shape their course directly east or west.6 Thus
the Canaries were the first objective of Columbus in his
outward voyage, and, when he steered thence, served to
determine the Bahamas as the first landing-place in the
New World. This island outpost and the beneficent

8 THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE
trade wind combined to make the voyage into the
unknown of as short duration as possible for the timid
and mutinous spirits of the Spanish crew.
The Cape Verde Islands, ten degrees further south,
formed the turn in the road in the third voyage of
Columbus, whence his southwesterly course brought him
into all the horrors of the equatorial belt of calms.
These islands, a Portuguese possession, served to direct
also the course of the Portuguese navigator^Cjjhxali
when, standing further out to sea than was customary
for vessels following the Cape route to India, and drift
ing or driven further westward than he realized, he came
to the coast of South America, which here lies directly
in the path of the southern equatorial current, and only
ten degrees west of the longitude of the Cape Verde
Islands. This protrusion of the South American con
tinent forty degrees east of the Bahamas, and therefore
east of the " Line of Demarcation " laid down by the
pope, Alexander VI., threw Brazil to Portugal and gave
that power its sole domain in the New World.
That Portugal should have been the pioneer in the
search for the "outside" passage to the Indies and
should have followed the southern route was intimately
connected with her geographical location. Through
the Mediterranean she had felt the influence of the
Oriental trade for centuries; by her outpost position
on the ocean and her long coast-line facing west and
south she was dominated by the Atlantic ; while the
proximity of Africa and the outlying islands to the
southwest, rediscovered by her, naturally attracted her
maritime enterprise. The resolution of all these geo-

THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE 9
graphical forces was the search for the African sea
route to the Orient. Minor forces also contributed to
this end. Portugai^ikirAragon and Old Castile, being
remote from the center of Saracen dominion in south
eastern Spain, was held by a weaker grasp and" was
therefore able to throw it off sooner. Lisbon was lib
erated in 1341, a century and a half before Spain had
accomplished the reconquest of her territory, and there
fore could turn to other tasks. Moreover, her Moorish
neighbors helped to develop the seamanship of Portugal
in naval warfare with Mussulman pirates, in pursuit of
whom Portuguese vessels became accustomed to sail
a little way down the western coast of Africa. After
wards such voyages were continued for commerce, just
as the sequel to Prince Henry's military expedition
into Morocco, where he learned of the gold-laden cara
vans from the Guinea coast to Mediterranean ports,
was his endeavor to reach the Gold Coast by sea. From
that time, in his sea-bound castle of Sagres where the
promontory of St. Vincent carries Portugal territory far
out into the ocean, Henry the Navigator, watching his
ships outbound from the neighboring harbor of Lagos,
gazing out into the Atlantic for the return of his storm-
beaten caravels, is symbolic of Europe in the fifteenth
century. From Lisbon, Lagos, and Sagres the fever of mari
time discovery spread along the coast to Palos, Cadiz,
and Seville. Many men, like_Chxistopher--ColHmbns, his
brother Bartholomew, and J^agellaiij, learned much in
"the~servic*ff~Df' Portugal before they made their great
discoveries for Spain. Columbus's sojourn in Lisbon,

10 THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE
at that time the center of nautical science in Europe,
strengthened his convictions of the feasibility of his plan
to sail west. Added impulse was given his purpose in
1471 by the expedition of Santarem and Escobar which
rounded the elbow of the Guinea Gulf and disclosed
the southern trend of the African coast. This informa
tion occasioned probably the simultaneous inquiry of
Columbus and King Alphonso V- of Portugal to Tos-
canelli in regard to a shorter transoceanic route to the
Indies.7 Though the southern route was sure to be long,
Portugal was committed to it, and Columbus turned to
Spain, where Portuguese achievement had aroused mari
time enthusiasm and the spirit of rivalry which would
welcome the strange proposition. And then, on the
southwestern coast of Spain, in the ports of Cadiz,
Palos, and San Lucar de Barrameda, was concentrated
the life of the country for the next hundred years.
The safety and ease of the first route of Columbus,
the mistaken idea that the Spice Isles were still to be
found in the tropical regions of the western Atlantic,
and finally the search for a possible water passage
through the continental barrier, combined to hold the
Spanish in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea,
especially when Mexico and Peru were found to yield
gold. Their explorations, therefore, extended around
these two bodies of water, with some sporadic voyages
further north up the east Atlantic coast, while their
conquests spread from Mexico down to Chile. The
marked southwestward trend of the South American
coast below the Tropic of Capricorn made it evident that
this part of the country, according to the papal bull,

THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE 11
must belong to Spain. The Spanish, acting on this
pope-given right, established settlements at the mouth
of the La Plata River, because this stream afforded an
approach from the Atlantic side to the Potosi mines on
the Bolivian Plateau, and they wished to secure it
against foreign attack.
England, the next Atlantic power of Europe to take
part in the westward movement, had its maritime de
velopment predetermined by its geographical conditions.
Its long coast-line and abundant harbor facilities en
couraged the nautical proclivities of its population,
which was made up of oversea elements, — Anglo-
Saxons, Danes, and Norman French. As an island, its
earliest means of defensive warfare lay in the navy of
King Alfred. Later its merchant vessels found a near
market in the ports of Norway, and its fishing-smacks
drew in their nets off the coast of Iceland. Looking
towards the western waters was Bristol, at the end of
the fifteenth century the chief seaport of the island.
Hither came the Genoese Cabot, and hence sailed the
first transatlantic expedition of the English. Cabot's
instructions excluded the southern course, probably to
avoid encroaching on the maritime field of Spain and
Portugal ; so he sailed directly west, and came to the
coast of Labrador or Cape Breton. His course lay
westward approximately along the fifty-fourth parallel,
where the distance from shore to shore, in consequence
of the eastward projection of North America and the
general convergence of the continents towards the
north, is only about two thousand miles. But while his
voyage was little over half as long as that of Columbus,

12 THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE
the prevailing currents of ocean and air were against
him in the outward passage.
Exploration of North America in the higher latitudes
lay near to England as a result of her own northern
location, just as in the case of the Norse discoveries ;
but the early English voyages, like those of the Vikings,
were not followed up by European explorers because
of the harsh climatic conditions of the bleak coasts
thus reached. At a later date, however, the search
for the Northwest Passage, when it came to be limited
to Arctic regions, fell naturally to English naviga
tors, such as Frobisher, Davis, Baffin, and Hudson.
Thus was established England's claim to the sub-polar
regions of the continent; but it remained barren till
1670, when Prince Rupert secured a grant of "the
sole trade in all those seas, straits, bays, rivers, lakes,
creeks, and sounds lying within the entrance of Hud
son's straits," with all the lands bordering upon the
same. This was the beginning of the Hudson Bay
Company, whose traders, operating among the Indian
tribes of the interior, came into collision with the
French voyageurs, who were pushing up from the St.
Lawrence by way of the Saguenay for the northern furs.
The English, however, had met the French before
in the New World on the Banks of Newfoundland.
From northwestern France two peninsulas of ragged
contour project into the Atlantic and the Channel;
and from the days of Caesar and the famous Veneti,
Brittany and Normandy have nourished a hardy mari
time race who, like the Norse, have been forced to rely
in part upon the sea for their means of subsistence.

THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE 13
These were the men, born to the sea, who first sailed
from France to the western continent. Opposite Brit
tany and in the same latitude is southeastern New
foundland, which marks the point of North America's
closest approach to Europe south of Greenland. To the
Banks of Newfoundland came these Breton and Norman
fishermen as early as 1504 ; they were followed by the
Portuguese, attracted thither by the possibility that
this land might lie east of the papal meridian, and at
a later date by the English, the original discoverers ;
for fishing-grounds are always the great cosmopolitan
areas of the earth. The attempted settlement on Sable
Island by the French in 1518, the exploration of the St.
Lawrence soon after, and another short-lived colony
near the present site of Quebec, all show that the French
took this field for their own. Their activities were
in effect limited to Nova Scotia, the islands about, and
the Gulf and River St. Lawrence, though French names
along the coast of Maine still bear evidence to their
wider claims of territory, based upon voyages of ex
ploration as far south as Cape Cod.
Until near the end of the sixteenth century we find
the range of English exploration in the New World
south of the Norse, north of the French, and far to
the north of the Spanish, reproducing the geograph
ical stratification of these nations in Europe. The
Canary Islands and the northeast trade winds, as we
have seen, conspired to draw Spanish activities somewhat
further south than the Iberian peninsula, and to keep
them limited in America between the equator and 30°
north latitude, the parallel of St. Augustine. But from

14 THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE
that point north to the mouth of the Penobscot River
the coast remained debatable ground. Both French
and English came hither, drawn out of their natural
path at different times, but by the same motive, — the
prizes which Spanish treasure ships afforded in time of
war. There is nothing like naval warfare to turn the
political geography of the earth topsy-turvy. When
war broke out between France and Spain in 1521,
French cruisers were attracted southwestward to make
depredations on Spanish caravels as they set out from
the Mexican ports ; and one of these cruisers under
Verrazano, after having relieved a galleon of its rich
cargo not far from its home port, set westward from
the Madeira Islands to make discoveries for the benefit
of France, and explored the American coast from Cape
Fear to the Piscataqua River. But no permanent results
followed from this venture.
The first English navigators to appear in the tropical
waters of the western Atlantic were the slave traders,
drawn thither to find a market among the Spanish
colonies for their human merchandise. Sir John Haw
kins was bringing slaves from the Guinea coast to meet
the steady demand in this region from 1562 to 1567 ;
but his traffic was interrupted soon afterwards by the
outbreak of war with Philip II. of Spain. Then English
privateers began to wait for Spanish vessels in the
western Atlantic, and thus became accustomed to the
southern route and to these remote coasts. But the
English had a motive leading them to combine with
their naval and commercial expeditions the more sub
stantial colonial ventures. The loss of Calais in 1557

THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE 15
ended England's hope of continental territory ; it was
a blow to her "balance of power" idea all the more
serious in view of the vast dominions of Spain and the
aggressive territorial policy of France. The loss might
be made good in the New World. The war was scarcely
begun when, in 1578, Sir Humphrey Gilbert sailed
with his seven ships from Plymouth to found a colony
in that problematical land of "Norumbega," which,
however, he never reached. The year 1584 saw the
birth of Raleigh's design to " plant an English nation
in America," while at home was found in abundance
the raw material out of which colonies could be made,
a superfluous population induced recently by retrograde
economic measures, and persistently by the limited area
of the little island kingdom. For a long time and with
few exceptions the colonial expeditions from England
followed the southern route by way of the Canary Islands
on their outbound voyages, although it was long and
tedious. The reason is to be sought either in the help
given by the northeast trade winds in the southern
latitudes, and the difficulty presented by the prevailing
westerlies further north ; or in the preference of the
early navigators for the route made familiar by their
adventures on the Spanish main.
Thus, separated by almost a century from the explora
tions of the Cabots, was initiated the second phase of
England's oversea enterprises ; and in a hundred and
fifty years her permanent settlements occupied a narrow
strip of coast almost continuously from Georgia to
Nova Scotia. As both extremities of this line overlapped
the claims of their neighbors, the English came into

16 THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE
conflict with the Spanish on -the south, where St. Au
gustine and Savannah were alternate objects of attack;
and with the French on the north, where the settle
ments of both nations along the Maine coast suffered
from the mutual hostilities. Within this area the Eng
lish had to suppress the colonial ventures of the Dutch,
the last of the Atlantic powers of Europe to take part
in the westward movement.
In the events establishing the colonial empire of Hol
land, geographic conditions were the leading factors.
By its location at the northern end of the great trade
route up the Rhone and Rhine valleys from the' Medi
terranean, this country, through the Hanseatic League,
became the distributing-point in northern Europe for
oriental products. When Portugal got control of the
Asiatic trade, the commercial dealings of the Dutch
were transferred from Venice and Genoa to Lisbon.
But when the union of Spain and Portugal under Hol
land's hereditary enemy, Philip II., excluded Dutch
vessels from the mouth of the Tagus, the merchantmen
of the Rhine began to contend for a share in the land
of the East Indies. The long coast-line of Holland, its
numerous harbors, rich and active seaports, readier
access to the Atlantic, and previous experience in the
open ocean gained in the long voyages to Portugal,
gave to the Dutch cities a broader horizon than the
inclosed basin of the Baltic afforded the German mem
bers of the Hanseatic League, and hence fitted them
for wider maritime enterprise.
Not till the end of the sixteenth century, therefore,
did the Dutch appear upon the high seas. Henry

THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE 17
Hudson's discovery of Hudson River in 1609 and his
report on its opportunity for fur trading led them to ap
propriate Manhattan Island at the mouth of the stream
and the great angle of the American coast between
Delaware Bay and the Connecticut River. Meanwhile
the English colonies were spreading along two natural
geographical lines which converged upon the Dutch
holdings. From the east, the New England settlements
were rapidly throwing out one frontier station after
another along the protected waterway of Long Island
Sound, so that the year 1639 saw an unbroken line
from Newport to Stamford and the modest beginnings
of Greenwich, which was within thirty miles of New
Amsterdam. From the south, Virginia and Maryland
colonists were spreading up towards the head of Chesa
peake Bay, where it approaches within twenty miles
of the mouth of Delaware River. From his trading-
post on Kent Island, the Manhattan of upper Chesa
peake Bay, William Claiborne was pushing up the
Susquehanna River as early as 1631 to compete with
the Dutch for the peltries of the Northwest. Moreover,
the Dutch holdings occupied territory included in the
original Virginia grant. The English were aware of
the commercial and strategic value of the Hudson, as
well as the danger attached to the separation of their
two areas of colonization by a foreign power. So the
fate of New Netherland was sealed.
Geographical conditions made the acquisition of New
Netherland the most important political event up to this
time in the history of the English colonies in America.
The natural highway of the St. Lawrence and the Great

18 THE ATLANTIC STATES OF EUROPE
Lakes brought the French up to the back doors of New
York and Pennsylvania, the two colonies carved out of
the Dutch territory. From the head waters of the Ohio
to those of the Hudson, French and English frontiers
met. Lake Champlain with the Richelieu River to
the north, and the Mohawk with Lake Ontario to the
northwest, made two open, easy thoroughfares for army
or trader between Canada and New York. Here no
forest wilderness intervened to form a barrier, as it did
between the New England settlements and the lower
St. Lawrence. Contact was therefore immediate and, in
consequence of the northwestern fur trade, of vital im
portance. Conflict was certain. Against the hostilities
of the French, New York became the bulwark of the
colonies, whom she helped to unite by demanding their
aid against the common enemy. Thus she became the
keystone in the arch of the English settlements, which
was made all the stronger by the pressure of French
aggression from above.
NOTES TO CHAPTER I
1. Ratzel, Politisehe Geographie dor Vereinigten Staaten, p. 13. 1893.
2. E. C. Semple, Development of the Hanse Towns in Relation to
their Geographical Environment, Bulletin of the American Geo
graphical Society, no. 3. 1899.
3. Norway, Official Publication for, the Paris Exposition, p. 308. Chris-
tiania, 1900.
4. Ratzel, Anthropogeographie, p. 290. Second edition, 1899.
5. Indians of Southwestern Alaska in Relation to their Environment,
Journal of School Geography, June, 1898.
6. Fiske, Discovery of America, vol. i. p. 315.
7. Ibid. p. 355.

CHAPTER II
THE RIVERS OF NORTH AMERICA IN EARLY EXPLORA
TION AND SETTLEMENT
The early European navigators did not find their voy
ages of discovery limited by the coast of North America ;
back of the sea-like bays, back of the bay-like estuaries,
they met the tide-mingled flood of the great American
rivers. Sea navigation^passes without break into river
navigation. Nature draws no sharp line between stream
and ocean. The tide moves up the Potomac almost as
far as Washington, and the waters of the Hudson at
Newburgh are brackish ; while the fresh, muddy current
of the Orinoco is carried fifty miles out to sea. In
recent years size has differentiated ocean vessels from
river steamers, though deep canals are fast extending
the landward^reach of the sea and wiping out this dis
tinction ; but the small craft of the early navigators
dropped their anchors and their barnacles into the broad,
quiet flood of the American rivers, beyond the reach of
storm and tide.
Rivers have always been the^reat intermediaries
between land and sea, for in the ocean all find their
common destination. Alexander's discovery of the
Indus led by almost inevitable sequence to the redis
covery of the Eastern sea route. The St. Lawrence
brought the French from the Atlantic into the Great

20 THE RIVERS OF NORTH AMERICA
Lake basin of North America, and the hardy explorers
had scarcely launched their canoes upon the tributary
waters of the upper Mississippi before they were planting
the flag of France on the Gulf of Mexico at its mouth.
The accessibility of continents is determined by the
navigability of their rivers, and this in turn is a matter
of continental build. From the huge, monotonous hulk
of the African plateau the rivers come plunging down
the steep escarpment within a few miles of the narrow
plain of the coast ; only where the Nile leaves its last
terrace three hundred miles inland, has the Dark Conti
nent been open to the light. The vast intaglios of the
Euphrates, Indus, and Ganges valleys have served as
highways into southern Asia. The structure of the
Americas is characterized by long mountain ranges con
nected by trough-like valleys, continental in size and
drained by streams which in flood-time look like inlets
of the sea. Into the Atlantic most of these mighty cur
rents are poured, affording waterways from the ocean
into the heart of the continents. The chief Atlantic
streams of North America are found between 25° and
50° north latitude, in the most desirable part of the
temperate zone. Furthermore, North America presents
to the Atlantic a long, low, coastal plain similar to that
of Europe ; and down its gentle slope pour the easy
going currents of its drainage rivers'. Only in south
eastern New England does a narrowing of the lowland
belt shorten the course and hasten the current of the
streams, thus destroying their value for navigation.
From the mouth of the St. Lawrence, therefore, to the
mouth of the Rio Grande the eastern side of North
America invited exploration.

THE RIVERS OF NORTH AMERICA 21
During the sixteenth and the early part of the seven
teenth century there are .to be distinguished two great
maritime movements along this shore of the continent,
the fisheries, which held to the coast, and the search for
the Northwest Passage, which penetrated into the in
terior!1 Both were profoundly influenced by geograph
ical conditions. From Cape Cod to Cape Race natural
conditions combined to stimulate the fisheries industries.
The Labrador current, which sweeps around this angle
of the continent, is the natural habitat of the cod, the
mackerel, and the herring. The neighboring coast,
fringed with fiords and dotted with outlying islands, ,
afforded harbors and fishing-stations in abundance. In
the land__jtself^,poor soil and bleak climate refused to
the early colonist more than a niggardly subsistence, but
the sturdy pine forests, toughened by cold and nourished
by rain, put into his hand the material for his fishing-
smack. A'line from Quebec to Boston defines the base
of the peninsula forming the back country to most of
this coast. It is a limited area, drained from north to
south where its dimension is least. The rivers are there
fore small, and hence did not adequately open up the
back country for the fur trade, that great resource of
the American pioneer. Thus the supply of peltries
which each stream could command was soon exhausted.
The search for the Northwest Passage took the ex
plorers into every inlet and up every river. These men
came from a continent less than half as large as North
America, and their eyes were trained to the smaller
dimensions of Europe.2 In the prevailing estuaries of
American rivers, with their salty tide, they saw possible

22 THE RIVERS OF NORTH AMERICA
channels which, like the Strait of Gibraltar and the Bos
phorus, might lead to an ulterior sea. A man accus
tomed to the small streams of England might well
explore the broad, sluggish course of the James River,
as Newport did in 1608, to find a passage to a western
ocean ; or, like Henry Hudson, might easily mistake the
lower Hudson for a pelagic inlet. The search for the
Northwest Passage, therefore, made the early navigators
familiar with the interior waters ; but as the futility of
their quest became apparent, the knowledge acquired in
the process was of great value. If an oceanic waterway
was not to be found in the interior, furs were. It is
surprising with what rapidity the desire of the Europeans
moved from the Passage to peltries.
The best and most abundant furs were to be reached
only up the channels of the rivers ; for the indiscrim
inate killing of animals, young as well as old, female as
well as male, and the growing wariness of the creatures
made the fur fields rapidly recede from the coast. Rivers
were the only highways into the interior, and up the
rivers, preferably those flowing from the north, went the
American colonist, — the trapper, trader, and voyageur
always in advance. The history of every colony testifies
to this fact. In 1627 William Claiborne, of Jamestown,
had begun to trade up the Potomac and Susquehanna
rivers. The Dutch came to America for the sake of
the peltries, and up the courses of the rivers they were
drawn. Landing first on Manhattan Island at the
mouth of the Hudson, they had a small settlement there
in 1613 to control this highway into the back country.
Two years later they had built a post on a small

THE RIVERS OF NORTH AMERICA 23
island just below Albany ; by 1623, Fort Aurania was
constructed on the mainland near by ; and 1661 saw the
beginning of Schenectady at the rapids of the Mohawk.
The distribution of their other settlements betrays the
same motive and the same characteristics : they were
primarily trading-posts, were limited to the other two
great rivers of the vicinity, the Delaware and the Con
necticut, and were located well upstream. At Fort
Nassau, near where Philadelphia now stands, the Dutch
traders gathered in the furs of the Schuylkill and the
middle and upper Delaware ; Fort Good Hope on the
Connecticut, near the present site of Hartford, enabled
them to meet halfway the beaver-laden canoes of their
savage customers. But the Dutch were shortsighted
enough not to secure to themselves the natural com
manding positions at the entrance of these streams,
as they did in the case of the Hudson ; so when John
Winthrop, Jr., of Boston, in 1635 built Fort Saybrook
at the mouth of the Connecticut, they were shut out of
that river and forced to relinquish their upstream post.
But when later a small colony of Swedes appropriated
the western shore of the Delaware estuary, the Dutch,
now grown wiser, overcame them and annexed their
territory. The Plymouth colony in 1634 had established a
large trade with the Indians of the Connecticut and
Kennebec rivers. But, owing to the smallness of the
New England territory and the lack of great rivers,
furs soon became scarce along the coast, and the traffic
retreated rapidly up the few considerable streams, where
the business was ruined by concentration of the traders

24 THE RIVERS OF NORTH AMERICA
and over-competition. Broad areas, widely scattered
and remote posts, belong to the nature of the fur trade.
Springfield, a frontier settlement on the Connecticut
founded in 1636, was for a short time one of the best
points for beaver, but by 1645 the market was spoiled
by over-competition ; 3 and Sir Richard Saltonstall and
others endeavored to secure a monopoly of the right to
establish trading-posts further north than those already
existing, while the Springfield colonists were forced to
resort to the duller and less lucrative occupation of
agriculture. With the exception of the Connecticut,
therefore, which added fertile meadow lands to the
attraction of the fur trade, the streams of New England,
in consequence of their limited basins and rapid-broken
courses, scarcely affected early settlement; while the
larger rivers of the country carried far into the interior
the vessel of the explorer, the canoe of the trader, and
the shallop of the colonist. At Albany and Montreal,
on the Hudson and the St. Lawrence, the traffic in pel
tries finally concentrated, and with far-reaching politi
cal results.
In Canada the search for the Northwest Passage was
pursued longer. The only great waterway in the tem
perate zone westward into the heart of the continent is
afforded by the St. Lawrence and the chain of the Great
Lakes. Here the hope of reaching the fabled " Sea of
Verrazano " had more to feed upon because of the very
length of the magnificent waterway already discovered.
Therefore, nearly sixty years after the English Hudson
and Baffin were limiting their search for the Northwest
Passage to Arctic seas, where alone it was to be found,

THE RIVERS OF NORTH AMERICA 25
the problem of a water route to Cathay was luring La
Salle to the head streams of the Ohio and Mississippi.
It is a significant fact that all exploration and coloniza
tion in North America has been westward from its
" Europe-fronting shore." Even the Mississippi, though
first reached near its mouth by the Spanish, was effect
ively approached and appropriated throughjts westward
flowing tributaries. Moreover, this approach which
gave possession was made in its northern course by the
Wisconsin River, at a point whence the distance east to
the Atlantic shore is greatest. Not the wintry silence
of the frozen north, nor river rapids, nor storm-swept
lakes, nor swamp-covered portages, nor two thousand
miles of travel sufficed to check the westward moving
tide. Close on the heels of the French explorer came the
voyageur, drawn landward by the magnet of the fur
trade. Traffic in peltries sprang up along the shores of
Acadia side by side with the fisheries ; but in Canada,
as elsewhere in North America, the presence of a big
river determined its progress into the interior. More
over, the location of this stream to the north, and its
connection with the Great Lakes bordering on the vast
forests of the bleak Northwest, gave the French access
to a field yielding furs of finer quality and longer staple
than any before known ; while the remoteness, vastness,
and harsh climate of the region promised to insure it
against excessive exploitation. An infant colony, in
order to survive, must command some source of large
profits, such as tobacco yielded to the Chesapeake Bay
settlements, the fisheries to New England, sugar and

26 THE RIVERS OF NORTH AMERICA
spirits to the West Indies. The reason is to be found
in the remoteness of their market, the increased cost of
such commodities as they buy in exchange, and the
necessity of some indubitable allurement, like the pros
pect of wealth, in the new country to tempt settlers to
make the long voyage from their native land and face
the hardships of the wilderness. The glaciated soil of
Eastern Canada could promise no great fertility, its
bleak climate no luxuriant vegetation ; but there was
money in peltries. Hence the upstream advance of
trading-post and settlement went on with amazing rapid
ity. Significantly enough, the long stretch of the St.
Lawrence gulf and estuary was left almost unmarred by
human habitation. Only where the gloomy gorge of
the Saguenay River opened up an avenue northwestward
to the Hudson Bay country and its rich furs did the
trading-post of Tadousac break the solitude of the
lower St. Lawrence.
The first settlements were made at the mouth of the
river in 1608, at Quebec, Beaupre, Beauport, and the
Island of Orleans. By 1670 there were missions, each
the center of a busy trade, at the outlets of Lakes Supe
rior and Michigan, and farther west at the head of
Green Bay. As the waterways determined the land
ward stretch of the French claim, so they fixed the
proportions of the habitant's land grant and the loca
tion of his cabin. His farm was always on the river,
which served as the highroad. River frontage was in^
demand, therefore, so his land grant was very narrow,
measuring its widthjby the foot and its depth by the
mile.' His dwe]Un£^facedJhe^_stream, and hence" was

THE RIVERS OF NORTH AMERICA 27
close to that of his neighbors. Thus the settlements
were strung out in long, thin lines on the margins of
the rivers. " One could have seen nearly every house
in Canada by paddling a canoe up the St. Lawrence
and Richelieu." 4 The riparian grouping of the colo
nists, though eminently convenient for the Indian
trade, made defense and government difficult. Like all
natural forces, this geographical control of the rivers
was so strong that it nullified royal decrees designed to
concentrate the inhabitants and form villages.
Missionary zeal and dreams of far-reaching' empire
were factors in the westward movement of the French ;
the fur trade, on the other hand, was a determinant,
because it became the sole support of settlement and
fort in all the wide region of Canada. But the land
ward expansion of commerce and church and state was
permitted and controlled by the Canadian lakes and
rivers. The recurrent westward search for the prob
lematical " great water " of the Indian anticipated the
trader as it had done in the beginning. Then the
remotest trading-post became a base for the next out
ward expedition of the explorer. And the passage
from the Lakes to the Mississippi was made almost as
easily as that from the Atlantic to the Lakes. This
was the result of geographical conditions.
The mighty trough which runs through the center of
the North American continent, from the Arctic Ocean
to the Gulf of Mexico, is met halfway between these
points by a lesser valley to the eastward occupied by
the Great Lakes. The rim dividing these two basins is
low and narrow, running close to the margin of the

28 THE RIVERS OF NORTH AMERICA
Lakes. West of Superior and Michigan the ill-defined
watershed is flooded in a wet season ; and at all times
the ponds and pools and the endless meanderings of the
connecting streams tell of a drainage system unfinished
because of too slight incline. Hence the transition
from the Lakes to the small affluents of the Mississippi
tributaries was easy, especially as the French early
adopted the canoe of the Indian as eminently suited to
the low, narrow divides of the region. In flood-time
there was an unbroken waterway ; but the rule was to
paddle up a short stream flowing into one of the Great
Lakes, carry the canoe over a portage one to ten
miles in length, and then launch it on a stream beyond,
to float down to the all-receiving bosom of the Missis
sippi. The great number of the portages both offered
a choice to the traders, especially advantageous in time
of war with one or the other of the Indian tribes inhab
iting this region, and enormously increased the voya-
geur's sphere of activity by opening up to him all the
country drained by the Ohio and Mississippi.
The order in which these portages were discovered5
and used by the French was determined in part by the
political neighborhood of the hostile Iroquois along
the southern shores of the nearer lakes, and in part
by geographical conditions. Up to 1670 the westward
route of the canoe fleets was up Lakes Ontario, Erie,
and Huron, to the westernmost outpost at Michilli-
mackinac on the Strait of Mackinaw. This trading-
station could be reached also by a more direct northern
route from Montreal up the Ottawa River, across to
Lake Nipissing and Georgian Bay,— a route which was

PORTAGES BETWEEN THE GREAT LAKES AND THE MISSISSIPPI

THE RIVERS OF NORTH AMERICA 29
often used when the Iroquois were on the war-path about
Ontario and Erie. Further progress thence naturally
led up the waterways afforded by Lake Superior and
Lake Michigan to the portages which the Indian de
scribed as leading to the western waters. The conse
quence was that the passages earliest known were those
remotest from the Canadian settlements. The first carry
route used by the French led from the head of Green
Bay up Fox River, across the northern part of Lake
Winnebago, and along the upper Fox River for sixty
or seventy miles to a narrow portage of two miles, lead
ing to the head of the Wisconsin River.6 This was the
route followed by Marquette and the fur-trader Joliet
in 167.3, when they explored the Mississippi to the mouth
of the Arkansas. The other of these earlier portages
was across the narrow, lake-dotted watershed between
the St. Louis River, which flows into the western
extremity of Lake Superior, and the easternmost bend of
the Mississippi.
By the end of the seventeenth century the portages ^
at the head of Lake Michigan were the best known.
There were a number of these close together. The i
Chicago River, the lesser and greater Calumet, and the j
St. Joseph all led by short carries to the Des Plaines /
and Kankakee branches of the Illinois. The Lake Erie j
portages, though affording nearer, more direct routes
by the Ohio tributaries to the Mississippi, came into use
only in the eighteenth century, and here, too, the pro
gress was from west to east. When the French from
their base in the newly founded Detroit (1701) were able
to hold the neighboring Iroquois in check, the Maumee

30 THE RIVERS OF NORTH AMERICA
River with its portages west to the St. Joseph and the
Wabash was open to travel; afterwards the portages
from Lake Erie to the Big Miami, Scioto, and Muskin
gum were rendered safe. When in the middle of the
eighteenth century the French began to draw their lines
closer around the back of the English settlements, that
from Presque Isle (site of Erie) to French Creek and the
Allegheny River marked the entrance to the fortified
route of the French to their post at the forks of the
Ohio, where Pittsburg now stands.
Having swept westward up the broad highway of
the Great Lakes to the upper reaches of the Ohio and
Mississippi, the French went to work more slowly to
secure all the portages to these rivers and to occupy
every strategiiTpoint at the extremities of th#; Lakes.
Forts Frontenac (Kingston), Niagara, Rouille (Toronto),
and Detroit were designed to command the Lakes, as
Fort St. Louis on the upper Illinois and the post of
Outianon on the upper Wabash controlled the Chicago
and Maumee portages ; while Vincennes, Cahokia, and
Kaskaskia completed the line of connection with the
lower Mississippi. The vast area thus opened up to
the French by their possession of the two great watery
ways of the continent led to the ultimate shipwreck
of their colonial venture, because the large extent of
the territory lured them to exploit itsjrade rather than
make_p^rman£fldLsettlements. They spread' themselves
tm^nJ^e_r^anJ»°™ous area, yielding to the danger of
too great expansion. Their hold upon the country
was akin to that of the small, widely scattered Indian
tribes, whose manner of life they came to imitate and

THE RIVERS OF NORTH AMERICA 31
whose economic methods they adopted. Superficial use
of a country's resources always means sparse population
and therefore a weak hold upon the land. The com
pact settlements of the English made a surer basis
for military operations than did the scattered posts of
the French. The English had no mighty waterway to
tempt them into the remote lands of the abundant furs.
The peltries came to them on the upper Hudson and the
Mohawk ; but everywhere else the fertile river valleys
of the narrow Atlantic plain rooted them in the soil,
or numerous harbors and neighboring fishing-grounds
bound them to the coast. Their advance . towards the
interior was therefore a slow heel-and-toe process, and
never lost its connection with the tide-swept shore.
As the French settlements in North America were
dominated by two great rivers, the English were con
trolled by_ the larger and smaller indentations of the
coast, together witETtEe- streams draining into them.
Coming from their island home with the object of
making permanent settlements, they met geographical
conditions which combined to strengthen them in the
purpose. Therneed of keeping m_*oucn "^h *ne m0"
ther country, at first for supplies and later for commerce,
and the-equal need of getting beyond the sandy beaches
and rocky shores of the coast to the more fertile soil as
well as to the trade of the interior, were the two motives
determining the distribution of their colonies. Under
the influence of the first, their settlements wereTgrouped
in inclosed sea-basins which carried their vessels by pro
tected waterways as far as possible into the land. Mas
sachusetts Bay, Narragansett Bay, Long Island Sound,

32 THE RIVERS OF NORTH AMERICA
New York Bay with Raritan Bay, Delaware Bay with
the Delaware estuary, Chesapeake Bay, Albemarle with
Pamlico Sound, marked each the beginning of one, in
some cases two, of the original colonies.7 The same
principle of selection was shown in the geographical
distribution of the French settlements in Acadia, where
the Bay of Fundy and Penobscot Bay comprised the
majority of their fishing-stations and trading-posts, and
their three agricultural villages of Port Royal, Beau-
bassin, and Les Mines.
All of these inlets answered the requirement of con
tact with the sea ; the rivers flowing into them answered
the other requirement of broad contact with the land.
Some of these bays, like Massachusetts and Narragan-
sett, which received no affluents, gave to their settlements
preeminently the stamp of coast communities. In such
the advance of the population towards the interior was
very slow, especially as there were almost no fertile allu
vial bottoms to vary the monotony of a stubborn glacial
soil and to tempt to agricultural expansion. But wher
ever navigable rivers flowed into these inlets of the
sea, we notice the predominance of settlement at or
near their mouths and a steady advance of population
up their valleys. The mouth, and also in general the
lower course of a river, afforded safe harborage for
the small craft of the colonial period, while the back
country was made accessible by the main stream and
the ramifications of its creeks for canoe travel. A set
tlement thus located on a river commanded the Indian
trade of its whole basin, and could easily export the
products of its fields and forests. The instructions of

THE RIVERS OF NORTH AMERICA 33
the London Company to the officers of their first expedi
tion, sent to Virginia in 1606, point out another advan
tage of a river location well up towards the head of sea
navigation : " Such a place you may perchance find one
hundred miles from the river's mouth, and the further up
the better, for if you sit down near the entrance, except
it be in some island that is strong by nature, an enemy
that may approach you on even ground may easily pull
you out." 8 This caution was dictated by fear of coast
attack from rival colonies of other European nations.
The destruction of Ribault's colony at the mouth of the
St. John's River in Florida by the Spanish, and later
French depredations upon English settlements on the
Maine coast, showed the wisdom of this precaution.
The river-made peninsulas of Maryland, Virginia, and
North Carolina formed a geographical environment which
influenced profoundly the development of these colonies.
Here a mild climate, abundant alluvial bottoms, naviga
ble streams, and a network of creeks combined to further
agricultural expansion. Twelve years after the founding
of Jamestown twenty-five miles from the mouth of the
James River, the plantations extended up that water
course for seventy miles, spreading out four or six miles
from either bank. In a few years more (1624) popula
tion had pushed up the stream to the present site of
Richmond and across the peninsula between the James
and the York. The intervening waterways and the
series of rivers made it easy to expand laterally, so that
by 1663 we find the Virginians had spread northward to
meet the Maryland colony on the Potomac, and southward
to the Chowan Peninsula on Albemarle Sound. The

34 THE RIVERS OF NORTH AMERICA
ramifying streams brought almost all the plantations of
this tidewater country in contact with the sea. It was
customary for every planter to have his own wharf where
he shipped tobacco or corn in exchange for the merchan
dise of Europe or the salted codfish of New England.
Plantations on the upper reaches of small affluents were
always able to send their produce downstream in canoes
to the nearest head of navigation. Canoe and shallop
became the coach of state and the vehicle for neigh-
, borly visits, while every plantation was its own seaport.
I The result of these geographical conditions was a
jwide and evenly distributed rural population, lack_of
j roads, and absence of large commercial towns. Never
theless, certain natural features lying beyond the limits
of Chesapeake Bay caused the rise of a bustling city at
each extremity of this basin. The head of Chesapeake
Bay just failed to touch the territory of Pennsylvania,
much to William Penn's disappointment, for his colony
had no coast and its one seaport town, Philadelphia, was
quite on the eastern border. Hence much flour, farm
produce, and quantities of valuable furs from the interior
of Pennsylvania found their way down the Susquehanna
River to Baltimore for export. This town, founded in
1729, grew so rapidly that in 1770 its population num
bered 20,000. At the other end of the bay Norfolk came
to be a fairly active seaport. Two different geographic
factors were operating here. The town became an out
let for the produce of the Albemarle Sound country,
whose rivers had their navigation spoiled by the pre
valent sand-bars, and whose fine lumber from the pine
barrens met a steady demand in Virginia, as the tide-

THE RIVERS OF NORTH AMERICA 35
water country was stripped of its forests. Furthermore,
the location of Norfolk at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay
gave it a certain commercial advantage and attracted the
West Indies trade in sugar, molasses, and rum, which
were exchanged for pork and beef of the Sound country,
and subsequently marketed in the river plantations.9
Thus the early development of the French and Eng
lish colonies in America was profoundly influenced by
the watercourses. The New England settlements, com-
mittedby their geographical conditions to fisheries and
a coastwise trade, found great compensation for their
lack of rivers in the protected waterway of Long Island
Sound. Their geographical location at the northern end
of the English colonies, and the inevitable encroachment
of their fishermen and traders upon the shores of Aca
dia brought them into conflict with the French and
made them the natural bulwark against French aggres
sion in this locality, just as the Hudson and the Mohawk
in the middle section lent this same character to New
York. NOTES TO CHAPTER II
1. Ratzel, Zur Kustenentwickelung Jahresber. d. Geograph. Gesell-
sohaft in Munich, 1894.
2. Ratzel, Anthropogeographie, part i. p. 248.
3. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, vol. i. 147.
4. Parkman, The Old Regime in Canada, p. 297.
5. La Salle's early discovery of the Ohio by way of the Allegheny
River, even if authoritatively proved, would not invalidate this gen
eral statement, because sporadic and not productive of permanent
results.
6. Justin Winsor, The Mississippi Basin, p. 22.
7. Ratzel, Zur Kustenentwickelung.
8. Quoted in Fiske, Old Virginia and her Neighbours, vol. i. p. 72.
9. Ibid. vol. ii. p. 211.

CHAPTER III
THE INFLUENCE OF THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER
UPON COLONIAL HISTORY
History shows us by repeated instances that the geo
graphical conditions most favorable for the early de
velopment of a people are such as secure to it a cer
tain amount of isolation. For this reason, a highly
articulated continent like Europe has proved a forc
ing-house for nations. Almost every people there has-
grown up, shut off from its neighbors by barriers of
mountain or sea. Confined to a limited area, protected
from without by bulwarks of nature's own making,
population increased rapidly and civilization moved
with strides under the strongly interactive life. The
people soon filled out their natural territory, then began
to crowd it, pressing upon the limits of subsistence, and
perfecting their political and social organization in the
effort to avoid the friction incident to greater density
of population. Local life grew in intensity and the
sense of statehood was early developed. An increasing
industrial and commercial activity endeavored to supply
from abroad the deficit of food for the growing num
ber of consumers ; while the population, already redun
dant, began to expand beyond its natural environment
and overflow into other lands.1
Of the three leading colonizing nations which came to

THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER 37
North America from Europe, one appropriated the only
part of this continent which could afford geographic
isolation in any way approximating that which it had
enjoyed in Europe. That people were the English.
At the end of the first century of permanent settlement
they found themseJUas~in .possession-©#~a- narrow-strip-
oE^oastj-ehflfroff^from the interior of "the* country by -
an almost unbroken jnountanuEalL... Sea and watershed
"arew their boundary lines and constituted at the same
time their frontier defenses. Only one border was
really open, that to the south along the Spanish posses
sions in Florida. The English__were therefore in a
naturally defined area, isolated enough to lend them the
protection and cohesion which colonial fife so much
needs, affording the long line of coast which could give
to this maritime people its most favorable environment,
large enough for growth and strength, but small enough
to secure concentration and to guard against the evils
of excessive expansion. Beyond this seaboard country
lay the great valley of the continent, shut in by the
upheaved masses of the Appalachian and Rocky Moun
tain systems, a vast basin unbroken save by the faint
traceries of its winding streams. Here nature offered
no obstruction, afforded no protection. The two nat
ural highways into this country, the St. Lawrence on
the east and the Mississippi to the south, came into the
hands of the French, and consequently gave them con
trol of this extensive territory. It proved, however, too
large for them to hold ; the very extent of it scattered
their population, tempted to the adventurous, half-
nomadic occupation of the fur-trader rather than the

38 THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER
sedentary life of the colonist. Here were seen for
tified trading-posts instead of the agricultural villages
which dotted the seaward slope of the Alleghenies.
The people who came to the New World to " plant
an English nation in America" had experienced at
home the economic evils of overcrowding. They re
alized that here was a chance to make a living ; and
in so far their motive was wholesomely selfish. They
went to work accordingly to get an industrial hold on
American soil. The narrow strip of land between the
Atlantic and the mountains favored and strengthened
their purpose. The Appalachian barrier narrowed their
horizon and shut out the jjreat Jbeyond ; it took away
the temptation to wide expansion which was defeating
the""poTitical aims of the Spanish and the French, and
transformed the hunter into the farmer, the gentle
man adventurer into the tobacco-grower. Territory
that is held industrially in all its extent is _held strongly^
The less dispersed the population, the fewer are the
avenues for invasion and the more solid is the front
which the country presents to attack. The mountain
walLgave to the Thirteen Colonies a certain solidarity
which they would not have otherwise possessed — a
solidarity which fought for them in the Revolution.
The Appalachian system, which, together with the
ice-worn highlands of New England, presented such an
insuperable barrier to the early colonists, extends from
the Green Mountains of Vermont to the pine-covered
hills of Alabama. It consists in general of parallel
ranges, altogether some three hundred miles in width,
which stretch along with only one considerable break

> THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER 39
in all their length of thirteen hundred miles. A man
tle of primeval forest with a singularly dense under-
growth contributed further to make them impassable.
The backwoodsman had fairly to carve a path for him
self through this wall of living green. In consequence,
the tidewater country had its long-established colonies
before anything of the mountains was known. The
rivers flowing down the eastern slope were not navigable
far back from the coast and therefore did not afford
ready access into the interior ; but when followed to
their head waters they were found to disclose excellent
passes. This was especially true of the southern por
tion of the system, but even here the disposition of the
passes involved long, circuitous routes to reach the
western slope ; for, one range, passed, the next one pre
sented a similar barrier and the longitudinal valleys
between had to be traversed before another gap could
be found. The Pennsylvanians gained access to the
Ohio by the West Branch of the Susquehanna, and also
by another route further south from the Juniata to a
tributary stream of the Allegheny. The Virginians,
though, found a more direct way up the valley of the
Potomac and thence by a short portage to the Yough-
iogeny. Among the broken hills of the southern end
of the Alleghenies, an almost level route was frequented
by the traders from the Carolinas and Virginia seeking
the Cherokee villages ; it was known from the earliest
times, but had only a limited use, because it was too
remote from the northwestern Indians who commanded
the all-important fur trade.
The only important Jbreak. in this mountain wall was

40 THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER >
\ to be found in the natural depression of_ the Hudson^
1 and Mohawk valleys,2 where the pass into the interior is
only about four hundred and forty-five feet above sea-
level. This route was also able to tap the northwestern
fur trade, then in the hands of the French. Further
more, trails led from the Mohawk and Genesee to the
upper Allegheny, and thence to the Ohio and Mississippi.
For this reason it became apparent at an early date that
the Mohawk and Hudson valleys formed the key to the
Northwest, as the meeting-place of the Allegheny and
Monongahela was in reality the " Gateway of the West."
By the geography of eastern America, therefore, these
rivers were cut out for battle-grounds in all colonial
wars between the English and the French, just as the '
head streams of the Po and Ebro leading down from
the passes of the Alps and Pyrenees have been the
scenes of conflict in every northern invasion of Italy
and Spain since the days of Hannibal and Roland.
The French, who felt that the heart of the continent
was in jeopardy, kept a sharp eye on these avenues to
the West. They could attack the English most easily
along the Mohawk valley and at the southern end of
the mountains ; but at both these points the English had
a buffer state between themselves and the enemy in the
Iroquois tribes in the north and the Cherokees in the
south, both of which nations were attached to British
interests. The chronic jealousy between the French
and English took an acute form when the French dis
covered that the Mohawk valley was getting too large
a share of the northwestern fur trade. Consequently,
by a long series of wars, they endeavored to drive the

THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER

41

English out of this region altogether. The enemy were
at a longdistance from the middle and southern colonies,
which were further guarded by the wall of the Alle-
ghenies ; so that, with the exception of one or two spo
radic attacks, they were
left undisturbed by the
struggle going on to
the north of them. On
the colonies along the
Hudson and in New
England, though, the
attacks were almost in
cessant. In the French
and Indian War nearly
every foot of the up
per Hudson was fought
over as far as Lake
Champlain, and the
route up the Mohawk
to Oswego was almost
as bitterly contested.
This history repeated
itself in the Revolu
tionary War. Both in
the French wars and in the Revolution the Six Nations
who inhabited this region rendered valuable aid to the
British. In the earlier wars particularly, the fact that
they occupied a strategic position gave them a power
and importance out of all proportion to their numbers.
The British early ingratiated themselves with the
Iroquois and Cherokees, that they might have these

MOHAWK VALLEY AND LAKE CHAMPLAIN

42 THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER
Indians as outposts against the French. But the rest
of the tribes on the seaboard were not treated with any
undue consideration, for they were not a numerous and
therefore not a dangerous enemy ; and they were pre
vented by the mountains from making any combination
with the far more populous tribes of the Mississippi
valley. The bodies of savages with whom the settlers
had to contend were small. The Indians of southern
New England were exterminated in two short wars.
The Delawares were dislodged from their original home
and emigrated beyond the mountains. The Tuscaroras
were made to evacuate their holdings in North Carolina.
Living in the narrow area of the tidewater country, it
was unavoidable that the Indians should soon feel the
encroachments of the whites ; and it was equally certain
that they would suffer defeat, when it came to a conflict,
in consequence of the weakness of the tribes. Fortu
nately for the young colonies, the Alleghenies protected
them against the depredations of the wild, half -nomadic
Indians of the Northwest, and of the fierce Appalachian
tribes of the southern Mississippi.
'/ Hemmed in thus by the mountains, for the first one
hundred and fifty years of their occupancy the English
settlers were limited to the tidewater region of the
Atlantic coast. This seaboard country presented in its
different portions different aspects, which had a corre
sponding effect upon the colonists. In New England
the lowland belt is only from fifty to eighty miles
wide; but it gradually broadens asTt continues"south-
ward, till in the Carolinas the mountains are two hun
dred and fifty miles bacF from the sea. The~~area

THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER 43
adapted to settlement was therefore more extensive in
the South than in the North. Furthermore, the north
ern district had suffered glaciation ; it was covered with
a heavy deposit of boulders, which had to be removed
at the cost of infinite labor before the land was ready
for cultivation. The hardest work had to be done be
fore a plough could be used ; but this once over, the
soil could be tilled for a long time without giving signs
of exhaustion.3 This fact, together with the small area
at their command, preserved to the settlers the con
tracted territorial ideas which they had brought with
them from the mother country, and served to root them
in the soil. Consequently the _people of New England
developed little of the tendency to expansion which
later became a characteristic of the American people.
That tendency developed further south. Here the
larger unobstructed area invited. it,~*a5d the leading
occupation of the settlers — tobacco-culture — made it
a necessity. At a time when artificial fertilizing was
almost unknown, the production of the better kinds of
tobacco demanded a virgin soil. The planters were
therefore led to take up as large tracts as possible. The
only preparation was " girdling " the trees, the primitive
mode of clearing the land which the colonists learned
from the Indians. Land so prepared was planted in
tobacco for three years, and afterwards in corn. This
method of cultivation, expedient in view of the abun
dance of arable land,4 was superficial, and the materials
taken from the soil were never replaced. By this
system of agriculture, the evils of which were further
accentuated by slave labor, low lands were exhausted

44 THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER
in eight years, fir Ids less favorably situated in three.
Ceasing to yield, they were abandoned and allowed to
revert again to a state of nature. More forest was
cleared for the plough, and the settlements invaded the
wilderness. In 1685, "although the population of
Virginia did not exceed the number of inhabitants in
the single parish of Stepney, London, nevertheless they
had acquired ownership in plantations that spread over
the same area as England itself." B Thus developed that
spirit of expansion which early in the eighteenth cen
tury led the settlers to hammer at the gates of the
mountain wall on their western frontier, and to resent
the claims of the French that the British possessions
were limited by the crest of the Alleghenies.
It was therefore not a matter of chance that the first
protest against the French forts on the Ohio was made
by a governor of Virginia. Towards the gap in the
ridge of the Alleghenies between the head waters of the
Youghiogeny and the Potomac, French and English
were approaching up the flanking valleys. Fort Cum
berland was Maryland's frontier defense on the upper
Potomac to guard this strategic point ; Fort Necessity
and the battle of Great Meadows represented the effort
of the Virginians to secure the western approach to the
dividing range, just as Braddock's march by this same
route a year later was aimed at Fort Duquesne, which
commanded all the river approaches from the west to
the mountain rampart of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and
northern Virginia.
The Virginians in the battle of Great Meadows took
the initiative in the French and Indian War before the

THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER 45
declaration of hostilities. Men like Byrd of Westover
and Governor Spotswood appreciated the character of
the mountains as a bulwark against the enemy, and real
ized the necessity of making themselves masters of its
passes before the French should do so. They knew
that their expansion over these mountains wasJnejtuW
able; therefore the sea-to-sea claims of the English were
to them of vital importance. This view was shared also
by the colonists of Pennsylvania and New York because
they, too, lived under similar conditions of expansion ;
,but the people of New England, on the other hand,
were indifferent to the disposition of the western coun
try. They seemed quite satisfied with the fine of the
Alleghenies as a, boundary, if the trade with the western
Indians could be secured. Their standpoint was there
fore provincial, in contrast to the continental concep
tions of the middle and southern colonies.
The policy of the latter prevailed and the whole line
of settlements from Maine to South Carolina was levied
on for its support in the French and Indian War. This
was the first time in their history that all the colonies
acted together ; this was the first time that there was
a common American interest at stake. Hitherto none
had combined, except the New England colonies, where
the geographical conditions made for greater density
of population, and a certain degree of isolation empha
sized their community of interests. The southern col
onies, with their widely scattered plantations, did not at
first have much to do with each other or with their
northern neighbors. Blocked by the mountains in their
growth towards the west, however, they were finally

46 THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER
compelled to expand laterally and fill up the~stretches
of forest which originally separated them. The effect
of the Appalachian barrier was therefore to keep the
population within clearly defined limits and lend it that
density which means strength. In 1700 " it was pos
sible to ride from Portland, Maine, to southern Virginia,
sleeping each night at some considerable village." 6
With the rapid increase of population characteristic
of colonial life, the limited extent of the country which
would repay cultivation, and the prevailing wasteful
methods of agriculture, it was to be expected that the
supply of arable-land would eventually be exhausted,
and the activities of the colonist necessarily directed
into other channels. This condition was reached first in
New England, so that its people were early forced info
industrial and maritime enterprise. Manufactories for
the most "common articles of consumption were estab
lished ; the forests were levied on for shipbuilding, and
American vessels were soon doing all the carrying trade
between the colonies.
The Appalachian barrier had the effect, therefore, of
keeping the colonies to the hem of the continent. It
limited them to a strip of coast, where they were most
easily retained under British domination. If they had
expanded at an earlier date to the west, England would
have found it a much more difficult task to make her
power felt over all the area settled. The mere element
of distance in a new, unbroken country would have
complicated greatly the machinery of government, while
diminishing its efficiency. Furthermore, it would have
generated in a larger proportion of the population the

THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER 47
spirit of the frontier, that is, the spirit of independence.
Disaffection towards the mother country would have
developed slowly as a chronic disease; and we may
think it would have been a long time before the feeling
could have gathered strength to break out in rebellion.
As it was, held under the thumb of the British govern
ment, disaffection took on the form of an acute attack,
and rapidly ran its course from protest to rebellion,
from rebellion to independence. More than this, when
the conflict did come the colonies were all of one mind,
no matter from what section they came. The spirit of
union which animated them can be attributed in no
' small degree to their close contiguity, while their occu
pation of a contracted area with their two and a half
million population enabled them to operate in a solid
mass against the enemy.
In revolting against England the American colonies
followed a recognized law of political geography. They
constituted the remote western frontier of Europe ;
and a tendency towards defection manifests itself in all
peripheral holdings.7 History is full of examples. The
causes are deep-seated. Differences of geographical
conditions^ of climate^soil^economic methods, and there-^
fore of political and social ideas, rapidly differentiate
colonists from the parent nation. Moreover, mere dis
tance increases greatly the difficulty of governmental
control, even in this day of rapid communication, as
England has experienced recently in Cape Colony. A
hundred years ago Burke stated this politico-geographi
cal law in terms that cannot be improved upon. " The
last cause of this disobedient spirit in the colonies . . .

48 THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER
is deep laid in the natural constitution of things. Three
thousand miles of ocean lie between you and them. No
contrivance can prevent the effect of this distance in
weakening government. Seas roll and months pass
between the order and the execution ; and the want of
a speedy explanation of a single point is enough to de
feat a whole system. . . . Nothing more happens to
you than does to all nations who have extensive em
pire ; and it happens in all the forms in which empire
can be thrown. In large bodies, the circulation of
power must be less vigorous at the extremities. Na
ture has said it. The Turk cannot govern Egypt and
Arabia and Kurdistan as he governs Thrace ; nor has
he the same dominion in Crimea and Algiers which he
has at Brusa and Smyrna." 8
This is the statement of the law from the standpoint
of the governing power ; those on the far-away peri
phery also were affected by their remoteness from the
center of authority. The colonists found it difficult to
get a hearing in England ; distance dulled the edge
and weakened the force of their protests, — this by
a psychological law. They found it irksome, often
detrimental to their interests, to wait months for the
ratification in England of colonial laws. Compelled
I often bysudden^rises to act without authority in con-
' sequence of their -remoteness, Jhe colonists developed
a spirit of initiative and independence. When the
outbreak came, England for the first time learned the
expense and difficulty of an arm's-length war. Time
and space fought on the side of the Americans.
With the opening of hostilities, geographical condi»

THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER 4<
tions directed campaigns and influenced the result oi
battles. The valley of the Hudson made the natura
line of communication between Canada and the British
fleet on the coast, and at the same time formed the land
connection hfttwAm^^ew England and the other colo
nies. As the Uriusn had full control of the sea, the
colonial armies could move only by land routes. Hence
the Hudson River was of vital importance to both sides.
and from the first both sides aimed at its control. The
seizure of Crown Point and Ticonderoga at the starl
enabled the Americans to command the line of com
munication with Canada. The British operations tc
gain the Hudson followed three geographical lines,
By the Champlain route and the Mohawk valley twc
armies from Canada advanced towards Albany, where
they were to form a conjunction with troops coming up
the Hudson. The naval battle off Valcour Island in
Lake Champlain, and later the capture of Ticonderoga
and Fort Edward, traced the British advance to the
Hudson from the north ; Bemis Heights, Stillwater, and
Saratoga, the attempted retreat along the same route.
On the Mohawk valley route, Oswego, Fort Stanwix,
— which corresponded in its geographico-strategic lo
cation to Fort Cumberland on the upper Potomac, —
and Oriskany marked the conflict between the British
and American forces. The approach from the south
began with the operations at the mouth of the Hud
son. Here the siege of Brooklyn Heights, battles of
Harlem Heights and White Plains, with the capture of
Fort Washington, gave the British the control of Man
hattan and the lower Hudson. But the success of the

50 THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER
Americans in cutting the British lines of communication
with Canada along the Mohawk and Lake Champlain,
and Washington's tactics to prevent Howe's moving up
the Hudson, frustrated British ejfrfct to control eastern
New York. fl^
The colonies by their position Snthe long, narrow
border of the American continent had an extensive
sea frontier, which was open to the attack of the Brit
ish fleet. Consequently much of the Revolutionary
War was fought on or near the coast. The coast towns
of New England were cannonaded and levied on for
supplies by the British frigates. Charleston, South
Carolina, and Savannah were taken by naval attack,
and the fleet assisted in the capture of New York. With
the exception of Canada, the British had no base on
the land frontier, so they had to establish their base at
coast points accessible to their ships. And if their
armies advanced into the interior, a threat to their line
of communication with the sea would bring them hur
rying to the coast. Washington's occupation of Mor-
ristown Heights in January, 1776, enabled him to pre
vent the enemy from crossing New Jersey to take
Philadelphia, because he was in a position to cut them
off from their supplies. The campaigns of Cornwallis
and Tarleton in the Piedmont country of North and
South Carolina were terminated chiefly by the threat
to their lines of communication with the coast. The
final overthrow came when, by the advent of the French
fleet, the Americans were able to invest the position of
r Cornwallis at Yorktown by water as well as by land.
The barrier of the Appalachians kept the American

THE APPALACHIAN BARRIER 51
armies facing eastward. The colonies braced them
selves against the mountains and fought towards the
sea. The bulwark at their back protected them from
the onslaughts of tfaittrestern Indians, who were stirred
to hostilities by Bflsh agents. Only the few settle
ments beyond the"" mountains in Kentucky and Tennes
see were exposed to this danger; but as they were
debarred in general from participation in the eastern
campaigns, they could give the Indians their undivided
attention. For a hundred and fifty years the American people
were dammed up against the mountain barrier. But
the energies aroused by the prosecution of a successful
war, and the snapping of the cords which held the col
onies in leash to England, enabled the mass of Ameri
can life to rush through the breaches in the mountains,
down to the Mississippi and beyond ; till in half the
time it had taken the people to reach the crest of
the Alleghenies, they were planting their towns on the
genial coast of the Pacific.
NOTES TO CHAPTER III
1. Shaler, Nature and Man in America, p. 152, and Ratzel, Anthropo-
geographie, part i. p. 249. Second edition, 1898.
2. A. P. Brigham, The Eastern Gateway of the United States, in the
Geographical Journal, May, 1899, reprinted in The Journal of
School Geography, April, 1900.
3. Shaler, Nature and Man in America, p. 225.
4. Roscher, Nationalokonomik des Ackerbaues, pp. 74 and 104. 12th
edition.
5. Philip Bruce, Economic History of Virginia, vol. i. p. 424.
6. Shaler, Nature and Man in America, p. 199.
7. Ratzel, Anthropogeographie, p. 219. 1899.
8. Burke, Speech on Conciliation, Bohn Library, vol. i. p. 468.

CHAPTER I

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT IN RELATION TO THE PHY
SIOGRAPHIC FEATURES OF THE APPALACHIAN SYSTEM
A mountain system is always a barrier ; this character
it maintains in a greater or less degree according to its
physiographic features. A single high massive range
like the Himalayas, or a double snow-crowned rampart
like the Great Caucasus and Anti-Caucasus, or a series
of parallel earth-folds like the Alps, are enduring ob
stacles to intercourse, whose resistance is measured
largely by their height and width. The number, dis
tribution, and elevation of its passes also affect the
barrier nature of a mountain. A comparatively low
range like the Pyrenees, which lifts an even sky-line
unbroken by any deep gap or notch, is a wall without
breach or door, while the many easy and evenly dis
tributed passes of the Alps have reduced the difficulty
of communication between the plains to the north and
south. Finally, the presence of transverse river valleys
leading up like natural roads to these lofty portals in
the mountain wall facilitate transmontane travel, and
their absence leaves many an excellent pass unutilized.
The general with his army, the pack-laden trader,
migrating settler, and the engineer laying out the. course
of a railroad, see in a mountain range only a challenge
of their energy and endurance ; and they straightway

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 53
search for the lowest dip in the crest by which to cross.
The pass points the easiest road across the ridge, and
therefore becomes the focus of all established highways
on either slope. Along its narrow, rugged channel
pours a tide of humanity, drawn thither by some dream
of good beyond, while on the flanking summits reigns
the solitude of primeval forest or the eternal snows.1
Mountains which spread out on a broad base with a
succession of parallel ranges must be crossed by a suc
cession of passes determining more or less circuitous
routes. This is the case in the Austrian Alps and in
the Hindu Kush along the caravan road from Peshawar
in the Punjab to Balkh in the plains of northern Af
ghanistan. But sometimes powerful drainage streams
have carved their valleys straight across the axis of the
corrugated upland and opened up natural highways
to a single pass, which thus dominates a system several
hundred miles wide. The valley of the Ticino from
Lake Maggiore and of the Reuss from Lake Lucerne
form an unbroken ascent to the St. Gotthard, the only
point in which the central Alps can be crossed by one
pass. But even where streams have not cut reentrant
valleys into the heart of the mountain system, but fur
row only the outermost slope, they mark the avenue of
easiest approach to the gaps above. Navigable in their
lower course, they expedite travel ; as the grade grows
steeper, however, rapids demand portages, and later
canals, but always the rugged gorge above furnishes a
foothold for the trail to the summit.
By river valley and pass migrating races and indi
viduals have found their way over mountain barriers.

54 THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
The Gap of Belfort, connecting the long valleys of the
Rhone and the Rhine, has been the historic route of
migration and travel between the North Sea and the
Mediterranean. The Brenner Pass was the Alpine
portal by which the Cimbri swept down into the valley
of the Po ; and the breaches in the eastern Alps deter
mined the line of Rome's expansion to the Danube, just
as later they exposed her to the inroads of the Goths and
Huns. To-day the Russians are pushing southward
from the sandy plains of Turkestan up the Heri Rud
and Murghab rivers to the low dips in the western
Hindu Kush which form the " Gates of Herat ; " and
eastward by the valleys of the Syr Daria and the Oxus
she has stretched her power to the snowy passes of the
Tyan Shan and the Pamir, from which she hopes to lay
hold on Mongolia and Chinese Turkestan. In the same
waJ> gaPs and rivers enabled the American colonists to
cross the Appalachian barrier. The location and distri
bution of these natural passways determined which col
onies should furnish the largest quota of the pioneers,
and also what should be the destination of those early
winners of the West. To see how this geographic con
trol operated, an analysis of the Appalachian topography
is necessary. The Appalachian system is peculiar in that it consists
of a long central zone of depression, bordered on the
southeast by the Appalachian Mountains proper, and
on the northwest by the Allegheny and Cumberland
plateaus. This central trough, known as. the Great
Appalachian Valley, is sunk several hundred feet below
the highlands on either side, but its surface is diversi-

TRANS-i

>t 80° from Greenwich "'

ROUTES

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 55
fled by intermittent series of parallel, even-crested ridges,
which rise, one beyond the other, like successive waves
of the sea, across the whole seventy-five miles of the
valley's width. The Blue Ridge, which forms the east
ern rim of the Great Valley, is a range of gentle slope
and rounded crest, notched at frequent intervals by gaps
a thousand feet deep, or cut through by flaring river
gorges. The western rim is the Allegheny Front, the
bold, forbidding escarpment of the Allegheny and Cum
berland plateaus, whose rugged surface, scoured and fur
rowed by drainage streams, runs off into the low plains
of the prairies and the Great Lakes. The height of the
Appalachian system increases from the north towards
the south ; but the average elevation of the ranges,
which is only from three to four thousand feet, is
nowhere sufficient to constitute a great obstacle. It is
the long, unbroken extent of the system and its great
width of three hundred miles which make it a barrier.
This character would be far more pronounced were
it not for the drainage streams of the upland. The
Appalachian rivers cut across the grain of the mountains
from west to east or east to west, only intermittently
controlled by the ranges and following the trend of
the longitudinal valleys. The reason for this physio
graphic discordance is to be found in the geologic his
tory of the highlands.2 The transverse river channels are
older than the mountains themselves, and as the nas
cent ranges slowly protruded their crests, or were left in
relief by erosion, cut through them in flaring water-gaps.
The northern rivers, like the Delaware, Susquehanna,
Potomac, and the James, have their sources on the

56 THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
Allegheny Plateau, cut through the Allegheny Front,
the ranges of the Great Valley, and the Blue Ridge or
its northern extension, South Mountain, and empty into
the Atlantic Ocean, while their head waters interlock
with those of the Ohio along inconspicuous divides to
the west. The southern rivers take an opposite course.
They rise, as the Watauga, Nolichucky, Holston, French
Broad, and New River, on the eastern rim of the system
in North Carolina or, as in the case of the New, even
on the seaward side of the Blue Ridge, carve their way
westward through every barrier, and flow out as the
Tennessee and Kanawha into the Ohio. Their sources
interlace with those of the Yadkin and Catawba, which
furrow the eastern slopes of the Blue Ridge to the
Atlantic ; and among the Allegheny ridges of West
Virginia, the Greenbrier, a northern tributary of the
Kanawha, is separated from the head waters of the
James River only by a narrow range tracing the Alle
gheny Front, which is now crossed by the Chesapeake
and Ohio Railroad.
The divides within the Great Valley are peculiar in be
ing distinct from the Allegheny ridges ; for this reason
they are intricate and little elevated above the general
level, so that it is easy to pass down the whole length of
this trough from the Susquehanna to the Tennessee,
merely by following the lateral branches of these and of
the intervening streams as they flow along the minor
longitudinal vales of the whole system. Hence the out
bound pathfinders to the west were able to enter the
Great Valley by the Susquehanna, Juniata, Potomac,
James, or Roanoke, turn right or left up a lateral branch,

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 57
ascend a notched gap or low watershed to the next
transverse river within the valley, and following it to
its source pass over to some westward flowing stream.
In this way he could cross the Appalachians in almost
any direction.
The eastern head waters of the Tennessee, after leav
ing the high open valleys just to the west of the Blue
Ridge, had to cut through the broad, complex belt of the
Unaka Mountains 3 in deep gorges, which afforded no
easy passway and were further dangerous on account of
the hostile Cherokees. Hence North Carolina pioneers
from the upper Watauga and Nolichucky valleys found
readier connection with the west through the New River
and the Virginia routes to the northern tributaries of
the Tennessee. And for over a hundred years the
Unakas remained an obstacle to deflect the tide of em
igration. The westward progress of the colonial frontier in early
times was slow. Bound to the coast by the need of
ready sea communication, in 1700 the settlements em
braced all the tidewater country up to the " fall line,"
the outer limit of the Piedmont Plateau and the first
interruption to river navigation ; the frontier was some
what farther inland, about fifty miles to the east of the
Blue Ridge. But by 1750 the far-ranging traders were
building their lonely cabins in the murmurous solitude
of the great Appalachian forests, while their pack-horses
were loosening the rocks on the mountain passes beyond,
and their bateaux were burdening the waters of the Ohio,
Great Miami, Wabash, and Sandusky Bay.*
The successful ending of the French and Indian War,

58 THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
which extended England's territory in America to the
^Mississippi (1763), was the signal for a western advance
of the population; but at the outbreak of hostilities
(1755) the frontier of settlement described a rough
curve, which reached its easternmost points in New York
and Georgia, and its westernmost on the Greenbrier
and Holston rivers. Conditions of physical and political
geography determined this frontier line. In New York
the advance up the Mohawk valley moved at a snail's
pace as compared with the leap of settlement from Man
hattan Island to Albany. From Schenectady some late-
coming Germans pushed the narrow valley zone of civ
ilization constituting New York first to Palatine Bridge
and Stone Arabia (near Canajoharie), then in 1723 to
German Flats along the upper Mohawk between Little
Falls and Utica. The Catskill and Adirondack moun
tains on either side, too inaccessible in those roadless
days, were left uninhabited. From 1723 till 1784 there
was no advance of settlement in central New York, for,
though the country was fertile, the location was too ex
posed to French aggression ; and after the removal of
this danger, the relatively dense population of the Iro
quois tribes was an effective barrier to expansion. Thus
political neighbors held back the frontier of settlement.
In eastern Pennsylvania, where the Appalachian
trough is easily accessible in consequence of dips and
breaks in the mountain wall, settlers early spread into
the Cumberland and Lebanon valleys, and founded
Easton, Bethlehem, Reading, Carlisle, and Shippens-
burg, while the traders had pushed up the Susquehanna
to Wyoming and across the " Endless Mountains " by

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 59
the Juniata, in whose upland valleys they were marking
their " tomahawk claims" and preparing for permanent
settlement.5 But this western part of the Great Appa
lachian Valley is much broken by linear ridges and little
adapted for agriculture. Hence the tide of frontier
settlers, who were made up chiefly of Scotch-Irish and
German late-comers to the New World, spread south
ward along the line of least resistance into the broad
open Valley of Virginia. A few passed thence by the
gap of the Roanoke River to the head streams of the
Yadkin in the Piedmont of North Carolina.
Both these regions received accessions also from the
tidewater portion of the southern colonies. Especially
in Virginia, as the large estates predominated more and
more, the small proprietors, unable to compete with the
plantation system of the tidewater, moved westward and
southwestward into the Piedmont and mountain regions,
where other economic conditions prevailed, and thus by
natural selection added to the democratic element of
the frontier. The broad, fertile Shenandoah Valley was
easily accessible to these through the low passes of the
Blue Ridge between the Potomac and the Roanoke, and
hence drew steadily if not extensively from the tidewater
sources; but it received the greater part of its popula
tion by the nature-made highway leading down from the
north. The geographical order of its settlement indi
cates this. The first clearing was made in 1732 near
the present town of Winchester, about thirty-two miles
from the Potomac, by one Joist Hite, who came in from
Pennsylvania and who was soon followed by sixteen
families from the same state. Two years later some

A

60 THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
cabins and cornfields appeared in the vast encasing
forest about twenty-eight miles further up the valley in
the vicinity of the modern Woodstock ; and from then
till 1740 the tide advanced rapidly up to the sources of
the Shenandoah River, and beyond to where the head
waters of the James and Roanoke interlace with those
of the westward flowing New River.
V In 1755, just before the outbreak of the French and
Indian War, Winchester, Staunton or Augusta Court
House, as it was then called, and Fincastle were distant
frontier posts ; but fifty miles beyond, the westward flow
ing streams, readily accessible from Virginia, showed
the remotest habitations of all the colonies. Colonel
Wilson's mill on Cheat River was reached by a twenty-
mile trace from the South Branch of the Potomac. Just
to the southwest there were a few cabins and clearings
on the Greenbrier.6 William English or Ingles, with
a few other Scotch-Irish and a group of Dunkards, had
their outlying dwellings on the upper New far up the
Valley of Virginia ; and just across the divide to the
south the enterprising Stalnaker — his name tells his
origin — was building his cabin on a head stream
of the Holston near the present Tennessee boundary,
when Dr. Walker passed that way in 1750 to explore
the lands of Kentucky. In North Carolina at this
time the remotest settlements were along the sources of
the Yadkin ; but just beyond were the westward flowing
streams of the Tennessee, and here the Watauga and
Nolichucky valleys in 1758 saw the first stockades
across the Blue Ridge south of the Virginia line.7
So long as colonies were limited to the tidewater,

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 61
Piedmont, and the eastern part of the Great Valley in
Pennsylvania, the Appalachians were an effective barrier
against the western Indians ; but when the enterprising
settlers began pushing out to the inner ranges of the
mountains and contesting the territorial claims of the
French beyond, the latter stirred up the savages to de
predations upon the outlying settlements. Then every
stream which opened a route into the mountains from
the west became an Indian war-path ; and between 1754
and 1759 every mountain pass or divide at their sources
began to bristle with English fort or stockade to check
these onslaughts. In this period a whole line of such
strongholds was erected, — Ligonier on the Loyalhanna
branch of the Allegheny near the pass from the Juniata,
Fort Cumberland on the upper Potomac, Fort Chissel in
the Valley of Virginia on the divide between the New
River and the Holston, Colonel Byrd's fort at Long
Island on the upper Holston in East Tennessee, and a
hundred miles further south Fort Loudoun at the junc
tion of the Jellico and Watauga rivers. These remote
military outposts and the scattered clearings about them
were from a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles west
of the frontier of continuous settlement in Virginia
and North Carolina.
In the tidewater and Piedmont regions, the general
movement of the population was northwest along the
course of the drainage streams, at right angles to the
coast ; but, within the mountains, population advanced '
down the longitudinal valleys, along a northeast-south
west line, parallel with the trend of the Appalachian
system, and it swept along in its tide all the little tribu-

62 THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
tary streams of outbound settlers who crossed the Blue
Ridge. The consequence was that while the tidewater
regions of the colonies kept. each its distinctive char
acter, born of distinct old-world sources and diverse
environments, the backwoods population of the moun
tains, from the Wyoming valley to the Yadkin, showed
a wide mingling of ethnic elements — Dutch, German,
Huguenot French, Scotch-Irish, and English, — which
obliterated the distinctive types of the coast, while the
prevailing similarity of their geographic environment
operated to produce the new type of the backwoods.
From northern Pennsylvania to Georgia, the whole
Piedmont and mountain tract gave its stamp to the
life of this forest frontier. Mountain economy, based
upon the small farm, did not permit the development of
large estates, with the concomitant industrial system
of slavery and aristocratic organization of society. Dif
ficulty of transportation to the coast prevented trade on a
large scale and the amassing of wealth. Without social
jdasses and wealth, democracy reigned supreme. The
daily struggle for existence amid the dangers of the
wilderness produced a race of men, sturdy in their
self-reliance, self-respecting in their independence, quick
to think, strong to act, and above all filled with the
spirit of enterprise. Their remoteness from the arm of
the law led them to frame laws for themselves, or to
take the law into their own hands. Therefore with
impartiality they were prone to deal summarily with
horse-thieves and tax-gatherers. But their hardihood
and fertility of resource, practical and political, fitted
them to be pioneers and founders of states in the more
distant wilderness beyond.

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 63
When the westward movement came, the base of its
advance was geographically defined. The isolation of
New England excluded her from it. New York also
took no share in it because of her French and Iroquois
neighbors. Moreover, after the war with France, Eng
land was bound to regard the rights of her Indian allies.
Therefore, by the treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1768,
though the Iroquois ceded the western lands lying
between the Tennessee and the Ohio, from Kittanning
on the Allegheny the " Property Line " defining the
frontier of white settlement turned eastward along; the
West Branch of the Susquehanna, crossed by a small
creek to the North Branch, then to the elbow of the
Delaware at the present site of Deposit, from which it
turned directly north along the Unadilla branch of the
Susquehanna to a point midway between Fort Stanwix ,
and Lake Oneida. Western New York was thus secured
to the Iroquois ; but even after the Revolution, which
had made the Six Nations the enemy of the colonists,
the retention of the Lake posts till 1796 by the British
and the strength and number of the Indians themselves
deterred the advance of settlements, which in 1800
scarcely extended to the Genesee River.
Around the southern end of the Appalachian Moun
tains an almost level route led to the Mississippi Valley,
but here, as in the north, the Indians barred all western
advance. Creeks and Cherokees were stirred by the
Spanish, who acquired Louisiana in 1762, to drive the
colonists in this region back to the coast. Later,
crowded to the south and east by the encroachments
of the whites in Tennessee and the infant state of

64 THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
Alabama, these Indians were able to limit Georgia's
frontier of settlement to the Altamaha and Ocmulgee
rivers as late as 1820.
y Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and North Caro
lina, therefore, were the only participants in the early
westward movement. In the three southern colonies,
land-hunger resulting from existing agricultural meth
ods supplied the motive, while in Pennsylvania the far-
ranging traders had drawn attention to the fertile regions
beyond the mountains. Individuals from this colony
and from Virginia were prominent in the land compa
nies which from 1750 were trying to secure patents to
large areas on the " Western Waters." 8 Furthermore,
V the provincial governments, with the approval of the
British crown, issued innumerable warrants for land as
pay for military service in the war with the French and
with Pontiac ; such claims were to be located along the
Ohio, within the charter limits of Virginia and Penn
sylvania. Later, the young Republic, rich in land hut
poor in specie, paid off in the same way a part of the
debt incurred in the Revolution, and thus gave a new
impulse to the outmoving tide.
Geographical conditions favored the expansion of the
middle colonies. Their long line of western frontier
was a chord subtending the rude arc formed by the
Tennessee and Ohio rivers. The head waters of these
streams or of their tributaries opened so many gateways
to the transmontane lands. The broad territory between
the two rivers had been ceded to the English by the
Indians at Fort Stanwix (1768). Reserved by the sav
ages as a hunting-ground, and having, therefore, no

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 65
permanent Indian settlements, it opened a line of least
resistance for colonial expansion ; while its fertile soil,
agreeable climate, and abundant salt-springs afforded
all essentials for pioneer homes.
The topography of the Appalachians and their two
distinct drainage systems determined that the northern
routes should converge where the Allegheny Plateau is
spanned by the forks of the Ohio, and the southern
where the Tennessee, Kanawha, and, just between the
two, Cumberland Gap open portals to the West. Three
routes met at Pittsburg : one from Philadelphia by the
West Branch of the Susquehanna, a forty-mile portage
over the divide, and Toby Creek to the Allegheny at
Kittanning ; a second further south, also from Philadel
phia, by the Juniata tributary of the Susquehanna, or
by a more direct trace known as Forbes's Road from
Carlisle through Shippensburg, Fort Lyttleton, and Fort
Bedford to the upper Juniata, thence by an easy moun
tain pass to the Loyalhanna River by Fort Ligonier
and on down the Allegheny or across the low dividing
ridge to the forks of the Ohio ; and a third up the
Potomac to Fort Cumberland and thence by Braddock's
road over the divide to the Youghiogeny or to Redstone
Old Fort on the Monongahela. This was the natural line
of connection with Alexandria and Baltimore. On these
northern routes water-carriage predominated. Naviga
tion on both the Susquehanna and Potomac was inter
rupted by rapids ; but for early canoe travel this obstacle
was not serious. As the transmontane region became
settled, however, the Potomac was improved by canal
ization and a better road shortened the distance between

66 THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
Fort Cumberland and Redstone. The traders said that
Alexandria was four hundred miles nearer the fur-fields
than any other Atlantic port.9 Therefore Baltimore re
ceived a large part of the bulky exports from the back
country, while Philadelphia furnished to the western
trade most of the manufactured supplies, which were
sent by a more direct wagon-road three hundred miles
across the mountains.
Once over the mountains, the pioneer continued his
journey westward from Pittsburg by flatboat or keel-
boat down the Ohio. But as there was no established
carrying business on the river at this time, the supply of
even these primitive means of transportation was uncer
tain, all the more as, once at their downstream destina
tion, they were unfit to stem the swift current on a
return voyage. The emigrant, therefore, was often com
pelled to wait a month or more before he could get a
boat built ; for workmen were scarce. His troubles were
not over when his rude craft was launched. Danger
from Indian attack was constant and imminent. But
after the Revolution and Wayne's defeat of the northern
savages in 1794, and especially after the opening up of
the Northwest, the Ohio route was much used, except
for the return trip to the East. The current that bore
the outbound settler down the tide of the western
waters was his obstacle when he turned his face towards
the coast. Hence this difficulty and the horror of Indian
attack deflected much of the westward movement to the
land route from southwestern Virginia by Cumberland
Gap. The intervening trail from the head streams of the
James River to the Greenbrier tributary of the Kanawha,

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 67
and the rugged portal opened to the same river and to
the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy by the deep canon of
the New, seem to have been little used by the pioneers.
Buffalo trace and Indian war-path had pointed out the
easiest way across the mountain barrier, and these the
backwoodsman followed. The Big Sandy and New River
route was the common war-path of the Shawnees when
making incursions from Ohio into the territory of their
relentless foes, the Catawbas of North Carolina, because
it was the most direct line from the villages along the
Scioto ; but the light equipment of savage warriors per
mitted rougher traveling than the pack-horses and cattle
herds of the outbound settler.
The Cumberland Gap route was the natural avenue to^
the West for emigrants from Virginia and the Carolinas,
but it was preferred also by colonists from Philadelphia
when they carried little baggage, though the distance
from that city to the interior of Kentucky was eight
hundred miles. From Philadelphia an established line
of travel led across the Potomac by Wadkin's Ferry, and
up the Valley of Virginia along the old war-trail of the
Iroquois and Cherokee, over the low watershed to the
New River. The pioneer crossed that stream and con
tinued up its western affluent, Reed Creek, which on an
almost level divide interlocks with the head streams of
the Holston. Here the western trail was joined by
another path from Richmond, Virginia, and here at the
" forks of the road " was Fort Chissel, the block-house
built in 1758 to hold the Cherokees in check. At this
point began the Wilderness Road. The distance to
Cumberland Gap was two hundred miles.

68 THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
From the upper Holston, the Wilderness Road turned
west, and by a maze of gaps and their approaching
streams which furrowed the mountain sides, it crossed
the parallel ranges of Clinch, Powell, and Walden
mountains to the Powell River, and turned down this
valley to Cumberland Gap, an old "wind-gap" which
opened an easy gateway (1600 feet elevation) through
Cumberland Mountain to the West. Just beyond the
pass the frontiersman struck the " Warriors Path," an
Indian trail which ran between the Shawnee villages at
the mouth of the Scioto in Ohio and the Cherokee lands
in eastern Tennessee. The Wilderness Road, as tracked
in 1775 by Daniel Boone for Colonel Henderson, fol
lowed this Indian trail across the ford of the Cumber
land, where this river breaks through Pine Mountain,
and down the stream for a few miles to Flat Lick ; but
here it turned northwest, and followed a buffalo trace
along the ridges over to Rockcastle River. In Kentucky
the pioneer, following the example of the buffalo,
avoided the immediate watercourses ; for in contrast to
the broad basins of the Allegheny rivers, these streams
had carved out the surface of the Cumberland Plateau
into deep V-shaped valleys, which afforded only preca
rious foothold for the traveler and necessitated continu
ous crossing of their rushing currents.
By buffalo trace the road continued north from the
Rockcastle River through Boone's Gap in the rugged
barrier of the Big Hill range (present route of the
Louisville and Nashville Railroad) to Otter Creek and
the Kentucky River at Fort Boonesborough, thence to
Lexington and the smiling lands of the Bluegrass.

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 69
From Rockcastle River another branch of the Wilder
ness Road, blazed by Logan in 1775, turned northwest
and, by a natural gateway near Crab Orchard, reached
level land near the present town of Stanford, where
Logan built Station St. Asaphs. This track became
more important than Boone's trail to the north because
it led more directly to the attractive level lands of Ken
tucky, and, passing through Danville, Bardstown, and
Bullitt's Lick, terminated at the Falls of the Ohio,
whence was the readiest connection with the old French
trading-posts on the Mississippi and the Wabash.
The route taken by Robertson to the Tennessee coun
try followed the Wilderness Road beyond Cumberland
Gap, and then turned southwest, guided largely by buf
falo traces seeking pools and salt-licks, to the " bend of
the Cumberland " where Nashville grew up ; but the
women, children, and baggage for the new settlement
made a long and dangerous journey in flatboats, dug
outs, and canoes down the winding course of the Ten
nessee River to the Ohio, and up the Cumberland to the
little stockade on the bluffs. But later (1783) a new
road from the confluence of the Holston and the Clinch
rivers passed by easy ascent over Cumberland Mountain
to the valley of the Cumberland and Nashville. This
route was joined by a trail also from North Carolina,
and at the mouth of the French Broad River by still
another from South Carolina. Thus several roads from
the east converged upon the upper Tennessee, just as
Cumberland Gap was a plexus of other routes aiming at
Kentucky and the West.
At first only blazed trails through the great wilder-

70 THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
ness, then traces trodden out more plainly by the feet of
pioneers and pack-horses, impassable to wagons, these
transmontane roads offered no easy conditions for travel.
The floor of the Great Valley in southern Virginia rises
to 1700 feet and the linear ranges to be crossed were in
general only 600 or 800 feet higher ; but each in turn
barred the western horizon like a wall, and only here and
there were their even sky-lines notched by a gap. These
gaps were never opposite one another in the successive
ranges, so the traveler had to take a circuitous way up
and down the intervening valleys from pass to pass. He
had to ford trough streams and mountain creeks, which
one summer rain might raise to rushing torrents. For
food he depended upon game or the cattle which he
drove along with him, while an outlying habitation occa
sionally supplied him with bacon and corn-meal. The
danger of attack from the Cherokees, stirred to hostility
first by the French and later by the Spanish, was always
there, but never so imminent as the perils on the Ohio ,
from the Shawnees. But in spite of dangers and hard
ships, the trail through the wilderness had its joys, —
the charm of the wondrous Appalachian forests, the
flicker of sunlight through the high-reaching trees, the
plunge into a tunnel of green through the tender spring
underbrush, the sense of strong, pulsing life with the
upward climb, finally the deep-drawn breath on the
summit before the outstretched billows of land, and
the hope of opportunity beyond.
The distribution of trans-Allegheny population in
1790 was in close relation with the western highways.
Pennsylvania settlements formed a continuous line from

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT

71

the Juniata to the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio
almost to the mouth of the Muskingum River. In
Virginia there was an unbroken area of settlement to
the western rim of the Great Appalachian Valley ; but
beyond the Greenbrier and the New, the frontiersman

TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS IN 1790
had passed by the rugged country of the Cumberland
Plateau along the upper Kanawha to make a small set
tlement at its mouth. The frontier farms and villages
of southwestern Virginia merged into "the independent
state of Franklin " in the parallel valleys of the Holston
and the Clinch. Downstream moved the tide of settle-
\ment. Where the Holston and French Broad unite to
form the Tennessee, White and Conner in 1787 located
a warrant of land which they had received as pay for
military service in the Revolution, and about their fort
the town of Knoxville was laid out soon afterwards. In
1785 a settlement was attempted at the Muscle Shoals
of the Tennessee River in northern Alabama, and a few
years later Sevier and others secured a grant of land for
settlement just south of the Shoals. The attraction here

72 THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
was a geographical one. The obstruction to navigation
by the rapids necessitated a carry at this point, which
therefore became a halting-place for travelers. Fur
thermore, the Big Bear River, a southern tributary of
the Tennessee, connected by a short portage with the
head streams of the Tombigbee and Yazoo, thus open
ing up lines of trade with the lower Mississippi and
Mobile Bay. ,
To the west Nashville, whose eighty or ninety cabins
were a center for the five thousand pioneers settled for
eighty miles along the river, was a product partly of the
waterway formed by the Tennessee and the Cumber
land, and partly of the land routes through the gaps in
the Cumberland range. In the same manner the Ken
tucky settlements were born of the Ohio and the Wilder
ness Road. The Cumberland and Kentucky settlements
Vwere separated from the frontier of civilization in Vir
ginia by a wide zone of wilderness, the rugged upland
of the Cumberland Plateau, a region condemned even
to-day by its geographical conditions to isolation, pov
erty, and a retarded civilization.10 With the exception
of Louisville at the Falls of the Ohio, the Kentucky
settlements avoided the main streams, but chose the
smaller affluents and rich undulating country between.
Filson's map (1784) shows fifty-two villages and eighteen
scattered houses. One large group, with Lexington as
a center, spread over the land between Elkhorn Creek
and the Kentucky River and showed a few outlying
stations on the South Fork of the Licking;; another
group, including Danville and Harrod's Town, was
located within easy reach of Dick's River, a southern

THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT 73
tributary of the Kentucky; and a third to the west
stretched along the upper forks of Salt River, where
Bardstown was the backwoods metropolis, and merged
into the closer settlements along Beargrass Creek and
the Falls of the Ohio. The geographical distribution
of the early Kentucky population brings into relief
the home-making motive in striking contrast to the
purely trading instinct which determined the location
of the French settlements across the Ohio to the north.
With the outbreak of the Revolutionary War these
trans- Allegheny settlements took on a peculiar political
importance. They were a wedge driven into the great
West, which was claimed by the colonies on the ground
of their sea-to-sea charters, claimed also by the British
by the treaty of 1763 and the royal proclamation re
serving the transmontane country as crown lands, and
the Quebec Bill (1774) bringing the region north of
the Ohio under the jurisdiction of Canada. But the
Americans were on the ground. Virginia, pushed on
by the pressure of land-hunger and facing the open
doors along her mountain frontier, on which the best
western highways converged, insisted more than any
other colony upon the terms of her sea-to-sea charter.
It was she who invested Clark with a commission to
conquer the Illinois country, but it was this man from
the backwoods settlements who proposed the scheme.
The capture of Kaskaskia swept the British from the
West. They had now no fort or garrison between the
Lakes and the Gulf. In the face of enormous diffi
culty, Clark maintained his hold upon the Illinois coun
try. The sparse population of the West afforded a

74 THE WESTWARD MOVEMENT
scanty supply of troops to guard a frontier reaching
from the Mississippi to the upper Ohio. The remote
ness of the region and the barrier of the mountains
interfered with the transportation of reinforcements and
supplies from the East. Munitions and food came even
to Fort Pitt from the Spanish at New Orleans up the
Mississippi. The possession of the Illinois and Ken
tucky country annulled the proclamation of 1763 and
the Quebec Bill, and influenced the final negotiations
for peace. Though the extension of the young Repub
lic to the Mississippi was based formally in these nego
tiations upon the charter bounds, the presence in these
western lands of a vigorous people who had made good
their title by axe and plough and rifle constituted a
more solid claim to the debated territory than the yel
low parchments of dead monarchs or living potentates.
NOTES TO CHAPTER IV
1. Ratzel, Politisohe Geographie, p. 685, and Anthropogeographie, part
i. pp. 420, 424. Also E. C. Semple, Mountain Passes :• A Study
in Anthropogeography, Bulletin of the Amer. Geog. Soc. nos. 2
and 3. 1901.
2. Bailey Willis, The Northern Appalachians. National Geographic
Monographs, vol. i. no. 6.
3. C. Willard Hayes, The Southern Appalachians. National Geo
graphic Monographs, vol. i. no. 10.
4. Justin Winsor, The Mississippi Basin, pp. 243, 249.
5. Ibid. p. 258.
6. Evans's map made iu 1755, reproduced by T. Pownall, in his Topo
graphical Description of North America, 1776. Also Journal of
Dr. Thomas Walker, in Pilson Club Publications, no. 13, pp. 38^11.
7. Roosevelt, The Winning of the West, vol. i. pp. 170-172.
Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, vol. i. p. 313. 1846.
8. Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, vol. i. p. 348.
9. Justin Winsor, The Westward Movement, p. 508.
10. E. C. Semple, The Anglo-Saxons of the Kentucky Mountains.
Geographical Journal, June, 1901.

CHAPTER V
GEOGRAPHICAL ENVIRONMENT OF THE EARLY TRANS-
ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS
The trans-Allegheny settlements had been planted in
the center of a country which comprised five eighths
of the territory of the young United States. Barred
from the East by the Appalachian Mountains, it sloped
gently from the plateaus westward to the Mississippi and
southward to the Gulf of Mexico, its surface broken
only by low hills or undulating upland. A canoe could
travel from Lake Erie to Mobile Bay through the heart
of the region, with only two portages, one at the sources
of the Wabash, and the other between the Tombigbee
and the Tennessee ; while on its western margin the
Mississippi furnished a waterway from its northern to
its southern frontier. The Ohio and its tributaries
aggregate 12,000 miles of streams which in early times
afforded transportation routes and facilitated the move
ment of men and produce.
The abundance of land, the lack of barriers, and the
easy river connection, all made for expansion of west
ern population. The vacant space between the Cum
berland and the Kentucky was soon filled up ; settle- /
ments were strung along the Ohio, like beads on a cord,
from the Big Sandy to western Pennsylvania, while in the
Northwest Territory scattered cabins up the course of

76 EARLY TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS
the Muskingum, Scioto, Great and Little Miami rivers
indicated the lines population was following. In the
frontier of a country is to be" found always the index of
its growth or decay. A rapid advance of the boundary,
whether of settlement or political control, speaks of
vigorous, abundant forces behind demanding an en
larged field of activity : a retrogression or caving-in of
the frontier points to declining powers, inadequate
strength.1 Along the western waters all was activity,
eager advance, yearning for a further beyond. Here
appeared that uncramped, undiscouraged development
which has given the distinctive stamp to American life.
The abundance of land was reflected in the generous
soil of the transmontane country. North of the Ohio,
the surface is underlaid by a thick mantle of glacial
drift formed from rocks of a chemical nature to supply
food for plants. The timberless character of the coun
try enabled settlement to go on at a rapid rate, unre-
tarded by the slow work of cutting down forests and
clearing out stumps. South of the Ohio and beyond
the rim of the Cumberland Plateau with its poor land,
the blue limestone outcrops, furnishing to the subsoil
an inexhaustible supply of plant food. This has made
the fame of the Bluegrass region of Kentucky. It
underlies also southwestern Ohio and Tennessee to the
northern border of Alabama ; but owing to the cov
ering of glacial drift in the north and the sandier
character of this rock in the south, the soil is less fer
tile than in Kentucky.2 The southwestern parts of
Kentucky and Tennessee are underlaid by Subcarbon-
iferous limestone, which enriches the soil almost a*s much

EARLY TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS 77
as does the Silurian. The Gulf slope of this western
country is a fertile silt-made plain, built up from the
debris of limy or clayey rocks, and hence far richer
than the crystalline detritus which covers the surface of
the Atlantic plain.
An abundant rainfall well distributed through the
year, a temperate climate varied by cold, dry winds
which sweep down the great trough of the continent
from the northwest, and warm, moist winds from the
Gulf, a long, warm summer for the growing crops, all
united to mitigate the hardships of pioneer life and to
keep up the courage of the home-maker in the wilderness.
The men who grew up in this westward facing country
were the first genuine Americans. The seaboard popu
lation were Europeans living on American soil under
English control, bred to English luxuries which were
supplied by English manufactories. In time of danger
English armies had been in part their resource, and the
English treasury paid in part the costs of colonial wars.
American soil and the barrier of the Atlantic had modi
fied European institutions and character in the hands
and persons of the colonists somewhat ;3 but their gaze
was seaward, towards the English palace and council hall
where their destiny was decided. Volney, a French
man traveling in this country in 1796, discerned the
difference of standpoint between the people of the
tidewater and the over-mountain region. " The inhab
itants of the Atlantic coast call the whole of this the
Back Country, thus denoting their moral aspect, con
stantly turned towards Europe, the cradle and the focus
of their interests. It was a singular, though natural

78 EARLY TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS
circumstance, that I had scarcely crossed the Alle-
ghanies, before I heard the borderers of the great
Kanhaway and the Ohio give in their turn the name of
Back Country to the Atlantic coast, which shows that
their geographical situation has given their views and
interests a new direction, conformable to that of the
waters which afford them means of conveyance towards
the Gulf of Mexico."4
In the cabin clearings of the western wilderness, be
yond the barrier of the mountains, English institutions
took on a new stamp of republicanism, society became
more purely democratic, and the new-born American
looked only to his own strong arm for aid, to his own
strong intellect for counsel. Separation from old-world
traditions, a return to close contact with nature, the
stripping off of non-essentials, growth under conditions
of uncramped development and untried possibilities —
these made the sturdy, youthful American of the western
wilds. Old-world methods and ideas must be trans
formed to survive in new-world conditions,5 and the con
ditions modify the man along with his methods. The
change may appear at first to be retrogression, but it is
only the step backward for the long running-jump.
The successful ending of the Revolutionary War had
focused the eyes of the Americans on their own country.
Then the possibilities of the young. West began to loom
up, especially in view of the economic depression of the
tidewater region following the long war. Warrants and
military scrip for western lands guided thither the dis
charged soldier from New England to South Carolina.
The outbound population to the Kentucky and Cumber-

EARLY TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS 79
land became more composite in its character than that of
the old backwoods on the Piedmont and Blue Ridge
frontier. It included the same racial elements and in
addition more varied American constituents, which be
yond the mountains forgot their colonial allegiance,
whether to the aristocratic capital of Charleston or
the Puritan township of Connecticut, lost their old sec
tional feelings, and instead substituted allegiance to the
national government and the sectionalism of the over-
mountain men as opposed to the seaboard states.
Upon these early western settlements isolation set its
stamp. Range after range of mountains, mile after mile
of rugged plateau separated them from the seats of civil
ization and government. Land and water routes were
beset by Indians, and even the homeward-leading rivers
beat back with their increasing currents the pirogue of
the eastbound Westerner. The great streams of the Mis
sissippi valley made the settlements more accessible to
their British neighbors to the north, and their Spanish
neighbors to the west and south ; but this accessibility
was disadvantageous rather than otherwise. Detroit
and the navigable waterway of the St. Lawrence and the
Great Lakes played the same part in the history of the
young West as did New Orleans and the Mississippi.
Both cities were the center of plots to incite the Indians
— northwest and southwest — against the backwoods
frontier, to construct the intervening savage tribes into
buffer states against the expansion and aggression of the
colonists, to invade American territory for illicit trade,
and finally to tempt the frontiersmen to defection by
promises of the needed river outlet for their produce to

80 EARLY TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS
the sea. By the retention of the Lake posts for twelve
years after the peace of 1783, the British kept their hold
on the fur trade in the Northwest Territory. Moreover,
they secured permission from the Spanish to trade on the
western bank of the upper Mississippi, and this neces
sitated their passing to and fro on American soil by way
of the Chicago portage or by the Wisconsin River to the
post at Prairie du Chien. In consequence of this tres
passing the American trade at Vincennes was greatly
reduced.6 From the south, the Spanish traded up the Alabama
and Tombigbee rivers f ronTMobile across the thirty-first
degree, north latitude, which had been agreed upon in
the treaty of 1783 as the northern boundary of West
Florida, and over the three-mile portage to the basin of
the Tennessee ; and traders from Pensacola were doing
a thriving business with the Creeks and Cherokees to
the northeast. From New Orleans and other Spanish
posts along the Mississippi, traders were encroaching
on American territory, especially up the Illinois River
where they shared the field with Canadian rivals, while
the officials on the Gulf were obstructing or inhibiting
the navigation of the Mississippi to the western pioneers
and hounding on the southern savages to attack.
On either side of the western wedge of settlement lay
a broad zone of Indians, whom the expansion and en
croachments of the whites, as well as the incitement sup
plied by British and Spanish, made the natural foe of the
settler. They were as much a part of his environment
as the fertile soil and the far-reaching wilderness. They
controlled in part his social organization, taught him new

EARLY TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS 81
modes of warfare, and modified his character. A fron
tier is never a line but always a shifting zone of assimila
tion, where an amalgamation of races, manners, institu
tions, and morals, more or less complete, takes place.1
The English pioneers in the wilderness retained their
sedentary occupation of the land, in contrast to the
nomadic habits of the French traders ; settled in more
or less strongly compacted groups, which were further
consolidated locally and politically by the danger of
the all-surrounding savage ; and thus retained an inner
environment which was civilized. The line between
them and the savage was therefore strictly drawn : half-
breeds were rare. But the outer environment was all of
the wilderness and the Indian, and to this the man of the
Cumberland and Kentucky yielded himself. He lived
in great part by the chase, dressed in buckskin and furs,
wore the moccasins of the redman, adopted his scalping-
knife and tomahawk, and waged against him a war of
extermination, with all its savage features of ambush
and scalping, and all its brutalizing effects.8 In view
of the ever-present danger of Indian attack, the basal
organization of pioneer communities was military. The
settlement was the stockade or station, — a fortified vil
lage ; militia service in the common defense became the
first duty of the citizen. Representation in the early
Kentucky conventions to consider separation from Vir
ginia was made on the basis of military companies.
The common remoteness and the conditions of wil
derness life laid their equalizing touch upon all. Equal
ity of opportunity and resource, identity of tasks and of
dangers, and the simplicity imposed upon all precluded

82 EARLY TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS
classes, and in the mass developed vigor, enterprise,
and independence. The backwoodsman had what the
forests and clearings could furnish, and little more.
Wooden vessels of all kinds, whether turned or coop
ered, were in common use. Owing to the great cost of
transportation over the mountains, hardware was rare.
Houses were built without nails, and even shingles were
put on with oak pins.9 Linen was made from the lint
of nettles, and buffalo wool was the raw material for
cloth. Furs became the medium of exchange, though
after the Revolution " there was some paper money in
the country which had not depreciated more than one
half, as it had at the seat of Government." 10 This fact
speaks eloquently for the isolation of the region. At
first salt was imported at almost prohibitive prices ; but
soon the pioneer began to boil water from the saline
springs which abounded, and later learned to bore for
richer brine. At Bullitt's Lick on Salt River in Ken
tucky, a regular industry was started, and supplied the
frontier communities from the Ohio to the Cumberland.
The products of the country which were bartered
for eastern merchandise were primarily those of the
wilderness — hides, furs, ginseng, snakeroot and bear's-
grease ; or of a frontier country with abundant pasture
land or forest range, such as horses, hogs, salted pork,
lard, tallow, and dried beef. Very soon the fertile soil
began to yield abundant crops. Tobacco, corn, flour,
whiskey, flax, and rope from the hemp-fields, were ready
for export. Before the treaty of 1783, when Spain
was friendly, much of this produce went down the Mis
sissippi and found a ready market in New Orleans.

EARLY TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS 83
Only the most valuable part would bear the cost of up
stream and over-mountain transportation to the eastern
seaboard. The high price of commodities imported by this
route forced the backwoods settlements to institute
manufactures at a surprisingly early date, so that here
in one small area were to be seen all the stages of eco
nomic development, — savage, pastoral, agricultural,
and industrial. The line of manufactures was deter
mined by the domestic supply of raw materials and the
most pressing need of the settlers. Retarded by the
selfish policy of England, manufactures along the sea
board scarcely antedated the appearance of industries
in this free western country. Iron was found in great
abundance on the westward slope of the Allegheny
Plateau along the Monongahela, Youghiogeny, and
Cheat rivers, and the big demand for it along the fron
tier caused the erection of furnaces and iron works as
early as 1788 ." Lexington, Kentucky, had a cut-nail
factory in 1801, and Georgetown a ropewalk and full
ing-mill in 1789.9
The first spinning-jenny after the Hargreave type in
America was operated at Philadelphia in 1775 ; a cot
ton factory was established at Beverly, Massachusetts,
in 1787, at Providence in 1788, and in Pawtucket,
Rhode Island, in 1790.12 A society for the encourage
ment of manufactures was organized in Danville, Ken
tucky, in 1789, under the auspices of Judge Harry
Innes and other prominent men, who in 1790 started
the first cotton factory in the West. The carding,
spinning, and weaving machines were purchased in

84 EARLY TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS
Philadelphia, where they were manufactured, carried
over the mountains at great expense to Pittsburg, and
down the Ohio to Louisville, whence they were hauled
to Danville. The raw cotton was produced in the
Cumberland River settlements, and for several years was
a regular article of trade between the two communities;
some was also raised in Kentucky. The four skilled
workmen and the manager were imported from Phila
delphia, and John Brown, congressman from the Ken
tucky district of Virginia, who negotiated the purchase
of the machines and the contract with the workmen,
explained to Judge Innes, in a letter of May 25, 1790,
that a certain irritating delay would never have occurred
"did. not a disposition prevail with some in this place to
prevent the emigration of Manufacturers and the estab
lishment of Factories in the Western country." 13 Here
speaks the new sectionalism. Already some of the
wiser heads in the East had predicted that, if the
federal government failed to secure by treaty with
Spain the free navigation of the Mississippi for the
transmontane settlers and an outlet for their agricultu
ral products, these communities would be early forced
into industrial ventures, and so rendered economically
independent of the northern seaboard states, who hoped
to find in them a market, and yet, for selfish reasons,
desired the closure of the Mississippi.
Nature had done everything to open up Kentucky,
Tennessee, and the growing Northwest Territory towards
the south. Ramifying through this whole country was
the Ohio with its tributaries, affording easy access to
the Mississippi and the natural market in semi-tropical

EARLY TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS 85
New Orleans. Old established routes of trade passed
their door ; and the reckless, jovial French voyageur,
with his gaudy backwoods dress and his fiddle, was still
passing down the Wabash or Miami from the Lake
country to trade at Louisville, St. Louis, and New Or
leans. With the cessation of the British and Indian
wars, and with the increasing tide of immigration, the
Ohio route from the East grew in importance. Brown-
ville, laid out at Redstone Old Fort on the Mononga
hela in 1785, and Pittsburg as the starting-points for
the downstream journey, became lively distributing-
centers for the western country. In both places an
active boat-building industry supplied boats for the hun
dreds of emigrants who arrived every week from the
East, and also for ^he regular trade on the river. Ken
tucky offered more to settlers than the country across
the Ohio ; and now they began to fill the northern part
of the state which had been left vacant because of its
exposure to the attacks of the Shawnees from the
Scioto. Now the old war-trail of the savages along the
outer rim of the Cumberland Plateau from the mouth
of Limestone Creek to the Kentucky River settlements
became a highway of trade. Limestone became the
point of debarkation of men and goods for central
Kentucky, and four miles back from the Ohio, on the
top of the steep ridge facing the river, grew up the town
of Washington. Here large wagons for the interior
started with loads too heavy to be hauled up the steep
slope. The Falls of the Ohio made Louisville a natural
port for the upper river, as also the head of navigation
for the lower stream. The town was furthermore the

86 EARLY TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS
western terminus of the Wilderness Road. Hence it
afforded unusual facilities for trade.14
In those early days commerce moved in wide circles.
The western pioneer from Nashville or Brownville passed
down the Cumberland or the Monongahela with his own
produce in his own boats to the Ohio, thence down the
Mississippi to New Orleans, where his cargo was sold or
exchanged. From there he went by sea to Cuba for
further sales, and then embarked for New York, Phila
delphia, or Baltimore, where his money was reinvested in
manufactured articles. These he transported over the
mountains at a cost of three dollars per hundredweight,
to sell them in the scattered markets of the Ohio basin,
after having been absent from four to six months. The
result of such circular tours was large financial profit
and a broad experience of life which made these men
of the backwoods in a sense the cosmopolitans of the
country. Smaller boats, laden with fine commodities of
slight bulk and great value, sometimes made the return
trip up the Mississippi from New Orleans to Louisville.
This took forty days or more. The barges, which were
equipped with sails and oars, were helped on by the
prevailing south winds and the eddying up-currents at
the bends of the river.
For the first decade of their history, the Kentucky and
Cumberland settlements relied chiefly on Pittsburg and
the Ohio for the limited trade they could furnish or
command ; but as the population increased, and the rich
fields began to respond to systematic culture, New
Orleans was looked to as the natural market for western
products, and as a source of supply for foreign and

EARLY TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS 87
domestic products not to be secured nearer home.
Therefore, when at the close of the Revolution Spain
laid claim to both sides of the Mississippi River as far
north as Kentucky, to the exclusive control of its navi
gation, and to the right to impose transit and harbor
duties ; and when in 1787 Jay, the secretary of foreign
affairs, was about to make a treaty with Spain conceding
this right, bitter protests came from the transmontane
settlements. In view of the increasing trade the barrier
of the Appalachians made the outlet of the Mississippi
a vital question. Collot in 1796, computing the expense
of transportation by the Potomac and other over-moun
tain routes as compared with the Mississippi, found that
goods could be conveyed from Philadelphia to Kentucky
at a cost of 33 per cent, ad valorem, and from New
Orleans to the Illinois of only 4 to 4J per cent.15 More
over, the difference in climate and consequently of pro
ducts between Louisiana and the Ohio country made
each a market for the other ; and the Gulf region, with
that lack of diversification of products which charac
terizes all new countries, was confining itself to cotton,
sugar, and molasses. From 1785 to 1795 the exorbitant
duties on American commerce descending the Missis
sippi and the oppressive commercial regulations imposed
by the Spanish brought stagnation on the river, while
in the frontier settlements from the Tennessee to the
Allegheny it was the moving cause in the separatist
movement. But other causes were operating also.
Along this whole western frontier appeared that tend
ency towards defection which we have found to be
characteristic of all peripheral holdings. The causes lay

88 EARLY TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS
in the remoteness of the settlements, the barrier of the
Appalachians, and the closure of the western outlet.
Geographical conditions had produced here a people
with different point of view, needs, and interests from
those of the seaboard. Their situation reproduced in
essential features that of the colonists before the Re
volution. In the constantly recurring Indian wars,
troops and munitions from the tidewater capitals always
arrived late, delay was dangerous, and the frontiersmen
had to act on their own responsibility. The East did
not appreciate the attitude of the frontier towards the
Indian : the frontier saw the futility of Indian treaties,
blamed the national authorities for talking and bribing
instead of fighting while American settlements were be
ing ravaged by the savages, and resented the course of
the national agents in ignoring state and private agree
ments with the natives. Peace came to the frontier only
when a punitive expedition from the Holston or Cum
berland or Kentucky or Ohio, unauthorized by state
or national authorities, used the only arguments appre
ciated by the Indians. The bloody raids of the savages
in 1786 called forth reprisals when George Rogers
Clark, Benjamin Logan, and Simon Kenton led expe
ditions against the Shawnees north of the Ohio, and
Robertson with a hundred and thirty hardy followers
sallied out from the Cumberland settlement to visit
retribution on some marauding Creeks and Cherokees
who had intrenched themselves near the bend of the
Tennessee. Requisition was made upon the settlers
for pack-horses and supplies, ranging from salt to lead,
with which to equip these forces.

EARLY TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS 89
Such expeditions, being of the nature of private enter
prises, did not have their expenses defrayed by the
government. The costs fell, therefore, as an unequally
distributed charge upon the communities, who felt in
consequence the injustice of being taxed while their
effective and constant military service went unpaid.
The excise taxes were a special grievance and led to the
Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania, and to
milder protests elsewhere along the transmontane fron
tier. The surplus corn in the remote settlements, being
of large bulk in relation to its value, could not stand the
heavy cost of transportation across the mountains until
it had been converted into whiskey. Here a nature-
made law was confronting a human one, as it continues
to do in the isolated regions of the southern Appa
lachians to-day. In Pennsylvania the law was resisted
as unjust, and in the mountains to-day it is evaded by
the moonshine still. Similar geographical conditions
produce similar results. In other respects the burden of
distant tidewater control rested heavily upon the fron
tiersmen. They had their local courts for minor cases,
but all the more important civil and criminal cases and
all appealed suits had to be carried to the tidewater
capitals for trial. This involved a journey of from
three to five hundred miles, much expense, and long
delay. On account of courts and taxes, therefore, the
pioneers desired separate state governments. But most
of all they desired the representation in Congress which
would give them a voice in the pending negotiations
with Spain regarding the navigation of the Mississippi.
All along the frontier from western Pennsylvania to

90 EARLY TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS
the Tennessee River the spirit of independent statehood
was rife.16 Some of the frontier communities wished
to estabHsh their states with boundaries geographically
determined, ignoring the charter lines of the old col
onies. They were guided by the principle of ready
communication. The Watauga settlements in western
North Carolina proposed to combine with the Virginia
settlements further up the valley of the Holston and
along the New, because together they formed a geo
graphical whole. As Nashville, through the river and
the southern branch of the Wilderness Road from Crab
Orchard, stood in closer communication with her north
ern than her eastern neighbors, there was talk of the
union of the Cumberland with the Kentucky settlements.
Blocked by the Eastern states in their efforts to secure
independent statehood, disgusted by the short-sighted
policy of the federal government which threatened to
sacrifice the interest of the over-mountain communities
in the free navigation of the Mississippi, and exasperated
by its desultory efforts to stand on its rights with Spain,
while the commerce of the Mississippi was being ruined
by the depredations of Spanish officials on vessels which
attempted to descend the river without their permission,
these pioneer settlements finally developed a separatist
movement of a different nature, which aimed at union
with any foreign power, Spanish or British, promising
to give them an outlet to the sea. The temptation was
very near, and it was geographically determined.
Every river system forms an unbroken whole and
therefore serves as a natural bond of union between
those living among its remotest sources and those settled

EARLY TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS 91
at its mouth.17 The direction of its flow guides the drift
of commercial intercourse and the trend of political com
bination. Down the course of the Dnieper and the
Volga moved Russian trade and Muscovite dominion.
The Danube carried Roman sway to the Black Sea.
The most serious wars of Holland had their cause in
the desire of France to control the mouth of the Rhine.
For twenty years the politics of our western country
centered about "the Island of New Orleans." The
pioneers were under the geographical control of the
western waters. Their rivers carried them on down
ward currents to the Mississippi and the Gulf, where
the Spanish offered free navigation and trade. From
the Ohio the winding courses of its northern tributaries
carried them to easy portages leading to the vast water
way of the Lakes and the St. Lawrence. Between them
and their blundering Congress in the East stretched a
mountain wall three hundred miles wide. In the colder,
undeveloped north they could find a near market, as in
the warmer, half-developed south, while the market to
the east was cut off by a mountain barrier. There was
another alternative, rather ideal in its character but
favored by geographical conditions : union with the
British and a downstream conquest of New Orleans.
This possibility was held over the head of the Spanish
Intendant on the Gulf. Spanish influence was felt more
in Tennessee and Kentucky, British in Kentucky and
the infant settlements of the Northwest Territory, where
the Muskingum country had its Colonel Wilkinson in
General Parsons.
All such intrigues ceased with the promulgation of

92 EARLY TRANS-ALLEGHENY SETTLEMENTS
Jay's treaty in 1795 which secured the free and un
limited navigation of the Mississippi, with the right of
deposit at New Orleans free from Spanish control. The
ultimate result of the Mississippi outlet, the discussion
it aroused, and the benefits it bestowed, was the pur
chase of Louisiana eight years later.
NOTES TO CHAPTER V
1. Ratzel, Anthropogeographie, part i. pp. 260-263.
2. Shaler, United States of America, vol. i. pp. 105, 106.
3. F. J. Turner, The Significance of the. Frontier in American History,
Annual Report of the Amer. Hist. Ass'n for 1893.
4. C. F. Volney, View of the Climate and Soil of the United States of
America, p. 21. London, 1804.
5. Roscher, Nationalbkonomik des Ackerbaues, p. 104. 1888.
6. Justin Winsor, The Westward Movement, p. 416.
7. Ratzel, Anthropogeographie, part i. p. 265. 1899.
8. Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, vol. ii. chap. 1.
1846.
9. R. H. Collins, History of Kentucky, vol. i. p. 516.
10. Dr. Humphrey Marshall, History of Kentucky, vol. i. p. 150. 1812.
11. Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, vol. ii. p. 199.
12. Weed en, Economic and Social History of New England, vol. ii.
p. 848.
13. George W. Todd, The First Cotton Factory in the West, an unpub
lished paper read before the Filson Club, March, 1898, based upon
unpublished letters and papers of Judge Harry Innes, great-grand
father of Mr. Todd.
14. Louisville : A Study in Economic Geography, Journal of School
Geography, Dec. 1900.
15. Justin Winsor, The Westward Movement, p. 608.
16. F. J. Turner, Western State-Making in the Revolutionary Era,
Amer. Hist. Review, vol. i. nos. 1 and 2.
17. Ratzel, Anthropogeographie, part i. pp. 344, 345.

CHAPTER VI
THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE IN THE LIGHT OF GEOGRAPHIC
CONDITIONS
For twenty years after the treaty of 1783 the Missis
sippi was accepted as the western boundary of the
United States. But a river is not a barrier and there
fore never a scientific boundary ; it is merely a conven
ient line of demarcation,1 uncertain at best on account
of its shifting bed. The plantations on the meanders
of the lower Mississippi belong now to one, now to the
other of the contiguous states, as the mighty stream
straightens its course after the almost annual overflow.
The Rio Grande is anything but a satisfactory boundary
between the United States and Mexico. Dry for many
months of the year, it bears no semblance of a barrier ;
then is suddenly filled with a resistless current which
cuts a new channel for itself, leaving many square miles
of Mexican territory on its northern bank, and in turn
cutting off Texas ranchers from their native state.
The result is a new survey or endless controversies as
to whether Texas or Mexico is to claim certain dislodged
pieces of land.
The political frontier line which is run along a river
is an artificial one, for every drainage system forms an
unbroken whole. The common destination of the trib
utary streams makes it as easy to cross as to follow the

94 THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE
structural axis of the basin. The water journey on
the Mississippi from Cairo, Illinois, to St. Paul, Minne
sota, and return presents about the same difficulty as
the round trip from Cincinnati to Kansas City by way
of the Ohio and Missouri. To migration and to con
quest a river presents no obstacle. Within the Tigris-
Euphrates valley three great monarchies — Assyrian,
Babylonian, and Persian — arose, and each in turn ex
tended its dominion over the whole basin. To the Ro
mans, the Danube and Rhine as their northern frontier
had the value chiefly of established lines in the unex
plored wilderness of the interior ; in a minor degree,
also, of strategic positions in defensive warfare for a well
trained army, like that of the Tugela River in the recent
Transvaal War. But even the Romans found it neces
sary to acquire the highlands forming the watershed be
tween the Rhine and the Neckar, and Dacia to the north
of the Danube. The Danube formed the northern Turk
ish frontier in 1444, but in twenty years the empire had
taken in Wallachia across the river and by 1672 em
braced the whole basin of the Danube up beyond Buda-
Pest. When the empire began to decline, the frontier
dropped back down the river to Belgrade (1700), hut
still held both sides of the valley. It is safe to predict
that the Oxus will not long remain the boundary of
Bokhara in the hands of Russia, but that its southern
tributaries will become so many wedges of Russian
expansion to split off blocks of Afghanistan territory.
Even more surely than conquest does migration tend
to hold the two slopes of a river basin. Before the west
ward movement of the Germans, both banks of the Rhine

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE 95
were held by the Gauls, whose villages in some instances
were bisected by the river, just as Rome arose on both
sides of the Tiber. Then in a like manner the Teutons
spread over the whole long, deep trough of the Rhine
valley. The trans-Rhenish provinces were lost to Ger
many in the eighteenth century by the aggressive policy
of France, but 1871 saw the restoration of the natural
boundary along the crest of the Vosges Mountains.
Across the Rhine, Meuse, and Seine the early Franks
spread into northern Gaul, and they occupied the valley
of the Rhone through the pass of Belfort. The popu
lation of all these river basins show the admixture of
that tall, blond race, while the surrounding highlands
harbor the darker, shorter race constituting the earlier
inhabitants of the land.2
A boundary of race or language cuts across the axis
of a river basin ; rarely is it defined by the stream itself,
and then only for a short distance. Where the Elbe
flows through the low plains of North Germany, across
its whole valley the population is the pure Teutonic
type — fair, tall, long-headed ; a broad zone of a more
brunette type occupies its middle course across the
uplands of Saxony ; while its upper course, hemmed in
by the Erz and Riesen Mountains, shows the broad-
headed, short people of the Bohemian plateau.3 Lines
of ethnical demarcation, therefore, cut the Elbe valley
transversely, not longitudinally. The whole valley of
the Danube from the Drave northward to the Austrian
boundary is Hungarian. From the Drave mouth to
the Iron Gate it is Serbo-Crotian on either bank, as
is also its western tributary, the Save. The linguistic

96 THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE
boundary of German cuts across the Danube between
Vienna and Buda-Pest.4 The German-Romansch line
of speech crosses the upper Inn at the entrance to the
Engadine, and the upper Rhine near Banz, some twenty
miles above Chur.5 So in America, the lower St. Law
rence is French and the upper stream is English. This
linguistic boundary is one of the few scars on a polit
ical body to be found in this country ; such scars, being
made in general in the youth of our nation, soon healed
over and were obliterated. The boundary line of
the Mississippi was never more than a scratch at best,
as we shall see, for as a race frontier it was only an im
aginary line. As soon as the enterprising Westerners
reached the Mississippi, they were on it and across it.
The trans- Allegheny rivers made the requisite con
ditions for a rapid expansion of population, and the
convergence of the Ohio, Tennessee, and Cumberland
upon the Mississippi guided the three incoming tides of
settlers towards the great central stream . As early as
1788-89, between eight and nine hundred boats went
down the Ohio past Fort Harmar (Marietta), carrying
20,000 people, with 7000 horses, 3000 cows, 900 sheep,
and 600 wagons.6 This does not take into account the
trains of pioneers whose feet were treading out a broader
trail along the Wilderness Road, or the large acces
sions to the Cumberland settlements after the cessation
of the Indian wars. The numbers of the western peo
ple were ominous to the Spanish power beyond the Mis
sissippi ; more ominous still were their spacial ideas.
Already the bigness jof the West was being absorbed
into their mental constitution. The mighty sweep of

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE 97
the western waters, the interminable stretch of the
northwestern prairies, the boundless extent of the Ap
palachian forests, were giving to these men from the
narrow Atlantic plain new standards of measure. Five to
ten thousand acres became the desirable, almost the usual
size of a farm, until the land was pretty well taken up.
A river voyage of a thousand miles was a commonplace
matter, and even a land journey of five hundred miles
on foot or horseback along the Chickasaw Trace from
Fort Adams, the southernmost post of the United States
on the Mississippi, to Nashville was nothing to brag of.
It was made every year by the returning traders with
their money from the river trips to New Orleans.
In 1800 the western settlements extended down the
Ohio almost as far as the mouth of the -Cumberland.
There were besides two remote outlying strips of settle
ment along the Mississippi, the form and location of
which were significant. The northern one was in the
western part of the present state of Illinois and formed
a narrow band along the Mississippi from near the
mouth of the Blinois River southward beyond the Kas-
kaskia. Its nuclei were to be found in the old French
settlements of Cahokia and Kaskaskia, and the at
traction was the opportunity of trade with St. Louis
and Ste. Genevieve on the Spanish side of the river,
where could be obtained foreign articles of luxury from
New Orleans or skins and furs which found their way
down from the upper Missouri. 
The other group was known as the Natchez District
and stretched along the bluffs of the Mississippi for a
hundred miles between the Spanish line of demarcation

98 THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE
and the Yazoo delta. Its population of about 6000,
including slaves, was distributed in several large settle
ments along the Bayou Pierre, Cole's Creek, St. Cathe
rine, Second Creek, Honochitto, Buffalo Creek, and Big
Black River, most of them within ten or fifteen miles
of the Mississippi. The District contained a nucleus of
English settlement, dating from the period of 1763-
1783, when the British held West Florida and were try-
in o1 to divert some of the commerce of the Mississippi
by way of the Iberville River, which was to be canalled,
and Lake Ponchartrain to Mobile or Pensacola.7 There
were new accessions of American population after the
treaty of 1783, which secured the region to the United
States, though the Spanish did not yield the control
which they had assumed by encroachment till 1798.
The proximity of Natchez to the Spanish boundary
made it the most convenient point for trade with New
Orleans, and it was the starting-point of the old wilder
ness trail to the Cumberland settlements for the return
ing river men. The bluffs above the Mississippi
afforded a more hygienic and less malarial situation than
the low bottom-lands either above or below. The ele
ments of the population were characteristically those of
a frontier region in this locality — Anglo-Americans
from the old British Florida, a few French who had
become dissatisfied with Spanish rule in Louisiana, a
remnant of Spaniards, and an increasing proportion of
Westerners. The nature of a frontier as a zone of commingling
elements has been described above. The composite
character of the Natchez population was duplicated on

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE 99
the west side of the Mississippi with the proportions
of the Latin and Saxon constituents reversed. In the
barge and flatboat life on the mighty stream itself, the
two races were in all probability about equally repre
sented. Not more completely did the Ohio and the
Missouri mingle their currents in the central channel
than their burdens of craft and men and merchandise.
Here was the cosmopolitan life of the country — river
men from the Holston and the Allegheny, newly arrived
New Englanders from the Muskingum settlements,
French, British, and Scotch traders from the Illinois
River, and French voyageurs with a few Spaniards,
chiefly officials, from the Louisiana side. Busy was the
trade on the river. By it New Orleans and Brownville
were linked together. The Creole city drew its flour,
grain, and salted meat from the Ohio country, its vege
tables from the Natchez District, so that when suspen
sion of the American right of deposit at New Orleans
put a quietus on the river traffic, it nearly starved.
In Upper Louisiana, French and American elements
predominated in the long strip of settlements which
bordered the Mississippi from St. Charles and St. Louis
to New Madrid. Some of the French had belonged
originally to the east side of the river, and had migrated
from the Wabash and Illinois when this region was
acquired by England in 1763. American settlers were
tempted across to New Madrid by Governor Miro of
Louisiana in 1787 by large grants of land and promises
of free navigation of the Mississippi, and under the
same allurements many from the Holston and Cumber
land emigrated to West Florida. By the census of

100 THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE
1799, the population of St. Louis was 925, St. Charles
875, Ste. Genevieve 949, New Bourbon 560, Cape Gi
rardeau 521, and New Madrid 782, all of them river
towns. The fact that Upper Louisiana had increased
its population much more rapidly than the remainder
of the province 8 was due largely to the steady influx of
American colonists. A regular extra-territorial expan
sion was going on : the backwoodsmen were anticipating
the movement of the flag : the race, by an anthropo-
geographical law, was spreading from the downward to
the upward slope of the river valley.
The trans-Mississippi country had a stronger attrac
tion for the pioneer than the region north of the Ohio ;
the climate and soil were better adapted to the crops
which he was accustomed to raise with slave labor, and
there slavery was not forbidden. Somewhere between
1797 and 1799, Daniel Boone, having lost his lands in
Kentucky by a defective title, moved to Spanish terri
tory and took up his residence in the Femme Osage
settlement, about forty-five miles west of St. Louis.
His son, Daniel Boone, Jr., had preceded him thither,
and other of his married children soon followed him.9
Captain Meriwether Lewis, in the spring of 1804, found
in this settlement thirty or forty families from the
United States, and another smaller group of American
emigrants on the Bon Homme Creek a few miles to the
east.10 All the river towns were getting accessions
from the eastern side of the Mississippi.
Lower Louisiana was more remote from the American
frontier of continuous settlement, and hence its popula
tion showed a smaller admixture of the American ele-

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE 101
ment. This was found chiefly in New Orleans, where
the advantage of trade attracted the enterprising mer
chant from the United States. There was an occasional
American planter between the Mississippi and the Wash
ita, and some American immigrants at Natchitoches far
up the Red River ; while a band of adventurers, under
Philip Nolan, in 1800 penetrated to the Brazos River
in the present state of Texas. There they had set up
their cabins, and were occupied in catching wild horses,
till they themselves were captured in 1801 by Spanish
officials.11 The zone of assimilation which constituted the Ameri
can-Spanish frontier was shifting ominously to the
western side of the political line of demarcation.
Louisiana was in danger of being inundated by the
on-coming flood of western settlers. The Intendant at
New Orleans became alarmed, and in 1799 issued regu
lations to discourage American immigration in every
way ; and in 1802 the king of Spain prohibited any
grant of land to a citizen of the United States.12
The expansion of the Westerners and the oneness of
the great river valley were working together for the
acquisition of Louisiana by the United States. Race
power and geographical condition were operating to the
same end. Jefferson understood this. In January,
1803, he urged upon Congress the desirability of pur
chasing from the Chickasaw Indians a strip of territory
along the Mississippi, north of the Yazoo, in order to
possess " a respectable breadth of country on that river
[the Mississippi] from our southern limit to the Illinois
at least, so that we present as firm a front on that as

102 THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE
on our eastern border."13 And again, he affirms his
faith in the policy of putting off the day of contending
for the possession of New Orleans " till we are stronger
in ourselves and stronger in allies, but especially till we
have planted such a population on the Mississippi as
will be able to do their own business." 14
Historians are fond of insisting that the acquisition of
the Louisiana country was fortuitous, depending upon
half a dozen chances. The great factors of a nation's
development are not set in operation by the whim of a
First Consul or the uncertain events of a distant war.
The purchase of Louisiana was the occasion, not the
cause of the acquisition of the trans-Mississippi country.
That must have come sooner or later. Even if the
French had established themselves in Louisiana, they
could not long have resisted the operation of geographic
factors and the enterprising spirit of the western people,
itself in part a product of environment. The trans-
Mississippi region, hopelessly arid beyond the one-
hundredth meridian, could never have supported a large
enough population to resist the Americans, with whom
the common navigation of the Mississippi would soon
have brought them to blows. At the moment negotia
tions for the purchase were pending, the breadth of the
Atlantic rendered formidable an uprising of the blacks
in San Domingo and lost France that island. Napoleon
applied the geographical principle involved to a possible
French colony in Louisiana, further jeopardized by a
foreign war. Had England conquered Louisiana from
France — the chance which Napoleon feared — even her
superior colonizing methods could not have made the

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE 103
country support a population large enough to cope
with the thickly planted American settlements in the
wide, rich, well watered regions to the east. In a con
flict between a cis-Mississippi and a trans-Mississippi
power, the former had every geographical condition in
its favor, — coast-line, rivers, climate, soil, and habitable
area. The Americans were destined to hold the West.
The purchase hastened and facilitated the process.
For the time being, the United States could not have
had safer neighbors in the Louisiana country than the
Spanish. They were too weak to be aggressive, and too
unprogressive to offer serious competition to American
trade. Jefferson's only fear was lest they should be too
feeble to hold the country " until our population can be
sufficiently advanced to gain it from them piece by
piece." The arbitrary suspension of the right of deposit
at New Orleans in 1788, and again in 1802 sufficed to
indicate the annoyance and hardship to which the
Americans would be exposed so long as the key to the
western commerce was in any hands but their own.
The excitement over this violation of the treaty rights
was greatest in the West, and here it was tremendous.
Kentucky and Tennessee in 1799 could with difficulty
be restrained by the federal authorities from sending
out an independent expedition to capture New Orleans.
Here spoke the self-reliant, dauntless spirit of the back
woods. In 1802, the President was flooded with protests
and memorials from the whole transmontane country.
Stirred even more by the rumors of the cession of
Louisiana to France, Kentucky and Tennessee called
for immediate action, and Governor Claiborne of the

104 THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE
Mississippi Territory offered to raise in his district alone
a sufficient number of volunteers to seize New Orleans
before it should be transferred to French hands.
The prospect of having these new neighbors in the
Louisiana country was not reassuring. The French
were at this time the mightiest nation in Europe. Their
recent training had not made them pacific, and the rest
less, energetic, impulsive temperament of the people was
sure to produce friction when they and the Americans
met on the waters of the Mississippi. " There is on the
globe one single spot," said Jefferson, " the possessor of
which is our natural and habitual enemy. It is New
Orleans, through which the produce of three eighths of
our territory must pass to market, and from its fertility
it will, ere long, yield more than half of our whole
produce and contain more than half our inhabitants.
France placing herself in that door assumes to us the
attitude of defiance. . . . The day that France takes
possession of N. Orleans fixes the sentence which is
to restrain her forever within her low-water mark. It
seals the union of two nations who in conjunction can
maintain exclusive possession of the ocean. From that
moment we must marry ourselves to the British fleet
and nation."15 These measures were not desired, but
would be forced upon the United States " as necessarily
as any other cause, by the laws of nature, brings on its
necessary effect." If the French insisted upon holding
Louisiana, the cession of the Floridas and the Island
of New Orleans might reconcile the Americans by
guaranteeing their free access to the Gulf of Mexico.
The transit duties on all commerce passing in or out of

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE 105
Mobile Bay also had been working a hardship upon
the small Tombigbee settlements, but the key to the
Mississippi was the crucial thing.
Napoleon's dreams of colonial empire had to be relin
quished. The rebellion of the negroes in San Domingo
demonstrated the futility of oversea domination for
France at this time. British naval power and the
British army in Canada made evident the impossibility
of holding Louisiana in the event of war with England.
French agents represented to Napoleon the great difficul
ties of an upstream campaign from New Orleans to pro
tect the distant settlements in Upper Louisiana against
the aggressions of the Americans, and the ease of a
downstream conquest of Lower Louisiana by the deter
mined Westerners. To the insight of the First Consul
into geographical situations, it was clearly futile to re
tain Louisiana and relinquish New Orleans, which was the
key to the whole province. But the dominant factors
in the alienation of this western empire was the broad
Atlantic and the island-born naval power of the English.
Thus, in every motive for the sale as for the purchase
of Louisiana, the geographic factor were the strongest.
The retrocession of Louisiana to France had been
made by Spain reluctantly, but the presence of a strong
buffer state between Mexico and the expanding United
States was undoubtedly a compensation.16 With the
annexation of Louisiana to American territory, however,
the situation of Spanish holdings in the northern con
tinent was seriously affected. Nearly the whole sweep
of the Gulf and Caribbean coast from the Guianas
around to Porto Rico was in the hands of Spain, except

106 THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE
the five-hundred mile stretch of the Louisiana littoral
between the mouth of the Sabine and the Mississippi;
but this possessed an importance out of all proportion to
its length. The significance of a coast is determined
largely by the extent and character of its hinterland.
Back of the Louisiana coast lay the vast Mississippi
basin, now wholly American, like a great funnel whose
mouth was at New Orleans. The pressure from the
back country was sure to be enormous and eventually to
burst the bonds of Spanish restriction on the Gulf coast.
The Spanish holdings in Florida and Mexico were now
severed, and that at a strategic point. If Louis XIV.,
from his base in Canada, had succeeded in his plan of
conquering the Hudson valley and intercluding the
two lines of English coast in America, the politico-
geographical situation would have been analogous.
According to the Purchase treaty, as understood in
the United States,17 the Louisiana province was to com
prise the original French holding from the Rio Grande
del Norte to the Perdido River, which defines the west
ern boundary of the present state of Florida. But
Spain, with the instinct of self-preservation, tried to
restrict these limits as much as possible, transferred
only that part of the Louisiana coast lying between the
Sabine and the Mississippi, together with the Island of
New Orleans on the east bank of the river, planted new
colonies in eastern Texas and new posts along this
frontier, and began to encroach with an armed force
along the Sabine and the Red, with the secret purpose
of making the Red River the eastern boundary of
Mexico 18 and thus excluding the United States from the
Gulf except at New Orleans.

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE 107
As well might they have tried to dam the mouth of
the Mississippi. Rivers and nations strive equally to
reach the sea. Soon after the occupation of Louisiana
by the United States, its Gulf coast was stretched east
ward to the Pearl River. What was known as the
Baton Rouge District of West Florida had a popula
tion made up largely of English, dating from the Brit
ish supremacy in this region, and Americans who had
come in from the Cumberland country and the Natchez
settlement near by. A revolt in the Baton Rouge Dis
trict and an appeal to the United States for annexation
to the Territory of New Orleans brought the American
flag to the Pearl River. The exigencies of war carried
it to the Perdido, when England, countenanced by Spain,
undertook to use the Florida coast as a military base
during the war of 1812,19 and Congress, to defeat this
project, ordered its occupation and annexation to the
Territory of Mississippi. Purchase secured East Florida,
and expansion of American settlers to the southwest
finally extended the Gulf coast of the United States to
the Rio Grande.
The extension of the federal authority over the
province of Louisiana was the signal for an inrush of
American settlers, both from the eastern and the west
ern states. Six months before the transfer hundreds
had collected on the Cumberland for the purpose. The
distribution of population in 1815 in the New Orleans
Territory, which comprised the present state of Louisi
ana, is instructive as illustrating the geographic control
of watercourses. The greater portion of the 90,000
inhabitants was found along the Mississippi for seventy

108

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE

miles above and thirty miles below New Orleans. Most
of these were Creole French, with a slight sprinkling
of Americans. There was a dense French population
on the Bayou Lefourche for fifty miles below its efflux

MAP OF DISTRIBUTION OF POPULATION IN 1810
from the Mississippi, on the Bayou Teche for fifty miles
below Opelousas, and on several bayous west of the
Atchafalaya in the same neighborhood. The French
occupied the Red River continuously up to Alexandria,
less compactly as far as Natchitoches, while there were
some scattered dwellings higher up the stream as also

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE 109
upon its northern tributary, the Washita, above the
present town of Monroe.20 The first comers had there
fore selected the rich alluvial bottoms, generally within
fifty miles of the Mississippi, which formed the chief
highway of the country.
In the old Florida parishes on the east bank the
Americans predominated. They were to be found else
where chiefly in New Orleans and certain coast towns,
though their plantations were scattered sparsely east of
the Washita and north of the Red, just opposite the
dense American center in the old Natchez District. The
French occupation of the present state of Louisiana
had progressed from the coast inland, and therefore had
fixed upon the lower courses of the rivers. The Ameri
can immigrants were later comers, and advanced from
the interior of the continent ; hence they located inland
on the upper courses of the streams, excepting those
merchants who were attracted to the seaports.
As the wild lands in the old West were taken up,
and steam navigation on the rivers facilitated expansion,
population poured across the Mississippi till in 1840 it
occupied a broad band up and down that stream, defined
on the west by the ninety-fifth meridian and the Sabine
River, and reaching from Iowa to the Gulf.
Thus the purchase of Louisiana was abundantly jus
tified, if only on the ground of American capacity for
expansion ; but the acquisition of so vast a. territory
was bitterly opposed in the Middle States and New
England, the natural habitat of the provincial point of
view. The reasons advanced were the preponderance
of the South and West in the future councils of the

110 THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE
nation, as this large area should be carved up into
states; and the possible formation of an independent
confederacy, embracing the whole Mississippi basin and
thus curtailing the extent and strength of the original
Union.21 It was argued that the course of the river
would divert western interests from the East to the
South. The same fear had been set forth by the East
at the time of the negotiation of the Jay treaty as a
reason for accepting the occlusion of the Mississippi as
a means of counteracting the separatist tendency of the
transmontane settlements.
Fortunately the narrow policy of the New England
statesmen secured no adequate following. The acquisi
tion of Louisiana destined the United States for a con
tinental power. The Republic was born synchronously
with the idea of national empire and large territorial
dominion. " Young countries know no exclusion from
the sea ; they are wont rather to grow from the sea
landwards and if possible onwards till they reach the
sea again." M All the countries of North America,
except little San Salvador, have a foothold on either
ocean, sometimes the very smallness of this foothold
indicating its importance.
In South America physiographical conditions have
been adverse to such sea-to-sea expansion, except at the
northern and southern extremities of the continent
where the mighty rampart of the Andes sinks into the
ocean. Colombia has a broad base on the Pacific and
the Caribbean Sea ; and where the Straits of Magellan
cut through the continent, the bare rim of the main
land is held by aggressive Chile to the detriment of

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE m
Argentina. The wall-like barrier of the Andes, rising
from no gently sloping plateau as do the Rockies, pre
sented a most formidable obstacle to expansion from
the east, while the tropical climate of the greater part
of South America served to emphasize the indolent
temperaments of the Latin half-breed population.
Though the upland valleys were early occupied from
the western coast, the mountain district of the Cordil
leras could not soon produce a pressure of popula
tion sufficient to mount the snowy ranges and overflow
into the great river valleys on the Atlantic side. But
recently the Pacific states are reaching out towards
the east, and the number of boundary disputes on the
Atlantic slope of the Andes is insignificant.
Russia, the youngest country of Europe to develop
under geographical conditions of continental expansion,
from a small inland area has pushed her frontiers to
the Baltic, the Black Sea, and the Pacific, where she is
constantly lengthening her base ; she promises in the
future to reach the Indian Ocean through the valley of
the Euphrates and the Persian Gulf, or through the
Gates of Herat and Afghanistan.
Four months before the Louisiana Purchase was con
summated, the Lewis and Clark expedition was planned
to prepare the way for American expansion to the
Pacific by discovering the best overland route for com
merce. Jefferson wished to exploit the advantages of
the great system of river communication across the
continent ; he realized the unifying power of the Mis
souri in creating an interest for the United States in
the far West. " The river Missouri and the tribes

112 THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE
inhabiting it are not as well known as is rendered desir
able by their connexion with the Mississippi, and conse
quently with us." w He complained that the furs and
peltries of the remote Northwest were carried off by
the British traders through Canada by a far less perfect
system of inland navigation which was interrupted by
innumerable portages and shut up by ice much of the
year ; whereas these products of the northwestern forest
ought naturally to reach the Atlantic through American
waterways. Lewis was instructed, therefore, to explore
the Missouri carefully, and follow any of its principal
streams which might afford the readiest communication
across the mountains with the Columbia and the Pacific
Ocean. The Mississippi valley was destined to become the
core of the nation as it was of the continent. Its fer
tile soil would support a dense population, and its cheap
waterways were to prove of inestimable value for a
: young, agricultural people. The acquisition of the
' new West prolonged greatly the most distinctive feature
of American anthropo-geographic conditions — the
abundance of free land.24 A nation is influenced not
only by the topography, but by the size of its territory.
The presence of the new West reacted most wholesomely
upon the East and the old West : the stimulating effect
of inexhaustible opportunity never allowed American
energy to abate, and the democratic spirit of the ever
youthful frontier fostered the spirit of democracy and
youth in the whole nation. The abundance of unoccu
pied land beyond the Mississippi afforded a solution of
the Indian question, and prevented it from ever reaching

THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE 113
an acute stage. Some of the Indian purchases were
doubtless delayed because of the new outlet for the
white population ; but when made, were simplified by
the transfer of the tribes to new hunting-fields beyond
the Mississippi. Thus the western half of the great
valley brought more room to the eastern half.
NOTES TO CHAPTER VI
1. Ratzel, Anthropogeographie, vol. i. pp. 349-352, 2d edition. 1899.
2. W. Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, maps, pp. 143, 147. 1899.
3. Ibid. p. 222, map.
4. Ibid. pp. 403, 429, maps.
5. Ibid. p. 284, map.
6. Justin Winsor, The Westward Movement, p. 372.
7. Ibid. p. 32.
8. Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, vol. i. p. 545. 1846.
9. C. B. Hartley, Life of Daniel Boone, pp. 308-324. Phila. 1865.
10. E. Coues, History of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, vol. i. p. 7.
11. Roosevelt, Winning of the West, vol. iv. p. 266.
12. Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, vol. ii. pp. 541,
547. 1846.
13. P. L. Ford, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. viii. Confidential
Message to Congress on the Expedition to the Pacific, Jan. 18, 1803.
14. Ibid. Letter to John Bacon, April 30, 1803.
15. Ibid. Letter to Robert Livingston, April 18, 1803.
16. Roosevelt, Winning of the West, vol. iv. p. 207.
17. Albert Bushnell Hart, Foundation of American Foreign Policy,
p. 97. 1901.
18. Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, vol. ii. p. 461.
1846.
19. Ibid. vol. i. pp. 83-85.
20. Ibid. vol. ii. p. 516.
21. P. L. Ford, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. viii. Letter to
J. C. Breckenridge, April 12, 1803.
22. Ratzel, Politische Geographie der Vereinigten Staaten, p. 1. 1893.
23. P. L. Ford, Writings of Thomas Jefferson, vol. viii. Confiden
tial Message to Congress, Jan. 18, 1803.
24. F. J. Turner, Significance of the Frontier in American History,
Report of American Historical Association, 1893.

CHAPTER VII
GEOGRAPHY OF THE ATLANTIC COAST IN RELATION TO
THE DEVELOPMENT OP AMERICAN SEA POWER.
While western settlement was spreading up the lower
reaches of the Missouri, Arkansas, and Washita in
1810, the center of population for the whole country
lay at the eastern foot of the Blue Ridge, forty miles
northwest of Washington and the tidal floods of Chesa
peake Bay. Even as late as 1830, the star which marks
the westward course of population on the census maps
had not passed beyond the head waters of the Potomac ;
it still lingered with the waters draining into the Atlan
tic, thus showing the ocean's power of attraction, even
after the nation by the acquisition of Louisiana had
committed itself to continental dominion. The influence
of the Appalachian barrier, as we have seen, was to
limit the British colonies to'the coastal plain, and in cer
tain regions to stimulate maritime development because
of the limited supply of easily exploited natural resources
on the narrow shelf of the continent. When fur-fields
and corn-fields gave out, enterprising spirits sought a
new field of activity on the sea.
The attraction of the abundant lands in the Louisiana
country was not felt immediately. Enterprise and capi
tal do not change their direction so rapidly. The decade
of 1830 and 1840 witnessed a decline in the American

DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER 115
merchant marine and a widespread movement of popula
tion which pushed the western frontier to the ninety-
fifth meridian, where it lingered for many years. Then
our development became continental as opposed to mari
time or extra-continental. " In the present century we
see the effects arising from the opening of the Missis
sippi Valley to our Atlantic coast peoples in the gradual
decadence of our shipping interests. . . . Although
there have been many influences at work in the diversion
of our people from maritime life, it seems on the whole
that the most important cause is to be found in the way
opened to enterprising people through the ready access
which this century has given to the central fields of the
continent. This phase over, we may expect reversion to
maritime life on the Atlantic coast."1
Through all the colonial period and for the first four
decades of the Republic, the United States was dominated
by the ocean. Geographical location and a variety of
geographical conditions determined this. The original
Thirteen Colonies were a long cordon of settlements
along the Atlantic, stretching from the St. Croix River
in the north to the St. Mary's in the south ; they had
length but not breadth, and this length was washed by
the tides of the ocean. Each colony had ample contact
with the sea, and developed along the lines of its sea
connection. Travel from colony to colony by land
crossed the watercourses at right angles ; only in excep
tional cases could it make use of these natural highways
of a young community. Inter-colonial travel and traffic
therefore went by sea, and the coastwise trade became
a great artery through which circulated the common life

116 DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER
of the nascent people, contributing to that solidarity
which made their strength.
Of harbors there were plenty, from one end of the coast
to the other. The Atlantic shore of the United States
is characterized by multiplicity of small indentations
and paucity of large ones. In this respect it presents a
contrast to Europe. Chesapeake Bay and Long Island
Sound are the only partially inclosed bodies of water
considerable in size, and even they run parallel to the
coast and so contribute comparatively little to opening
up the back country. This office was performed by the
Atlantic rivers with their estuaries, which sufficed to
carry maritime influences well into the heart of the nar
row zone of settlement.
A paucity of large inlets means a paucity of peninsulas.
In the domain of the United States we can count only
the Delaware-Maryland arm of land, southern New Jer
sey, the southeastern projection of Massachusetts, and
at a later date Florida, which, however, owing to its
poverty of harbors, has contributed little to the mari
time development of the country. The United States
has also few segregated areas in the form of islands ; it
lies between the great island i/egions of the Atlantic,
between Newfoundland, Cape Breton, Prince Edward,
and Anticosti to the north, and the vast loop of the An
tilles to the south. Thus the continental location of the
United States is emphasized.2 Such islands as it has are
close inshore, a part of the general contour of the
country. They are fragments of the mainland cut off
by glacial action and subsidence, as those along the fiord
regions of Maine ; or long bars of deposit which inclose

DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER 117
the coast with few interruptions from Sandy Hook to
the Rio Grande. Only Long Island by its size and Nan
tucket by its comparative remoteness have achieved an
independent or individual existence. The presence of
foreign powers in all the islands to the north and south
and even those off the coast, as the Bermudas, Bahamas,
and Antilles, has been a distinct factor in the naval
and military history of the United States, demonstrating
the disadvantages of a purely continental location. But
now that the nation is alive to the value of such oceanic
outposts and is securing them where she can, much of
this will be changed.
Length of coast-line and abundance of harbors united
with a third geographical condition, namely, location,
to make the Americans from the start a seafaring
people. They held a central position on the rim of the
populous and progressive North Atlantic basin, and in
this position New England occupied the choice place.
Trade followed the great sweep of the Gulf Stream, the
North Atlantic Drift, and the returning Equatorial Cur
rent past the shores of Newfoundland, Great Britain,
Spain, Africa, the Canary Islands, West Indies, and up
the coast of the United States. This path the Ameri
can schooners followed, helped onward by the currents
and their causing winds, visiting in turn all the markets
passed and completing with profit the great circuit of
trade. Not England itself had a more advantageous
position for the commerce of the North Atlantic, if we
except her proximity to the isolated maritime field of the
Baltic. Located in the temperate zone, the colonies, as
later the states, were under the necessity of importing

118 DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER
tropical products from the West Indies, among whose
islands American vessels threaded their way, carrying
in exchange the substantial foodstuffs of the North. As
a new country with an abundance of -surplus products
from forest, field, and shore, it demanded the manufac
tured wares of Europe, while that continent in turn clam
ored for the raw materials of America. To both these
important markets colonial America held a near and cen
tral position. These are the large features of her geo
graphical location. A more detailed analysis of early
American exchanges will reveal other advantages which
can be attributed in great part to conditions of climate,
soil, and physical feature obtaining in the states them
selves, or in the markets which their merchantmen
sought along the current paths of the pathless ocean.
Within the area of the Thirteen Colonies there were
differences of natural condition sufficient to diversify
their activities and their products, to make land interests
predominate in one section and maritime in the other,
and that in spite of the fact that both regions had ample
contact with the sea. The geographical environment
of a people consists of all the natural conditions to
which they are subjected, not merely a part. A coast
region shows always the interplay of the forces of land
and of sea. According to the fertility and extent of
arable soil, or to the abundance and availability of har
bors combined with an unproductive or limited back
country, now the agricultural phase of development, now
the maritime prevails, following the law of the resolu
tion of forces. A one-sided view of environment in the
study of geography is disastrous, as shown by the con-

DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER 119
elusions of a recent writer, who says : " The evidence
of history is, however, strongly against the assumption
that geographical facilities alone will make a people
maritime. The Phoenicians and the Jews dwelt side by
side on the same coast, but they made very different
uses of their opportunities. The Phoenicians filled the
Mediterranean with their commerce. . . . The Jews
never developed any aptitude for the sea." 3
These two peoples made a different use of their op
portunities because their opportunities were essentially
different, both as to the land and as to their respective
coasts. The Jews inhabited a broad band of fertile
country stretching westward from the Syrian desert,
but reaching the Mediterranean only southward from
the promontory of Mt. Carmel ; here the coast is one
smooth, unbroken stretch, even the tiny estuaries of its
streams being filled up by the current-borne sand swept
northward from the Nile delta. The coast afforded no
harbors, while the back country with its varied, abundant
crops, rich orchards, but scanty forests, offered every
inducement to an agricultural life. The Phoenicians
occupied a narrow hem of land between the solid range
of the Lebanon Mountains and the sea. The port of
Sidon was only fifteen miles distant from the summit of
the range (4000 feet). Expansion to the eastward was
practically impossible ; only where the Leontes River
had carved its way through the mountain barrier to the
sea did the Phoenicians stretch their dominion through
its gap to the inner range of Mt. Hermon. The coast
which they held north of Mt. Carmel, in contrast to that
of the Jews, was somewhat broken and irregular from

120 DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER
the fact that the roots of the mountains here intruded
upon the sea. An occasional harbor, an inshore islet
making a protected roadstead, and outlying Cyprus, in
vited to maritime life. On the slopes of Lebanon, which
condensed the moisture brought in by the prevailing
southwestern winds, grew the magnificent cedars which
furnished the material for the Phoenician fleets. But
the steep hillsides would grow little else. Hence geo
graphical conditions both of the sea and of the land
combined to make a maritime race of the Phoenicians,
an inland people of the Jews.*
Much such a contrast was presented by the Atlantic
shore of America and with much the same result. In
New England the deeply embayed coast, the narrowness
of the lowland belt, and the glaciated soil were all geo
graphic factors operating to develop maritime life. In
New York and Raritan bays similar conditions, com
bined with favorable routes of communication with the
interior, produced a region of natural seaports with the
attendant nautical activity. Philadelphia near the mouth
of the Delaware River and Baltimore commanding the
Susquehanna outlet became the ports for eastern Penn
sylvania. But southward from this point, in spite of
bays, sounds, inlets, and deep river mouths, the sea loses
its ascendency in controlling the activities of the people,
and the extensive, fertile soil of the southern states de
termines their agricultural development. By length of
coast-line the southern colonies were kept in contact
with oversea influences, but the profits of tobacco and
rice crops withheld their investments from the carrying-
trade, which they therefore left to others, notably New

DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER 121
England. Even to-day the southern states own scarcely
more than a tenth of the ships under our flag.
The great navigators of the world have always been
those nations living in small, half-barren coast countries,
or in larger countries with only a limited fertile area,
but lying near to larger fruitful regions for whose pro
ducts they could play the part of middleman, or ex
change the harvest of their seas. Such peoples were
the Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks, Latins, English,
the burghers of the Hanse towns, and the Norwegians^
The rocky, indented coast of New England produced
the great maritime carriers of the New World, with
whom even British merchantmen found it difficult to
compete. The ports of Massachusetts Bay are four de
grees of longitude nearer to England than is Philadel
phia, nine degrees nearer than Charleston, South Caro
lina; therefore they had distinct advantages in the
trade with the island kingdom which, by reason of its
limited area and denuded forest lands, made a steady
demand for the raw products of America. Especially
it needed masts, spars, and lumber for the royal navy
from the northern forests of New England. These
materials the colonists also worked up assiduously for
their own marine, so that shipbuilding for home uses
and exportation became one of the earliest and most
important industries of the northeast coast.
The geographical distribution of early shipbuilding
ports in New England shows the dispersion of maritime
interests along the whole coast, as opposed to the con
centration at a few favored points in later times ; it tells
of abundant forests near all the shipyards, of the splash

122 DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER
of waterfall and the whir of sawmill almost minghng
with the roar of the surf on the shore. In the period
from 1620 to 1750 we find vessels being launched at
numerous towns along the coast from Cape Ann to the
Connecticut River, — at Gloucester, Salem, Marblehead,
Medford, Dorchester, Boston, Plymouth, Portsmouth
and Newport in Rhode Island, Westerly on the estuary
of the Pawcatuck, and New London.
But after 1750 the lumber supply near the older ports
was exhausted, and the shipbuilding industry began to
concentrate along the shores of northeastern Massachu
setts, New Hampshire, and the nearer coast of Maine.
Wells, Maine, built a schooner of eighty-eight tons in
1767, but the greater center of shipbuilding activity was
on the Piscataqua River, where vessels were turned out at
the rate of two hundred a year. The abundant forests
furnished the lumber ; the cordage, anchors, and canvas
to equip the vessels came from England, though Ports
mouth started up three ropewalks at this time. Naval
stores, such as tar, pitch, and turpentine, came from the
northern woods or the forests of North Carolina. As
the Piscataqua began to need all its lumber resources
for the construction of ships, the center of export of
masts and spars moved eastward from Portsmouth to
Portland, Maine, evidencing the relationship between
forests and commerce.5
Reading the early commercial history of New Eng- *
land, one seems never to get away from the sound of
the shipbuilder's hammer and the rush of the launch
ing vessel as she " schoons " on the waves. Massachu
setts employed a fleet of two hundred vessels as early

DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER 123
as 1709, and sold on an average one hundred a year to
merchants of London and elsewhere.6 Shipbuilding
was inspected by the government, such was the pride in
the industry, and builders were granted special privi
leges in several ports. Other lines of manufactures
which started up before 1650 remained undeveloped
because this one great industry absorbed the energies
and capital of the population. American ships were
the cheapest and best afloat. Philadelphia, which was
advantageously situated near the Appalachian forests and
also near the sea, turned out the best-finished vessels,
but New England's were the fleetest and staunchest.
Such an important field of activity was offered by
the American merchant service that it attracted a supe
rior class of men both for officers and crews. A vessel
which started out with the highly composite cargo of
an American ship, to visit the markets on the great
circle of trade from Newfoundland around to Barba-
does, required a master who understood the possibility
of every market both for selling and buying, and was
alert to pick up a bit of freight business between the
foreign ports which he might happen to pass. For this
reason the personnel of American seamen was far supe
rior to that of the British in the eighteenth and early
part of the nineteenth century. The consequence was
that American vessels were the favorite carriers on the
ocean. They were the fastest, safest, took better care
of their goods, loaded and unloaded most quickly.
This reduced for them the rate of insurance, and ena
bled them to select the most valuable freight at the
highest profit.7

124 DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER
The shipbuilding industry of New England was
stimulated especially by the proximity of the extensive
fishing-grounds off the northeast coast of North Amer
ica, where the submarine plateau of the Grand Banks
pastured the finny herds of the ocean. Fisheries have
always been the original inducement for men to go to
sea, and they continue to-day to be the training-school
of seamen. Boston alone in 1664 had three hundred
boats fishing in the waters about Cape Sable ; and there
were fifteen hundred fishermen casting in their nets off
the Isles of Shoals.8 Cod became the staple of New
England exports. Salted and packed, it found a ready
and extensive market. The choicest fish were sent to
the Catholic countries of southern Europe where the
regular fast-days occasioned a steady demand, just as
they had done in the fifteenth century for the salt
herring of the great Hanse fisheries.9 The medium
quality was kept for home consumption, and the refuse
fish was carried in great quantities to feed the slaves
on the sugar plantations of the West Indies. This
trade was carried on regularly with the British hold
ings in the Antilles, and illicitly but extensively with
the French and Spanish colonies. The limited area
of these islands and the more profitable use of their
soil for a few semi-tropical products necessitated the
importation from the American colonies of foodstuffs,
which presupposed larger areas for agriculture and pas
turage, as well as proximity to the northern fish. At
the outbreak of the Revolution, the interruption of
commercial dealings with the West Indies almost anni
hilated the fisheries and likewise the slaves, for thou-

DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER 125
sands of these unfortunates died of starvation in a
few years.
But cod and mackerel were not the only prizes that
lured the American fisherman upon the water. In the
early colonial days the right or baleen whale frequented
these coasts, and a spout offshore was the signal for
the launching of boats for the attack. In case a dead
whale drifted to land, riparian rights, defined by law,
decided the ownership of the prize. But soon the drift
whales decreased, and in consequence sloops and other
small craft began to seek their prey, especially the sperm
whale, in the open ocean, and a regular industry devel
oped. This seems to have been concentrated chiefly on
the southeastern coast of New England. The leaders
were Nantucket, Long Island, and New Bedford ; Provi
dence, Warren, and Newport in Rhode Island, Dart
mouth and the Cape Cod district participated. Boston
took no very active part, though it was the chief port
for the commerce in the products of the whale.
Deep-sea whaling demanded larger vessels, both for
safety and to hold the big cargo of bone and oil.
These ranged first from the Bahama Islands northward
to Baffin Bay and Davis Strait, then across to the Azores
and the Guinea coast. New England soon led the
world in this industry ; and when the whale was exter
minated in the North and South Atlantic, her vessels
followed it to the Pacific and Arctic. Whalebone and
oil became important items in domestic and foreign
exchanges. Of five thousand tons of whale-oil im
ported into London in 1763, nearly three fifths belonged
to American owners, while forty tons of bone were

126 DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER
deposited in the same market in 1761 and 1762.10
Thus ships, lumber, fish, whale-oil and bone, New
England's contributions to the world's exchanges, were
intimately connected with her geographical location and
natural features of coast-line, climate, and soil.
Geographical conditions, as we have shown above,
determined that inter-colonial communication should he
largely by sea. This prepared the way for a peculiarly
active coasting-trade, especially as every district of the
Atlantic slope was highly differentiated as to its pro
ducts in consequence of varied natural conditions. The
geographical control in the activities of New England
and the southern states has been considered. New York
and Philadelphia, by reason of their extensive interior
connections through the Hudson, the Delaware, and the
Susquehanna, were the natural ports for the fur trade.
New York, Pennsylvania, and northern Maryland were
the chief wheat-producing countries. New England,
with the early exhaustion of her limited farm-land, soon
(1745) found it necessary to import her wheat,11 and
the southern states found it more profitable economy
to get their cereals from the North. South Carolina
utilized her swamps for rice, and North Carolina, which
long held the place of a frontier country to the older
Virginia, contributed to commerce the products of
a frontier region, — lumber, naval stores, cattle, and
leather. The most active agents in the early coasting-trade
were the Dutch of New Amsterdam, whose central
position in the angle of the continent gave them pecu
liar advantages ; but they soon found active competitors

DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER 127
in the New Englanders, as soon as these later comers
began to adapt themselves to their environment. The
absence of great inlets along the western shore of the
Atlantic had the effect that the American coastwise
commerce was not thalassic but oceanic. It made wide
sweeps, and in truth was intimately associated with the
foreign trade. Just before the outbreak of the Revo
lution Rhode Island alone had three hundred and fifty-
two vessels coasting from Newfoundland to Georgia.12
The small coasting-craft did a continuous drop-in
business from port to port. The southern states wanted
fish from the Grand Banks, European wares and wines
from Boston, West Indian molasses, sugar, and rum
from the New Haven docks, and wheat from New York
and Pennsylvania ; while tar from Albemarle Sound and
tobacco from the Chesapeake in turn went up to fortify
the hulls of the ships and the souls of the skippers off
the Grand Banks. Often a homebound vessel from a
tour in the Caribbean Sea would stop at Norfolk and
exchange a part of its semi-tropical cargo for tobacco.
Thus the coastwise trade shaded off into the foreign
trade with the near-by Antilles.
But the commerce which was most remunerative and
most regular was that with the West Indies. The
islands demanded things which the colonies could give
them or bring them, and they gave in exchange pro-.
ducts which commanded a ready market. Besides fish,
salted meats, and flour, they wanted horses in large
numbers for the cane-crushing mills of Barbadoes and
other sugar districts, barrel and pipe staves for their
sugar and molasses, boards and houses ready framed to

128 DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER
be set up, and lastly they wanted slaves. The slave-
trade, particularly, was profitable and delightfully simple
in its reciprocity aspects. Moreover, it stimulated the
industrial development of New England by introducing
the manufacture of rum in enormous quantities. Made
of inferior molasses which the Indies themselves fur
nished in vast quantities, rum was distilled chiefly at
Boston and in the twenty-two still-houses of Newport,
and then went to buy the kidnapped negroes on the
Guinea coast and introduce the residual inhabitants to
the advantages of civilization. The slaves, who were res
cued from the debauching effects of the rum, closely
and carefully packed as it behooves valuable merchan
dise, made a short voyage to the Antilles, were distrib
uted among the British, French, and Spanish plantations,
or were brought further north to supply the slave-mar
kets of the southern states, without contaminating the
soil of New England, or by their presence disturbing
the placid conscience of even such a liberty-loving
trader as Peter Faneuil.
The chief places interested in the West Indian trade
were Ipswich, Salem, Boston, Newport, New London,
New Haven, Windsor, and New York. We notice that
Long Island Sound points, which were slow in partici
pating in colonial maritime activity, became important
in the West Indian trade. The wealth of New Haven was
based largely on its commerce with Barbadoes. New
England vessels visited with little discrimination British,
Spanish, French, and Dutch holdings in the Caribbean
region ; for the Navigation Laws were too carelessly
enforced to limit the commercial field of the enterpris-

DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER 129
ing Yankee trader. Outbound vessels from the Ameri
can coast generally carried an extra supply of staves
and a number of coopers, who were busied setting up
barrels and hogsheads to hold the return cargo of sugar
and molasses. The same vessels brought in also indigo,
cotton, mahogany, dyewoods, silver, and Spanish iron,
the last two being items of Spain's trade with her own
possessions. New England, always in need of salt for
her fish industry, at one time tried importing this article
from the Tortugas of the Gulf, but it proved an unsat
isfactory variety for preserving fish, and she continued
thereafter to rely upon the Mediterranean supply,
which was shipped chiefly at Malaga.
As England's commercial policy permitted the col
onies to trade with all European countries south of
Cape Finisterre in such commodities as she herself did
not produce, American merchantmen did a thriving
business with Spain, Portugal, and, on the return voy
age, with the Madeira and Canary Islands. These
countries being Catholic wanted fish, and being great
wine-producers wanted staves, both of which the col
onies gladly furnished for salt, wine, oil, and fruits.
Once in these regions, it was a simple matter to run
down the African coast for gold-dust, ivory, and slaves.
Geographical conditions determined New England as
the great maritime region of America. New York's
limited though valuable coast, and the retardation of
her back country by the proximity of the hostile
French, and later by the retention of British posts on
the Lakes, prevented her early maritime development.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, the entrances

130 DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER
and clearances in the ports of Philadelphia and New
York combined were just equal to those of Boston
alone. In 1731, when Pennsylvania owned 6000 tons
of shipping, Massachusetts had nearly 38,000 tons,
one half of which was employed in European trade.
In her early history, the port of New York had to
share honors with Perth Amboy, which attracted trade
on account of its nearness to the sea and its superior
advantages for avoiding the import and excise taxes;13
but with the expansion of population along the shores
of Ontario and Erie, the activity along this frontier in
the War of 1812, and the consequent construction of
the Erie Canal, the port of New York attained that
preeminence marked out for it by its position before the
" eastern gateway of the United States."
A merchant marine becomes in time of war an im
portant factor in national defense and aggression. It
furnishes seamen, transports, its vessels are converted
into armed cruisers, or are fitted out with letters of
marque to prey upon the enemy's commerce. Colonial
privateers did effective service in the Spanish and
French wars, for it was easy to intercept French supply
ships or merchantmen in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, or
Spanish vessels on their way to the Antilles. In the
Revolution, the supremacy of English sea power left
any regular naval warfare out of the question for the
young Republic. However, the great number of her
merchant ships and seamen, whose occupation was for
the time destroyed ; their familiarity with the secluded
ports and island hiding-places of the coast ; moreover,
England's necessity of exporting her supplies in this

DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER 131
oversea war, while she held a naval base on the mainland
only at two points, New York and Newport, all com
bined to make a situation in which privateering could
be most effective, while affording to the merchant marine
means of partially recouping their losses. Therefore we
find that Boston had three hundred and sixty-five vessels
commissioned for this semi-piratical service, Salem about
a hundred and eighty, Rhode Island some two hundred,
though right under the nose of the British guns at
Newport, — while other New England ports frequently
sent out vessels. That they went to some purpose is
evidenced by the fact that in 1776 the rate of marine
insurance between England and the West Indies rose to
twenty-three per cent. The vessels which the national
government put into the service were most effective as
cruisers on the high seas, while the colonial cruisers,
with the privateers, were employed in the same way in
shore. The prize cargoes of military and naval supplies
which were thus brought in did much to relieve the
needs of the colonies, which, in consequence of their
previous dependence upon England, were almost desti
tute of the simplest means for carrying on the struggle.
From Cape Breton to Martinique these gadflies of the
ocean stung, preyed upon, and almost stampeded Eng
lish commerce.
Just as the achievement of independence was the
signal for territorial expansion on the part of the Ameri
cans, so it marked the beginning of a pronounced
maritime expansion. England was to be no longer the
middleman in the trade with the Orient. American mer
chantmen, encouraged by discriminating duties in their

132 DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER
favor, found their way to Canton and the East Indies,
stopping en route in the Indian Ocean to trade at Bour
bon and Mauritius, which had been opened by France to
American commerce. A Boston ship, in 1788, following
in the track of the whalers in the Pacific, began trading
with the Indians of the northwest coast of America for
furs, which it carried across to Canton and exchanged
for Chinese products. In the succeeding years New
England vessels were to be seen constantly in the Span
ish ports of California, where they outnumbered all other
foreign merchantmen, and first drew the attention of
the national government to the need of a foothold on the
Pacific. The exclusion of English competition by the Naviga
tion Laws and superior facilities for shipbuilding en
abled the states to exploit all the advantages of their
location and natural equipment for maritime ascendency.
While in the period from 1789 to 1793 their proportion
of the carrying-trade of the country rose from twenty-
five per cent, to seventy-nine per cent., by 1810 they had
absorbed eighty-nine per cent. Interests so important
and operating in such a wide field required the protec
tion which only a navy could give. Depredations on
American commerce by French vessels in the West
Indies in 1793 was the occasion for the construction of
the first war-ships by the new Union and for the re
prisals which taught the French manners. Similar out
rages by the corsairs of the Barbary States, just outside
the Strait of Gibraltar, gave the youthful navy, in 1803,
that experience in conducting a campaign which pre
pared it for the more serious contest of 1812.

DEVELOPMENT OF AMERICAN SEA POWER 133

NOTES TO CHAPTER VII
1. Shaler, Nature and Man in America, p. 200.
2. Ratzel, Politische Geographie der Vereinigten Staaten, p. 29. 1893.
3. George, The Relations of Geography and History, p. 76. Oxford, 1901.
4. George Adam Smith, Historical Geography of the Holy Land, pp.
76-85 and 127-135. 1897.
5. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, vol. ii. pp.
765, 766. 1899.
6. Ibid. vol. i. p. 366.
7. Shaler, The United States, vol. i. pp. 551, 552.
8. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, vol. i. p. 245.
9. Schaefer, Die Hansestadte und Konig Waldemar von Danemark,
p. 256. 1879.
10. Weeden, Economic and Social History of New England, vol. ii. p. 746.
11. Ibid. vol. ii. p. 507.
12. Ibid. vol. ii. p. 761.
13. Broadhead, History of the State of New York, vol. ii. pp. 392 and
460.

CHAPTEE VIII
GEOGRAPHY OF SEA AND LAND OPERATIONS IN THE
WAR OF 1812
In the War of 1812, even more than in the Revolution,
the United States felt the advantages of its remote
geographical location and large area. The three million
people who had fought the War of Independence had
increased in 1810 to over seven millions, a consequence
of the abundant land and resources of a new country,
its encouragement of natural increase, and attraction to
immigrants. The line of inhabited coast was only little
longer than in 1780, but the land frontier of continuous
settlement slanted southwest from Lake Champlain to
the mouth of the Ohio, and from that point southeast
to the St. Mary's River, which marked the northern
border of Spanish Florida. Outside of this 2900 mile
frontier were isolated areas of settlement, every one of
which, except the Mississippi group between the Ohio
and the Missouri, figured in the War of 1812, — De
troit, Mackinaw, Prairie du Chien, Fort Dearborn
(Chicago), New Orleans, and Forts Mims and Bowyer,
which guarded the approaches to the Tombigbee settle
ments. From the geographical standpoint, the distinguishing
characteristic of this war lay in the fact that it was
limited strictly to the frontiers, both land and marine.

THE WAR OF 1812 135
Only in the attacks on Washington, Baltimore, and New
Orleans, which, by reason of their tidewater location,
can be set down as coast towns, did invasion penetrate
more than a few miles from the sea ; while on the land
frontier, where there was no waterway to aid, the Brit
ish hesitated to advance even this far from their base
upon the border. It was therefore a peripheral war,
and left the mass of the country undisturbed. This
could have been the case only in a country of large
area and isolated location, or in a land like England,
with only marine frontiers defended by a strong navy.
Thus even the taking of Washington, the capital, lost
its military significance, because it only scratched the
skin of the country and left the great body unimpaired.
The fall of Pretoria in a ten-fold larger Transvaal
would not materially have altered the outlook of the
Boer War, just as the taking of Moscow in 1812 shrank
to insignificant proportions against the background of
Russia's vast area.
In view of the maritime development of the United
States at this time, the impressment of American seamen
into British service had to be checked. Six thousand
Americans on English naval vessels tells how the English
had improved their opportunities. The war was under
taken, therefore, to vindicate the rights chiefly of the
maritime states, and yet it was just these states who
were opposed to the war. Hostilities meant the inter
ruption of navigation and the destruction of their com
merce ; but they preferred to lose their mariners rather
than their money. Hence the sectionalism of parties
in their attitude towards this war was clearly drawn.

136 THE WAR OF 1812
In the opposition was found all of New England, with
the exception of the coastless state of Vermont, a large
part of New York, and the majority of New Jersey and
Delaware. The South and West supported the war,
though Maryland, showing the conflict of her land and
sea interests, cast three votes against it.1 The leader
in the opposition, as was to be expected, was Massachu
setts, moved by her dominant maritime interests.
The war was probably distasteful to New York be
cause she would suffer not only in her port, but also
in her northern frontier, which, together with that of
Vermont and the northeastern corner of Ohio, consti
tuted the only settled area of the United States con
tiguous with the Canadian border. This was the old
danger-line from Champlain to Presque Isle (Erie)
which had been made conspicuous in the French wars
and in the Revolution ; and now with the advance of
population it extended westward to Detroit. Moreover,
in contrast to the natural indifference of French Canada
in this conflict, the Americans felt the animosity of
their neighbors in the adjoining province of Ontario.
These were loyalists who had withdrawn from the United
States after the Revolution. Opposed to mingling with
the French element in the older eastern part of Canada,
like all late comers in America, they were located in
the west, and were granted tracts of land by the Brit
ish government in the remote district north of Lake
Ontario, where they formed the nucleus of the later
political division of Upper Canada.2
It was along this line that hostilities began, though
war had been declared because of maritime outrages.

THE WAR OF 1812 137
But the youth and weakness of the American navy,
and the strength of the British in our waters, with their
naval stations at Halifax, the Bermudas, Santa Lucia,
Barbadoes, and Jamaica, whence they could blockade
our coasts, necessitated the opening of the campaign
with an attack on Canada. But here, again, geograph
ical conditions determined that the war should be in
large part naval; fleet and infantry were to combine.
Lakes Ontario, Erie, St. Clair, and Champlain were the
scene of these water operations; and the two short,
detached lines of the Niagara and Detroit rivers, where
the land frontiers converged, became strategic areas of
continued military activity where encounters were hand
to hand.
Along this inland frontier the British had the advan
tage. The St. Lawrence afforded them a protected line
of communication with the naval and military stores of
Canada and England, and hence brought the frontier
nearer to the treasury and troops of England than
were the Americans to the Hudson. The Mohawk
route with its imperfect and interrupted navigation,
though it had served well for the birch canoes and
furry cargoes of the colonial wilderness, was ill adapted
to the transportation of heavy guns. Moreover, the
outlet of this route was the mouth of the Oswego River,
and supplies for the naval base at Sacket Harbor at
the easternmost end of Lake Ontario had to run the
gauntlet of British ships which issued from their station
at Kingston near by ; while Kingston, by its position
at the effluence of the St. Lawrence, secured the British
line of communication on that river. For both sides

138 THE WAR OF 1812
the control of these inland waters was of the utmost
importance, because upon it depended the supplies of
all the Niagara and Detroit River posts.
The land position of the British, too, had some geo
graphical advantages. Lake Ontario laps over the end
of Lake Erie in such a way as to make a small rect
angular peninsula of the British territory along the
Niagara River; and this formation is duplicated at the
western extremity of Ontario Province along the De
troit River by the same relative position of Lake Erie
and Lake St. Clair. The position of the British,
flanked by the Lakes, was peculiarly protected along
these two rivers, which, by their shortness, isolation,
controlling positions, and their exceptional character as
the only settled land frontiers west of the St. Lawrence,
were immediately endowed with strategic importance.
The British post of Fort Maiden particularly, by its lo
cation on an angle of land at the mouth of the Detroit
River, was able to cut off reinforcements moving to De
troit by land and supplies coming by water from the
American settlements at the eastern end of Lake Erie.
The long arrow-shaped wedge of Upper Canada
brought the British at Maiden far into American pos
sessions, enabled them to cut off the upper lakes from
Erie, and gave them an administrative center on the
northwestern frontier for stirring up the Indians all the
way from the Wisconsin River to Sandusky Bay. De
troit was the post whence the efforts of the British
might be frustrated : hence its strategic importance and
the early movement of American forces towards this
point. The capture of the sole American boat on Lake

THE WAR OF 1812 139
Erie as it was going up the Detroit River with the sup
plies of the troops from the Maumee, the defeat at Hu
ron River of the reinforcements for Detroit, the capture
of the post, the two battles on the Raisin River, and the
advance of the British to Sandusky River, show the dis
advantage of Detroit's position, remote from the frontier
of continuous settlement, while British ships held the
control of Lake Erie. To maintain an effective line of
communication by a long detour around the western
end of Lake Erie through pathless forests was almost
impossible. And the British, masters of Lake Erie,
were able to seize the remote post of Mackinaw, whose
position was made hopeless by the interruption of its
line of communication through Detroit. Indian allies
seized Fort Dearborn and Prairie du Chien, though a
relief party coming up the Mississippi from St. Louis
endeavored to save this post at the mouth of the Wis
consin. But while these successes were falling to the enemy,
Perry was doing the impossible at Presque Isle, — con
verting a forest into a navy. The falls of the Niagara
necessitated the construction and maintenance of sep
arate flotillas on Lakes Ontario and Erie, thus increas
ing the expanse and difficulty of war on the inland
waters. The one American ship on Erie had been cap
tured. The British at Fort Erie prevented supplies and
a few purchased ships from coming ont of the upper
Niagara River to Presque Isle. Out of the green woods
of Erie, therefore, from hull to mast grew Perry's fleet
in 1813 ; there it was equipped and manned, though
supplies had to be hauled over blazed tracks through

140

THE WAR OF 1812

the forest, and remoteness made it difficult to get sea
men. But before the summer was over, this Rhode
Island man with his high-seas experience wrested the
control of the lake from the provincial seamen of
Canada, cut off the
British supplies, and
cleared the way for the
American advance on
Maiden, with the con
sequent retreat of the
enemy from this post
and Detroit, and their
defeat at the Battle of
the Thames.
The remoteness of
Detroit and the isola
tion of Lake Erie, due
to the interruption of
navigation at Niagara
Falls, made this region
drop out of the con
flict as soon as it was
retaken from the British. The- really strategic fron
tier was the Niagara River, and here the land opera
tions of the war were focused. Here was the battle of
Queen stown Heights, the attack on Fort George, the
capture of Fort Erie, the battle of Chippewa Creek and
of Lundy's Lane on the Canada side ; and on the Amer
ican the capture of Fort Niagara and the burning of
Youngstown, Lewiston, Manchester, Black Rock, and
Buffalo. As the fate of the Niagara posts on both

NIAGARA RIVER 1812-14

THE WAR OF 1812 141
sides depended upon the maintenance of navigation on
Lake Ontario, and as the fleets were pretty evenly
matched, neither dared risk an engagement without de
cided advantages of wind and position. Too much was
at stake. Hence warfare on Lake Ontario was color
less because it lacked a decisive battle. The body of
water was so small and distances so short that it was
always possible for either Americans or English to avoid
an engagement by running into a home port and taking
refuge under the land batteries. For this reason seiz
ure of stores in course of transportation up the Lake,
and predatory descents like those upon Oswego, Sacket
Harbor, Toronto, or Burlington Bay made up the
story of Ontario warfare.
The possible prize the British hoped to gain by suc
cesses on the Great Lakes was the future exclusive right
of navigation, by which the British could have retarded
the whole development of the Northwest : hence the con
centration of military activities on Lake Ontario. The
old Champlain route, which had figured prominently
heretofore in every war across the Canadian boundary,
by reason of its detached location played a smaller part
in the hostilities of 1812. But when the temporary
cessation of the Napoleonic War in 1814 released
the English troops from service on the Continent,
and large reinforcements were sent to Canada for an
invasion of New York, this shortest line of communica
tion between the St. Lawrence and the Hudson became
the line of march.
The route of the invading army from Canada was
flanked for a long distance by the Richelieu River and

142 THE WAR OF 1812
Lake Champlain, so a flotilla of ships accompanied the
land forces to carry supplies and at the same time
lend protection. Hence both the land and water route
had to be contested by the Americans. In anticipation
of such an invasion, a flotilla had been stationed on
Lake Champlain, but the body of water was so long
and narrow that cruising was out of the question ; so
the vessels took up their position inshore near the
land forces, which were stationed along the Saranac
River to check the enemy's advance. Modern warfare
is largely a science of communications and transporta
tion. Hence the defeat of the British ships on Cham
plain was the signal for the retreat of the British army.
Here, as on Lake Erie, a naval victory was of supreme
importance to the Americaus, because of the difficulty
of constructing a new fleet on this isolated body of
water, were the first one destroyed. Defeat would
have put them in the position of the British after
Perry's victory.
It was not possible for the United States to sustain
any considerable damages along a land frontier which
through Maine and New Hampshire was a primeval
wilderness and from Vermont westward was only
sparsely settled, and which, moreover, by its very short
ness left only a limited area exposed to attack ; but the
long and densely populated sea frontier presented a vul
nerable surface to the onslaughts of the British navy.
From one extremity of the coast to the other, and from
the beginning to the end of the war the enemy's ships
made their depredations. England's great sea power
enabled it to blockade all the principal harbors from

THE WAR OF 1812 143
Maine to Chesapeake Bay, with the result that several
new American vessels which were building never got
to sea. This had been the case before in the Revolu
tion. The fisheries of New England were almost broken
up and the foreign commerce of the eastern states was
totally destroyed. Stonington, Connecticut, and Lewis-
ton on Delaware Bay were bombarded. The salt-works
on Cape Cod saved their buildings by a ransom. In
Chesapeake Bay depredations extended from Norfolk to
Havre de Grace at the mouth of the Susquehanna. The
estuaries of the Patapsco and Patuxent afforded easy
lines of approach to Baltimore and Washington, and the
Potomac carried the British fleet to Alexandria. Thus
the waterways of Chesapeake Bay and its estuaries, to
gether wjth the weak-kneed resistance of the militia
which met the invading force at Bladensburg before the
city of Washington, enabled the enemy to penetrate
farther into the interior than at any other point along
the whole coast.
Further south, the coast of North Carolina was pro
tected from naval attack by the " skaergard " of the off
shore sand-reefs, for the only place to suffer was the vil
lage of Portsmouth, which occupies an exposed position
on the Ocracoke Inlet into Pamlico Sound. The South
Carolina coast was plundered by the British ships after
the defeat at New Orleans, where the enemy made their
greatest demonstration during the war. From the island
of Jamaica came the expedition, — a fleet of fifty ves
sels carrying twelve thousand troops. Lakes Borgne
and Ponchartrain and the numerous bayous offered
many avenues of approach to the city, whose position

144 THE WAR OF 1812
was therefore even more exposed than had been that of
Washington. But it was defended by troops of the
backwoods and Jackson, the man of the frontier, the
man of initiative and resource, the man who waited not
for precedent. Still breathless from his unauthorized
punitive attack upon the Spanish in Pensacola, who had
aided the British in an attack upon the Americans at
Fort Bowyer, he hurried back to New Orleans. He
seized the cotton bales of protesting merchants to build
his barricade, and afterwards paid the fine imposed for
this high-handed, high-minded act. The bayous he ob
structed. He called the Mississippi to his aid, cut the
levee in front of the enemy's army to check its advance,
and behind it to embarrass its retreat. Then his men
behind their cotton bales, flanked by river and marsh,
showed what kind of marksmanship the military school
of the backwoods produced.
It is fair to say that the only valiant work of this war
was done by the infantry, regulars and volunteers,
trained on the frontier, and the mariners who had
learned their lesson on the high seas. Geographical
environment, making the necessity and opportunity, had
in both cases brought forth a sturdy product. From
Newfoundland fishermen, Nantucket whalers, New Eng
land sailors, merchantmen, captains, and American ship
builders was combined a navy that could deal some
heavy blows even to the sea power of England. The
British fleet was big enough to blockade every American
port, but it did not know well enough the secrets of the
shore to prevent the escape of sea-rovers, some belonging
to the navy, but far more fitted out by private enter-

THE WAR OF 1812 145
prise to prey upon British commerce. American priva
teers swarmed on every sea, while the navy, both men
and ships, was recruited from the merchant marine.
The sea-fights of this war, if studied merely in their
chronological sequence as presented in the ordinary
school histories, leave only a confused impression, of
which the student, young or old, retains little at all
and less that is valuable. But an analysis of the geo
graphical distribution of these engagements reveals a
wide underlying system which explains their purpose
and brings order out of an apparent chaos.
Two important ports of the British on the American
continent were Quebec and Halifax, one their supply
station for the war along the Canadian frontier, and the
other their chief naval base in American waters. Hence
American vessels cruising to the southeast of Cape Bre
ton Island were likely to intercept supply ships for these
two points ; furthermore, they were in the path of home-
bound English merchant ships returning heavy laden
from Caribbean ports. But before the American cruisers
could reach this strategic position on the high seas, they
had to run the gauntlet of the enemy's ships coming
out from Halifax.
In the light of these geographical conditions, observe
some of the important naval engagements of this war.
Captain Broke, with the British vessels Shannon and
Tenedos, was instructed to watch the American coast
east of Cape Cod and prevent the escape of the four
chief American frigates from the harbor of Boston.4
Two of these slipped by him, but a challenge lured Law
rence in the Chesapeake to single combat, with the result

146 THE WAR OF 1812
of the encounter off Cape Ann, the defeat of the Chesa
peake, and the towing of the prize to Halifax. The
Constitution, which had been hanging about the en
trance to the Gulf of St. Lawrence off Sable Island in
August, 1813, was victorious in a terrific fight with the
British ship-of-war Guerriere southeast of this point
(41° N. L., 55° W. L.). About halfway between Ber
muda and Halifax (37° N. L., 65° W. L.) the American
sloop-of-war Wasp two months later fell in with the
Frolic, which was convoying a homeward bound fleet of
six British merchantmen of the Honduras trade. In
the conflict the Wasp was successful, but the victor and
its prize were immediately captured by the Poictiers
and taken to Bermuda.
The proximity of the British bases to the American
coast enabled 5 both regular ships and privateers to make
depredations on American commerce. Hence some of
our vessels were kept on the eastern coast to guard
against this threatening danger. The ship Enterprise,
of the United States, in the summer of 1813, captured
the Boxer from the Bay" of Fundy off Penguin Point
in Maine, then cruised south and took the British pri
vateer Mars off the coast of Florida. In the same
vicinity the Peacock from New York captured the Eper-
vier, and carried it into Savannah, the nearest American
port. Vessels from these southern ports also used to
lie in wait offshore for Jamaica convoys.
Further south, in the great tropical highway of the
trade-winds, from one side of the Atlantic to the other,
there were rich prizes to be secured in the British ships
bound for the Caribbean holdings, and also those turn-

THE WAR OF 1812 147
ing southward from Cape St. Roque to round the Horn
for the East Indies. Therefore some of the fiercest
engagements of the war took place along this path of
the Indiamen. The vessel United States took the
Macedonia a few miles west of the Canary Islands.
The Hornet captured the British ship Peacock off the
coast of British Guiana, and the Southampton captured
the American Vixen among the West Indies. Thirty
miles off the northeast coast of Brazil, where the sea-
road forked to the West and the East Indies, the Java,
bound for the Orient, made a valiant resistance to the
Constitution, but was captured and then burned, because
there was no American port sufficiently near where it
might be taken for repairs. The United States suffered
in this war because of its strictly continental position
and its consequent lack of naval bases away from its
own shores. Captain Porter in the Essex made a prize
of the British packet Nocton, just northeast of Cape
St. Roque. As English influence was dominant on
the whole South American coast, and the United States
had no depot in that region, Captain Porter turned
south and rounded the Horn to levy for supplies on the
English whalers in the South Pacific, who always went
well provided, and at the same time to protect American
whalers who were at the mercy of English cruisers.
Off the coast of Chile, among the Galapagos Islands
and as far west as the Marquesas group he cruised, cap
turing whalers and privateers, but finally off Valparaiso
he had an engagement with the British war-ship Phoebe
and was taken.
Depredations on British vessels in English waters

148 THE WAR OF 1812
constituted natural reprisals. There we find the Argus
making a daring cruise off the coast of England and
Ireland, capturing twenty merchantmen, until she her
self is captured by the British Pelican. Then her place
is taken by Wasp II., which captures the Reindeer and
puts into the friendly port of L'Orient on the coast of
Brittany. This was the only remote region where the
Americans had a friendly harbor into which they could
go for supplies or repairs, or to sell their prizes. Else
where prizes had to be manned by the conquering ship
or destroyed at sea.
Even after peace had been declared, war fingered
upon the sea along the trade-wind track of the India-
men. The Constitution captured two British vessels off
the southwestern coast of Portugal, and the Hornet
took the British Penguin off the coast of Brazil. Dur
ing the three years of the war, fourteen hundred Brit
ish vessels were taken, together with several thousand
seamen and rich cargoes. Though the Americans, too,
lost heavily, the spirit of maritime enterprise was kept
alive and the quality of American seamanship was
proven. The coastwise and foreign trade were greatly
reduced in the period of hostilities, but by 1819 the
reaction set in, and American vessels were doing
seventy-eight per cent, of the country's carrying-trade ;
and from 1820 to 1830 they reached their high-water
mark of ninety per cent.
/ After 1830, the center of population moved across
the Allegheny Mountains; the development of the
country became more continental, and attracted land
ward the activity of the people. The Erie Canal,

THE WAR OF 1812 149
whose necessity had been made apparent by the War of
1812, became a channel through which flowed a west
ward streaming tide of population, pushing the national
center of gravity farther from the coast. In the South
the slave power, searching for unexhausted lands which
would repay cultivation under an extensive system of
agriculture, was spreading over a larger interior area.
Hence the ascendency of the maritime coast declined
until the time when, the industrial conquest of a vast
country having been accomplished, there should come
an extra-continental development, seeking new markets
and foreign bases of commercial activity.
NOTES TO CHAPTER VIII
1. Ingersoll, Second War of the United States with England, vol. i.
pp. 48-65. 1845.
2. Morris, History of Colonization, vol. ii. p. 98. 1900.
3. Ingersoll, Second War of the United States with England, vol. i.
p. 198.
4. McMaster, History of the People of the United States, vol. iv. p. 91.
5. For distribution of British naval bases, see Mahan, Influence of Sea
Power in History, map, p. 532.

CHAPTEK IX
SPREAD OF POPULATION IN THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY AS
AFFECTED BY GEOGRAPHIC CONDITIONS
The westward expansion of the American people has
been marked by a slow advance from tidewater to " fall
line," and from " fall line " across the Alleghenies ; a
rapid progress downstream to the Mississippi and up
stream along its western tributaries to the margin of
the arid belt ; a leap across the Great Plains and the
Rockies to the Pacific, long accepted as the outer edge
of American dominion, till a faltering step was planted
on the Hawaiian Islands, and a bold stride took the
flag across the " world-ocean " to the Philippines.
For twenty-five years after the conclusion of the War
of 1812 there was a pronounced movement of popula
tion into the Mississippi valley. This was due to the
release of new forces after the cessation of hostilities ;
the final defeat of Tecumseh's warriors in the North
west as allies of the British and Jackson's successful
quietus upon the Creeks and Cherokees, who had long
checked the expansion of Georgia and Alabama ; the
acquisition of the Floridas by which the Gulf States
came into their own, geographically speaking ; finally
the forced opening up of western New York incident
to the military operations on its frontier and the con
sequent construction of the Erie Canal. The strategic

THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 151
necessity of an exclusively American waterway to Lake
Erie in the event of another war with Canada, because
of the serious difficulties and delays recently experienced
in forwarding supplies to the front, and the immediate
demand for better means of transportation through the
Mohawk thoroughfare for men going west and products
coming east, called for the union of the Hudson and
Lake Erie. Steam navigation on lake and river, well
established at this time, was developing the full useful
ness of the interior waterways, both as avenues of immi
gration and means of exportation, — men coming in
one season, the products of their fields going out the
next. Moreover, a strong tide of immigration from
Europe, set in motion by the subsidence of the Napo
leonic wars just at this time, found its way to the
unoccupied lands of the Mississippi valley.
All of these causes combined started a movement
towards the great central basin so strong that it went
far before its energy exhausted itself. This is the ex
planation of the fact that the period from 1810 to 1820
blocked out the work of expansion which the next two
decades were occupied in completing.1 As has been
shown before, the degree of life or movement in a
people is indicated by the advance of its frontier, the
truest index to which is found in the bulges of its outer
line of settlement. In American history the notice
able fact is that these bulges have almost always been
along the course of rivers. In the early eighteenth
century these protrusions followed the Mohawk and Po
tomac, and later extended over the adjacent watershed,
halting along the ultramontane river sources when these

152 THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
occupied fertile valleys, as in the case of the Youghio-
geny, Monongahela, and Holston, or passing over a
more rugged plateau area to the smiling plains of the
middle courses, as in the case of the Kentucky and
Cumberland settlements.
In 1820 the frontier protrusions took the form of
long fingers, which seemed to point the line of advance
along the waterways of the country. These fingers
were longer, more slender, more eager, so to speak, south
of the Ohio and west of the Mississippi, attesting their
origin in the population of the South Atlantic states, in
whom had long been bred the spirit of expansion. One
finger crooked around the western rim of Lake Erie to
Lake St. Clair, and ten years later touched the outlet of
Lake Huron. Up the Wabash and the Kaskaskia, up
the Mississippi, almost to the mouth of the Des Moines,
up the Missouri two thirds across the present_state_of
^that^name, up the Arkansas, the Washita, and the Red,
pointed these sign-posts of western migration, while cor
responding lines of settlement down the Pearl, Pasca-
goula, Tombigbee, Alabama, and Chattahoochee led the
way to the Gulf. Rivers present the lines of least
resistance to the incoming colonist, and afterwards lend
themselves to his economic needs.
Within this ragged frontier are numerous vacant
spots. These are often rough mountain regions, as in
the Adirondacks in New York, the Allegheny Plateau
in northwestern Pennsylvania, and the Cumberland
Plateau in West Virginia and East Tennessee. Two
decades later similar islands of unpeopled areas are
found in the Ozark Mountains of northern Arkansas

THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 153
and southern Missouri, where a rugged hill country
with poor soil repelled settlement. Vacant spots of this
class began to contract and eventually were filled up,
but their scars are still left in the sparsity and retarded
development of their populations even to-day. Other
vacant spots also were due to geographical causes, —
swamps, as in northwestern Ohio, western Indiana,
southern Georgia, and along the Gulf coast of the
southern states ; flood-plains in the lower course of
several Mississippi tributaries, like the St. Francis,
White, and Yazoo, which periodic overflows and con
tinual malaria made unfit for settlement until an accu
mulation of capital and men justified the construction
of levees. Here, too, the scars have lingered in the
form of a sparser population. Elsewhere areas of se
vere climate, small streams unfit for steam navigation,
and dense forests rendering the preparation of the
ground for agriculture more difficult, were long left
uninhabited. These causes checked the landward ad
vance of population in Maine, especially after the
decline of wooden ships ; and for the same reasons, fur
ther west, the incoming tide of settlement set towards
Michigan and Wisconsin only to forty-three degrees
north latitude, and then was deflected towards the
trans-Mississippi country with its fertile prairies and
navigable streams. Much of this northern forest re
gion is empty to-day except for an occasional winter
logging-camp or the hut of the summer sportsman.
The other vacant spots on the maps showing density
of population from 1820 to 1840 were due to the pre
sence of Indian tribes who held large tracts of fertile

154 THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
land right in the natural path of expansion of some of
the oldest settlements. Choctaws and Chickasaws pre
vented Tennessee settlement from extending to the
Mississippi River, and kept the population of Missis
sippi crowded down in the southwest corner of the terri
tory. Further east the Cherokees and Creeks blocked
Georgia's advance and crowded upon the flank of Ala
bama; though the latter state, placed between these
two great Indian areas, had developed more rapidly
during its short existence than its two neighbors,
Georgia and Mississippi, which enjoyed far greater geo
graphical advantages. Georgia's population, dammed
up against this Indian barrier, overflowed into the val
ley of the Chattahoochee and moved down its channel
into Florida. In northern Elinois, the Sac, Fox, and
Pottawatomie tribes delayed settlement in large areas
of fertile land which they held.
The decade from 1830 to 1840 saw the title to all
these Indian lands gradually extinguished by the federal
government and the tribes themselves removed to the
Indian Territory. Within two or three years thereafter,
the area thus relinquished was covered with a compara
tively dense population, and in the next decade was as
thickly settled as any parts of these states. Here there
were no scars because no adverse natural conditions.2
The elements of population moving into the North
west Territory, as likewise their distribution, were de
termined largely by its two great geographical lines of
approach. New England, New York, New Jersey, and
Pennsylvania furnished most of the early and later set
tlers ; these entered the country by the Ohio River and

THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 155
spread northward along its tributaries towards the water
shed, or followed the route of the Mohawk depression
into the northern part of Ohio, stretching a band of
settlement along the whole southern shore of Lake Erie
as early as 1820. But beyond, the northern parts of
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were cut off from the influx
of population coming from Lake Erie because -of the
swamps covering the uncertain watershed of the Mau-
mee, Wabash, and St. Joseph rivers. The southern
parts of these states received considerable accessions of
population from neighboring Kentucky and Tennessee.
Some of the southern immigrants with anti-slavery sym
pathies were attracted thither by the free-state clause in
the Ordinance of 1787 ; others by the chronic land-
hunger of the day.
The geographical position of Illinois was interesting
in 1818. With the exception of a group of fur-traders
at the lonely station on the Chicago River, all its popu
lation was concentrated in the extreme southern part,
where focused the Missouri, Mississippi, the Ohio, Cum
berland, and Tennessee rivers, and with them the influ
ence of the South and West. Here was a strategic area
for military and political purposes. In 1818 Illinois
applied for entrance as a state. The Ordinance of 1787
provided that the northern boundary of the north Ohio
states was to follow a line drawn through the southern
bend of Lake Michigan, thus excluding from Illinois the
post at Chicago which was to be the outlet of the already
projected Illinois and Michigan Canal. The withdrawal
of the western and southern states from the Union was
even then a possibility ever present to men's minds.

156 THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
Therefore it was decided to give Illinois a goodly shore
line on Lake Michigan in order to strengthen its northern
line of connection, which the Erie Canal was rehed
on to perfect, and thereby weaken its dependence upon
the South and West. Hence a politico-geographical
necessity traced the northern boundary of Illinois.3
The- opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 • exerted a
strong influence throughout the Lake region, and soon
afterwards other canals across the low watersheds south
ward to the Ohio opened up a hitherto inaccessible
country. Into this region, especially after the removal
of the Indians to the west, poured a stream of immi
grants from the eastern states and from Europe, espe
cially Germany. Between 1820 and 1840 the states
north of the Ohio and east of the Mississippi increased
as a whole over 360 per cent.4 The frontier of con
tinuous settlement outlined an almost wholly compact
area along the forty-third degree of latitude; while
isolated cabins and farms beaded the shore of Lake
Michigan and indicated the future line of expansion.
The New York, New England, and German elements
brought with them the staid, contracted ideals of the
old Atlantic seaboard and of Europe ; they tended to
settle on moderate and equal-sized farms on the uplands
between the streams, put solid improvements on their
land, reflecting their sedentary purpose, while only a slow,
compact protrusion of their frontier registered their
advance at the cost of the wilderness. The trans-Missis
sippi Westerners, on the other hand, with the half
nomadic instinct bred from many migrations, and in
herited from their Virginia and Carolina forbears, strung

THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 157
out their settlements along watercourses whence a fresh
movement was easy, put up temporary buildings which
could be abandoned without a pang,5 left the upland
region between unoccupied, and strode forward into the
up-river country with the glory of the sunset in their
faces and the yearning for the bigness of the prairies in
their hearts.
Expansion between the Ohio and the Gulf went on
rather more rapidly than in the Northwest Territory.
The small group of settlements between the Natchez
District and the Yazoo delta formed the nucleus of
the state of Mississippi, as those on the Tombigbee
did of Alabama. The purchase of Louisiana attracted
immigrants to this region, but they were forced to take
the long roundabout river journey by the Ohio or Ten
nessee and Mississippi. And such as came this way
were generally from North Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky,
and Tennessee. Accessions from the nearer source of
Georgia and South Carolina were excluded by the bar
rier of the hostile Creeks, until Jackson's victory in 1814
rendered travel across their country less dangerous, and
the natural highway around the southern end of the
Appalachians could come into use. Hence by 1820 the
Tombigbee settlements had grown and spread till they
coalesced with those on the bend of the Tennessee and
the expanding area of civilization in southern Missis
sippi. Kentucky and Tennessee at this time were cut off
from the Mississippi by a wedge of the Chickasaw tribe
which extended as far as the Ohio between the Missis
sippi and the Tennessee. But in 1820 the claim of the

158 THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
Indians was extinguished and immigrants poured into
the Chickasaw Purchase, and soon by the Obion, Forked
Deer, Hatchie, and Wolf rivers reached the long desired
lands on the Mississippi. The southern boundary of
Tennessee (35° N. L.) marked the limit of the Chickasaw
Purchase, so expansion was checked at this line till
1838, when all the southern tribes were removed to the
Indian Territory. Then from the already densely popu
lated Chickasaw Purchase, immigrants rushed into
northern Mississippi. The new lands thus opened were
peopled chiefly by their neighbors, Georgia, the Caro-
linas, and more particularly Tennessee, which has been
called the " mother of states," because she contributed
more to the new settlements in the Mississippi valley
than any other state in the Union. From her came an
important part of the population of northern Alabama,
Mississippi, and Florida, as also a large portion of the
early settlers of Missouri, Arkansas, and Texas.6 To all
of these states she holds a central position, and from her
borders radiate the rivers making them accessible.
It was in the trans-Mississippi country, however, and
especially in Missouri, that expansion was most active
from 1810 to 1840. To the unbounded West came all
those restless spirits in whom opportunities for migration
had aroused all the Wanderlust long dormant from the
opiate of a sedentary civilization, and to whom move
ment had become a habit of life. On they came, the
more vigorous and daring pushing on to the western
rim of the Mississippi valley to set their beaver-traps
on the head streams of the Pacific rivers ; the less daring
taking up " a bunch " of prairie land beyond the out-

THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 159
skirts of settlement on which to graze their cattle, and
erecting a temporary shelter to be occupied till a more
industrious and permanent race of agricultural settlers
began to press upon their rear. Then they moved on, —
hunting, trapping, rounding up their cattle, planting an
occasional field, but always more assimilated to the
wilderness beyond them than to the civilization behind.
The greater part of the population belonged to this
class. The West was peopled by a sort of staccato
movement. Immigrants built cabins and laid fences*;
but before the wood was seasoned or the fresh rails
darkened by exposure, the place was sold,7 and the wheel-
tracks of the canvas-covered wagon going to meet the
advancing afternoon shadows told the wide destination
of the migrant family. Thus the frontier zone broad
ened until it reached the margin of the arid belt ;
then a partial recoil set in.
Along the Mississippi boundary of Missouri was the
gathering of the waters ; hither turned the Ohio with its
vast tributaries, the Illinois, and the Missouri. The Mis
sissippi furnished communication with the Gulf below,
and with the Green Bay and Chicago portages above.
Missouri was accessible to American settlers from the
Lakes to the Gulf, and straight across its broad territory
ran the natural highway of its own mighty stream.
Every section of the United States, therefore, con
tributed to the population of this nascent state, though
some sections more than others.
The old trading intercourse between the early trans-
Allegheny commonwealths and the French settlements
on the west bank of the Mississippi made the Missouri

160 THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
country the natural destination of restless backwoods
men like Daniel Boone and his sons. The right of
property in slaves, guaranteed by the Purchase treaty to
the original French inhabitants of Louisiana, fixed Mis
souri's future as a slave state, and enabled it to receive
accessions of population from all the other slave states
which the Ohio could deposit at its doors. Its chief
sources of population were therefore Kentucky, Ten
nessee, Virginia, and North Carolina ; the states just
north of the Ohio, also, yielded emigrants who were
lured westward by the current of " La belle Riviere."8
Other settlers came from New England by way of the
Erie Canal, the Great Lakes, and the Illinois River ; and
in 1833 came some thirty thousand frugal and indus
trious Germans.9 As early as 1820 Flint had found in
the Girardeau district a substantial settlement of Ger
mans, some of whom had come directly from the Father
land, but the greater portion from Pennsylvania and
North Carolina.10 After the introduction of steam navi
gation, foreign emigrants began to land at New Orleans
and ascend the Mississippi by steamboat to this western
country,11 while they poured in by the thousands from
the northern waterway of the Lakes.
In the distribution of population in Missouri, the geo
graphic control of the rivers was the dominant factor
up to 1830. Settlements spread in a narrow belt up the
Mississippi and the Des Moines to the northern boundary
of the state ; in a broader zone up the Missouri, chiefly
on its northern or prairie side, to the western frontier
jdefined by the elbow of this great river ; and in a still
broader band along the small western affluents of the

THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 161
Mississippi, especially the Meramec, and the head streams
of the Whitewater and St. Francis, just above the
swamps in which these rivers lose themselves in the
southeastern part of the state. The hilly country of
the upper Whitewater and St. Francis extends eastward
as the Cape Girardeau country, early selected by the
French for settlement ; it is fertile, thickly timbered,
well watered, furnishing pure streams and mill-sites,
and for these reasons early attracted colonists while the
still richer alluvial bottoms remained untouched.12 Mill-
sites were a rarity in this level country. For a long
time maize was pounded in a mortar by hand. In
1825 steam-mills were introduced in St. Louis, but
elsewhere treadmills worked by oxen or horses did the
work,13 and lumber was costly because of the lack of
water-power sawmills.
At a time when only the rivers with their rich bot\
toms, flanking prairies, and natural highways, could
boast a population of from two to six to the square
mile, the ranger and the rancher, nevertheless, were
setting up cabins and fences in remoter parts of Mis
souri. Flint says that as early as 1818 there were
white settlers in the wilderness near the western state
line between the Arkansas River and Missouri, a hun
dred miles from any settlement. Thither they had
gone to secure a fresh range for their cattle, or merely
the " elbow-room " which was the first demand of the
backwoodsman. By 1840 population was distributed evenly but
sparsely over the whole state except in the rough hill
country of the south-central portion. A uniformly

162 THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
fertile soil resting on an underlying limestone rock,
abundant rainfall, temperate climate, a country too
level to present any obstacle to expansion, either on its
surface or in the current of its streams, diversified by
forest and prairie, the natural focus of the Illinois,
Wabash, Ohio, Tennessee, and Mississippi river routes, —
no wonder that Missouri increased in population. Here
grew the whole range of our northern agricultural
crops, and the labor, so difficult to secure in a new
country, was here supplied in part by slaves. The
staple crops were wheat and hemp ; the former was sent
down the Mississippi in large quantities as flour to New
| Orleans, and the latter, either as raw material or manu
factured into bagging and rope, was exported to Ken
tucky.14 St. Louis became the great emporium for the
commerce and manufacture of the upper Mississippi,
the depot of the western fur trade which the Missouri
River system brought to its doors, and the eastern termi
nus of the Santa Fe trade which was carried on via the
Missouri River to Independence, and thence by means of
caravan across the American desert. St. Louis, by its
command of the great inland water routes, early devel
oped the manufacture of steamboat supplies, steam
machinery, and finally by 1844 rivaled Pittsburg, Cin
cinnati, and Louisville in the construction of superior
steamboats.15 As Missouri filled up, and as settlements between
1830 and 1840 were spreading from northern Illinois
and from the southwestern nucleus of that state, the
natural expansion of these three areas of population
was creating the beginning of Iowa. No artificial

THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 163
state line or the demarking course of the Mississippi
ever really separated the settlements distinguished for
administrative purposes as Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa
Territory. In 1832 the government purchased from
the Indians nearly all the land within fifty miles of the
west bank of the Mississippi, from the Des Moines to
the mouth of the Wisconsin River on the north. The
beautiful, fertile prairie country was immediately taken
up by pioneers. Even in 1830 Illinois and Missouri
had overflowed into the little angle between the Des
Moines and Mississippi rivers ; but now settlement
spread rapidly north to Burlington and Salem, and by
1840 this southeast corner of Iowa was the most densely
populated portion of the territory. It merged into a
belt of similar density, which extended up the Illinois
River and over to the end of Lake Michigan, thereby
suggesting the avenue of approach.
At about the same time as the planting of Burling
ton (1833), Dubuque was founded nearly two hundred
miles farther up the Mississippi, and became a center
of distribution for the northern part of the newly pur
chased area. Its location coincided with the western
end of a band of denser settlement which defined a
broad belt of rich lead-mines extending along the
northern border of Illinois and over into southwestern
Wisconsin. These mines had been worked by Indians
and French traders from early times, but the rush
thither began in 1823, when they were described as the
richest mines in the world. The chief diggings were
at Galena and the vicinity in Illinois, and were pretty
well distributed over the present counties of Grant,

164 THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
Lafayette, and Iowa in Wisconsin, while rich mines
were found across the Mississippi about Dubuque.16
Hence the birth of this city followed closely on that of
Galena in 1826.
Population advanced rapidly up the drainage streams
of Iowa, covered the whole area of the Black Hawk
Purchase by 1836, and was encroaching on the Indians'
lands to the west, so that the government in 1837
extended the western boundary by a new purchase from
the Sacs and Foxes. A new and strong tide of immi
gration, begun in 1839, carried population far up the
Red Cedar and Des Moines rivers, and on the western
frontier up the Missouri beyond the present site of
Council Bluffs, while a vacant spot between the eastern
and western groups showed the geographic control of
the Iowa rivers in determining the location of settle
ments. As Iowa lay north of the Missouri Compromise line,
the movement thither was from free states. The route
of the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes brought immi-
grants from New York and New England, and foreign
elements from Germany, France, and Great Britain,"
who, with their small capital, could find no place in the
industrial system of the South. The Ohio also deliv
ered its contribution of settlers from the free states on
its northern bank.
The movement of population, at least after 1820,
was in general from free state to free, and from slave
state to slave. This was true in the Northwest Terri
tory and in Iowa, as we have seen. Missouri, occupying
an intermediate position between the two sections and

THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 165
convenient to the Ohio and the northern routes, drew
from both sections, but chiefly from the region south
of the Ohio. Arkansas and Louisiana by their geo
graphical location belonged to the slave power. They
recruited their population from the older and more
densely settled commonwealths of Kentucky and Ten
nessee, and from the wealthy planters of Mississippi,
Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia, who were seek
ing new, unexhausted lands for the employment of their
slaves. These, therefore, generally crowded into the
rich bottoms where cotton, sugar, and maize would
flourish. Emigration to Arkansas went on very slowly till
after the Indian Territory was erected as a separate dis
trict (1824), but from 1830 till 1835 the population
doubled itself. This was the period when Mississippi,
Alabama, and Georgia were feeling their expansion
blocked by the presence of the Indians in the exten
sive areas within their boundaries, and when the final
purchase and removal of 1838 had not yet brought
them relief. Louisiana, being an older state, had less
unclaimed land to offer the newcomer than her neighbor
to the north.
The population of Arkansas in 1820 was 10,000.
These were distributed in one narrow, detached line of
settlement along the Mississippi near the mouth of the
St. Francis, and in another fifty miles below the mouth
of the Arkansas ; in a broader line following the Arkan
sas upward from a point fifty-five miles above its con
fluence with the Mississippi, the area of cypress-swamp,
bayou-network, and ox-bow lakes which told the story

166 THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
of widespread and long-continued overflow.18 This first
point of safe habitation — leaving out of consideration
ague and fever — was occupied by the Post of Arkansas,
in early days the administrative center of the territory.
A line of continuous settlement extended from here to
about forty miles above the present site of Little Rock ;
but beyond that, far up the Arkansas, the " Mulberry
Settlement " in the hill country of the western frontier
told of the energy of the pioneer and his desire to get
out of the malarial bottoms. Two other detached set
tlements indicated the same need, one in the north
among the highlands of the White River, and another
in the southwest, known as Mount Prairie, on the table
land between the main Washita and its tributary, the
little Missouri.19
With the new accessions of population, these centers
expanded till at certain points they coalesced, but else
where were separated by vacant areas of mountain,
swamp, and flood land, while the fine of the Arkansas
valley rapidly carried settlement to the pleasant hill
country in the northwest, bordering on the Indian Ter
ritory. In 1835 rich planters were attracted to the
southwest corner of the territory where the deep mean
ders of the Red River furnished rich bottoms suited to
cotton and maize.20
The soil along all the great streams of Arkansas was
the richest alluvium and practically inexhaustible. The
extensive prairies and hill country also, by the decay of
their bedrocks, had an excellent soil, which eventually
was found to yield good crops of cotton, but in the
pioneer days of the state was taken up by the grazing

THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 167
element. A semi-tropical climate, abundant rainfall,
and accessibility to the Mississippi secured to Arkansas
both crops and a market.
Similar geographical conditions and similar results
obtained in Louisiana. Here too were swamp, alluvium,
prairie, and pine woods. " The people in the pine woods
raise cattle by the hundreds and thousands, — are poor,
satisfied, and healthy. In the bottoms are the sugar
and cotton plantations with wealth and sickness."
The prairie country west of Opelousas and the upper
Bayou Teche was devoted chiefly to cattle, partly to cot
ton and sugar plantations. The lowlands were mainly
swamps, so that we find the valley population distributed
in belts from two to three miles wide along the elevated
margins or broad nature-made dikes of the watercourses.
Here, as in the river peninsulas of old Virginia, the
planters were able to load their produce of sugar, mo
lasses, and cotton immediately on steamers at their own
wharves. This is Louisiana as Flint saw it in 1823.21
In 1836 a fresh tide of settlers, avoiding the swamp
regions of the coast, spread into the arable lands south
west of the Bayou Teche and along the head waters of
the small Gulf streams as far as the Sabine. This re
presented chiefly a natural expansion southward of the
Red River zone of settlement, and it was supplemented
by an advance of planters at this time into the fine cot
ton region of the upper Red, Washita, Black, and Ten
sas rivers, all in the northern part of the state.22 The
settled areas along the Mississippi and the Red now
merged into those of Arkansas, as shown in the census
map of 1840. The abrupt line defining the northwestern

168 THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
frontier of Louisiana settlement represents the political
separateness of the country beyond, but it conceals the
important fact that the expansion of the American
people, though not of the American government, had
gone far beyond the limits of the Sabine.
The subject of early trans-Mississippi expansion must
include that irregular advance of American citizens into
the domain of Mexico. We have seen that expansion
into Spanish Louisiana foreboded the political fate of
that vast territory, which, however, by the rapid shift-
ings of diplomacy and the clamorous demand of the
youthful West, reached its destiny without waiting for
the slow operation of the natural law of territorial ex
tension. Thirty years later in Mexico this law, rein
forced by other politico-geographical principles, worked
itself out to its inevitable conclusion, just as it has
done with slight local variations more recently in the
Hawaiian Islands.
The advance into the Texas province of Mexico was
a part of the general westward movement. It was stim
ulated by the restlessness, enterprise, and aggressive
spirit of the frontier ; and it was participated in largely
by the slaveholders of the southwestern states whose
legitimate political expansion was blocked by the Indian
Territory and the Missouri Compromise line, but it also
drew into its sweeping tide representatives from every
state in the Union and emigrants from across the sea.
To the landless, the wide grassy plains and fertile bot
toms of Texas were attraction enough. To the mer
chant or trader, Mexico with its belated industries and
rudimentary commerce would yield a fortune in a few

THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 169
expeditions. The uncertain claim of the United States
government to the trans-Sabine country before the final
understanding of 1819, the well-known weakness of the
far-away power in Madrid, the attraction of an ill-con
trolled border region of a foreign country to the rough,
lawless elements of our own frontier, probably all united
to swell the American population in Texas.
As we have shown before, a frontier is always a zone
of assimilation between the contiguous territories. It
will lean more to the one or the other side of the
political boundary line, according to the energy and
growth of the national life behind it. We have seen
how, just after the Louisiana Purchase, Spain, by the
energy she displayed in strengthening her hold on the
Texas country by settlement, fort, and garrison, secured
the Sabine instead of the Rio Grande as the eastern
frontier of Mexico. The United States had not at that
time accumulated a large enough population in the
southwest to constitute a natural pressure upon the
Mexican frontier. From that time, Spain, seeing the
unwisdom of her previous policy of hospitality to
American settlers, strove to keep the Texas district
uninhabited on the primitive principle of a waste
boundary as a barrier against the influx of her restless
neighbors. But the principle did not work. It is easier
to occupy a vacant land than an inhabited district. On
came the Americans, and the zone of assimilation grew
wider and wider, extending farther and farther on the
Mexican side of the Sabine.
The aggression of the Americans was shown by their
share in almost every revolution in Mexico between

170 THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
1812 and 1817. Officers of the United States army
helped to lead them, and the expeditions supporting
them were fitted out at Natchez on the Mississippi,
Natchitoches on the upper Red River, and Gaines Ferry
on the Sabine. When the treaty of 1819 renounced
the claim of the United States to the territory between
the Sabine and the Rio Grande, American interests in
Texas were already so strong that Henry Clay protested
against the agreement. Natchez, from whose doors the
Red River led to the Texas frontier, entered her pro
test against the treaty by sending out an expedition
under Dr. James Long to invade Texas. His small
force of seventy-five men swelled to three hundred by
the time he reached Nacogdoches, fifty miles west of
the Sabine. There he issued a Declaration of Independ
ence for Texas, but his enterprise failed of its pur
pose.23 In 1820 all Mexico revolted against Spain, and
in four years the United States of Mexico was estab
lished. At this time it included in its population about
three thousand Americans, settled mostly at Nacog
doches, the first town on the highway leading from
Natchitoches, and along the road southwest to San
Antonio. Mexico, anxious to increase her population, now met
the spirit of expansion in the American people by issuing
large grants of land in Texas. Stephen Austin, origi
nally from Connecticut but more recently from Mis
souri, secured an enormous tract extending from the
highroad between Nacogdoches and San Antonio to the
coast between Galveston and Matagorda bays, on which,
as empresario, he was to settle three hundred families.24

THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 171
Other contractors from the trans-Allegheny states,
Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio, or from New
York, Ireland, and Scotland, agreed to bring some two
thousand families, and received similar grants until
almost the entire state was parceled out. This was in
1825 ; by 1830 there were twenty thousand Americans
in Texas. They came by all the ports of the coast
and moved up the rivers ; or they followed the Ohio
and the Mississippi to the Red, which carried them up
to the head of steamboat navigation at Natchitoches,
or further still by smaller craft to Shreveport, some
what nearer the Texas frontier. The eastern border of
Texas about the Iyish Bayou was chiefly settled by
Americans,25 and beyond lay the rich boundless prairie
on which could be raised fine crops of sugar, cotton,
and corn. The genial, salubrious climate, too, had a
peculiar attraction for the ague-shaken dwellers of the
Mississippi lowlands.
Four roads, indicating the amount of intercourse
between Texas and the United States, crossed the fron
tier in 1826, — one from Liberty on the Trinidad to
Opelousas, Louisiana; another from Liberty, joined
at the Sabine by a branch road from Nacogdoches,
leading across to Alexandria on the Red River ; the old
highway direct from Nacogdoches to Natchitoches ; and
a fourth from the former town across the Red River at
Fulton to Little Rock, Arkansas.26
Mexico became alarmed and withdrew her favors,
canceled all except three land grants, forbade further
colonization and the importation of slaves ; and to check
the active trade between the two countries, closed all

172 THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
but one port on the American side and laid heavy
import duties on all the manufactured articles needed
by the agricultural population of Texas. In the mean
time the spirit of expansion was making itself manifest
in another way. The United States government was
becoming desirous of acquiring this last territory occu
pied by the American people, as it had followed them into
Louisiana and into West Florida. From 1827 to 1829
repeated offers were made by the government at Wash
ington to buy Texas. The reasons advanced were
politico-geographical ones. Mexico was too near to
New Orleans, the entrepot of the great American water
way. Much of the Red River and many tributaries of
the Arkansas lay in Mexican territory. When the
country should become thickly settled, community of
interest in the navigation of these streams would give
rise to disputes. Clay suggested the Brazos, or the
Colorado, or the Rio Grande with the western water
shed of the Red and Arkansas rivers as boundary ; and
when these offers were rejected, he warned Mexico of
the possibility of her losing Texas because of the large
American contingent there, and the consequent collisions
between the two elements of the population which might
draw the two republics into war.27
Finally the Texas uprising came and a new star
dawned for the American flag. The revolt of Mexico
against Spain, like the American Revolution, was the
repudiation of the central authority by a peripheral state
according to the politico-geographical law already stated.
Somewhat similar, though somewhat different, too, was
the declaration of independence by Texas. In the

THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 173
American colonies there had been little infusion of
foreign blood to modify the race : a pure-blood offspring
rebelled against parental authority. In Mexico, the
ethnic element of the Spanish conquerors had been
greatly weakened in its absorption into the large native
population. Hence racial differences had combined with
new and unfamiliar geographical conditions to differen
tiate the Mexican from the Spanish, and strengthen the
tendency towards disintegration. Texas, too, was a peri
pheral state, with all its natural tendencies towards
defection enhanced by the fact that the dominant race
here — dominant by reason of energy, intelligence,
wealth, and affiliations, though not by number — was of
an imported, alien stock, having no inherited sympathy
with the governing power.
The geographical location of Texas on the outskirts
of the Mexican territory, remote from the center of the
federal authority, with a savage frontier on the north,
and an alert, enticing neighbor on the east, put this
province much in the situation of the early trans-
Allegheny settlements in relation to their mother states
of Virginia and North Carolina, and generated the
same separatist tendencies with the same threat of
defection to a neighboring foreign power. It was diffi
cult to get a hearing before the general government.
" Texas is situated twelve hundred miles from the
capital of Mexico ; and owing to the distance, and state
of war in the country ever since we have known it as a
Republic, communication could be no other than tedious
and uncertain. ... All these . . . have been sufficient
to cause so much delay as to injure Texas materially

174 THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
without the possibility of remedy." This is an extract
from a circular issued in Texas in 1834, advocating
patience and loyalty to the Mexican government. Two
years before this Texas had sent in a petition for in
dependent statehood and separation from the more
densely populated province of Coahuila extending south
of the Rio Grande, on the ground that Indian problems
along her northern frontier threatened a calamity
" which nothing short of a well-regulated government
of a free, unshackled, and independent state can provide
against." " The wide extent of wilderness, forming a
natural boundary between Texas and Coahuila, places
an indispensable barrier in the way of Coahuila's
extending the efficient means of defense she might
wish." 28 Furthermore, differences of climate, soil, and
productions, partly also of population, made such a
separation desirable. This line of reasoning might
have emanated from any of the pioneer leaders of the
Watauga, Cumberland, or Kentucky settlements.
Remoteness in turn enabled the Texans to ignore
certain Mexican laws. A long reach weakened the arm
of the executive here as we shall find was also the case
in Mexican California. The inhibition of the slave-trade
was disregarded by the Americans in Texas, as was later
(1829) the decree of emancipation of all slaves ; and
the danger of revolt attending the enforcement of this
law was so apparent that a special decree made it inap-
plicative in this province. Even in the days of Spanish
supremacy in Mexico, the connection between Texas and
the center had been weak. Control of the province had
been administered after a fashion from the remote

THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 175
Chihuahua, five hundred miles even from San Antonio
iu whose vicinity was the only compact area of Spanish
settlement west of the Sabine and Red rivers. Subse
quently the vacant region between these border streams
and the Rio Grande was filled by a foreign population,
prone to fall apart from the Mexican center by the
weight of their own antagonisms, and furthermore
drawn in the opposite direction towards the United
States by every tie of race and interest. Here attraction
on the one side and repulsion on the other operated to
the same end.
When the revolt of Texas began, its affiliations with
the United States counted for something. Two com
panies of New Orleans volunteers, others from Mobile
and Kentucky, — some eight hundred in all, — took a
hand in establishing the young republic, while two
hundred deserters from the United States army were
found serving under the Texas standards; and Sam
Houston and Davy Crockett, men who embodied the
enterprise and recklessness of the backwoods frontier,
made picturesque figures in the Texas war of inde
pendence. How truly this was in the last analysis a war of un
authorized or individual American expansion, is indi
cated by the fact that, of the fifty-eight delegates who
declared the independence of Texas at New Washing
ton in March, 1836, only three were Mexicans, though
Americans constituted only about one fourth of the
total population. Their immediate application for an
nexation to the United States showed that in their own
consciousness they had never really expatriated them-

176 THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY
selves, but merely had stretched the farming, cattle-
tending, trading America out over Texas prairies, with
the expectation that the flag would do its smaller
part and follow. Therefore, when the admission of the
Lone Star State was agitated ten years later, the
American mind reverted to the old claim of the United
States to the Rio Grande boundary of Louisiana, and
argument ran high for the " reannexation of Texas."29
NOTES TO CHAPTER, IX
1. Eleventh Census of the United States Population, vol. i. p. xxii.
2. For general subject of vacant areas, see ibid. p. xxviii. Also, Treaties
of the United States with the Several Indian Tribes, 1778-1837,
pp. 391, 497, 633. Washington, 1837.
3. Ford, History of Illinois, pp. 22-24. Chicago, 1854.
4. Sparks, Expansion of the American People, p. 268.
5. Flint, The Last Ten Years in the Valley of the Mississippi, p. 48.
Boston, 1826.
6. Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, vol. ii. p. 286. 1846.
7. Flint, The Last Ten Years in the Valley of the Mississippi, p. 206.
1826.
8. Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, vol. ii. p. 553.
9. Ibid. p. 554.
10. Flint, The Last Ten Years in the Valley of the Mississippi, p. 233.
11. Brownell, History of Immigration ; see New Orleans in list of ports
between 1820 and 1840.
Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, vol. ii. p. 567.
12. Flint, The Last Ten Years in the Valley of the Mississippi, p. 232.
13. Ibid. p. 211.
14. Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, vol. ii. pp. 553, 554.
15. Ibid. p. 558.
16. J. M. Peck, A Guide for Emigrants in Illinois and Missouri,
pp. 132-134. Boston, 1831.
17. Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, vol. ii. p. 568.
18. Flint, The Last Ten Years in the Valley of the Mississippi, pp. 252-
254. 1826.
19. Ibid. pp. 265, 266.

THE MISSISSIPPI VALLEY 177
20. Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, vol. ii. p. 555.
21. Flint, The Last Ten Years in the Valley of the Mississippi, pp. 329-
349. 1826.
22. Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, vol. ii. pp. 517,
518.
23. McMaster, History of the People of the United States, vol. v.
pp. 4-7. 1900.
24. Ibid. p. 13.
25. Flint, History and Geography of the Mississippi Valley, vol. i.
p. 464. 1832.
26. McMaster, History of the People of the United States, vol. v. p. 12.
Map of the period, 1900.
27. Ibid. p. 461.
28. David B. Edward, History of Texas ; or the Emigrant's, Farmer's,
and Politician's Guide, pp. 231 and 207. Cincinnati, 1836.
29. Sparks, Expansion of the American People, p. 318.

CHAPTER X
GEOGRAPHIC CONTROL OP EXPANSION INTO THE FAR
WEST : THE SOUTHERN ROUTES
The westward moving frontier of the American people
is beyond all doubt the most interesting subject that
American history presents. Here is written the full
ness of American energy, its daring resourcefulness and
ambition ; here the rate of national growth registers
itself in more telling figures than mere statistics of pop
ulation ; here, with rifle, axe, and plough ; with canoe,
bullskin boat, and pack-horse, the man of backwoods
and plain shapes the national dream of empire into the
sturdy stuff of trading-post and ranch and farm.
A frontier is a zone, and the width and character of
that zone tells the whole story. A narrow, evenly
drawn frontier, like that of the American colonies in
1750 along the eastern foot of the Appalachian barrier,
points to the balance maintained between the half-
developed strength of the nascent people and the power
of British dominion reinforced by the geographical con
trol of the mountain wall. In 1800 the frontier has
lost its neat outline but has gained in interest. It sends
out great bulges and streamers running out from the
Appalachian ridges to Lake Ontario and to Erie, and
to the Wabash. Its width bespeaks a rapid rate of
expansion, while farther still, outlying groups of settle-

SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST 179
ment in the Natchez District or opposite the Missouri's
mouth, and lonely cabins beyond the Mississippi in
Spanish territory lead the advance and signal to the
rear to follow over the easy roads which river and
prairie afford.
In 1820 and 1830 the western frontier is more ragged
still and forms a fringe with wide intervals up the trans-
Mississippi rivers. The map of 1840 shows what seems
to be again the neat, narrow frontier zone of arrested
growth, a line approaching the ninety-fifth meridian and
the northward bend of the Missouri River. Though
continuous settlement did pause long at this limit, be
cause it was the outer margin of the arid belt and the
eastern boundary of the Indian Territory, nevertheless
even before this time, that unofficial America on Texas
soil was supreme as far as the Nueces River. Ameri
can trading-posts at the gates of the Rockies, missions
on the Columbia, and ranches on the Willamette had
stretched the United States frontier to the Pacific, while
individual enterprise was Americanizing the commerce
of New Mexico and influencing the politics of Alta
California. Never were the accumulated energies of
the American people so great, never was its frontier so
broad a zone. Over arid plain, snow-capped mountain,
and alkaline desert, it stretched from the Missouri to
the Pacific, wherever the smoke from the trapper's
camp-fire in the Rockies curled upward in the evening
air, wherever the trader hobbled his footsore beasts
at night in the scant meadows of the western trails,
wherever the immigrant staked out his land claim on
the banks of the Columbia or the Sacramento. The

180 SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST
breadth of this frontier explains the fact that, while
continuous settlement paused at the western boundary
of Missouri and Iowa in 1850, the United States had
made good its claim as far as Puget Sound, and the
American flag waved over the presidios of California.
To the first stage of this far western expansion
nature presented no serious obstacles, though she also
afforded no great assistance, such as that rendered by
the Ohio River and the Great Lakes in the trans-Alle
gheny advance. The even, gradual rise of the Great
Plains to the foot of the Rocky Mountains made the
ascent to an altitude of even five thousand feet almost
imperceptible. No forests obstructed progress, and the
character of the soil was such that the passage of a few
wagons marked out a well-beaten road. The rivers
draining this even slope flowed in parallel courses to
the Missouri and Mississippi. They pointed the direct
way to the West, and were closely followed by the
moving caravans for the sake of their water supply.
The cottonwoods growing on their islands or scantily
fringing their banks furnished fuel for camp-fires,
which otherwise had to be supplied by bois de vache,
the " buffalo chips " of the plains. The arid and treeless
regions of the world everywhere resort to similar fuel,
— the excrement of camels in the deserts of Arabia,
and on the rainless plateau of Tibet, cattle dung, with
which Kipling's hero, the boy Kim, also cooks his even
ing meal in the deforested valley of the Indus.
With the exception of the Missouri, the western
rivers afforded no waterways to the emigrant, for they
are navigable only in rare, short periods, and only for

SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST 181
canoes or very shallow flatboats. Rising in the Rockies
they flow directly east through an arid land, receiving
no tributaries to increase their volume, while their water
is evaporated in the dry air or sucked up by the porous
soil. In crossing the broad belts between these rivers
the early caravans would often travel a hundred miles
without meeting a single permanent watercourse. Hence
the trails preferably passed from one river to another
somewhere between the ninety-fifth and ninety-eighth
meridian on the eastern margin of the arid region, and
again by the lateral streams at the base, of the Rockies
where the beds were still full.
These rivers, owing to their usually scanty volume
and consequently weakened currents, possess only slight
erosive power ; hence they have deposited much detri
tus in the valleys previously cut in the friable soil of
the prairie. Over these sandy plains in time of flood
they spread a shallow sheet of water, often two miles
wide ; but when the flood passes, the river becomes a
series of shallow interbraided streams, obstructed by
sand-bars and islands. The topography of the coun
try gives a different character to the Missouri. From
48° to 39° north latitude this stream is a lesser Missis
sippi, occupying a central basin running north and
south, and intercepting all the western streams which
set out from the mountains on their way to join the
Father of Waters. Hence the Missouri is reinforced
constantly by new affluents. Moreover, it rises in the
extreme north of the Cordilleran plateau, where the
mountain system is narrower and in general lower than
it is further south, thus admitting the moisture drifted

182 SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST
in by the Pacific westerlies ; hence this river has better
supplied sources than the Platte and the Arkansas.
Nor is this all. The upper Missouri by its tributaries
spans the base of the Rockies from the sources of the
Milk River (49° N. L.) to the springs of the Big Horn
(43° N. L.), while its own main stream penetrates to
the western ranges of the system, thus levying a tribute
of water on a wide stretch of the highlands. Hence
the Missouri is navigable as far as Fort Benton at the
mouth of the Teton River, just below where the Great
Falls present an obstacle to further advance.
The sources of the Platte, the Arkansas, and the
Red stretch out along the eastern slopes of the Rockies
with a narrower span, but their lateral head streams
interlace with one another, as the North Fork of the
Platte does with the southern affluents of the Yellow
stone in the Big Horn and Powder River. Thus it is
possible to pass from one of these rivers to another by
lateral head streams over easy watersheds along the
whole eastern base of the Rocky Mountains. These
geographical lines determined the trails of the trappers
going north and south in the first half of the past cen
tury, and later the route of the railroads which now
traverse the base of these mountains.
The superior navigability of the Missouri and its
course straight from the great fur-fields of the North,
naturally drew the canoe of the trader and trapper up
its course first. The Lewis and Clark expedition in
1804 had no difficulty in finding Canadian guides and
voyageurs who knew the Missouri as far as the Mandan
villages at the great northern elbow of the river. On

SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST 183
the upstream voyage, the expedition met a trapper,
Valle, who had spent the winter nine hundred miles up
the Cheyenne River at the foot of the Black Moun
tains.1 It found also French traders among the Man-
dan villages, and several agents of the Northwest Fur
Company who had come from their station on the Assin
iboine River only a hundred and fifty miles to the
north.2 The course of the Canadian rivers, the Sas
katchewan and Assiniboine, are here parallel with that
of the upper Missouri, from which they are separated
by only a narrow, lake-dotted watershed; and both
systems lead to the springs of the Columbia. These
geographical conditions determined the clash of two
rival commercial interests on the Pacific coast. No
sooner did Lewis find the English trading on the Mis
souri than he began to speculate whether the Milk,
Maria, or some other of its northern affluents might not
give the Americans access to Canadian territory on
the upper Saskatchewan for trade with the Assiniboine
Indians, with whom the English were already doing a
lively business.3
The advance of the traders up the western streams
was rapid. In 1805 the Little Missouri was the remotest
point on the Missouri visited by white men ; but on his
return voyage in 1806, Lewis met two American traders
in camp on the White Earth River,4 and on the lower
Missouri he constantly passed strings of canoes on their
way to the Platte.5 Two years later, when Astor's party
set out for the mouth of the Columbia to establish their
trading-post on the Pacific, Missouri trappers had appro
priated all these western streams. They spent the

184 SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST
winter among the mountains setting their traps, hunt
ing, and trading with the Indians for buffalo robes ; and
in the spring took advantage of the annual rise in the
shallow rivers to float their cargoes of furs in canoes or
barges down to St. Louis. The flood was generally
sufficient to carry them to their destination, but not
always. Fremont in 1842 met some traders of the
American Fur Company who had started out from Fort
Laramie on such a voyage down the North Platte.
Their boats drew only nine inches of water, and floated
rapidly down the full tide for some sixty miles; but
then followed wide, shallow reaches, blind channels,
and sand-bars, while the river was falling rapidly. There
was nothing to be done but to leave their goods on
land with a guard, while the rest, with such packs as
they could carry, started out on foot for St. Louis.6
When the frontier military posts of the United States
were still confined to the western boundary of Missouri
and Arkansas, trading-stations, those vedettes of civili
zation, had been planted far up the head waters of all
the western rivers, or beyond the Rockies on the sources
of the Pacific streams. As early as 1808 the Missouri
Fur Company had a station in the mountains at the three
forks of the Missouri, but in 1809 they were dislodged
by the hostilities of the Blackfeet Indians, so they
crossed the Rockies and established a post on the head
waters of the Columbia.7 The Laramie Fork of the
North Platte was marked by two such stations, Fort
Platte at its mouth and Fort Laramie 8 a little farther
upstream. Vrain's Fort and Fort Lancaster, two
private posts on the South Fork of the Platte, at an

SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST 185
elevation of 5400 feet,9 gathered in the furs of the
Colorado Rockies, but had rivals just to the south in
Bent's Fort on the upper Arkansas, just above the
mouth of Purgatory River, and Barclay's Fort in the
Mora valley of the Canadian. All of these posts became
later great way stations in the westward movement. In
the wake of the trapper came the pack-horse or wagon-
train of the trader and the white-roofed caravan of the
settler. In the early days (1810) St. Louis was the last out-\
fitting point for the Indian trade of the West ; but as
steam navigation was introduced and then improved,
and as the commerce of the prairies increased, the out
fitting point traveled westward up the Missouri, first
to Franklin, opposite the present town of Boonville, a
hundred miles from the frontier ; then, in 1831, to the
new town of Independence, only twelve miles from the
Indian border and two or three miles south of the Mis
souri ; and, finally, when the steamboat landing forj
Independence caved in, just beyond to Westport and
Kansas City. These three places then shared the con-1
trol of the overland trade.10 The northward bend of^
the Missouri here made this elbow the natural ter
minus of the river route to the West. Here began the
prairie trail. The unfitness of the streams for naviga
tion forced the westward movement to resort to other
means of transportation. Pack-horses and wagon-trains
took the place of canoe and barge and steamboat, dusty
trail over wide grasslands and sandy waste the place of
gliding current twixt wooded banks. Independence
became a market for horses, mules, and oxen. Here the

186 SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST
Rocky Mountain trapper could get his simple equip
ment ; but it was the overland trade with the Mexican
town of Santa Fe which gave to Independence its bus
tling activity and made St. Louis the great commercial
city of the early West.
Just beyond the eastern rim of the Rockies in the
valley of the upper Rio Grande, and Opposite a natural
gateway in the mountain barrier, lay the old city of
Santa Fe, a territorial capital even in the early Spanish
days, and under Mexican rule a squalid adobe town
of some three thousand inhabitants. The business of
the place was considerable, for it supplied almost the
whole population of New Mexico, which was distributed
in villages and ranches along the valley of the Rio
Grande for a hundred miles to the north of Santa Fe and
a hundred and forty to the south.11 Its markets were
stocked under the Spanish regime with goods which
came up from Vera Cruz and other Gulf ports of
Mexico at enormous cost; but after Mexican inde
pendence was established, a less exclusive commercial
policy was adopted and the overland trade from the
United States began. Then every wagon-track and
mule-trail across the plains marked the passing of the
shuttle weaving northern Mexico and the American
Republic into one fabric. The aridity of the prairies
called a temporary halt to agricultural expansion, but
wider ranging commerce made Las Vegas and Santa Fe
American towns in their business quarters.
A few pioneers in the overland trade between 1805
and 1820 had found their way to Santa Fe by various
routes, — up the Platte and the Arkansas to their

SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST 187
sources, over the Colorado ranges, and into the valley
of the upper Rio Grande above Taos ; n but the estab
lished Santa Fe trade began in 1822, and after a few
experiments as to routes, settled down to what was
known as the Santa Fe Trail.
Geographical conditions determined Independence,
Westport, or Kansas City as the starting-point of the
overland commerce. The east and west course of the
Missouri between the frontier and the Mississippi made
this river the natural western extension of the Ohio
route, which brought goods from the manufacturing
centers of the country, and for which St. Louis was the
natural western depot and distributing-point. North of
New Orleans there was no emporium except St. Louis,
whose river and land connections with Santa Fe, more
over, were shorter and better than those of the Gulf
city. Arkansas, with its exclusively agricultural in
terests, developed no commercial center which might
have profited by the waterway of the lower Arkansas
River, tortuous though it was, and the direct western
line along the Canadian River to San Miguel and the
gates of Santa Fe. This route from the Arkansas
frontier was several days shorter than the northern trail,
was open earlier in the spring, with a supply of pastur
age for horses which lasted, too, later in the fall ; it was
better provided with timber along the tributary brooks
and less intersected by large streams.13 For these rea
sons it was sometimes taken by a belated caravan in
the winter-time in preference to the colder northern
route. But the preponderance of advantages was along
the line of the Ohio, the city of St. Louis, the Missouri,

188 SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST
and the upper Arkansas, which therefore determined
the route of the Santa Fe Trail. This road, eight hun
dred miles in length from the last outfitting-point at
the southern elbow of the Missouri, rising by such im
perceptible degrees for three fourths of this distance as
to seem quite level, guided straight across the thirsty
stretches of the Great Plains by the eastward-flowing
streams, bending then slightly southward to the gate in
the mountain wall which opened upon the old Spanish
city, made the simplest and most direct connection be
tween the emporium of the middle Mississippi and the_
distributing-center of the upper Rio Grande valley.
The sudden northward bend of the Arkansas between
the ninety-seventh and ninety-eighth meridians brings
the upper course of this river parallel with the Kansas
and almost directly west of Independence, making its
valley the natural supplement by land of the Ohio and
Missouri route to New Mexico. The Santa F^ Trail,
after crossing a well-watered country to the Arkansas,
followed the river westward as far as Bent's Fort
in the early days, turned southwest up Timpas Creek
and the Purgatory River into the Raton Hills, and
over this ridge to the interlocking head streams of the
Canadian and Pecos, which led to Las Vegas and San
Miguel.14 Fifty miles northwest across the mountains
lay Santa Fe in its hill-locked valley. To the west of
San Miguel the outer range of the Rockies is broken up
into detached plateaus and ridges, between which the
Apache Canon, a pass three miles long and wide enough
for only one wagon, carried the road over the water
shed. Thence with a slight dip it dropped to the

SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST 189
elevated valley of Santa Fe (7000 feet). It was at the
western end of this gap that the Mexican army, in
1846, took its stand to oppose the advance of General
Kearny, who had brought his forces from Fort Leaven
worth by this route.
For the first year or two of the Santa Fe trade,
transportation was confined to pack-horses, which could
make their way over the rough hill country at the foot
of the Rockies ; but when the commerce was developed
and wagons were resorted to, the travel left the Arkan
sas at Cimarron Crossing, just beyond the present Dodge
City, and struck southwest across the desert to the
Cimarron River, which by a decided northern bend here
approaches within fifty miles of the Arkansas. The
road led then southwestward up the half-dry Cimarron,
and struck the older trail at Las Vegas on the Mora,
the most northern affluent of the Canadian River. This
became the established line of the Santa Fe Trail. In
addition to the easier gradients of the plains, it had the
advantage of avoiding the long detour of the upper
Arkansas; but the effort of the pioneer caravan to
cross the desert to the Cimarron proved almost dis
astrous, and this stretch was always the scene of suffer
ing for man and beast.
Since the Trail ran along the banks of the western
rivers for a great part of the distance, and these, owing
to prevailing aridity, received only a few small tribu
taries, the drainage system of the country placed no
serious obstacles in this path of overland commerce.
It crossed the unbridged streams by fords in the dry
season, when teams had to be doubled to the wagons

190 SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST
and lashed across the quicksands to prevent their sink
ing; in spring freshets by buffalo boats and wagons
encased in skins to make them impervious to the water.
Out from Independence moved the scattered parties of
traders to rendezvous at Council Grove some hundred
and fifty miles away on the Neosho, and there to organ
ize their caravan under a captain. Apaches beset the
trail to murder and plunder, wolves to prey, and droves
of wild horses to stampede the live stock of the train.
The wagons were formed into a hollow square at night
as defense against the Indian or corral for the animals.
Every man had to take his turn at guard duty, accord
ing to " the common law of the prairies."
The outgoing caravans were to trade with the non-
industrial population of New Mexico ; hence their car
goes included every manufactured commodity from salt
to silk. The exchanges included specie, gold and silver
bullion, gold-dust from the placer mine near Santa Fe,
buffalo rugs, furs from western trappers, some wool of
poor quality, a few coarse Mexican blankets which could
find a market in the American frontier settlements, and
immense droves of mules and horses.15 Most of these
were products of a people lingering in the hunting and
pastoral stages of civilization. The value of the mer
chandise exported from the United States after 1826,
when wagons were regularly used for transportation, ,
averaged about $140,000 per annum, but it rose to
$250,000 in 1831 and 1839, and to $450,000 in 1843.
The goods were sold at a great advance, and the profits
were doubtless large, but the business was most hazard
ous. Moreover, it was in the hands of a large number

SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST 191
of small dealers, who invested their all in the cargoes of
their wagons. The number of men in these yearly car
avans was always large in proportion to the transac
tions, indicating that the human intercourse between
the United States and New Mexico was more significant
than the commercial.
Soon Americans settled in Santa Fe, monopolized its
trade, and then extended their commercial operations
over a still greater field. Stretching away for three
hundred and twenty miles directly southward, the valley
of the Rio Grande, like a deep groove between the
flanking ranges, opened a way to Mexico through the
water-gap of El Paso in the mountains. This had
been the line of early Spanish expansion northward into
New Mexico and the San Luis Valley of Colorado, and
became now the route along which American commerce
spread to the southward. The Rio Grande is not navi
gable in this upper course, but the great national high
way along its banks carried American traders with their
pack-horse trains to El Paso, whence they continued
two hundred miles south to Chihuahua, an important
administrative and commercial center of northern
Mexico. The trade with this place became particularly
active and profitable, so that between 1830 and 1840 it
absorbed nearly one half the imports of the Missouri

caravans.16

Thus American commercial expansion found a natu
ral opening to a market in the south. To the west there
was no such point of attraction for the merchant, but
for the trapper, the wild, rugged uplands of the Rocky
Mountains, their snow-fed streams, and untouched game

192 SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST
preserves formed an alluring field of operations. The
geographical location of Sante Fe made it a center from
which in a wide sweep he could follow his favorite occu
pation. Therefore in the next advance to the west the
trapper was again the pioneer. The trader keeps to
a beaten road between two points, but it is the nature
of the trapper to penetrate a whole river system, follow
ing its main course and the twig-like branches of its
head streams, in order to set his traps for beaver
or hunt deer in the isolated meadows of the upland
valleys. Santa Fe lies at an elevation of 7000 feet, on the
north and south course of the Rio Grande about half
way between two points where this river is closely
approached by two westward-flowing streams, the Gila
and the Colorado, which themselves unite at the south
eastern corner of Calif ornia. In other words, the Colo
rado system, by means of the Gila to the south, the
Grand River and Gunnison to the north, spans the
valley of the Rio Grande from southern New Mexico to
southern Colorado. In Santa Fe American energy had
a foothold within the rim of the Rockies for further
expansion. The well-beaten roads along the banks of
the Rio Grande led in either direction to the narrow
watersheds beyond which lay the rushing sources of the
west-bound rivers. Hence we shall see that Santa Fe,
in consequence of its geographical location, became the
center of the first sustained expansion to the Pacific ;
that the two main routes followed were determined by
the Gila and the upper Colorado ; and that consequently
southern California was the first portion of the Pacific

SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST 193
coast to experience any regular overland intercourse
with the United States.
From the Rio Grande in southwestern New Mexico
to the sources of the Gila River is only about fifty miles.
The watershed is formed by the Mimbres Mountains,
which rise only three or four thousand feet above the
Rio Grande, here flowing in a valley four thousand feet
above the level of the sea. At a very early date there
was an established trail over these mountains as far as
the Copper Mines, which were worked by Spanish or
New Mexican proprietors, or leased to Americans.
They lay twenty miles northwest of the upper Mimbres
River, about twenty miles east of the present town of
Silver City at an elevation of over six thousand feet,
and about thirty-five miles, or a two days' journey,
from an eastward bend of the Gila or " Helay." Pack-
mules bringing out the metal and carrying fuel into the
mountains for the primitive smelting works had worn
a distinct trace. This branched off from the main
thoroughfare of the Rio Grande valley at 33° 20' north
latitude near the present village of Palomas and led
southwest a four days' journey to the mines. It ran
through a beautiful grazing country, over streams
flowing down from the Mimbres Mountains, ascended
one of these narrow valleys, and crossed the range by
a pass so easy that the summit was left behind sev
eral miles before the fact was discovered ; then down
the dry bed of an arroyo to the Rio Mimbres and the
mines." Just beyond, the countless branches of the
Gila sources harbored beavers in considerable num
bers.

194 SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST
All this region became a natural field of activity for
the trappers from Santa Fe ; and the direct western
course of the Gila in no very long time guided them to
the border of California. This was the shortest route
across the continent from St. Louis. The marked south
eastward bend of the California coast from Cape Men
docino brings San Diego five degrees of longitude
farther east than San Francisco, and within twelve de
grees of old Fort Union in the Mora valley of the Can
adian River. After the cession of all this southwestern
country by Mexico in 1848, the first government sur
veys for a transcontinental railroad were made along
the valley of the Gila.
The first overland party to enter California was that
of Jedediah Smith in 1826, who took a more northern
route from an advance trading-post on Great Salt Lake,
southwest to San Diego. But his purpose was merely
to explore and therefore his venture may be regarded
as a sporadic effort, especially since it did not establish
regular communication, as did the early advance from
Santa Fe along the Gila route. The pioneers in this
movement were the Patties, father and son, in 1827.
The career of these men is typical. Natives of Ken
tucky, they became lumbermen in Missouri, in 1824
joined a trapping and trading expedition to New Mexico,
and by the next three years they brought in skins from
the Gila more than once. Then the elder Pattie organ
ized a party of thirty trappers at Santa Fe to operate
on the Colorado. Only eight of these reached the
mouth of the Gila. Thence they floated down the Colo
rado in canoe-rafts and reached Santa Catalina mission

SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST 195
in Lower California in January, 1828.18 Ewing Young,
a Tennessean, came with a party of beaver-hunters from
New Mexico in 1830 to exploit the streams of southern
California, and again the next year, trapping on the
Gila as he went. Jackson in 1831 left Santa Fe by
the southern route with nine hired men to buy mules
for the Louisiana country.19 Their route was traversed
by several parties in the next few years, for it was
always an open one ; and in spite of the desert and
Apache attacks it was comparatively safe for even small
bands of travelers. Some members of all these early
parties, after one or two trips, settled in California and
planted the first milestones, as it were, of American
expansion to the Pacific.
The Gila Trail formed the route of Kit Carson's
famous ride in 1846 from California, when he came
bearing dispatches from Commodore Stockton for the
authorities in Washington concerning the part of
the Americans in the Mexican War in California ;
and it was the line of General Kearny's march the same
year to take charge of the military operations on the
Pacific coast. The Trail was practicable for horses and
was well supplied with water, but further south the
Mimbres Mountains sink into the Sierra Madre Plateau,
which afforded a more arid though almost level route
to the West. Skirtingr this southern rim of the Gila
basin, it was possible to pass westward at an elevation
of three or four thousand feet, and then drop down to
the regular Gila Trail just above the great bend.
Therefore Kearny sent his wagon-train under Lieu
tenant Cooke to follow by this more level path which,

196 SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST
once being opened, was utilized by Californian emigrants
in subsequent years. Moreover, its value as an easy
passage for a national railroad to the Pacific became
apparent to W- H. Emory of the Mexican Boundary
Commission, and was later a strong motive in the pur
chase by the United States of the territory south of
the Gila.20
In the mean time, the restless activity of the trapper
had pushed northward from Santa Fe to Albiquiu and
along the valley of the little Chama River over the
divide and westward across the sources of the San Juan
to the Dolores and the Colorado ; or these same untir
ing explorers had moved up the high valley of the Rio
Grande and into the elevated basin (7500 to 8000 feet
elevation) known as the San Luis Valley, from the
northern end of which, by pass and stream-worn gorges,
they traversed all the wild upheaved area of the central
Rockies, and penetrated to all the upper tributaries of
the Colorado, — the Gunnison, Grand, and Green rivers.
The ranges and the passes were high, but so was the
base of the trappers' operations. Taos, the center of
trade and population on the upper Rio Grande, was
about sixty-five hundred feet above the sea. The
head streams of the Colorado system afforded fine
hunting-fields, especially near their sources ; for the
canon formation of the chief branches and the trunk
streams impeded the ubiquitous searching of the trap
pers. Hence in their progress to more western hunting-
grounds, these men of the woods passed along by the
minor watersheds and small transverse valleys of the
Colorado affluents, avoiding the main streams. When

SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST 197
they had reached the inner rim of the Great Basin, the
next obvious step was to the Pacific.
William Wolfskill of Kentucky, after trapping and
trading extensively for eight years about Santa Fe,
fitted out a party in 1830 to trap in California. He
set out from Taos by a northerly route, swung around
westward across the Grand and Green rivers and over
the Wahsatch Mountains to the Sevier River. This is
a stream of the Great Basin, flowing northward from
the divide which the Virgin River, an affluent of the
Colorado, drains to the south. Hence his path turned
southward up the Sevier, over the mountain rim of the
Basin, and southwest down the Virgin. The vast
canons of all these western rivers in their highland
course preclude navigation even when the volume of
water would permit it. Therefore Wolfskill turned
away from the Virgin before reaching the Colorado,
and struck out southwest across the wide Mohave Desert
and reached the Cajon Pass (4560 feet) in the San
Bernardino Range, through which he moved down to
Los Angeles.21
This route came to be known as the Spanish Trail.
It settled down to the more direct line up the Chama
River and down the Dolores valley to the Grand. This
it crossed near the present town of Moab, Utah, where
a post-road now leads over the river, and took advan
tage of a break in the canon formation of the Green to
pass that stream just where the railroad crosses it to
day.22 In time it was well defined, for along it moved
yearly caravans from Santa Fe to California led by
Americans or New Mexicans, bringing woolen fabrics

198 SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST
and zarapes to exchange for the mules and horses of
California or the silks and other choice imports of
China.23 It was the route followed by Fremont on his
return from California in 1844. The Mohave section,
like all desert trails, zigzagged across the arid waste
from one watering-place to another. These were
springs, water-holes, or little wells, dug narrow and deep
in the dry bed of the Mohave River by wolves, whose
keen scent told them of the underground water sup
ply.24 Sometimes there were stretches of forty or sixty
miles without water. It was impossible to miss the
Trail here, because it was traced with bones. After a
twelve or fifteen hours march without relief, the animals,
exhausted by the scorching heat and parched with
thirst, would stagger along with drooping head and
tail, when suddenly the wild mules which generally
accompanied the caravans as return products or reserve
pack-animals, would toss their heads with an alert move
ment, sniff the air, and then start off at a full gallop
down the dusty pathway. This brought joy to the men
of the Trail, because they knew there was a surface
supply of water a mile or two ahead.
Such were the two routes, geographically determined,
from New Mexico to California. Both had their natural
termini in San Diego and Los Angeles. The men
who came to this country to trap continued their oper
ations along the river feeders of Tulare Lake and the
mountain tributaries of the San Joaquin, and lived the
nomadic lives of hunters. Though a steady intercourse
was kept up by the annual visits of the Santa Fe
traders, these southern routes never became avenues of

SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST 199
heavy immigration. The trapper and the trader are
not domestic animals ; they bring no families with them
except mongrel offspring of Indian wives. Mountain
and desert acted as a barrier, and the overland infiltra
tion of American elements into California in early days
went on very slowly. Only thirty hunters were added
to its population between 1831 and 1835, the residuum
of the Santa Fe parties and of two other expeditions
which came directly across the Sierra Nevada to the
Pacific.25 More Americans came by sea. The New
England trading-vessels, which yearly visited this coast
in goodly numbers, added more to the American colony,
for they were constantly leaving here invalided sailors,
deserters, and occasionally a commercial agent. So an
American population in California was slowly being
recruited, exclusively men who in general married Cali
fornian women. The steady influx which later planted
a bit of the United States on California soil was inti
mately connected with the peopling of the contiguous
territory of Oregon, where the United States frontier
met that of California. NOTES TO CHAPTER X
1. Elliott Coues, History of Lewis and Clark Expedition, vol. i. p. 150.
1893.
2. Ibid. pp. 178, 203.
3. Ibid. p. 273.
4. Ibid. vol. ii. p. 1116.
5. Ibid. vol. ii. p. 1206.
6. Fremont's Narrative, p. 17, Washington, 1845, and Parkman, Ore
gon Trail, pp. 87, 88. 1901.
7. Irving, Astoria, pp. 134, 178. 1854.
8. Parkman, Oregon Trail, chap. ix.

200 SOUTHERN ROUTES TO THE FAR WEST
9. Fremont's Narrative, pp. 35-95. 1845.
H. M. Chittenden, The American Fur Trade of the Far West, vol.
iii. pp. 947-970, and map. New York, 1902.
10. Josiah Gregg, The Commerce of the Prairies, vol. i. pp. 32, 33.
1845. Inman, the Old Santa Fe" Trail, pp. 142-145. 1897.
11. Gregg, The Commerce of the Prairies, vol. i. pp. Ill and 145. 1845.
12. Ibid. vol. i. pp. 18-21.
E. Coues, Pike Expedition, vol. ii. pp. 490-493. 1895.
13. Gregg, The Commerce of the Prairies, vol. ii. p. 155.
14. Ibid. vol. i. pp. 108, 109.
15. Ibid. vol. i. p. 307.
16. Ibid. vol. ii. pp. 161-164.
17. W. H. Emory, Notes of a Military Reconnoissance from Fort
Leavenworth in Missouri to San Diego in California. Made in
1846-47. Map and pp. 55-59. Ex. Doc. no. 41. Washington,
1848.Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie of Kentucky, p. 52. Cincin
nati, 1831.
18. Ibid. pp. 51-57, 133-137.
Bancroft, History of California, vol. iii. pp. 162, 163. 1884.
19. Ibid. pp. 174, 387.
20. W. H. Emory, Report of the United States and Mexico Boundary
Commission, vol. i. p. 93, 1857.
Bancroft, Arizona and New Mexico, pp. 477, 478. 1889.
Lieutenant-Colonel Cooke, Report of March from Sante Fe", New
Mexico, to San Diego, California, pp. 553-557. Ex. Doc. no. 41.
Washington, 1848.
21. Bancroft, History of California, vol. iii. p. 386.
22. Senate Report of Explorations and Surveys for a Railroad Route
from the Mississippi River to the Pacific, vol. xi. part ii. Map 4,
by Captain E. G. Beckwith. Washington, 1861.
Lieutenant Abert, Examination of New Mexico, 1846-47. Ex. Doc.
no. 41. Washington, 1848.
23. Bancroft, History of California, vol. iii. p. 395.
24. Fremont's Narrative, p. 245. 1845.
25. Bancroft, History of California, vol. iii. p. 373.

CHAPTER XI
EXPANSION INTO THE FAR WEST BY THE NORTHERN
TRAILS
At the time the American trappers and traders found
their way to the Pacific, California was a foreign pos
session. This fact, reinforced by the length and diffi
culty of the journey thither, sufficed to discourage the
immigration of families, especially after the rebellion of
Texas under American leadership had rendered citizens
of the United States undesirable tenants of Mexican
soil. Texas, to be sure, had been Mexican domain, but
it was close to Louisiana and the Mississippi River.
Oregon was remote as California, and like it was barred
by two thousand miles of plains, mountains, and desert ;
but it was claimed on solid grounds by the United
States. Hence in this direction Americans turned when
the uneasy spirit of migration began to stir along the
Missouri and Mississippi frontier.
The mouth of the Columbia had been discovered by
a New England vessel in 1792 ; it had been reached by
the overland exploring expedition of Lewis and Clark in
1805, and occupied temporarily as a trading-point by the
fort of the Astor party in 1811. The line of the Mis
souri and Columbia first opened the way to the Oregon
country; immigration set vigorously into this trans-
Rocky America, and from the southward-pointing valley

202 NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST
of the Willamette spread over into the vast trough of
northern California. Thus California was entered freely
at its northern and southern extremities by natural ave
nues, while on the east the double barrier of the snow
capped Sierras and the vast expanse of the Nevada
Desert long excluded immigration.
From the point where the Colorado, after a long
canon-bound course, pours its thin, desert-worn current
into the Gulf of California, northward to Vancouver
Island there is only one river which traverses the whole
width of the trans-Rocky region and breaks through
the double mountain wall to the sea. This is the Co
lumbia, claimed by the United States and counterclaimed
by the British ; for both it was the key to western ex
pansion on the Pacific. Its three long arms penetrate
to the heart and even to the eastern rim of the Cordil
leras ; they stretch a mighty span from the head waters
of the Athabasca in the north to the sources of the
Platte and the Colorado in the south, touching fingers
along the Great Divide with the divergent affluents of
the Missouri. These Columbia streams, with their slen
der supply of water and turbulent current, would rarely
hear the dip of paddle or ripple of canoe-prow upon
their canon-shadowed surface ; but they guided the trail
down those rocky slopes from where the mountains
doffed their caps of snow and flung wide their giant
portals to the march of an invading people.
The Columbia was first approached from the east
through the Missouri, where it takes its rise in the
western ranges of the Rockies. The Lewis and Clark
expedition therefore followed this river to its forks in

NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST 203
the heart of the mountains, continued up the Jefferson,
its most westward branch, to the outermost range,
whence the Lemhi Pass and an Indian trail led down to
the Lemhi branch of the Salmon River.1 Hopeless of
traversing the wide desert by the mad, rock-bound
waters of the Salmon, the party turned northward over
the range and up the Clark River, which flows between
the parallel ranges of the Rockies. Its lateral affluents,
corrading transverse valleys, served as intermediary
paths over the mountains between the upper Missouri
and the central tributaries of the Columbia, just as
farther south the Green River branch of the Colorado
by its side valleys opened a way over two watersheds
for the Oregon Trail from the Sweetwater branch of
the North Platte to the Port Neuf and the Snake River
at Fort Hall. Such was the part played by the New
and the Holston in the early trails across the Alle
ghenies ; and earlier still, such was the anthropo-
geographical importance in the Alps of the torrent-
scoured gorges branching off from the valleys of the
Upper Rhine, Rhone, and Inn in the lines of communi
cation between Italy and the northern plains of Switzer
land.2 The return route of Captain Clark led directly east
from the great elbow of the Columbia up the Snake and
Clearwater River, over the Bitter Root range by the
Lolo Pass, and by the Lou Lou Fork and Blackfoot
valley of the Clark River to the Lewis and Clark Pass,
down to the little Dearborn River of the Missouri. A
well-beaten road marked the whole trail, for it was the
path of the western Indians coming to hunt buffalo on

204 NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST
the plains.3 This was the shortest route across the
mountains, because the Rockies contract as they near
Canada ; this route had the longest river approach on
a navigable stream, the best mountain pass, the nar
rowest stretch of desert on the west, and the most direct
approach to the great bend of the Columbia, where
regular canoe nayigation began; but it involved too
great a detour to the north.' It was too far from St.
Louis and that bustling center of emigrant preparation
at the elbow of the Missouri. Hence we find that
the Astor expedition, which set out in 1810 to estab
lish an American trading-station at the mouth of the
Columbia, went up the Missouri only to the Grand
near the Aricara villages, and then made a short cut
by striking out southwest across the plains to the Big
Horn branch of the Yellowstone ; thence it continued
up the Wind River to the great central dome (9000 ft.)
of the Rockies, defined by the Teton, Gros Ventre,
and Shoshone ranges. This it crossed by a single pass,
analogous to the St. Gotthard in the Alps system, to a
head stream of the Snake River.
A returning party of Astoria traders a year or two
later struck southeast from the upper Snake, and reach
ing the Green River basin, took advantage of the gen
eral dip in this section of the Rockies to reach the
Sweetwater, the North Platte, and finally St. Louis.4
This was in its main features the route followed later
by the Oregon Trail when expansion to the Pacific
began in earnest. The Astoria venture was short-lived
because it had to contend with an overland line of
communication hopelessly long and difficult, without

NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST 205
any base between the Mississippi and the Pacific ; with
interruptions to its sea communications caused by the
War of 1812 ; and with territorial encroachments of
the British in the aggressive expansion of the Hudson
Bay Company into the valley of the Columbia.
The claim of the British to the Columbia was
geographically based. The east and west line of the
Saskatchewan River had at a very early date carried
English explorers in Canada to the northern arm of
the Columbia among the Selkirk Rockies. Discovery of
the mouth of the river, by an international principle
which the English themselves had established, gave this
great stream to the United States ; but its northern
source was in the hands of the British. We have seen
how easy and natural is downstream expansion. The
great trading company had a near base in their fur
stations on the upper waters of the Canadian rivers.
Wealth, organization, a long-established service, and
strong political backing gave them an effectiveness
which Astor's American Fur Company lacked. Aided
by the happy accident of war, they were able to extin
guish by the seizure of Astoria the last spark of life
in the American Fur Company on the Columbia. Then
they proceeded to take systematic possession of the
whole Columbia basin after the manner of the fur-
trader which the French in Canada had found effective
for a time.
By 1834 every strategic point at bend or fork of
stream, and every center of the great fur-hunting fields
in the Rockies was marked by a fortified post. Fort
George, on the site of the old Astoria, maintained

206 NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST
communications with the sea. Fort- Vancouver, the
chief administrative post, six miles above the mouth of
the Willamette River, exploited the rich farm-lands of
that valley to supply the upstream line of forts with
bread. Where the wide diverging arms of the Columbia
met at the great bend, Fort Walla Walla held a position
as vital for the control of this sole western waterway as
old Fort Duquesne for the command of the Ohio. It
felt the pulse of the wild trapping life from Fort Hall
on the upper Snake, drawing in its beaver from the
slopes of the Wahsatch Mountains, to Fort Colville,
far up the Columbia at the foot of the Selkirk
Rockies.5 As we have seen before, a primeval wilderness, widely
separated trading-posts, a sparse population of nomadic
trappers half assimilated to the savage life about them,
and above all a monopoly, belong to the nature of the
fur trade. The influence of the Hudson Bay Company
was sufficient to keep out the English traders and set
tlers from this great game preserve, and they could
undersell the American traders;6 but they could not
exclude American settlers under the agreement of joint
occupation made with the United States in 1818. The
experience of the French had proved how weak a land
tenure was that of the trading-post when contesting
claims with a sedentary agricultural population. At
first it was only a few American trappers who sifted
through the mountain breaches into the Oregon coun
try ; but soon a line of dust hovering in the air marked
from afar the Oregon Trail. Into the wide gaps be
tween the stations and forts poured an inundating tide

NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST 207
of American immigrants, sweeping away the beaver and
the game, setting up the claim of plough and saw-mill
against the weaker title of the trap.
The Hudson Bay Company, through the natural
avenues of the Salmon and Snake rivers, made its power
felt as far as Great Salt Lake, the Bear River, and the
Green River basin ; but here it came into conflict with
American trappers who entered this famous fur-field
from every direction, from the upper Rio Grande, Ar
kansas, North Platte and Sweetwater, and the Wind
River branch of the Big Horn. Rivalry was fierce.
The American and the Rocky Mountain Fur Company
had their traders' rendezvous sometimes on the Wind
River, more often on the Green, and sometimes even at
Pierre's Hole,7 a valley just west of the Teton Range
and draining into the Henry branch of the Snake ; but
occasionally American traders pushed into the British
rendezvous at Ogden's Hole on Bear River within the
Great Basin. All this area of interlocking streams
was the battle-ground of rival commercial interests;
but though the American got a slight foothold on the
westward-flowing streams, encroachment was limited in
general to the sources. The Americans had an ad
vantage to the southwest. Ashley of the Rocky Moun
tain Fur Company made his first rendezvous on the
Green River in 1824, entering its valley by the famous
South Pass ; and the next year founded Fort Ashley
on Utah Lake, where he left a hundred men to exploit
the peltries of this rich country.8
Between 1826 and 1829 there were about six hun
dred American trappers in the region of the Teton

208 NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST
Mountains and Green River, also a great number of the
Hudson Bay Company men.9 The wild sons of the
trail explored every upland valley and pass, and opened
the mountain paths for others, but there is little evi
dence that they contributed to the settled population of
Oregon until after the dissolution of the American Fur
Company in 1840. Furthermore, it was comparatively
late before a regular westward movement of popula
tion set towards Oregon.
The first immigration into that country was the result
of individual enterprise originating on the Atlantic sea
board, and having nothing in common with a national
expansion of the frontier. It was recruited from a
population which had left its pioneer days far behind
and therefore had unlearned the useful lessons of the
wilderness ; or it drew upon Canada's ready-made stock
of traders and trappers. It came in no small part
by sea and relied upon maritime connection with the
East for supplies, support, and growth. Such was the
Astoria party, recruited almost entirely both as to part
ners, factors, and engages from the Scotchmen and
French Canadians of Montreal and Mackinac. Such
was the Massachusetts expedition under Wyeth, which
came overland in 1832 to establish a trading-post at the
mouth of the Columbia. The journey of over a thou
sand miles from St. Louis to the Snake River in the
company of the veteran Sublette and his Rocky Moun
tain trappers educated the inexperienced but purposeful
Wyeth to the most important pioneer requirements.
Some of his fantastic equipments, elaborately devised in
the scholarly environment of Cambridge, were laughed

NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST 209
out of service by the practical men of the plains at the
Missouri rendezvous ; the rest were exhausted or lost, or
discarded when the strength of himself or his pack-
animals began to fail, so that his diminished party
reached the Columbia almost empty-handed. The ves
sel which was to bring merchandise around the Horn
for his post never arrived ; and though a return to the
East and reinforcements of his supplies justified him in
building his stations on Wapato Island in the lower
Columbia and at Fort Hall on the Snake, the Hudson
Bay Company was too strongly entrenched in all the
Oregon country to suffer this invasion of its trading-
grounds.10 While the men who knew the ground, the American
trappers and traders, were still hanging on the moun
tain outskirts of the Oregon country, religious enthusi
asts in the eastern states were fitting out missionary
parties for the uplifting of the western Indian, their
zeal being as usual in direct proportion to their igno
rance. Such was the beginning in 1834 of the Metho
dist mission in the valley of the Willamette and the
Presbyterian stations on the Walla Walla and the Clear
water branch of the Snake River in 1836. The pioneers
came overland by the North Platte and the Snake River.
The inland location of the Presbyterian missions, the
poverty of the country about, and the dangerous charac
ter of the Indians, though at the river terminus of the
desert trail, prevented their attracting reinforcements
and growing to a settlement. The Willamette mission,
accessible to the mouth of the Columbia, drew from
Boston and the East by sea the supplies and people

210 NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST
which the wide expanse of plain and mountain and
desert at that period debarred.11
Jason Lee, finding the Indians of the Willamette
impossible and the country highly possible, was con
verted from missionary to colonizer. His lectures in
the United States advocating the settlement and formal
appropriation of this western possession before the
clutch of the British should be tightened upon it,
writings in similar strain of other pioneers who had tried
to get a foothold in the Columbia trade, and the discus
sion of the " Oregon Question " in Congress, served to
advertise the trans-Rocky country. Lee, on a return
trip to the United States, met his first audience and the
first response to his eloquence in the frontier states.
In the spring of 1839 two small parties moved out from
Illinois on the route to the Columbia,12 the forerunners
of a new westward movement. Here was a genuine
expansion from our western frontier, inaugurating the
second phase of Oregon immigration.
Up to this time the settlements in Oregon were an
anachronism, — our farthest West with the stamp of
our farthest East ; social, political, and economic ideals
of New England storekeeper, mill-owner, preacher, and
school-teacher in the vast Cascade forests and the wil
derness valleys of the Willamette and Columbia. But
the eastern settlers were too few and the Atlantic
seaboard too remote for this to last. As the irregular
explorations of the West reduced the Oregon Trail
to its easiest and final route, the Missouri frontier was
brought nearer. By 1840 the rapid occupation of the
early western states, the lack of other outlets than

NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST 211
the Mississippi and New Orleans, and the consequent
gorging of that market without relief for the plethora,
caused a disastrous drop in the prices of western agri
cultural products. One Missouri farmer sold a boat-load
of bacon and lard for a hundred dollars. The Missis
sippi steamboats at times found in bacon a hot and
cheap fuel. So much for living in a country without a
seacoast. And the western farmer, with the migratory
instinct in his blood, set out without regret to the fertile
plains of the Oregon country, whence the wide Pacific
highway led to Asiatic markets.
From that time the dust of travel thickened on the
Oregon Trail. From Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa, from
Kentucky, Tennessee, and Illinois 13 the pioneers gathered
at the rendezvous at Independence, Liberty, St. Joseph,
and Council Bluffs, with their heavy moving-wagons and
their lowing herds. The Trail, 2400 miles long, led up
the Platte and its North Fork to Fort Laramie, around
the Black Mountains by the Sweetwater to South Pass
(7490 ft. elevation), over this dip to the Green River, up
the transverse valley of the Black River, by Muddy Creek
to a pass over the divide rimming the Bear River valley
on the east. This was the highest point of the whole
long trail, 8230 feet elevation.14 The road dropped
down the Bear River to the most northern point of its
course and then crossed over an insignificant watershed
to Port Neuf River and Fort Hall on the Snake. Thus
far the way was easy. To South Pass the ascent was so
gradual that it was difficult to determine when the sum
mit was reached, and the grassy road to the higher pass
over the Bear River divide was only " at times steeper

212 NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST
than the national road in the Alleghanies." 15 The
pass itself was a good one, and the fertile meadows of
the Bear River valley were a natural recruiting-ground
for the travel-worn caravans.
Fort Hall was 1200 miles from Independence and only
a little over halfway to the mouth of the Columbia.
But the last part of the road was the hardest. For three
hundred miles across the desert without a fertile spot or
any pasturage, the trail followed the Snake River, whose
canon walls for days together barred the thirsting herds
from its rushing waters. From Salmon Falls the road,
avoiding a wide bend of the river, cut across the plains
to Fort Boise, an intermediate station of the Hudson
Bay Company, whence it continued northward down the
Snake again to Burnt River. Now only the thickly
wooded range of the Blue Mountains lay between the
emigrant and the Columbia. The road turned off up
the Burnt River Canon, over a dividing ridge to the
upper Powder River, whose transverse valley pointed
the line of easiest ascent up the steep slope. The range
once surmounted by double teams, the Umatilla opened
an easy path down to the Walla Walla and the great
bend of the Columbia.16
Four months of continuous traveling, over two thou
sand miles of weary plodding over plain, mountain,
desert, and mountain again, with two hundred and
fifty miles of dangerous navigation on the rapid-swept
Columbia ; days and weeks of scanty food and scantier
drink, of midday heat and midnight cold in the plateau
desert, — these were the tests which geographical con
ditions set to the survival of the fittest on the Oregon

NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST 213
Trail. Faint-hearted members of the caravans turned
hack at Fort Laramie, Green River, or even Fort Hall.
In the earlier days wagons were exchanged for pack-
horses at Fort Laramie ; but as the road became better
known, the lumbering vehicles were carried farther, —
to Fort Hall and finally to the Columbia. Property
was abandoned all along the route as pack or draught
animals dropped from exhaustion or were used for food.17
Even the Columbia did not bring relief. The lean and
sore-footed herds, the hope of future ranches and the
leather trade with China over the wide highway of
the Pacific, might reach its banks, but they could not be
transported in the frail canoes and bateaux which shot
its rapids. The only alternative was to sell them at a
sacrifice to the British at Fort Walla Walla, or to start
out on another weary journey over the wall of the Cas
cade Mountains along a dangerous trail beset by thiev
ing Indians who carried off prizes from every herd.
But in spite of all these obstacles, on they came by
the hundred and the thousand, a sturdy western stock,
large in the patience and hospitality born of their expe
rience, broad in their democracy, insistent upon their
rights, aggressive and even blustering in their Ameri
canism. They settled in the valleys of the Willamette
and its tributaries, on the Nehalem River flowing into
the Pacific, the plains about Astoria, and in spite of
British protests staked their claims about the head
of Puget Sound.18 Along the Willamette they found
a mixed population. In the ascendency were the origi
nal mission settlers from New York and New England,
who in 1843 had been reinforced by small parties from

214 NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST
Massachusetts and Maine, coming by sea and well pro
vided with worldly goods. These had come to set up
stores, build mills, and speculate in land.19 Living among
the men from the East but holding themselves aloof were
a considerable number of French Canadians, old employ
ees of Fort Vancouver, who now raised wheat for the
post.20 These, too, had received accessions from an
unexpected source. In 1841 the Hudson Bay Company,
in order to strengthen its hold on the Oregon country,
brought out a colony of sixty people from the Red River
settlement of Canada by the way of the Saskatchewan
to take up land on Puget Sound about the Nisqually
River. But the colonists, finding the soil poor, re
moved to the Willamette valley, thus defeating the
political design of the British and strengthening the
American center.21
But now the Willamette settlement was inundated by
the inpouring tide from the Missouri frontier. The
new immigrants by their number were able to remove
from Oregon the local stamp of the East and of the
Hudson Bay Company, and to put upon its political and
social institutions the stamp of a larger Americanism.
" They carried the world of politics on their shoulders."
The petty provisional government set up under mis
sionary domination in 1843 they fundamentally altered
in 1844 to conform to their own more democratic
ideals. The presence of eight thousand Americans in the
Columbia country in 1845 M hastened the settlement of
the " Oregon Question " in 1846. The appeals of the
Pacific colony for incorporation in the Union were ener-

NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST 215
getically supported by the western states, who from
1843 to 1846 assailed the Senate and Congress with
resolutions from general assemblies, memorials, and
petitions for the political occupation of Oregon. The
bond of union between the Columbia and the Missouri
frontier was close, for the geographical environment of
the Mississippi valley had bred the expanding tendencies
which peopled the valley of the Willamette.
As the most accessible and choicest land in Oregon
was taken up, an open, direct road made by nature up
the valley of the Willamette and down the long trough
of the Sacramento invited dissatisfied colonists to seek
more desirable fields in northern California. This was
already a well-beaten trail. Before the coming of the
missionary, the American trapper with well-laden pack-
mule had taken this way up from California to the ready
fur market at the Hudson Bay post of Vancouver.23
The California cattle which stocked the Willamette
ranches in the early days helped to beat out this trail,24
and at all times there was more or less communication.
Oregon received a few stray immigrants from California,
and California got some of its earliest pioneers, like
Sutter, from Oregon ; but from 1843 to 1846 every
year saw a large party from the Willamette cross the
watershed to the Sacramento.
Nor was this the only expansion into northern Cali
fornia. Russians and English had already made a com
mercial invasion of the country from the relatively near
bases on the Columbia River and Baranof Island. The
Hudson Bay Company had a post on San Francisco
rBay, whence its trappers ranged the upland valleys

216 NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST
of the Sierra Nevada. Communication with Fort Van
couver was maintained both by land and sea. The
Russian expansion was maritime ; it was therefore easy
and appeared early. In 1812 it built its trading-post
at Ross near Bodega Bay a few miles north of the
Golden Gate, and established a sub-station on the Farra-
lone Islands, where from twelve to fifteen hundred fur
seals were taken annually for the first few years by the
Aleutian hunters in their skin boats or bidarkas. The
Russians wanted not only furs, whether of sea or land,
but also grain and other food supplies which they pur
chased from the Spanish Californians for their far
northern trading-stations on the Alaskan coast.25
Lake Superior, Lake Winnipeg, the Saskatchewan,
Columbia, Willamette, Sacramento had been the British
line of approach to San Francisco Bay ; the more open
highway of the Pacific along "Russian America" and
its islands, that of the Slav advance ; the Gila River,
Spanish Trail, and Oregon Trail, that of the American.
The presence of all these foreign elements in this north
ern province of Mexico points to the broad zone of
indefinite frontier characteristic of every new land.
Western boundaries were not yet evolved and western
territories had ' not yet been differentiated out of their
" indefinite, incoherent homogeneity." The Americans,
English, and Russians were all regarded with some
apprehension by the Californians, though the advantages
of foreign trade overcame their misgivings. It was the
United States which on the basis of an as yet unformu
lated Monroe Doctrine called a halt to Russian expan
sion on this coast in 1823, when the line of 54° 40'

NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST 217
north latitude was agreed upon as the southern limit
of Muscovite dominion in America.
Meanwhile the American element in this extra-
United States territory was increasing. The efficacy
of informal expansion in Texas was an argument to the
practical mind of the American for the application of
the same method to California. The public sentiment
as to " manifest destiny " was pretty well formulated as
early as 1841. Scouting parties of early immigrants,
as we have seen, had found the northern and southern
breaches in California's mountain wall; but now the
advancing army began to cross the vast sandy moat of
the Nevada Desert and assail the mighty rampart of the
Sierras. From the time that Ashley and Bonneville 26 had dis
covered Great Salt Lake and trading-posts had been
established there, and on Utah Lake to the south,
small bodies of trappers and explorers had been guided
by the Humboldt River westward across the desert,
and with their slender equipment had managed to
scramble over the mountains into the great Valley
of California.27 They discovered many high-laid passes
at the heads of the deep-cutting torrents which tore
down the steep slope to be sucked up by the bibulous
sand below, but none were practicable for a heavy-
laden caravan of immigrants. As the accounts of
California aroused greater interest in the states, an
adventurous body of immigrants under Bid well and
Bartleson in 1841 struck off from the Oregon Trail at
the northern bend of the Bear River, followed the
course of that stream southward almost to Great Salt

218 NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST
Lake, and then turned west, searching for the Mary or
Humboldt River, which they found after nearly a month
and followed westward to Humboldt Sink. Thence
they continued south to the Walker River, by means
of its valley struggled up the mountains, crossed the
ridge near Sonora Pass (10,115 feet elevation) with
untold suffering from cold and starvation, and reached
the San Joaquin valley by the Stanislaus River.28
The best lands in Oregon were now taken up, and
the overflow into California was increasing ; hence there
were renewed efforts to find a more direct route to
the valley of the Sacramento without making the long
detour by way of Oregon or Los Angeles. Finally the
Truckee Pass in the Sierras was discovered in 1844 and
the California Trail settled down to the line of least
resistance. It branched off from the Oregon Trail and
the Snake River about a hundred miles below Fort Hall,
turned southwest up Goose Creek, a southern affluent
of the Snake, and over to the head waters of the Hum
boldt River. Later it left the Oregon Trail at Bear
River. From Humboldt Sink the road led directly west
to the Truckee River, up this stream to Truckee Pass
(7017 feet) and down the western slope by the American
or Bear River of California to the Sacramento valley.
Sutter's Fort near the mouth of the Bear River was a
distributing-point for immigrants entering both by the
Sacramento route from Oregon and by the California
Trail. Therefore this adobe settlement with its various
industries formed a caravanserai, ever filling and empty
ing its contents into the Sacramento, Napa, and Sonoma
valleys. With the opening of the California Trail, the

NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST 219
immigrant parties increased in size and in 1845 began
to include families.29 Northern California was being
Americanized and Sutter's Fort was the rallying-place.
This trading-post on the frontier, remote from Mexican
control emanating from Monterey or Los Angeles,
accessible to the steady stream of Americans from the
east and north, was in a position to " contribute mate
rially to hasten the success of American occupation."30
But California was much farther from the United
States frontier than Mexican Texas had been. Both
the length and natural difficulties of the overland jour
ney precluded immigration on the large scale that had
made an Anglo-Saxon state out of a Latin province
on the Sabine and Brazos. At the end of 1845 the
total foreign male population of California was only
680 ; 31 but the majority of these were Americans and
were collected around and about the Sacramento valley
and San Francisco Bay.
But if California was far from the United States, it
was almost as remote from Mexico, and the Mexicans
on the ground not numerically strong ; 6900 for the
whole department, 3550 for northern California.32 In
relation to the administrative center in the City of
Mexico, California was distinctly a peripheral state with
the usual tendencies towards defection. Conditions in
the northern department were not understood in the
far-away capital. Mexican governors and officials were
unsatisfactory. Hence in 1836 and again in 1844 a
successful revolution established the principle of home
rule under national allegiance as against centralism,
while there were advocates of entire independence.33

220 NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST
Officials in California ignored instructions for the con
trol of that department emanating from the capital;
and the federal authorities at the City of Mexico found
the efficiency of their control sadly diminished by
poverty, which complicated the difficulty of maintaining
troops in the remote province. On many subjects the
Californian and the Mexican point of view differed
fundamentally. When in 1843 American immigration
into California began to increase noticeably, Mexican
orders were received excluding such newcomers, pro
hibiting retail trade by foreigners throughout the re
public, and reserving the coasting-trade to Mexican sub
jects ; but no attempt was made to enforce these decrees
in California. On the contrary, American immigrants
were well received, obtained land grants readily ; and
for the protection of Boston trading-vessels on the
coast, the governor of California levied a duty on all
foreign goods coming in from Mexican ports.34 The
long stretch weakened the arm of authority.
The federal sentiment was strongest in the south.
San Diego fought for centralism in the revolution of
1836, and Los Angeles was the bulwark of Mexican
allegiance against the revolutionary agitations of Mon
terey and the north.35 It was southern California which
made the only obstinate resistance to American con
quest in 1846. This portion of the state had a closer
sea connection with the national port of San Bias
through the Gulf of California and the Pacific than
that enjoyed by Monterey and San Francisco ; and it
was the natural terminus both of the Gila River Trail
uniting it with Santa Fe* and Chihuahua, and also of

NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST 221
a more southern route leading through the province of
Sonora in northern Mexico.
The California of the Sacramento valley and San
Francisco Bay, on the other hand, was more isolated
from the central authority and more open to American
influences coming in by the two northern trails. Unlike
the Russian and British traders, the Americans were
settled on farms and ranches, had largely monopolized
the commerce of the country, and had taken to them
selves Californian wives ; for until the Truckee Pass
alleviated the worst hardships of the California Trail,
there were few women among the immigrants. Bonds
of property, commerce, and marriage united the Ameri
can settlers to the Californians, who fully appreciated
the advantage to the community of such enterprising
elements. A certain assimilation of sentiments un
doubtedly followed. When in 1846 the war between
the United States and Mexico became imminent, many
Californians foresaw the economic benefits which woidd
fall to their country with an American regime.36 Gen
eral Vallejo, guardian of the northern frontier and the
sturdiest character among Mexican subjects in this
region, favored the annexation of California to the
United States. Everywhere in the north the spirit of
resistance to the threatened invasion was lukewarm at
best. The United States had been turning covetous eyes
towards California since 1835. It needed ports along
this mountain-bound coast. Floyd of Virginia in 1822
advocated the occupation of Oregon chiefly to secure
the mouth of the Columbia as a harbor for American

222 NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST
whaling-vessels. In Jackson's administration an offer
was made to purchase that part of California between
37° and 42° north latitude in order to secure San Fran
cisco Bay. A few years later so radical a measure was
no longer contemplated. West Florida and Texas had
taught the Americans that the expansion of the trader's
pack-horse and the rancher's herds was the surest
pledge of territorial aggrandizement. They were pos
sessed therefore with a large patience, in spite of elo
quent appeals for acquisition from lecture platform and
press, while immigration into California went steadily
on and did its work. Thus the question of annexation
was taking care of itself. Time was the only thing
necessary, and the Americans felt they had all the time
required. But the United States government was not napping.
The Russians had withdrawn from the field. The
thinly scattered trappers and isolated posts of the Hud
son Bay Company in California could not vie with the
spreading farms and growing families of the American
settlers, but Englishmen who had large claims against
the Mexican government for money loans had been for
some time negotiating for a cession of territory in
California or elsewhere as payment or security for the
same.37 The English government took no part in this
so far as known. Any effort on the part of any for
eign power to seize any part of California was to he
checked on the basis of the Monroe Doctrine. This
was always held in reserve. Towards California the
greatest diplomacy was shown. If that province should

NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST 223
declare its independence of Mexico, it should be en
couraged and supported as a " sister republic," and
later invited to join the Union.38 American settlers
and American influence were to be relied upon to dic
tate the answer.
The American element in California, however, was
less patient than the government. When rumors of a
war between the United States and. Mexico became
louder, these men, remote from succor, threatened as
some believed with expulsion from their hard-won
homes, outnumbered but not outmatched by the Cali
fornians, acted upon the instincts of self-help bred on
the plains and the frontier. They raised the flag of
revolt in the Sacramento, Napa, and Sonoma valleys ;
and the American colors were flying over Sutter's
Fort and the captured Sonoma when Sloat under Amer
ican orders hauled down the Mexican flag at Mon
terey on July 11, 1846. Filibuster venture though it
was, and complicate though it did the American occu
pation of the country by antagonizing the Californians,
it strengthened Sloat's position on the coast and
supported Kearny's troops when they appeared in
southern California after their forced march westward
along the Gila Trail.
In the treaty of 1848 the United States forced
Mexico to yield up not only New Mexico and Cali
fornia, which American troops had conquered, but all
the intervening country from the Rio Grande to the
Pacific and from the Gila north to the boundary of
Oregon. The lines of communication with the new

224 NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST
territory had to be secured. The United States now
realized " the manifest destiny " of the American peo
ple to occupy the continent from ocean to ocean.
NOTES TO CHAPTER XI
1. Elliott Coues, Lewis and Clark Expedition, vol. ii. pp. 484-493.
2. Ratzel, Politische Geographie, pp. 684 and 688.
E. C. Semple, Mountain Passes. Bui. Amer. Geog. Soc. vol. xxxiii.
nos. 2 and 3. 1901.
3. Elliott Coues, Lewis and Clark Expedition, vol. ii. pp. 1060-1070.
4. Irving, Astoria, chaps. 43-60.
5. Bancroft, History of Oregon, vol. i. pp. 6-14. 1886.
6. Ibid. vol. i. pp. 48 and 70.
7. H. M. Chittenden, The American Fur Trade of the Far West, vol. i.
pp. 296-299. 1902.
Bancroft, History of the Northwest Coast, vol. ii. pp. 455 and 562.
8. Ibid. vol. ii. p. 448.
9. Ibid. vol. ii. p. 459.
10. Ibid. vol. ii. pp. 557-564.
11. Bancroft, History of Oregon, vol. i. pp. 78-182.
12. Ibid. vol. i. pp. 227-237.
13. Ibid. vol. i. p. 393.
14. Fremont's Narrative, pp. 112-116. 1845.
15. Ibid. p. 60.
16. Bancroft, History of Oregon, vol. i. pp. 400-402, and Fremont's
Narrative, pp. 147-166.
17. Parkman, The Oregon Trail, pp. 101-103. 1901.
18. Bancroft, History of Oregon, vol. i. pp. 413-415, 458464.
19. Ibid. vol. i. pp. 422-424.
20. Ibid. vol. i. p. 15.
21. Ibid. vol. i. p. 252.
22. Monette, History of the Valley of the Mississippi, vol. i. p. 569,
footnote. 1846.
23. Bancroft, History of the Northwest Coast, vol. ii. p. 455.
24. Bancroft, History of Oregon, vol. i. chap. vi.
25. Bancroft, History of California, vol. i. pp. 298, 628-635.
26. Irviug's Bonneville.
27. Bancroft, History of the Northwest Coast, vol. ii. p. 449, and History
of California, vol. iii. pp. 389-391.

NORTHERN TRAILS TO THE FAR WEST 225
28. Bancroft, History of California, vol. iv. pp. 269-271.
29. Ibid. vol. iv. p. 578.
30. Ibid. vol. iv. p. 227.
31. Ibid. vol. iv. p. 588.
32. Ibid. vol. iv. p. 649.
33. Ibid. vol. iii. p. 468-476.
34. Ibid. vol. iv. pp. 380-385, 429, 555.
35. Ibid. vol. iii. pp. 613-615, 629.
36. Ibid. vol. v. pp. 73 and 113.
37. Ibid. vol. iv. p. 298.
38. Ibid. vol. v. pp. 74 and 196.

CHAPTER XII
GROWTH OP THE UNITED STATES TO A CONTINENTAL
POWER GEOGRAPHICALLY DETERMINED
From a narrow strip on the. Atlantic littoral, the
United States had pushed steadily westward until they
had possessed themselves of the most desirable stretch
of coast on the Pacific. In this advance from ocean to
ocean geographic conditions, in the cumulative effects
of their direct and indirect operation, became factors
so strong that just for the sturdy energy of the Anglo-
Saxon race they became determinants. A less vigorous
people would hardly have responded to the educative
influences of this peculiar environment.
The remoteness of the North American continent
from the centers of civilization and teeming populations
of Europe and Asia had maintained it as a great terri
torial reserve, occupied only by a sparse population
whom the want of propitious geographical environment
had helped to keep in savagery or the lowest stages of
barbarism.1 Here were lacking those small segregated
geographical areas which early curb the wandering in
stincts of a primitive people, bring them to a sedentary
life, and then by protecting mountains and seas guard
their germinating civilization, and force its development
by the warm interactive life of a contracted territory.
Savagery and barbarism mean a scant population, weak

GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER 227
tenure of the land, and a fragile bulwark against ag
gression. Therefore the westward advance of the
young republic met only slight hindrance from the
indigenous tribes of the country.
The result of this savage occupancy was a country
with all the pristine richness of untouched resources.
The barrier of the Atlantic was a basis of natural se
lection among the early colonists, so that in general
only the fittest, the robust and enterprising, reached
American shores. The abundance of opportunity in
this virgin land constantly attracted foreign immigra
tion to reinforce the American population. Easy con
ditions of earning a livelihood induced early marriages
and the consequent large families which became a factor
in the expansion of the nation. When with growth of
population competition grew stronger and land scarcer,
with a fine impatience of these altered economic condi
tions the dweller of the frontier moved westward to
take up unexhausted lands, an unused "range," and
also to seek that unconstrained life of the backwoods
which has a powerful charm to the natural man. Thus
fullness of opportunity bred the migratory instinct,
and geographical conditions favored it.
Just as the continental build of North America was
unpropitious to the development of small detached na
tions, so it afforded the natural environment for a few ';
great ones. Its topography is marked by large simple
features, — two parallel mountain systems, their two
ocean slopes, and between a vast trough-like valley
reaching from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.
Small physical features like detached mountain ranges,

228 GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER
islands, peninsulas, and deep embayments are scarce.
Nowhere is there a highly diversified surface or a
highly articulated coast except in the half-submerged
'lowlands of the sub-polar regions: shore-line and in
terior are equally characterized by simplicity and unity
of structure. This unity is reflected in the few political
divisions of the continent.
Eurasia, the land-mass formed by Europe and Asia,
whose wide margin is devoted to fringing peninsulas,
islands, large isolated mountain areas, and therefore
to diversified nations and separate political dominions,
has in its interior an unbroken stretch of lowlands and
plains shelving down from the continental highlands
and extending from the gently swelling uplands of
Siberia to the marsh-covered plains of the Baltic. This
is the domain of the one continental power of Eurasia,
Russia. Expanding eastward from the nucleus of in
land empire on the Dnieper and Volga along the fine
of least resistance through the sparse population of
Siberia, Muscovite dominion reached the Pacific by
1645. Westward its growth met likewise no topo
graphical obstruction, but the older population of the
Baltic shores, reinforced from Germany and Sweden,
retarded its advance till in 1720 Peter the Great made
Russia an interoceanic power.
Australia, in consequence of its simple structure,
island character, relatively small size, and still smaller
habitable area, was destined for a single political terri
tory. The size of North America, some three times
as large as Australia, precluded it from becoming in
its youth the seat of one empire ; but as the general

GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER 229,
law of increasing territorial dominion2 shall continue!
to operate, unless counteracted by some superior force,
we may look to see the political union of that which I
is geographically one.
All the political divisions of North America reach
from ocean to ocean, with the exception of little San
Salvador. In Mexico and Central America the dimin
ishing width of the continent made such expansion
easy, especially since it was guided by military conquest,
despite the isolation of fending mountain barrier. The
great breadth of the northern section was traversed
in Canada before it was in the United States. Here
physiographic conditions were all conducive to early
expansion, especially when the method was that of the
far-ranging voyageur. No mountain barrier like the
Appalachian system discouraged early progress. The
St. Lawrence owed its great significance in early days to
the fact that it alone opened a way from the east into
the central valley of the continent. Beyond, the Great
Lakes and the low plains of the Saskatchewan carried
the early explorer three fourths of the distance across
the continent to the foot of the Rockies, which bend
rapidly towards the west after entering Canadian terri
tory. Lower passes in the mountains and the absence of
deserts, due to the lower level and narrower width of the
highlands, further expedited Canadian overland advance.
Hence from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Puget Sound
was the easiest and earliest line of expansion from the
Atlantic to the Pacific. Furthermore, the severity of
the Canadian climate, the consequent smaller incentive
to slow agricultural conquest of the country, and the

230 GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER
greater temptation to the nomadic exploitation of the
fur trade, stimulated the advance towards the west.
These conditions of topography and climate explain the
fact that the Lewis and Clark expedition made their
explorations in the light of data furnished chiefly by
Hudson Bay Company factors.
In the United States geographical features were not
quite so favorable, and yet were not adverse to west
ward expansion. On the threshold of the continent
stood the Appalachian barrier, but there were five great
routes across or around this, — by the St. Lawrence
and the Great Lakes, by the Hudson and the Mohawk
valley, by the line of the Potomac and the Ohio, by the
Appalachian Valley and Cumberland Gap, and by
the open way through northern Georgia. Beyond, the
mighty Mississippi system, built for intercourse, gave
ready access to the threshold of the Rocky Mountain
portals. The great width of the Cordilleras, flanked
on the east by arid plains which long kept at arm's
length the frontier of continuous settlement, and on
the west by wide stretches of desert, drained by canon-
cutting rivers unfit for navigation, and scantily supplied
with grass for fodder or wood for camp-fires, greatly
increased the difficulty of American expansion.
But difficulty is always a relative term and must be
measured by the means of overcoming it. The Alle
ghenies to a race in its infancy were quite as serious an
obstacle as the Rockies to the same race in its prime.
Frontier conditions along the Mississippi and Missouri
trained a people able to cope with the conditions of the
transmontane journey of two thousand miles. Life in

GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER 231
the plains and backwoods had become second nature.
to men from whom the need of luxury had been elimi
nated. Mere space, unconstrained existence, a buffalo
hunt or an Indian fray was pleasure enough. In the
large, fresh environment of the American continent
the English race had been born again and now was
animated with the irrepressible vigor of a youthful
people. A constant change of environment had given
them the adaptability of youth, vast opportunity had
bred the spirit of venture and enterprise. Nothing
seemed impossible and therefore little was impossible.
The advance from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi
and from the Mississippi to the Pacific was natural.
And in this advance the large and simple structure of
the continent kept the Americans one-people. Each
mountain barrier in turn was regarded as a possible line
of political division until the intercourse made possible
by gaps and approaching streams was developed by the
mechanical power of the people. The spirit of separa
tion in the young trans- Allegheny commonwealths was
short-lived. Later on the Pacific coast, the most truly
isolated portion of United States territory, the idea was
current that California and Oregon were destined by
geographic conditions to form an independent state.
This sentiment was voiced in Congress more than once.3
And the prompt survey for a transcontinental railroad
after the acquisition of California pointed to the gov
ernment's fear of losing this peripheral possession. The
work of construction was long postponed, however, until
in 1862 rumors that the people of the Pacific slope,
tired of waiting for overland communication, proposed

232 GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER
erecting an independent republic, and the report of a
Confederate invasion of New Mexico induced Congress
to lend government aid to the Union Pacific Railroad.*
Every forward step in American expansion meant
a more scientific boundary. Behind every process of
rounding out the contour of our political territory lay
the geographical motive. The Mississippi was only a
line of demarcation. Long before the Louisiana Pur
chase or the discovery of the Columbia, Jefferson saw
the value of a Pacific front. The line of the Rocky
Mountain watershed, especially as reinforced by the
desert beyond, was the highly scientific boundary se-
' cured with the Louisiana country ; but the ocean is the
only absolute boundary, and beyond lay the Pacific. A
seacoast is valuable chiefly on account of its ports, and
of these the slightly indented shore of the Pacific in
all its vast length south of Puget Sound afforded few.
Entrenched at first on the short strip of coast between
42° north latitude and the Columbia, the United States
had only the mouth of the river for a harbor ; but the
vast inlet of Puget Sound was secured by the com
promise of the " Oregon Question," San Francisco Bay
by the conquest of California, while by the treaty made
with Mexico in 1848 the international boundary line
was made to bend slightly south of west between the
mouth of the Gila River and the coast in order to
include in United States territory the excellent harbor
of San Diego. The United States was also guaranteed
the free navigation of the Gidf of California and the
Colorado River to the confluence of the Gila.
The Gila River boundary, as fixed by the Mexican

GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER 233
cession, was corrected by the Gadsden Purchase in
1853 of land to the southern watershed. This again
represented an advance from an unscientific to a scien
tific frontier. The Gila River occupies a depression
which divides the North American from the Mexican
Cordilleras, and which is " one of the most important
topographical features in North America."5 It pos
sesses a strategic value as a natural passway through
the mountains and deserts to the west, and therefore its
control could not be shared with another power. The
easiest trail, as we have seen, approached it by the
southern affluents of the Gila. It was the natural route
to the Pacific from the coast of Texas, where the high
way of the Gulf landed a west-bound traveler a hun
dred miles farther on his way than a Missouri steamboat
which put him ashore at Kansas City. In the Gila
depression the first survey for a transcontinental railroad
was made as the most obvious route, and here finally
was constructed the Southern Pacific line, on the south
ern side of the valley. The Gadsden Purchase has
been decried as a wasteful expenditure of ten million
dollars for forty-five thousand acres of poor land almost
unfit for occupation. But never was money better
spent. The value of the tract is not to be estimated
by its fitness for agriculture, but by its strategic impor
tance as a passway to the Pacific which is always open
on account of its lower levels and more southern loca
tion, when the northern routes are blocked by snow.
The southern boundary is continued by land along
the Rio Grande, which serves as a convenient though
rather unreliable line of demarcation. From the mouth

234 GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER
of this river the United States territory reaches the sea
again. The great westward-bending inlet of the Gulf
of Mexico creates a southern coast for the United
States, which therefore from Key West to the Rio
Grande faces South America and not Europe, though
washed by Atlantic waters. Confined at first to the ,
strip between the Sabine River and Lake Pontchartrain,
the republic with persistent effort worked to broaden
her base on the Gulf in order to control the natural
outlets of her southern and western country, and give
it the absolute boundary of the sea.
The eastern and western boundaries of the United
States are alike in being entirely oceanic except for a
bit of Maine. The southern boundary is land in its
western half, water in its eastern ; so too the northern
boundary. The international frontier of Canada and
the United States extends from Lake Superior over
land westward along the forty-ninth parallel to Georgia
Strait, whence it continues south and west through
Haro and San Juan de Fuca Strait to the Pacific ; east
ward from northern Minnesota to northern New York
the boundary is defined by the Great Lakes, three short
connecting rivers, and the broad channel of the St.
Lawrence.6 Though these " Mediterranean Seas " are
fresh water, they have played as great a part as a
marine highway in opening up the interior of the
country as has the Gulf of Mexico, and that in spite
of the fact that they receive no great affluent like the
Mississippi to enhance their importance.
.Everywhere the contour of the United States terri
tory is simple and as far as possible natural. Any line

GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER 235
separating it from Canada in the west must be artificial
because the valleys, plains, and mountains of the one
country continue into the other without topographical
division ; but the forty-ninth parallel has the advantage
of brevity. Moreover, it was easy to draw such an
artificial line of political division in the remote, almost
uninhabited regions of the Northwest. The interna
tional boundary of New England, however, is long,
irregular, and follows natural features only for a short
distance along the St. Lawrence watershed, the St. John
and the St. Croix rivers. Contrasted with the north
west frontier and the Mexican boundary, "it marks the
contrast in effect of contact with an old and organized
state and a politically new and unorganized one." 7
Such were the limits which the republic wrought
out for itself by 1853. The territory which it acquired
was confined almost wholly to the mainland. This is
its distinguishing characteristic. Its islands are few,
small, and close inshore. Island acquisitions were
renounced in the struggle for continental aggrandize
ment, though some lively diplomatic battles were fought
for the possession of the outlying fragments in Passa-
maquoddy Bay in the negotiations fixing the eastern
boundary of Maine.
Another geographic factor in the growth of the i
United States to a continental power was to be found i
in its isolation from Europe. The wide barrier of the
Atlantic which furthered political independence stimu
lated economic independence and a rapid development
of natural resources more extensive than intensive.
This involved expansion. The young republic of 1776

236 GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER
which turned its back upon the Old World set its face
systematically towards its own vast hinterland ; it was
animated by a continental poficy in 1783 in claiming
territory beyond the Alleghenies to the Mississippi.
This policy was shadowed forth yet more distinctly in
the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark expe
dition, and twenty years later reached a novel and final
expression in the Monroe Doctrine.
This national principle was enunciated because geo
graphic conditions made it possible. Geographic isola
tion suggested and dictated its oldest and fundamental
proposition, that of our non-interference in the internal
concerns of European powers. " Our detached and
distant situation," said Washington, "invites and en
ables us to pursue a different course " from that of
Europe with its international entanglements. " Why
forego the advantages of so peculiar a position ? " 8
The obvious corollary of this proposition was the non
interference of Europe in American affairs,9 which
could best be secured by calling a halt to European
colonization on the American continents and the reas-
sertion of European dominion over successfully rebel
lious colonies. This principle, foreshadowed again by
Jefferson, was formally stated first to meet Russian
aggressions on the northwest coast, which the United
States hoped to make its own through the Oregon claim,
before it was embodied in Monroe's message to Con
gress in December, 1823 ; so that it was designed to
protect the territorial plans of the nation. It was for
mally adopted as a national policy to protect the Cen
tral and South American republics which had been

GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER 237
enabled by a remote peripheral position and the divid
ing expanse of the Atlantic to secure their independ
ence. The third proposition of the Monroe Doctrine,
the purpose of the United States to interpose in de
fense of the independence of any American nation
against any attempted conquest by a European state,
was undoubtedly reinforced by the knowledge that
geographic isolation would enable the champion to inter
fere successfully. A broad military base near at hand
on the Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific, as opposed to the
remoteness of the European powers, even with their
narrow footholds in the Caribbean Sea, would give to
the United States the advantage in any intercontinental
war. The leadership in the American continents assumedT)
by the United States in the enunciation of the Monroe
Doctrine has its final basis in geographical conditions.
Identical as to the dominant race, Canada and the
United States differ only in the seats of their respective
dominions; hence climate, soil, location, and natural
features have been the differentiating factors in their
history — the aeterminants. In the contest of expan
sion which resultecTIn this leadership, Great Britain
was the most dangerous competitor of the United
States ; it was an American power with large interests
in this continent which could be seriously marred by
new appropriations of territory by its republican rival.
But the center of British power was extra-continental
in relation to America : the broad interoceanic belt of
Canada was not enough to cinch the western conti
nent. "The United States had all its forces on the

238 GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER
ground and no distracting interests in other parts of
the world. Hence in all the debatable territory Eng
land gave way. Texas was annexed without oppo
sition; Oregon was divided; California was con
quered."10 The isolation of North America gradually eliminated
the lesser European rivals of the United States in the
Western Hemisphere, and enabled her by securing some
' of their previous holdings on the mainland to carry out
her continental policy of compact growth, which made
for strength in the struggle with England for conti
nental control. The compact political territory, having
little exposed surface as frontier, is less vulnerable than
the widely scattered political area, and can expend all
its powers at will in any one direction, just as Russia
throws its great weight to-day against the wall of the
Hindu Kush, to-morrow against the buffer of Manchu
ria. The United States has in general directed its
I efforts at only one thing at a time and that with suc
cess, because its energies have not been dissipated as
have England's.
; Geographical location has been the most powerful
1 factor in this leadership ; it has given the United
States advantages over both Brazil and Canada; the
only other two large territorial powers of the Western
Hemisphere. Canada has, like the American republic,
an interoceanic position, but it is too far from the
center of things to make its influence felt widely, and
has too severe a climate to permit the development of
the dense population necessary for strength. Brazil
has the fertility and area, but its tropical location will

GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER 239
always limit the energy of its people, even if we leave
out of consideration the limitations for leadership
native to the Latin races ; and Brazil's want of a Pacific
and Caribbean seacoast must confine its sphere of influ
ence largely to the Atlantic.
The location of the United States makes it the
master of the situation. It alone has a location wholly
in the temperate zone stretching from ocean to ocean. I
Thus it has a population energetic by reason of an
invigorating climate and multitudinous because of the
large and fertile area of the country. Its extension
to the Pacific brings it into relation with the western
states of South America, while its long coast-line on
the Gulf of Mexico makes it the leading Caribbean
power. Its position in the North Atlantic opposite
Europe makes it the great maritime doorkeeper of the
western world. Thus this central belt of the North
American continent was geographically determined as
the seat of control of the new hemisphere. This des
tiny was fixed by its colonization by the sturdy Anglo-
Saxon race.
The evolution of the place of the United States in
world politics is interesting. In its colonial days,
America, as merely the western periphery of Europe
and an appanage of the Old World, was subjected to
all the international forces which swayed her sover
eigns. European wars had episodic campaigns on
American soil, and provisions as to American territory
figured in all their treaties from Ryswick to Paris
(1763).11 For a short time after the Revolution the
young republic was embarrassed by some responsibili-

240 GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER
ties to France, heritages from the time she formed a
part of the European body politic, which led France to
think she might be used as an ally against England.
] But in the isolation of her new environment, the United
States quickly threw off her European connections,
worked out her destiny as the foremost American state,
became an interoceanic continental power, then a hemi
sphere power, dominating the international affairs of
North and South America.
For a long time this domain satisfied her. Geo
graphic isolation was so strong in its suggestion that
there was no temptation to extra-continental political
activity ; but even in this period of apparent quietude
the seeds of further expansion were germinating, —
expansion which was to lead the United States beyond
the confines of her hemisphere, now grown too narrow,
to take her place as a world power. Isolation gave to
the infant giant that protected position which fostered
political development on a large scale, just as the segre
gating environment of the Greek . city-states achieved
for those a similar development on a small scale, till in
these latter days, issuing from the seclusion of its hemi
sphere, the United States has participated as a world
power in the affairs of the Pacific and of Asia.
The size of the United States has been determined
largely by the continental build of North America.
We have seen how its simple structure facilitated west
ern expansion and preserved the unity of the people.
We have seen how the ranks of the future nation were
drawn up in compact form along the narrow Atlantic
littoral between the mountains and the sea, how the

GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER 241
line of march was flanked by the Great Lakes on the
north and the Gulf on the south, how the Mississippi
carried the outbound conquerors southward to the Gulf
and the Ohio tributaries carried them north to the
Lakes; how the length of the Mississippi became the
base for the next advance. The imperfect geographical
knowledge of 1783, supposing the sources of this river
to be northwest of the Lake of the Woods, by a happy
mistake fixed the incipient point of the northwest
boundary beyond the head waters of the Mississippi, and
thereby increased the dimension of the United States
along the ninety-fifth meridian.
Confined between the Lakes and the Gulf, the natural
outlet of growing powers was towards the west. Had
the continent been wider, its width would have been
mastered, though perhaps more slowly ; had the Missis
sippi been longer, its greater length could have been as
easily controlled, providing its geographical nature
remained the same. The effect of the continental build,
combined with the constricting influence of the Great
Lakes and the Gulf, has been to give the United States
a predominant east and west direction, with a dimension
twice as great as that from north to south ; to keep it
within relatively narrow zonal limits, away from tropical
heat or polar cold, and yet. to lend it the enormous area
of three million square miles.
Geographic conditions further conspire to make by
far the larger part of this area available. Through the
great central trough of the continent sweep the cold
winds of the north and the warm moisture-laden breezes
of the Gulf, modifying in turn the climate of Minnesota

242 GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER
and of Texas. The narrow width and lower level
of the northern Rockies admit the Pacific winds which
bring warmth and moisture to Montana and the
Dakotas. There is probably no other continuous
political area of like size which contains so large a
proportion of territory adapted to the habitation of
man. The size of a land is to be measured finally in
^erms of the population it can support and bring to a
high degree of civilization ; amount and effectiveness
otf population is the measure of power.
The effect of the size of their country can be traced
/ in the ideas of the American people, which are marked
by a certain largeness and daring. The small territorial
standards of the early European settlers here became
profoundly modified by American continental condi
tions. The mere area of the individual states increases
from the east towards the west. The commonwealths
of New England seem pigmies in size compared with
the trans-Mississippi states. There are twenty-six states
in the smaller half of the country east of the Missis
sippi, and only twenty-three states and territories west
of it. The greater aridity of the western states, their
consequent sparsity of population, and also the rapidity
with which immigrants spread over them account in
part for this larger area. The Senate will always he
the legislative stronghold of the eastern states, where
representation is based upon units, not on population.
The West can therefore look for growing power only
in Congress, where increasing population in the young
states will increase their representation. In the recent
discussion of the admission into the Union of the

GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER 243
remaining western territories, the proposition was made
by eastern statesmen to unite New Mexico and Arizona
in order to limit their representation in the Senate and
avoid the evil of more " rotten boroughs " like Nevada,
destined by nature for a scant population ; and to admit
Oklahoma on condition that it shall one day incorporate
in itself the Indian Territory, when under the new Indian
policy that shall cease to be a tribal reserve.
The large area of this country, the mere space to be 'J
overcome whereby time might be saved, has brought
the United States to the front in improved methods
of transportations, whether in railroads, river steamers,
ocean liners, or in rapid battle-ships like the Oregon.
The numerous large rivers which we have had to span
have made us the great brhlge-builders of the world.
Hence the successful competition~of^America for the
Atbara bridge, in Africa. All other American indus
trial enterprises manifest the same magnificence of
scale, especially agriculture in the abundant lands of
the West. On one wheat farm in Dakota a man ploughs
a straight four-mile furrow; down its length takes
from breakfast to his noonday lunch, and back to the
start brings him home just in time for supper. In
Texas a cattle ranch often embraces a domain from one
to two hundred thousand acres enclosed by a single
wire fence.
Everywhere one notices a certain largeness of view
in the ordinary Westerner. Even when uncultured and
crude from lack of opportunity, he never takes a con
tracted view of things. He measures things with a big
yardstick. The nomadic instinct is still in him, handed

244 GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER
down by his emigrant forbears. Wherever he is found,
he has always come there from somewhere else. Hence
he is never provincial, and he is intensely, broadly
American. Distance never appalls him. If he is a
Californian he " steps over the mountains into Nevada,"
literally on foot if the fancy take him, with as little ado
as if he were walking around the corner ; or he crosses
half the continent by rail for a two days' visit at
Chicago. His point of view is therefore bred of his
geographically wide experiences and his intercourse with
the other highly mingled populations of the western
states. The areas of provincialism in the United States
are few, and none of them are to be found west of the
Mississippi River. The danger in the American point
of view lies in the tendency to confuse bigness and
greatness. " The struggle for existence is a struggle for space,"
says Ratzel. Abundant space in the United States has
meant abundant opportunity and a chance for all to
rise ; it has developed in the Americans a powerful initia
tive and encouraged the democratic spirit. Thus as the
isolation of North America helped the early colonists
divest themselves of European monarchical principles
of government, so the size of our country has kept
classes and masses on a nearly equal footing by equality
of opportunity. Everywhere the " four hundred " tends
to recruit itself from the four million near by.
The transcontinental expansion of the American
people has made them masters in " the struggle for
space." The question is not remote, How will they
use their power so acquired in the future ?

GROWTH TO A CONTINENTAL POWER 245
NOTES TO CHAPTER XII
1. Shaler, Nature and Man in America, pp. 168-172.
2. Ratzel, Politische Geographie, Dritter Abschnitt.
3. McMaster, History of the People of the United States, vol. v. p. 26.
Bancroft, History of Oregon, vol. i. pp. 350-380.
4. E. E. Sparks, Expansion of the American People, p. 368.
5. Ratzel, Politische Geographie der Vereinigten Staaten, p. 33.
1893.
6. Ibid. p. 35.
7. Ibid. p. 36.
8. Washington's Farewell Speech, September, 1796.
9. John W. Foster, A Century of American Diplomacy, p. 441. 1901.
10. A. B. Hart, The Foundation of American Foreign Policy, p. 36.
1901.
11. Ibid. p. 3.

CHAPTER XIII
THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE INLAND WATERWAYS
The simplicity of build which gives to the North
American continent its few large features of valley,
plain, and mountain range has been the chief deter
minant in producing its few large groups of navigable
rivers ; for these are always the product of big, well-
watered countries of simple form and gentle slopes.
The complex, fragmentary topography of western Eu
rope is too much broken up to develop a great river
system. The continental structure of Australia favors
a large central system like the Mississippi ; but the lo
cation of its mountain ranges on the eastern rim, where
they intercept the moisture of the trade-winds, robs
the wide, interior valley of its water. Africa has thou
sands of miles of navigable waterway high up on the
surface of its plateau, but the steep escarpment of this
mesa continent bars every river approach from the sea
with falls and rapids a few miles back from the coast.
Everywhere in North America, except in the trans-
Rocky region, an easy gradient marks the descent from
highland to sea. The natural obstacles to navigation
are few and slight. The Ohio from the edge of the
Allegheny Mountains to its mouth has only one partial
interruption to navigation in the so-called " Falls " at
Louisville, over which, however, steamers pass for a

THE INLAND WATERWAYS 247
great part of the year. The Missouri pours along its
smooth, yellow tide for 2700 miles from the Great
Falls in western Montana, where it plunges down the
first terrace of the Rockies, without other break to its
mouth. The gradient of the Mississippi's bed becomes
pronounced only above St. Paul, while insignificant
watersheds barely suffice to bar the sources of its tribu
taries from the Laurentine Lakes, or from the Red
River of the North which, through Lake Winnipeg,
finds its way to Hudson Bay.
Everywhere east of the Rockies the chief drainage
systems of the continent approach very near on some
low divide at one or several points. Here were located
the portages or " carries " which extended the network
of inland commerce in the days of bark canoe and
beaver-skin cargo. Here later were built the canals
which answered to the demand of spreading settlement
and increasing trade, and linked the Atlantic rivers
with the St. Lawrence, the Great Lakes, and the east
ern branches of the Mississippi. Thus the topography
of the country enabled even these abundant water con
nections to be vastly extended by artificial means. The
waterway of the Hudson River, Erie Canal, and Great
Lakes has an east and west extent of eighteen degrees
of longitude, reaching from New York to Duluth. The
chief lateral branches of the Mississippi, the Missouri
and Ohio, afford river connection from Fort Benton in
western Montana to Pittsburg, a distance of 1800 miles
in a straight line; and the canal links between the
Ohio and Lake Erie extend this water route to the At
lantic. The east and west direction of the Ohio and

248 THE INLAND WATERWAYS
Lake route was a strong factor in the union of the early
East and West, counterbalancing the centrifugal influ
ence of the Mississippi. And earlier still, the close
approach of the Potomac and Ohio, and the ease of
intercourse along the highroad between their respective
heads of navigation, was one of the chief reasons for
locating the national capital at Washington.
The Atlantic rivers, where they are navigable, whether
naturally or rendered so by canals, facilitate chiefly an
east and west connection. The Mississippi system is
most important as a highway between the northern and
southern borders of the country. Northward from the
line of the Ohio and the Missouri, as far as the great
bend at Kansas City, this north and south connection
is manifold. That of the main stream is reinforced
by the upper Missouri to the west, and to the east by
every tributary of its own or of the Ohio having canal
communication with the Lakes. Southward from the
Ohio only the main stream of the Mississippi forms the
conjunction with the Gulf. The second parallel route,
known and used by the canoes of the early traders, from
the great bend of the Tennessee over the portage south
to the Black Warrior or Tombigbee rivers, has not yet
been utilized by the construction of a canal ; but an
outlet from the Tennessee to tidewater in Mobile Bay
is a proposed improvement of our inland navigation,
conditioned only by the problem of an adequate water
supply on the summit level. The value of the Missis
sippi as a waterway is enhanced greatly by the fact
that it traverses the United States across the constricted
area between the Lakes and the Gulf, while these two

THE INLAND WATERWAYS 249
mediterraneans? fresh and salt, find their value enhanced
in turn by the connecting waterway of the mighty
stream.1 If we leave out of consideration the abrupt eastward
projection of the state of Maine, the ninety-seventh
meridian is found to mark the medial line of the United
States and also the western limit of abundant inland
navigation. Corpus Christi, the western terminus of
coastwise navigation on the Gulf, and the heads of navi
gation on the Red River and the Arkansas are located
almost exactly on this ninety-seventh meridian. Be
yond this line only the Missouri affords a navigable
course to the foot of the Rockies. Scanty rainfall and
shallow, shifting beds render the other streams unfit
for transportation.
The western part of the United States embraced in
the broad band of the Cordilleran upheaval, in conse
quence of a very complex topography combined with
extreme aridity, has developed no long river systems
navigable from the sea. Aridity has produced the pre
vailing canon formation and the scanty volume of
water which will float only the shallowest boats. The
lower Colorado, after it issues from the Grand Canon,
will carry vessels of eighteen-inch draft from Eldorado
in southern Nevada four hundred miles to its mouth.
But this sole river outlet to the south has little value
because of the desert country and scanty population
which it serves. The imprisoned streams and lakes
of the Great Basin have been of service merely in fur
nishing a line of oases which directed the route of the
California Trail. Only aridity, due to the encircling

250 THE INLAND WATERWAYS
mountains, has prevented these streams from develop
ing the volume necessary to cut away the slight oppos
ing barrier, and uniting to a system to find an outlet
along the general slope of the Basin to the south.
The gentle curve of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade
Mountains marks the eastern limit of the inland water
ways of trans-Rocky America. What is found behind
the barrier of these ranges counts for little or nothing,
and the aggregate of that beyond is only small. Puget
Sound, with its 19,000 miles of shore-line, owing to its
predominant north and south direction, finds its most
eastern point only about one hundred and twenty miles
from the sea. The Columbia, accessible to ocean ves
sels a hundred miles from the Pacific, has continuous
navigation only a hundred miles farther to the Dalles,
where the river rushes down through the narrow gate
way of the Cascade Range. Its plateau course farther
inland is navigable for a great many miles within the
state of Washington, but is little available on account
of its inaccessibility from the sea. The long valley
formed by the Sierra Nevada and Cascade Mountains
on the east and the Coast Range on the west is
occupied by the Willamette, navigable for steamer and
river craft for one hundred and twenty-five miles, and
further south by the submerged river mouth forming
San Francisco Bay with its tributary streams of the
Sacramento and San Joaquin, which together afford a
north and south waterway aggregating three hundred
and fifty miles. But like Puget Sound, all these rivers
except the Columbia, owing to their location in a great
longitudinal valley following the axis of the mountains,

THE INLAND WATERWAYS 251
reach points less than one hundred and twenty-five
miles back from the Pacific and form, as it were, only a
coast road at the foot of the vast Cordilleran upland.
The abundance of inland waterways in the East and
the paucity in the West has greatly differentiated the
economic history of these two sections of the United
States. Every country of large extent finds, next to
the fertility of its soil, its navigable rivers the most
important factors of its early development. The one is
fundamental to the production of wealth and the other
to its distribution and exchange. Small countries with
deeply indented coast-lines, like Greece, Norway, Eng
land, and New England, can renounce the advantage of
big river systems ; but in Russia, Argentina, Venezuela,
the United States, Canada, Egypt, India, and China, the
history of the country, political and economic, is indis-
solubly connected with that of its great rivers. Large
areas mean great distances, hence long lines of trans
portation, which are most easily and cheaply furnished
by natural waterways ; 2 and the complete exploitation
of such natural advantages has been in all times a con
dition and measure of commercial preeminence. The
strength of Venice and the Lombard League found
its geographic basis in the Adriatic, the roads across
the Alpine passes to the north, east, and west, and the
navigation of the Po and Adige. The League of the
Rhine towns flourished by reason of the Rhone-Rhine
highway across western Europe. The Hanseatic cities
from Bruges all the way east to the Russian Novgorod
owed their commercial supremacy largely to the great
rivers behind them from the Scheldt to the Volga.3 In

252 THE INLAND WATERWAYS
France the signal for a marked industrial and com
mercial development was the construction by Colbert in
the seventeenth century of a series of canals across the
central plateau of the country, designed to unite the
sources of all its radiating streams and perfect a wonder
ful system of inland waterways. The interior trade of
China to-day moves wholly by river and canal; and
this country remains the classical example of waterway
supremacy. The foreign " spheres of influence " there
are indicated generally in terms of the great Chinese
rivers, because these "spheres" are commercial areas
tributary to the river highways.
Early settlement and expansion of population in the
United States, falling as it did in a period prior to the
rapid development of transportation by means of rail
roads, and being confined to the well-watered Atlantic
slope of the continent, developed, as we have seen in
the previous chapters, largely by reason of waterway
facilities. Line of river and lake invited and directed
the westward movement, distributed the outbound set
tlers along remote tributaries, and the next year con
veyed the produce from the newly opened lands back
to the seaboard markets. For every outgoing stream
of people to the West, there was a return current of
trade, steadily increasing in amount, variety, and value,
which moved along these same channels. Later, when
railroads were introduced, the waterways remained as
the cheap competitor of the steel roads, regulating their
freight charges from the Lakes to the Gulf and from
the Atlantic to the ninety-seventh meridian.
In the trans-Missouri country with its scanty equip-

THE INLAND WATERWAYS 253
ment of waterways, geographic conditions have differ
entiated greatly the history of transportation. On the
margin of the arid belt, canoe, flatboat, and steamer
were discarded; pack-horse, ox-cart, and mule team
treked across the endless stretch of prairie and desert.
For the West there was nothing between the creeping
pace of the canvas-covered wagon and the railway ex
press, — that too in a country where time was money
and life, if an early snow threatened to block the moun
tain passes, if the scanty pasturage in the desert oases
was all consumed, if the food supply had to be reduced
to lighten the burden of the exhausted animals, whose
dragging, trembling pace made the desert twice as wide,
the hope of water twice as remote.
Here was the land where the railroad found no
competitor, a land moreover of " long hauls " and
"through freight," except for the sacks of wool from
the scattered highland ranches, and the cases of canned
vegetables dropped off at the lonely shacks of the
desert road-keepers. Wherever the cheap highways of
rivers and lakes are lacking, railroads must develop so
much the more rapidly.4 The sparsity of population
along their route diminishes the local business and
hence the profits ; but the absence of waterway com
petition enables them to formulate their policy un-
trammeled, fix ¦ their own tariff, and follow the lines
which the interests of commerce dictate. Railroads
have assumed an incalculable importance in Australia
because of the paucity there of permanently navigable
streams. Similarly in South Africa, an extensive area
without water communication, Cape Colony, Natal,

254 THE INLAND WATERWAYS
Rhodesia, the Orange River Colony, Transvaal, and
Portuguese East Africa, have been forced to construct
over fifty-five hundred miles of railroad in spite of the
youth of the country and the sparsity of its white
population. Even this large relative aggregate is in
adequate to the existing commercial and military
needs, and numerous extensions are already projected.5
In a like manner, our West has developed railroads
at an enormous rate, in spite of sparsity of population,
owing to the economic necessity of connecting two
opposite coasts which serve two areas of trans-oceanic
commerce. Freed from the regulating control of com
peting waterways, the western lines are in the position
of a monopoly. Hence the greater danger in their
" community of interests " system and the bitter fight
against it in the western states. The nearest rival of
the overland roads is the Straits of Magellan, though a
partial competitor is found in the sea and land route
of the Gulf of Mexico and the Isthmus of Panama.
The first serious rival will be the Isthmian Canal, which
will make itself felt as far north as the Canadian Pacific
Railroad. Owing to this lack of waterway competition
in the far West, surprising importance is acquired by
such small rivers as the Sacramento and San Joaquin
in California, which are navigable for large steamers
only to Sacramento and Stockton respectively, but
which are used extensively for passengers as well as
freight, even at the cost of personal inconvenience,
in protest against the monopoly of the Southern Pacific
Railroad. Twenty-five years after our trans-Rocky expansion

THE INLAND WATERWAYS 255
had begun in earnest, an overland railroad united the
Pacific with the Atlantic seaboard. Transportation de
velopment in the far West sprang from the trail to the
steel track, omitting the intervening stage of constructed
highroad on the one hand and unretarded by the pre
sence of waterways on the other. In the eastern half
of the United States, land routes felt everywhere in the
early days the competition of inland navigation. The
abundance of excellent waterways tended to discourage
the construction of highroads except such as led across
mountain barriers, like the old coach-road from Phil
adelphia to Pittsburg, the Cumberland National Road
from the head of canal navigation on the Potomac to
Wheeling, and ¦ the Wilderness Road across the south
ern Appalachians ; or across the axis of the prevailing
streams, like the early post-road from New York and
Philadelphia southward along the coast to Charleston,
South Carolina, or the extension of the Cumberland
National Road from Wheeling westward across the
northern tributaries of the Ohio through Columbus,
Indianapolis, Terre Haute, and Vandalia. New Eng
land, owing to its lack of inland navigation, was the
part of the country which earliest developed a complete
system of turnpikes and later of railroads; and even
to-day it is the favorite haunt of the bicycler, who else
where suffers from the fact that the country slighted
the highroad phase of communication.
Abundant waterways therefore mean prevailing water
transportation in the early stage of a country's economic
development ; the larger the size of a country and the
greater its distances, so much the stronger its need of

256 THE INLAND WATERWAYS
inland navigation, the greater the development and the
longer the survival of the same. Owing to the narrow
width of the Atlantic plain, its southeastward slope,
and the " fall line " never very far from the coast, the
career of our Atlantic rivers as avenues of transporta
tion has been short in period and limited in extent.
With the exception of the Hudson, they have served
only east and west communication. Intercourse be
tween North and South was delegated to coastwise
navigation, which here performed the function of the
Mississippi boats in the interior of the land.
The importance of these Atlantic streams was greatest
in colonial days, because, on account of the small sea
craft then in use, there was less distinction technically
between inland and marine navigation. Furthermore,
these rivers, being small, have suffered relatively more
from that necessary contraction of navigable waterways
which has resulted everywhere from the substitution of
large steamers for the shallow boats of the early period.
Finally, since in all water transportation the cost falls
largely to the expense of loading and unloading, the
small Atlantic rivers are under the economic disad
vantage of the "short haul." Hence only those have
maintained their importance which, like the Hudson,
St. Lawrence, and lower Delaware are navigable to sea
going vessels.6
It was in the great valley of the Mississippi that in
land waterways proved to be a most powerful economic
and political factor. This basin, embracing 1,240,000
square miles, containing 15,410 miles of streams navi
gable for present large river craft and having therefore

THE INLAND WATERWAYS 257
a much greater mileage in the day of canoe and pirogue,
early exploited its advantages of water communication,
all the more because of the rapid expansion of settle
ment throughout the valley, the increasing distances to
be covered, and the sparsity of its population, which
could not bear the expense or even furnish the labor
for road-making. In the pioneer days it was down
stream travel for the emigrant settler to his new home
along the Ohio, the Tennessee, and the middle Missis
sippi, as later for his produce to the market at New
Orleans ; but increasing economic development with its
more extensive exchanges made an insistent demand for
more effective upstream navigation, as for more rapid
water communication in general. Hence the introduc
tion of steam as a propelling power solved the problem
of the swift western waters.
In 1811 the banks of the Ohio first echoed to the
stroke of a steamboat's paddle-wheel ; and between 1812
and 1836 eight trans- Allegheny states were admitted
to the Union. Shipbuilding became an important
industry, centered chiefly in Pittsburg, Cincinnati,
Louisville, and St. Louis, though carried on also at
Wheeling and Marietta. All of these cities were situ
ated on the east and west waterway of navigation and
traffic ; they commanded abundant lumber supplies and
especially the iron necessary for machinery and con
struction which came from the mines on the upper Ohio
system ; and finally they commanded skilled labor from
the influx of northern settlers with industrial habits
such as were not to be found in the slaveholding region
farther south. Industrially the line of the Ohio was

258 THE INLAND WATERWAYS
a boundary zone, embracing in its lower course the
economic systems of the North and South. New Or
leans essayed steamboat building, but never developed
it as did the points along the Ohio. Her geographical
location, commanding a sea-route to the manufacturing
centers of Europe and the North Atlantic states, and a
great river highway for the downstream transportation
of her food supplies, made her independent of all craft
but sailboat and barge. The upstream men needed the
steamers. In the year 1818 five steamboats were built at Pitts
burg, one at Wheeling, four at Cincinnati, and four
at Louisville, or fourteen in all; the next year Louis
ville built twelve, Cincinnati six, Pittsburg two, Wheel
ing one, and New Orleans two, in all twenty-three for
the year 1819. The stimulating effect of the long
swift currents of the western rivers upon the building of
steamboats may be seen by a comparison of the statistics
of this industry in the Mississippi valley and along the
Atlantic coast and the Great Lakes, where sailing ves
sels were adequate to the demand of that time. Up
to 1820 there had been built upon the Great Lakes four
steamers which measured altogether 831.84 tons, and on
the Atlantic coast (exclusive of New England) fifty-two
steamers measuring 10,564 tons, as against seventy-one
steamers measuring 14,207 tons on the rivers of the
Mississippi valley. Even in the next decade, when a
continuous band of relatively dense population reached
to the southern point of Lake Huron, and the Erie
Canal had begun to stimulate traffic on these inland
seas, only eight steamers were built on the Lakes.7

THE INLAND WATERWAYS 259
In 1834 there were on the western rivers two hun
dred and thirty steamboats, with an aggregate tonnage
of 39,000, and in 1842 there were four hundred and
fifty boats measuring 90,000 tons. The number had
reached six hundred in 1843, and twelve hundred in
1848. Such a remarkable development reflects the
importance of great waterways in a new, vast, and
highly productive territory. The vessels were built for
the least draught of water, and to stem the strong
currents of the rivers. They carried heavy freight,
which included both agricultural and manufactured
products. On the large, elegantly equipped passenger
boats, which made regular winter trips between Cincin
nati or St. Louis and New Orleans, gay social life with
nightly balls gave to river travel on the Mississippi a
local color such as it acquired nowhere else. Less than
fifty years from the ripple of the fur-weighted pirogue,
paddled along by the voyageur with his buckskin
clothes and half-savage habits, to the monotonous splash
of the big paddle-wheel and the floating palace with
its lights, music, and the polished society of the gen
erous Southland.
The business of forwarding the river commerce
absorbed much of the capital and the best energy and
talent of the larger Ohio river cities. This was espe
cially the case with Louisville, which exploited the
advantages of its location at the natural obstruction
made by the falls to continuous navigation. Low water
on the falls stopped the passage of vessels over these
rapids. Louisville therefore was the natural port for
the upper Ohio, and the head of navigation for the

260 THE INLAND WATERWAYS
lower stream. Finally the increasing importance and
value of the river traffic rendered it advisable to open
a canal around the falls in 1830 ; but the tolls charged
were so exorbitant that boats plying between Louisville
and the South loaded and unloaded at Portland just
below the rapids, and the peculiarities of Louisville's
geographical location remained unaltered. Meantime,
its steamboat captains, who came from the best elements
of the community, were amassing fortunes.
Similarly St. Louis, by its dominating geographical
position at the plexus of the western waterways, became
an important agent in the commerce of the Mississippi.
Below St. Louis the depth of the Mississippi is six feet
or more, above it is only between three and five feet.
This fact has differentiated transportation on the upper
and lower river and made St. Louis a point of reship-
ment. It became the outfitting-point for the few early
steamers which, between 1813 and 1844, carried sup
plies far up the Mississippi to the Indian traders operat
ing in its upper courses and the troops stationed at
Fort Snelling, near the Falls of St. Anthony ; for the
boats running on the Missouri River to Independence
and Council Bluffs with supplies for the overland trails ;
and for the steamers of the American Fur Company,
which up till 1850 were the only ones to penetrate the
wilderness of the upper Missouri above Council Bluffs.
Once a year they set out to gather in the harvest of
the winter's hunting and trapping, advancing farther
and farther upstream as the fur-fields receded, — in
1831 to St. Pierre in South Dakota (1330 miles), and
in 1832 to Fort Union just above the mouth of the

THE INLAND WATERWAYS 261
Yellowstone (2000 miles), which long remained the head
of navigation. As population began to spread up the
line of the Missouri in western Iowa between 1859 and
1860, a weekly boat ran from St. Louis to Sioux City,
the head of navigation for larger vessels ; and when
this place became the terminus of the Sioux City and
Pacific Railroad in 1868, a steamboat company operated
in conjunction with it, carrying private, military, and
Indian freight to Fort Benton (2663 miles), the final
head of navigation.9
Meanwhile the lines of St. Louis commerce were
increasing in number and extent, and the amount of its
traffic growing from day to day. In 1845, when river
transportation was at its height and had not yet begun
to feel the competition of railroads, a report on the
river trade of St. Louis during that year records 2050
steamboat arrivals, aggregating 358,045 tons, besides
346 keel and flat boats. Of the steamers, 250 came
from New Orleans, bringing fine merchandise of foreign
or New England manufacture to exchange for the flour
and bacon of the more northerly states ; 406 came from
ports along the Ohio and its tributaries, laden with car
goes of agricultural products for the St. Louis market,
or with manufactured goods which had come in from
the Atlantic seaboard by the eastern canal routes ; 298
came from ports along the Illinois River, 643 from the
upper Mississippi, 249 from the Missouri River, and
204 from other ports, chiefly Cairo and intermediate
points.10 These figures reflect the commercial develop
ment attained by a young country because of its abun
dant waterways. The same story comes from another

262 THE INLAND WATERWAYS
source. Cairo, at the confluence of the Ohio and Mis
sissippi, had an excellent location for keeping tally on
the river traffic. A record of all vessels passing that
point during the year 1840 stated the number as 4566.
Following the progress of steam navigation and the
rapid settling of the country, the growth of commerce
on the Mississippi system was enormous, and early ini
tiated a demand for national improvements on the water
course. These were inaugurated by surveys as early as
1819, but the actual improvements began in 1827 and
followed rapidly for the next decade. The beneficiaries
at this period were the Missouri, Ohio, Wabash, Cum
berland, Tennessee, Arkansas, Red, Bayou Teche, and
the main Mississippi with the passes at its mouth. In
the early days the depth of water in the outlets sufficed
for existing vessels, but in 1875 operations were begun
to make New Orleans accessible to modern ocean steam
ers. A seaport at a great river's mouth is always the
converging point for many lines of inland and of marine
navigation. The interests of commerce demand that
the contact here of river and ocean should be as exten
sive and perfect as possible. Hence the outlet of a
great river system presents a natural field for the ex
penditure of large sums to this end, especially in a delta
region where the branching of channels multiplies the
avenues to the sea, but, owing to their tendency to silt
up or shift, require artificial aid to keep them open.
Therefore in the delta regions of the Rhine, Scheldt,
Po, and Adige, as earlier of the Nile, Ganges, and Chi
nese rivers, water communication with the sea has been
extended and secured by means of canals.11 Similarly

THE INLAND WATERWAYS 263
in the United States, the government has expended
large sums for the improvement of the passes and
bayous of the lower Mississippi. Appropriations have
secured the navigability of the Barataria, Atchafalaya,
Terrebonne, Black, and Lafourche bayous, while canals
give New Orleans additional outlets to the Gulf through
Lakes Salvador, Ponchartrain, and Borgne. In its
network of waterways the Crescent City resembles in
some degree Bruges, Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, and
other delta emporiums.
As the dividing channels of the lower stream sug
gest this extension of navigable outlets to increase the
fines of communication with the great ocean highway,
so the spreading branches of a river source which
approach or meet other such head waters over a low
divide suggest the extension of inland navigation by
the union of two drainage systems through canals.
The gentle slopes which so generally characterize the
eastern half of the United States, and the long, low
line of the watershed separating the drainage basin of
the Great Lakes from that of the Hudson and of the
Mississippi, made feasible a system of canals completing
the " Great Belt " of navigation from St. Lawrence
and New York bays to the Gulf. Every early canoe
route of river and portage over lake-dotted or swamp-
covered watershed to other river or inland lake beyond
pointed the line of a possible waterway, whose first sur
veyor was the redman coming to sell his winter's hunt
of fur, or the voyageur outbound with gaudy merchan
dise to trade in the Indian camps of the interior. Every
such trade-route from the Hudson and the Susquehanna

264 THE INLAND WATERWAYS
to the Northern Lakes, and from the long chain of lakes
to the springs of the Ohio and Mississippi, has been the
line of a projected or accomplished canal. And just
as in the days of the fur trade, the passway of the
Mohawk, Wood Creek, Lakes Oneida and Ontario en
abled the Dutch and English to draw the peltries of
the great Northwest away from the St. Lawrence down
to the Hudson, so the Erie Canal has enriched New
York with the wheat, lumber, and animal products of the
Lake region to the detriment of Montreal and Quebec ;
and so Canada to-day is projecting a short-cut ship
canal from Georgian Bay through Lake Nipissing to
the railroad down the Ottawa River, along the line of
the voyageur's interior route in the old days, in order
to secure its hold upon the growing wheat export of
Manitoba and the Northwest Territories. [See map of
Great Lakes portages.]
Men like Washington and Jefferson, who were alive
to the political as well as the commercial benefits of
communication across the country, saw the possibilities
of canals in completing the circuit of vast interior water
ways.12 " Extend the inland navigation of the eastern
waters — communicate them as near as possible with
those which run westward ; — open these to the Ohio ;
— open also such as extend from the Ohio towards
Lake Erie, — and we shall not only draw the produce
of the western settlers, but the peltry and fur trade of
the Lakes also to our ports . . . binding the people to
us by a chain which can never be broken." 13 In 1786
Congress declared all the portages between the Ohio
basin and the Great Lakes common highways. Albert

THE INLAND WATERWAYS 265
Gallatin in his famous report of 1808 M pointed out the
topographical features of the three low watersheds east
of the Mississippi rendering canal communication be
tween the East and West possible, and also the four
necks of land at the base of the Atlantic peninsulas
which could be pierced to give a shortened and pro
tected passage for coastwise navigation from Boston
to South Carolina. Many of the canals proposed in
his system had already been attempted or partially con
structed by private corporations. The Dismal Swamp
Canal (1785 to 1794) was even then bringing shingles
from the forests of North Carolina in barges of two feet
draft to Chesapeake Bay, and the Carondelet Canal
(1808) had just given New Orleans an outlet to Lake
Ponchartrain. When in July, 1825, the Delaware and
Hudson Canal from Port Jervis to Kingston was begun,
the Delaware and Chesapeake was well under way.
Raritan Bay was linked to the Delaware River at
Bordentown by an artificial channel across the neck of
the New Jersey peninsula in 1838.
The burning question for the consolidation of the
country was communication between the East and the
West. The consideration of Gallatin's plan for a water
way around the southern end of the Appalachian bar
rier by a canal five hundred and fifty miles long, from
tidewater in Georgia across the upper courses of the
Chattahoochee and Mobile rivers to the Mississippi, was
postponed by the Indian occupation of this country
till the introduction of railways had ushered in the
final stage of transportation development. The direct
course of the Potomac from the heart of the Allegheny

266 THE INLAND WATERWAYS
Mountains suggested a canal over the watershed to
the sources of the Ohio. The channel was constructed
from Washington to Cumberland, but there abandoned
as impracticable. The zigzag course of the Pennsyl
vania rivers across the Appalachian system, the general
parallelism of their flow from northwest to southeast,
and the interlocking of their tributaries in the high
mountain valleys between suggested the utilization of
even this mountain topography for canal communica
tion with the Ohio. The Schuylkill, Lehigh, and Lack
awanna were canalled along their lower course, but no
means were found to extend any one of these links west
ward across the intervening range to the Susquehanna ;
so for this stretch a railroad between Philadelphia and
Columbia was substituted. The transmontane canal be
gan therefore at Harrisburg, a little farther up the Sus
quehanna, and followed this stream and its western tribu
tary, the Juniata, to the base of the Allegheny range.
There another short railroad over the summit (2491 feet
elevation) made the connection with the western canal
down the Conemaugh and Allegheny rivers to Pittsburg.
This Portage Railroad, as it was called, took the place
of ;i proposed tunnel canal forty-two miles long.
This circuitous and complex route, made up of river,
canal, and railway, though valuable as an outlet for the
mineral products of Pennsylvania, could not serve the
purpose of a trans-Appalachian canal. That destiny
was left for the Mohawk depression, where the moun
tains drop to an elevation of only 445 feet above ocean
level and where the inland objective was not a single
river system like the Ohio with a navigable depth of

THE INLAND WATERWAYS 267
five feet, but a chain of interior seas with coast-line of
nearly 4000 miles, navigable to large vessels propelled
by steam or sail, and affording in their turn canal com
munication to all the vast territory contained in the
mighty angle of the Ohio and upper Mississippi.
The first suggestion of the Erie Canal came as a
proposition in the New York legislature in 1785 for
the improvement of inland navigation at various points
between Albany and Oswego. As the idea of a contin
uous canal developed, Lake Ontario was still regarded as
its western terminus. This was the canal embodied in
Gallatin's report, though even in 1808 the superiority
of a longer route direct to Lake Erie was discussed and
a proposition for its survey made in the New York
assembly. The exploration of this route disclosed the
fact that the series of elevated lakes in central New
York would exclude the necessity of constructing ex
pensive reservoirs on the summit level, since the canal
would occupy the depression which received the outlet
streams of these natural basins. Here was everything
needful for a cross-country waterway of 363 miles ; a
deep river leading northward from one of the finest
ports in the land, a tributary stream from the west
flowing down from a broad low mountain gap, lake
feeders on the summit, and a terminus on a line of
inland seas.
The competition of Lake Ontario and the St. Law
rence was already deflecting the greater part of New
York's internal commerce to Canadian ports, and the
Susquehanna was carrying off much of its produce
to Chesapeake Bay. Then came the War of 1812,

268 THE INLAND WATERWAYS
demonstrating the strategic necessity of a protected,
wholly American line of water communication with our
western frontier, one which should avoid the exposed
stretch of Lake Ontario and the obstacle of Niagara
Falls. Military as well as commercial considerations
dictated the wisdom of extending an arm of this canal
up to Lake Champlain, which in the recent hostilities
had occupied as dangerous and isolated a position as
had Lake Erie at the time of Perry's operations, and
which possessed a further strategic importance as a
natural avenue from the Canadian boundary. Another
branch from the main canal at Salina to Oswego on'
Lake Ontario completed the hold of New York on its
frontier lakes. Thus the Hudson River became the
channel through which three distinct streams of com
merce moved down to the port in New York Bay, when
1825 saw the formal opening of this great interior
waterway. The next year, nineteen thousand boats and
rafts from the Erie and Champlain canals filed past
West Troy on their way down the river. Shipbuilding
grew up as a regular industry on Lake Champlain, to
furnish transportation for the staves, shingles, boards,
and potashes seeking the big market to the south.
Warehouses sprang up along the canal bank at Buffalo
to receive the grain, lumber, rails, whiskey, fur and
peltry to be forwarded to the seaboard, while boats
coming through the canal from the east brought car
goes of salt, furniture, and general merchandise to the
bustling Lake Erie port.
, The Erie Canal fixed the destiny of New York City,
forced it rapidly to preeminence as the national port

THE INLAND WATERWAYS 269
of entry, and as the center of our export trade. It
shifted the great trans- Allegheny route away from the
Potomac, out of the belt of the slaveholding, agricul
tural South to the free, industrial North, and placed it
at the back door of New England, whence poured
westward a tide of Puritan emigrants, infusing elements
of vigorous conscience and energy into all the northern
zone of states from the Genesee River to the Missouri
and Minnesota. The prairie lands which these new
Westerners cultivated were, by means of the Lakes and
the Erie Canal, made tributary to the growing metro
polis at the mouth of the Hudson. New York became
now commercially, as formerly it had been in a military
sense, the keystone of the Atlantic shore arch. Balti
more, Philadelphia, and Boston lost much of their im
portance, and did not regain it even in part until rail
roads enabled them to reestablish interior connections.
The local effects in central New York State were
equally marked. The farmer found wheat quadrupled
in price and the timber from his newly cleared land in
reach of the market, for transportation from Buffalo to
Albany declined in the twenty-six years after the open
ing of the canal from $88 to $5.98 a ton. But the
farmer about Cleveland or Detroit also profited by these
advantages. The consequence was that the price of
land along the Erie Canal did not rise as rapidly as was
anticipated, because the cheap and abundant prairie
lands along the upper lakes were drawn like their pro
ducts into the market, on the economic principle that
every extension of transportation facilities tends to
enlarge the area of competition.

270 THE INLAND WATERWAYS
However, there was compensation in the industrial
impulse given by the abundant water-power developed
by the canal and its feeders from the upland lakes.
Mills and manufactories of great importance sprang up
along the entire length of the New York state canals,
as later on the Ohio canals. Especially pails, tubs, and
woodenware were fashioned out of the adjacent forest
by turning lathes run by water. The manufactured
products found a market east and west by the Erie
Canal. Water-power though cheap is local and immo
bile ; hence it must command transportation facilities,
or however perfect technically it is unavailable. Along
the Erie Canal the water-power was one with the water
way, and for this reason reproduced in part the
economico-geographical advantages of New England's
early manufacturing towns which were situated along
the line where river falls and ocean tide met.
Upon the West the Erie Canal had a marked effect,
not only by carrying thither new accessions of popula
tion and bringing out its produce, but also by stimu
lating the western states to open up their interiors by
canals in order to profit by the through waterway to
the East. This influence was first felt in Ohio, whose
long lake frontier on the north, narrow width between
Lake Erie and the navigable course of the Ohio on the
south and east, full-flowing interior rivers, and general
location near to the western terminus of the canal, sug
gested the feasibility and advantages of an extensive
system of artificial waterways, while its relatively dense
population, due to its proximity and accessibility to old
centers of settlement in the East, enabled the state to

THE INLAND WATERWAYS 271
sustain the cost of such improvements. Soon after the
work on the Erie Canal had been commenced in 1819,
the subject came up before the Ohio legislature. Out
of four possible routes — the Great Miami and Maumee
valleys, the Sandusky and Scioto rivers, the Cuyahoga
and Muskingum, and the Grand and Mahoning — two
were chosen. Between 1825 and 1835 the Miami Canal
(265 miles) was constructed, uniting Cincinnati with the
Maumee, and the Ohio Canal (306 miles), connecting
Portsmouth on the Ohio with Cleveland, by way of the
Scioto, middle Muskingum, and Cuyahoga valleys. The
effect upon the growth and prosperity of the state was
enormous, especially of that large central area of prairie
farms which had hitherto formed an isolated district,
cut off from the highways both of the Ohio and the
Lakes, but which now felt the stimulating effect of
increased intercourse to the north and to the south.
Cleveland and Toledo developed into active lake ports,
holding a geographic position similar to that of New
York, while Akron, Massillon, and other manufacturing
points near the summit level of the canal flourished
by reason of the accessible water-power, as did Rome,
Syracuse, and Rochester in central New York.
The stimulating effects of the Erie Canal were felt
still further west. Indiana was eager to take advan
tage of the low watershed in the northeastern part of
her territory to unite the Wabash with the Maumee,
and Lake Michigan with Lake Erie ; but her plans of
internal improvement were so extensive that the sparse
population of a new state could not sustain the ex
pense, and works half completed had to be abandoned.

272 THE INLAND WATERWAYS
The route of the fur-traders from Lake Michigan down
the Illinois, which seemed peculiarly adapted to canal
ization, early (1816) attracted national attention as a
military and commercial waterway between the Missis
sippi and Lake Michigan. The massacre at the mouth
of the Chicago River in the War of 1812 emphasized
the isolation of the northwest lakes. In 1817 Major
Long in his report to Congress regarded such a canal
as " first in importance of any in this quarter of the
country ; " but though projected in 1825, owing to
difficulties both technical and financial, it was not
opened till 1848, and then proved disappointing as an
investment, chiefly because the upper Illinois River
needed artificial aid to make it navigable to any but
small craft. The same difficulty was present in the
waterway of Green Bay, Fox River, and the Wisconsin.
The canal connecting the great bend of the Wisconsin
with the Upper Fox was only two and one third miles
long, but the sand-bars of the Wisconsin, the shallow,
tortuous course of the Upper Fox, and the numerous
rapids necessitating canals on the lower river, robbed
this waterway of much of its value, and made it suc
cumb rapidly to railroad competition. These western
channels over the Great Lakes watershed, being con
structed later (1848-53) than the Erie and Ohio canals,
because on the frontier of settlement, felt the deadening
grip of the railroad before their traffic had become
established, and suffered moreover the disadvantage of
reaching less navigable outlets into the Mississippi
River. The last extension of the Great Lakes waterway to

THE INLAND WATERWAYS 273
the west was the canal at the Sault Sainte Marie, which
made Lake Superior accessible. The Erie Canal, by
tapping Lake Erie above Niagara Falls, left to Canada
the work of constructing the Welland Canal ; but the
eighteen feet ascent by lock from Lake Michigan to
the level of Lake Superior was a natural task for the
United States because of her longer coast-line and
hence stronger interests in these more northern lakes.
Commercial and military considerations led Canada to
construct a similar channel on her side of the line, since
Lake Superior is a link in the, vast land and water
route formed by the Atlantic, St. Lawrence River,
Great Lakes, Canadian Pacific Railroad, and Pacific
Ocean, which unites England with her colonies in Aus
tralia and the Orient.
The " Soo " Canal, opened in 1856, deepened to a
ship canal in 1877, deepened again to twenty feet in
1896, developed its full importance only when it re
duced the cost of transportation by admitting large
vessels. Its consequences then were far-reaching. It
brought about the transfer of the iron industry from
the eastern to the western side of the Alleghenies.
The iron ore from northern Michigan and Wisconsin
is now carried at low freight rates to the manufactur
ing points in Illinois, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania,
but a return westbound traffic in coal from the Erie
ports fills the otherwise empty vessels, is carried there
fore at the very low rate of thirty cents per ton to
Duluth, and renders possible the manufacture of iron
near the mines.15 Since 1881 iron ore has formed
about one half the tonnage through the canal.

274 THE INLAND WATERWAYS
While the " Soo " Canal has given great impulse to
the manufacturing interests along the southern borders
of Lakes Michigan and Erie, it has brought large acces
sion of population to the Lake Superior counties of
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, stimulated the
growth of Lake Superior ports like Duluth, Superior
City, and Ashland, and occasioned the development of
railroads westward into the Red River valley, whence
comes the flour, wheat, and other grains which help
swell the freight of the " Soo " traffic, and make it
larger than that of the Suez Canal.
Rapidly increasing commerce has demanded larger
vessels constructed on the most approved pattern and
made of steel. The mines near the Lakes provided the
material for these and in turn furnished the cargo for
the craft when ready for service. The result has been
an enormous increase of our merchant marine on the
Lakes since the deepening of the " Soo " passage. In
1877 our lake tonnage was only one fifth of the total
on the Atlantic, Gulf, and Pacific coasts ; in 1887 it
was less than one fourth ; in 1901 the tonnage on
the two oceans, exclusive of the small additions com
ing to us by the acquisition of Hawaii and Porto Rico,
was 3,526,024 and that of the Northern Lakes was
1,706,294, or nearly half.16 The tonnage constructed
on the Lakes in the fiscal year ending June, 1901, com
prised very nearly one half the total constructed in the
United States, but nearly two thirds of the tonnage of
steel steamers.17
Canada and the United States are natural competi
tors for the commerce of the Great Lakes. Our north-

THE INLAND WATERWAYS 275
ern neighbor, by her system of deep canals, has com
pleted fourteen foot navigation from Lake Superior to
Montreal, while the shallow Erie Canal, with its small
locks, excludes all but the smallest craft. Montreal suf
fers, however, from the dangerous navigation of the
Lower St. Lawrence, which imposes a very high rate of
insurance on vessels bound for Canadian ports. Hence
the Erie Canal, despite its limitations, gets nearly two
thirds of the outgoing freight which seeks the seaboard
by water. However, the fact that a large part of the
traffic on these inland seas is limited to exchange be
tween Superior and the southern Lakes, and the fact
that the raw material worked up in the big manufac
tures of Illinois, Ohio, and western Pennsylvania comes
out as finished commodities capable of bearing the heavy
charges of rail transportation to the seaboard, decrease
the amount of freight moving by canal to Atlantic
ports and act to the detriment both of New York and
Montreal. New York is face to face with the problem of con
verting the Erie into a ship canal. The necessity is
urgent, for its old preeminence is passing from the great
port at the mouth of the Hudson. Philadelphia, Balti
more, Norfolk, and even New Orleans are gaining omi
nously, and the end is not yet. The latest report of
the New York commerce indicates not only a relative
but an absolute falling off. The warm discussion of
the proposed improvement of the Erie Canal in the
New York assembly of 1902 showed the importance
of the subject. The project to deepen the canal to nine
feet and enlarge its locks, or the other proposition to

276 THE INLAND WATERWAYS
give it twelve foot navigation for barges of one thou
sand tons, though ambitious schemes, and, because of
the great debt to be incurred, disheartening even to the
commercial courage of the Empire State, are themselves
inadequate and point to the alternative of national in
itiative. This is justified from the geographical stand
point. Eight states, embracing 416,360 square miles and a
population of 27,150,437, border upon the Great Lakes
and will profit by a ship canal outlet, which, moreover,
would draw upon the contiguous territory of Canada.
The chain of the Great Lakes is an interior sea, afford
ing the largest system of deep water inland navigation
on the globe. This system, with a general direction
east and west, extends from tidewater on the St. Law
rence and, by the Erie Canal, from tidewater at New
York 1400 miles into the heart of the continent ; from
its western extremity at the head of Lake Superior the
distance to the Pacific Ocean is only 1700 miles. It
bears a yearly traffic of 40,000,000 tons, carried in 3253
vessels, and it serves our iron industry and grain ex
port, two of the most important economic interests of
the United States. The outlet from this system should
be a national enterprise.
The Erie Canal was constructed in the light of ex
perience of the War of 1812. Our Lake shore remains
a frontier coast of a thousand miles, and across the zone
of water, which has become our busiest thoroughfare,
lies a foreign power. A war with England in view of
our present friendly relations seems improbable, but na
tional friendships are fitful things. A deepened Erie

THE INLAND WATERWAYS 277
Canal, admitting the smaller vessels of the navy in time
of war, would have a military importance similar in kind,
though less in degree, to that of the future Isthmian
Canal, or the proposed Mediterranean-Garonne Valley
Canal of France, or the Baltic-Black of Russia. All
mean the uniting of two separated water frontiers. In
the case of the Great Lakes this connecting- fink is the
more important because the St. Lawrence River and
the Canadian ship canals are large enough to admit
English vessels. From the military point of view, then,
this improvement is a task for the national government.
The very greatness of the natural resources of the
United States accelerated the rate at which these re
sources were exploited. Production finally outstripped
distribution, in spite of river and canal. The rapid
development of our railroads was a protest against the
economic inadequacy of inland waterways. A traffic
interrupted by ice in winter and drought in summer,
retarded by slow passage through canal or tortuous
river course, trammeled by the geographic control of this
or that port of outlet regardless of the final destination
of the cargo, would not answer the wants of a country
which had reached advanced economic development.
The palmy days of water transportation in the United
States were in the period from 1820 to 1860, when
steamboating had improved its facilities, canals had
extended the system of inland navigation, and railroads
had not yet begun seriously to invade the province of
our waterways, because the general economic develop
ment of the country had not yet passed beyond the
agricultural stage. The bulky but cheap products of

278 THE INLAND WATERWAYS
forest and farm found their economically appropriate
transportation in the low-priced water carriage of that
period. But with our industrial development came
costly manufactured articles of relatively small bulk
and large value, which were able to bear the heavier
expense of railroad transportation. Hence we find that
railroads developed earliest in the industrial areas of
this country and waterways retained their value longest
in the agricultural and forest regions. Even to-day
rivers maintain their original significance only in eco
nomically retarded agricultural regions, as in Arkansas
and northern Louisiana, and in the undeveloped area
of the Cumberland Plateau, where the government im
provements on the Great Kanawha, Big Sandy, Licking,
and Kentucky tributaries of the Ohio, the Caney and
Obey branches of the Cumberland, and the head streams
of the Tennessee have proved a boon to the country.
Here a commerce of lumber, railroad ties, barrel staves,
and shingles is followed quickly by cargoes of agricul
tural and mining products, and the appearance of the
latter will be the signal for the invading railroad, which
seeks always areas of intenser economic activity and
the concomitant denser population. The decline in the
commerce of the Mississippi and its chief tributaries
has everywhere been more than counterbalanced by im
provement of small affluents opening up new districts.18
NOTES TO CHAPTER XIII
1. Ratzel, Politische Geographie der Vereinigten Staaten, p. 19.
2. Ratzel, Anthropogeographie, p. 341. 1899.
3. E. C. Semple, Development of the Hanse Towns, Bull. Amer. Geog.
Soc, vol. xxxi. no. 3.

THE INLAND WATERWAYS 279
4. Ratzel, Anthropogeographie, p. 342. 1899.
5. C. Key, Railway Development in Federated South Africa, Engi
neering Magazine, May, 1902.
Statesman's Yearbook of 1903.
6. Ratzel, Politische Geographie der Vereinigten Staaten, p. 539.
7. Eleventh Census, Transportation, vol. ii. pp. 247 and 396, 397.
8. James Hall, The West, its Commerce and Navigation, pp. 166-194.
1848.
9. Eleventh Census, Transportation, vol. ii. p. 399.
10. Ibid. p. 397.
11. Ratzel, Anthropogeographie, p. 343. 1899.
12. Winsor, The Westward Movement, pp. 248-256.
13. Washington, Letter to Governor Harrison of Virginia.
14. American State Papers, Misc. vol. i. no. 250, Washington. 1834.
15. Fairlie, Economic Effects of the Ship Canals, Annals of the Amer
ican Academy, January, 1898.
16. United States Report of Commission of Navigation, p. 10. 1901.
17. Ibid. p. 17.
18. Eleventh Census, Transportation, vol. ii. pp. 418, 419.

CHAPTER XIV
THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR
" Civilization is at bottom an economic fact," at top
an ethical fact. Beneath the economic lie the geo
graphical conditions, and these in the last analysis are
"factors in the formation of ethical standards. The
question of slavery in the United States was primarily
a question of climate and soil, a question of rich allu
vial valley and fertile coast-land plain, with a warm,
moist, enervating climate, versus rough mountain up
land and glaciated prairie or coast, with a colder,
harsher, but more bracing climate. The morale of the
institution, like the right of secession, was long a
mooted question, until New England, having discov
ered the economic unfitness of slave industry for her
boulder-strewn soil, took the lead in the crusade against
it. The South, by the same token of geographical
conditions, but conditions favorable to the plantation
system which alone made slave labor profitable, upheld
the institution both on economic and moral grounds.
Various circumstances combined to postpone the
South's discovery of the economic unfitness of her in
dustrial system. The presence of slavery was a deter
rent to white immigration into the southern states and
encouraged emigration of their unmoneyed whites into
the free states, or withdrawal apart into the mountain

GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR 281
region of the southern Appalachians, whither the com
petition of the plantation method of production could
not pursue them. Furthermore, the rapid territorial
expansion of the slave power, due to rapid exhaustion
of the soil by the extensive agriculture characteristic of
slave industry and the consequent need of taking up
new lands, stimulated also by the increased demand for
cotton which followed the invention of the spinning-
jenny, maintained a sparsity of white population, which,
being unrelieved by new accessions from without,
reduced the competition of the whites among them
selves, kept down the beneficent struggle for existence
tending to produce a white laboring class, and thus
barred the experiment of free labor on the cotton and
sugar plantations.
The South thus maintained beyond its time the lavish
economic conditions of a new land, namely, extensive
area and sparse population. The relation of the planters
to their territory recalls the still more expansive and
therefore less economic hold of the fur-trading French
Canadians upon their wide country. In both cases
climate and soil, in the South too generous, in the
Canadian North too niggardly, combined, moreover,
with geographic conditions favoring expansion across
the broad Mississippi valley, as along the Great Lakes
highway into the vast forest interior, brought about
similar economic results. Hence the South found its
basis of political ascendency in its mere extent of terri
tory, and its life and death struggle was made in the
United States Senate, while the denser population of
the northern states gave them control in Congress.

282 GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR
The balanced admission of slave and free states into
the Union became a regular feature of political man
euvers ; but the North had more raw material in the
form of government territory out of which to form
states than had the South. And here, too, geograph
ical conditions played a conspicuous part. The bound
ary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, running just
below the fortieth parallel, was the original Mason and
Dixon Line dividing the free and slave states ; but by
the Ordinance of 1787, forbidding slavery in all terri
tory north of the Ohio, this river became the extension
of the line of demarcation, which, therefore, following
the southwest course of the stream to its mouth at
approximately the thirty-seventh parallel, encroached
three degrees southward beyond the original Mason and
Dixon Line. The early settlements in southeastern Mis
souri along the Mississippi at Cape Girardeau and New
Madrid, in the days of French and Spanish supremacy
here, were located in reference to the Ohio as the great
river route from the East. These settlements had to be
included in the young state of Missouri as admitted in
1820, and also in the privileges, one of them the right
of holding slaves, guaranteed to them by the treaty of
the Louisiana Purchase. Hence the Missouri Compro
mise Line at 36° 30' north latitude can be traced back
in its origin to the Ohio.
This line was of vast importance to the North. In
1820 the possible slave area east of the Mississippi,
increased by the slave state of Louisiana, was nearly
23 per cent, greater than the area devoted to free labor
(512,695 square miles as opposed to 417,680 square

GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR 283
miles), although the southward trend of the dividing
line from 40° to 36° 30' north latitude deprived the slave
power of a broad belt of territory. In the triangular
area of the Louisiana Purchase, however, with its apex
at the Gulf, there was now space for only two other
states south of this line, and the westernmost of these
was soon devoted to Indian reservations. The reces
sion of the Rocky Mountain watershed farther and
farther to the northwest increased so much the domain
of the free states. But the enormous acquisitions of
territory following the annexation of Texas and the
Mexican War in 1850 meant a possible extension of
the slave power to the Pacific, according to the terms
of the Missouri Compromise. However, geographic
factors came in to wipe out the purely artificial line of
36° 30' north latitude. California, in consequence of its
remote trans-Rocky location, had received no negro ele
ment and had been populated largely by emigrants
from the northern states or by small farmers from the
southern states. Hence it declared as a free state in
applying for entrance to the Union in 1850, though its
southern portion fell within slave territory according to
the Missouri Compromise.
The sectional feeling originating in differences of
climate and soil was further accentuated by the lack
of intercourse between the North and South. The
great natural routes of communication, the Potomac-
Ohio and the Erie Canal-Great Lakes, as also the chief
railroad lines of 1860, ran east and west. Moreover,
intercourse along these routes was particularly active
because their real termini were to be found, not in

284 GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR
Savannah, Charleston, Norfolk, Baltimore, New York,
or Boston, but still farther east across the Atlantic in
the ports of western Europe. The coast trade between
the two rival sections touched only the outer rim of the
southern country. Even the north and south course of
the Mississippi, strong natural bond as it was in the whole
trans-Appalachian region, did not suffice to offset the
East's hold upon the states of the old Northwest secured
by the double line of the Ohio and the Great Lakes.
Nor were the uniting influences of these great routes
confined within the boundaries of the free-soil states.
Geography knows no rigid lines of demarcation, no
sharp transitions. The geographical unity of a river
valley tends to be reflected in the homogeneity of its
population, a homogeneity not only of constituent race
elements but also of institutions and ideals. Hence
along the line of the Potomac, Ohio, and Missouri there
arose the phenomenon of the " border states," common
wealths not merely located along the northern bound
ary of the slave territory, but forming in themselves
a great zone of assimilation of the conflicting elements
to the north and south of them, and showing the inner
and outer friction which belongs to every frontier.
Kentucky and Missouri, by reason of soil, climate,
their industrial system, and their geographical lines of
intercourse with the Gulf country, were in sympathy
with the South. But though a large part of their
population had come from Virginia, North Carolina, and
Maryland, it had been drawn to a great extent from
the non-slaveholdiug yeomen of the Blue Ridge frontier
who had moved west by the Wilderness Road. At the

GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR 285
same time the Ohio drew from its sources in Penn
sylvania and New York northern farmers and artisans,
or outbound immigrants and settlers moving along the
National Road to Wheeling ; many of these it deposited
along its southern shores or carried further west into
Missouri, which was receiving similar accession also by
way of the Great Lakes. These men of northern or
yeoman descent were at best merely tolerant of slavery.
When it came to a question of slavery or the Union,
their answer was prompt and decisive.
After a brief civil conflict, Missouri was secured to
the Federal side. In Kentucky the strong planter ele
ment in the Bluegrass, the aristocracy of the state, was
balanced by this yeoman element, by the industrial
and foreign residents within its northern border, and
especially by the non-slaveholding population in the
rough uplands of the Cumberland Plateau. Mountain
economy found no place for the negro or plantation
cultivation in those sterile hillside farms, pathless for
ests, and roadless valleys. "The dwellers in the lime
stone formation, where the soil was rich, gave heavy
pro-slavery majorities, while those living on the poorer
sandstone soils were generally anti-slavery. This geo
logical distribution of politics was common through
out the South." 1 The whole region of the southern
Appalachians had therefore no sympathy with the
industrial system of the South ; it shared, moreover, in
contrast to the aristocratic social organization of the
planter community, the democratic spirit characteristic
of all mountain people, and likewise their conservatism,
which holds to the established order.

286 GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR
Hence when the rupture came between the North
and South, the mountains declared for the nation, and
thus formed a barrier of disaffection through the center
of the southern states, all the more serious because
coincident with the physical obstruction of the uplifted
ranges. But this area of Union sympathy, because of
its poverty, isolation, and remoteness from the Federal
base, remained ineffective as regards positive assistance
to the operations of the Union armies until after the
fall of Chattanooga, though its moral support was
always strong. One of the Kentucky mountain coun
ties enjoys the distinction of having furnished to the
Federal army the largest quota of troops in proportion
to its population of any county in the Union. The
uplands of East Tennessee put in a vigorous protest
against disunion when that state seceded, and soon
after the outbreak of hostilities endeavored to withdraw
from the commonwealth. The same thing was true in
the mountains of western North Carolina, northern
Georgia, Alabama, and even in the hill country of South
Carolina. West Virginia, a wholly mountainous region,
dominated, moreover, through its northward-flowing
streams by the upper Ohio, split off from its parent
state. The geographical line of cleavage is instruct
ive. It tells of the natural antagonism between upland
and lowland.
Long-standing conflict of interests between the tide
water and highland counties of old Virginia had
prompted schemes of separation prior to 1850, and in
that year a new constitution was drawn up to right the
grievances of the western section. When the perma-

GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR 287
nent break came in 1861, the first ordinance for the
new state adopted at Wheeling included only the coun
ties west of the Allegheny range proper, and drew the
boundary line along the mountain crest. The Old
Dominion maintained its hold to the south upon the
wide, fertile Valley of Virginia and thereby upon the
New River, a West Virginia stream ; but to the north
the younger commonwealth encroached over the pro
posed dividing ridge east to the Shenandoah or Great
North Mountain and its northern extension, the Sleepy
Creek range. When erected into a separate state by
the bill of Congress, July 10, 1862, West Virginia thus
extended only to the western rim of the Shenandoah
Valley. This district was geographically a part of the
Valley of Virginia, and like it was adapted to planta
tion culture ; but the two counties Berkeley and Jeffer
son in the lower end of the Valley, by their outpost
location on the bank of the Potomac, were the natural
recipients of northern settlers coming down the great
trough of the Appalachians. Therefore in the summer
of 1863, when most of the Confederate sympathizers
were off fighting in the South, these two counties by a
vote of the resident population were admitted to West
Virginia: hence the erratic eastern boundary of the
new state.2
The topography of West Virginia made it the sole
aggressively loyal state of the border. Kentucky's
attitude of declared neutrality was logical in view of the
even balance of northern and southern sympathizers
within her boundaries, but futile in the light of geo
graphical conditions. A state situated on the outskirts

288 GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR
of the scene of the war, like Kansas or Michigan, might
have maintained such a neutrality. Wedged in between
the Confederacy and the Union, Kentucky stretched its
great length east and west from the Appalachians to
the Mississippi across the very threshold of the South.
Traversing its territory, the Mississippi, Tennessee, and
Cumberland rivers opened up parallel avenues for an
invading army into the heart of the Confederacy, while
Cumberland Gap and the great intermontane valley of
East Tennessee afforded a protected highway from the
borders of the Bluegrass country to northern Georgia.
Kentucky therefore throughout its length presented a
strategic area, which was of paramount importance to
the South, moreover, because the Ohio River along its
northern border, bridgeless and almost fordless, pre
sented the one strong defensible line in the Mississippi
valley. Hence both sides made a dash for the posses
sion of the state, invaded its boundaries in spite of legis
lative proclamation, and forced it from its neutrality.
The territory of Kentucky was added to the area of
the Union ; but the flower of its manhood marched
across the border into Tennessee to join the standard
of the South.
In Maryland also geographical location was the all
powerful factor in determining the destiny of the state.
Here the predominant tidewater area and corresponding
planter population made the secessionist feeling very
strong; but Maryland's location behind the Potomac
made it a highway for the northern troops hurried
forward to the defense of the national capital, and
therefore insured its prompt occupation by the Federal

GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR 289
forces. The security of Washington was not the only
object to be gained. The possession of Maryland
meant the possession of Chesapeake Bay, a protected
sea route to the gaping estuaries of the Virginia rivers.
The adherence of West Virginia and Maryland to
the Union left the Old Dominion state a political pe
ninsula projecting into a sea of hostile territory on the
west and north, while the waters of Chesapeake Bay on
the east were controlled by the enemy's fleet. This
exposed position in itself insured Virginia a large share
of the conflicts. To this was added the fact that the
apex of her peninsula commanded the Federal capital,
while the base sheltered the head of the Confederacy.
The country between the Potomac and the James,
therefore, became one continuous battle-field in the
defensive and aggressive operations of both armies
throughout the war.
The campaigns in Virginia were controlled largely
by three geographical features, — the north and south
reach of Chesapeake Bay, which enabled Federal troops
to be transported by sea to any point on the Virginia
coast, and later, when command of the James and York
rivers was secured, supplies to be carried up to the
forces occupied in the operations against Richmond or
Petersburg ; the southeast course of the Virginia rivers
across the lines of advance or retreat ; and finally the
all important Shenandoah Valley, which, as a protected
highway for a northward-marching army, enabled a
Confederate force to threaten Washington just as surely
as Chesapeake Bay rendered Richmond's position un
safe. In almost every movement and counter-movement

290 GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR
of Federal and Confederate army these three elements
of bay, river, and mountain valley played their parts.
A line running through Greenville, Petersburg, Rich
mond, Hanover, Fredericksburg, Manassas, Fairfax, and
Washington indicates with a fair degree of accuracy the
"fall line" which divides tidewater from Piedmont in
Virginia. East of this line, which marks also the short
est route between the two capitals, the country is low,
swampy, and cut by numerous parallel rivers which made
the movements of an invading army difficult. Hence,
with the exception of those engagements resulting from
the advance up the James and York rivers on Richmond
from Chesapeake Bay, all the great conflicts on Virginia
soil were west of this line of one hundred feet elevation.
Moreover, they had a definite situation in reference to
the transverse streams, every one of which, from the
Rappahannock and Rapidan south to the little Chicka-
hominy and the Appomattox, was a natural line of
defense for Richmond.
These battles of Piedmont Virginia marked the line
of invasion which geographical conditions finally forced
upon the Federal commanders. McClellan, in the
spring of 1862, trying to avoid the difficulties of an
advance across the tidewater country, took his army by
Chesapeake Bay up the York and the James against
Richmond; but the failure of his campaign was due
not so much to Lee's valiant defense of the Confederate
capital as to the fact that Washington had been left
exposed by the withdrawal of the forces to the southeast,
whence they could not watch the danger lurking in the
Shenandoah Valley. Therefore, when in the fall of

GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR 291
1862 a second advance on Richmond was proposed,
McClellan's plan to go by sea again was rejected, and
Burnside, who succeeded him in command, selected a
route through central Virginia. The southward course
of the Potomac was utilized for transportation to the
great eastward bend at Acquia Creek just north of Fred
ericksburg on the Rappahannock, whose upper course
from this point forms a natural extension westward of
the line of the lower Potomac. The upper Rappahannock
became therefore the Confederate line of defense. The
concentration of Lee's forces at Fredericksburg, his
entrenched position on the heights which mark the
beginning of the Piedmont country, the difficulty and
delay of the Federal advance across the Rappahannock
by pontoons and ferry-boats while Confederate sharp
shooters did their deadly work, all combined to bring
about the disastrous repulse of the invading force.
The Rappahannock, about halfway between the two
capitals, long remained the line of defense of both
Federals and Confederates. Rifle-pits drew furrows
along its banks, and pickets bristled at every ford and
bridge. The southward course of the Potomac from
Washington to Acquia and the possession of Maryland
early gave northeast Virginia into the hands of the
Federals ; but the Rappahannock marked the limit
where the Confederates could thus be taken in the east
flank. Hence it saw the battle of Fredericksburg in
'62, the bloody repulse again at Chancellorsville in '63,
and the hard-won breach for the advancing Federals at
the battles of the Wilderness in '64.
The line of the Rappahannock was especially advan-

292 GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR
tageous to the Confederates because its head waters led
up to the northern passes in the Blue Ridge which gave
access to the Shenandoah Valley, the third important
geographic factor in the operations in Virginia. It is
the nature of mountains to lend themselves to strategy.
Their rocky ramparts conceal the movements of the
armies within their ranges and protect them from unex
pected attack. Their passes open the way for sudden
swoops down upon the enemy in the plain, and for
rapid retreat again, which may be covered by a small
force holding the narrow mountain gateway against the
pursuing enemy. Mountains are always primarily bar
riers ; passes, as the breaches in this barrier, are stra
tegic points having a military and political history of
their own ; the longitudinal valleys are the natural
highways, in general easy, along the axis of the upland
region within its guarding walls. For example, the
Hindu Kush bars out expanding Russia from Afghan
istan, but from their base in the plateau oasis of Merv
the Muscovite armies have moved southward up the
Murghab River to where its spreading head streams com
mand the passes of the western Hindu Kush, much as the
sources of the Rappahannock and Rapidan ramify to a
series of gaps in the Blue Ridge. Muscovite posts hold
also the parallel stream of the Tejend, and are creeping up
its course to the wide breach in the mountain wall known
as the " Gates of Herat ; " for from this point the
upper stream, known as the Heri Rud, flowing down
a longitudinal valley of the Hindu Kush system, leads
eastward through a fertile country to easy passes which
carry the national highway of northern Afghanistan

GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR 293
over to the sources of the Cabul River, and thence down
this stream to the Khyber Pass and the teeming plains
of the Indus. Mountain, valley, and pass have figured
conspicuously for the past twenty-five years in the
British councils of India.
All of these phases came into play in the military
history of the Shenandoah Valley. As a part of the
Great Appalachian Valley, we have seen how, in the
period of colonial expansion, it received population from
the Great Valley in Pennsylvania, and passed on some
of its own elements to the valley of East Tennessee ;
so now its military history had definite relations with
Hagerstown, Chambersburg, and Carlisle to the north,
Wytheville, Knoxville, and Chattanooga to the south.
Moreover, the Shenandoah Valley as a factor in the
campaigns of the Atlantic plain had a counterpart, with
only local variants, in the relation of the valley of East
Tennessee to the operations in the Mississippi basin.
In each case a mountain barrier and an isolated valley
highway flanked the movements in the adjacent low
lands. Cumberland Gap and the pass formed by the
Tennessee River at Chattanooga were the two openings
in the escarpment wall of the Cumberland Plateau giv
ing access to the valley of East Tennessee, and hence
were the two strategic mountain points in the western
operations. But the numerous " wind gaps " which
notch the crest of the Blue Ridge every few miles made
the Shenandoah Valley much more accessible, enabled
the two armies in Virginia to play a game of hide-and-
seek in and out behind the barrier, and gave the Con
federates opportunity for unexpected dashes through

294 GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR
these gateways either for attack or support, as in the
case of Joseph Johnston's timely descent through
Manassas Gap to reinforce the Southern troops at the
first battle of Bull Run.
Napoleon said that Antwerp, as an outlet of the
Rhine, was a pistol pointed at the heart of England.
Now the deep groove of the Shenandoah was a pistol
in the hands of the Confederacy, pointed at the heart
of the Union, and from its barrel poured the deadly
fire of Jackson's, Lee's, and Early's armies. The north
east and southwest trend of the valley brought its aim
against Washington, Hagerstown, and Chambersburg,
which therefore more than once felt its devastating fire.
The only part of the Union territory east of the Alle
ghenies to suffer invasion was just this region in front
of the Shenandoah opening. Hence it was always
possible for the Confederate leaders to threaten Wash
ington, and thus create a divertisement to draw off
Federal forces from activities against Richmond, or
retard the concentration of forces against a certain
objective point until the season therefor had passed.3
This was the purpose of Stonewall Jackson's raid from
the Shenandoah in the spring of 1862.
The Federals, realizing the importance of the Shenan
doah to the Confederacy, endeavored more than once
to occupy it ; but every advance up the Valley, by
reason of its southwest trend, took them farther and
farther from Richmond, and hence could have no other
purpose than merely to clear this highway of the enemy.
As soon as the Federal troops were withdrawn, the
Confederates poured into it again by every gap. In

GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR 295
the spring of 1862, while McClellan was advancing on
Richmond, General Banks with a Union army had
moved up the Shenandoah as far south as Harrisonburg,
about twenty-four miles south of Staunton. Stonewall
Jackson with two thousand men, to cut off Banks's re
treat, struck through the Blue Ridge farther north and
routed the Union force which had been placed at Front
Royal to guard Manassas Gap. Banks succeeded in
getting his forces north to Strasburg, and thence re
treated down the Valley, with Jackson at his heels,
across the Potomac. Union forces were now summoned
to the Valley to drive out the intruders, — Fremont
with his army from West Virginia and McDowell from
Fredericksburg, on whose support McClellan had been
counting for his operations against Richmond. Then
came Jackson's retreat up the Valley, the battles of
Cross Keys and Port Republic, his final escape through
the Blue Ridge, and his return to the Confederate army
at Richmond.
i McClellan's campaign against Richmond, deprived of
the necessary reinforcements which Jackson had been
engaging in the Shenandoah, was thus a failure, and
Lee saw his way clear for an advance on Maryland and
the national capital. At the battle of Cedar Mountain,
August 9, 1862, just north of the Rapidan, Stonewall
Jackson dealt a heavy blow to General Banks, who with
Sigel had brought his forces up the Valley from Win
chester and Middletown, crossed the Blue Ridge by
Luray Gap, and taken position at Sperryville on the
upper course of Thornton River, a tributary of the
Rappahannock. This position, just in front of the Luray

296 GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR
and Thornton gaps, aimed by these passages to main
tain a hold on the Shenandoah Valley and block any
Confederate movement down this thoroughfare towards
the north.4 At the same time it constituted the west
ern end of the Federal line stretching along the Rappa
hannock to Fredericksburg and Acquia on the Potomac,
and covering the approaches to Washington. The
fierce battles on the old Bull Run ground, Centreville,
and Chantilly at the close of August traced the route
of the Confederate advance to the upper Potomac at
Point of Rocks, where Lee's army crossed into Mary
land. Here the Potomac is narrow and in general
fordable ; hence we find the Federal army later invad
ing Virginia in this vicinity at Balls Bluff and Lovetts-
ville. In a few days (September 10) Lee had occupied
Hagerstown within the Great Valley of Maryland ; but
September 14 saw the Federal forces coming to the
relief of Hagerstown, fighting their way through
Crampton and Turner's gaps in South Mountain, the
Maryland extension of the Blue Ridge ; it saw Lee
falling back to where Antietam Creek flows into the
Potomac, to prevent McClellan's cutting off his retreat,
while the next day Stonewall Jackson seized Harpers
Ferry at the confluence of the Shenandoah and the
Potomac, to secure the avenue of escape. The battle
of Antietam, September 17, necessitated the withdrawal
of the Confederates, but they found a safe route up the
Shenandoah. Lee's second invasion of the North in the summer of
1863, following the repulse of the Federals at Freder
icksburg, was made also by the Shenandoah Valley.

GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR 297
He led his forces across the Blue Ridge by the passes
at the head of the Rappahannock and Rapidan, while
Ewell entered the Valley farther north by way of
Chester Gap and drove the enemy before him out of
Winchester, Martinsburg, and across the Potomac. In
the mean time Ashby and Snickers gaps in the Blue
Ridge, which were nearest the Federal forces massed
about Washington, were held by General Longstreet,
and General Stuart's cavalry was thrown out in front to
guard the approaches to the same. The engagements
at Aldie, Uppersville, and Middleburg were all battles in
the hill country to render secure the mountain passes
behind and protect Lee's advance down the Shenan
doah Vafley. Defensive warfare along a mountain
barrier, when vigorous enough, anticipates attack far
in front of the passes, and there deals its blow to the
invading enemy, like the victory of the Roman Marius
over the Teutons at Aquse Sextise, or the Scotch vic
tory at Bannockburn before the passes to the High
lands, or these Confederate successes before the gaps
of the Blue Ridge ; or with a handful of men it de
fends the pass itself, as the Greeks did at Thermopylae,
the Moors at Roncesvalles, the Afghans at the Khyber
Pass against the advancing English, or the Confeder
ates at Crampton and Turner's gaps in South Moun
tain.5 Thus every effort of the Federals to penetrate the
mountains being repulsed by Stuart's cavalry, the Con
federate army advanced in security up the Great Appa
lachian Valley to Hagerstown, Chambersburg, Carlisle,
and to within a few miles of Harrisburg. But now the

298 GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR
numerous breaches in the eastern wall of the Great
Valley in Pennsylvania enabled the Federals to inter
cept Lee's lines of communication, just as before Jack
son had been able to strike in and threaten Banks's line
of retreat. Therefore Lee turned and marched through
South Mountain to meet the advancing Federals at
Gettysburg. After his defeat there the Shenandoah
again afforded him a safe avenue of retreat, while
Meade with the Federal forces crossed the Potomac
near Lovettsville above the Point of Rocks and moved
southward to Warrenton, just north of the upper Rap
pahannock, whence he could watch the passes of the
Blue Ridge with the purpose of dealing Lee a final
blow as soon as he should show his head through the
mountain wall. It had been Lee's purpose to withdraw
to Loudoun County, Virginia, by way of Snickers and
Ashby gaps, but he was delayed by a sudden rise in the
Potomac which made it unfordable, and while his pon
toon bridge was being prepared, Meade occupied these
passes. The close succession of openings saved him,
however. He made a feint of crowding his forces
through Manassas Gap, drew thither the bulk of the
Federal army, and then marching south rapidly to
Front Royal, moved out of the mountains by Chester
Gap to Culpeper, while Ewell's corps took the Thornton
Gap route a few miles further south and thus avoided
the delay of crowding the whole army through one
passway. Thus the Shenandoah Valley had enabled the Con
federate leader to accomplish his purpose of drawing
off the Army of the Potomac to the north, diverting

GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR 299
and diminishing the forces invading the coast of North
Carolina and Virginia, and breaking up the plan of
the enemy's campaign by the time the summer was
ended.6 Finally, when the last advance against Rich
mond was begun in the spring of 1864 and Grant set
tled down to the siege of Petersburg, history repeated
itself in the Shenandoah Valley. Federal troops, as
before under Banks, were sent up the Valley to pre
vent a possible demonstration against Washington, were
defeated by the Confederates at New Market and driven
out, rallied again under a new leader and advanced up
the Valley as far as Staunton, and were threatening
Lynchburg at the western end of the Confederate line ;
but being exposed to peril here in the heart of the
enemy's country, they retreated over the mountains to
West Virginia. Then, in the hope of making Grant
loosen his hold on Petersburg, Lee tried the old expedi
ent of 1862 and 1863. He ordered General Early with
a strong Confederate force to sweep down the Shenan
doah Valley, invade Maryland, and threaten Washing
ton. Early came within gunshot of the capital, with
drew into the Valley with trains of plunder, moved
northward into Pennsylvania, and once more made
unfortunate Chambersburg feel the weight of the Con
federate hand.
Then came the final chapter in the military history of
the Shenandoah. Grant was not to be diverted from
Petersburg. He sent General Phil Sheridan to clear the
Valley. This meant not only driving out the Confed
erate force, but destroying everything which could fur
nish supplies to the enemy. Rich in its resources and

300 GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR
strong in its loyalty to the Southern cause, the Shenan
doah Valley had year after year given of its abundance
to the armies of Virginia ; but after Sheridan had done
his work, this granary of the Confederacy was con
sumed, the marching and countermarching ceased, and
the peace of desolation settled down upon the Valley.
Just as the Virginia rivers leading up to the passes
of the Blue Ridge drew the lines of Federal and Con
federate defense in the eastern operations of the Civil
War, so in the trans-Allegheny country rivers and
mountain passes determined the military lines. The
campaigns in the Mississippi valley, though in general
quite unconnected with those in the Atlantic plain, were
of the nature of a vast flank movement upon the Con
federates,7 by which the southern end of the mountains
was turned. Thus the Federals advancing from Georgia
and South Carolina were enabled to take the Confeder
ates in the rear, while another force, coming up the
side path of the Great Valley from Tennessee, cut off
Lee's retreat from Richmond by the southern passes of
the Blue Ridge.
In no other war of history, perhaps, have rivers
played so prominent a part as in the Rebellion. This
importance is reflected in the names of the Federal
armies, — the " Army of the Potomac," " Army of the
James," " Army of the Cumberland," and " Army of
the Tennessee." But while the Virginia streams, by
their east and west course, simply drew the lines of
defense adopted by either side, and with the exception
of the lower James figured only by their fords, bridges,
sudden rises cutting off advance or retreat, and head-

GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR 301
stream paths to the mountain gaps, the western rivers,
by reason of their large size, navigable character, and
predominant north and south course, played the far
more important role of highways for safe and easy
water transportation right into the heart of the enemy's
country. The great size of the territory constituting
the western theater of war, with the consequent long
lines of communication to be maintained by the invad
ing Federals, made the western rivers more effective
routes of communication than railroads, which could
be easily torn up by one of the brilliant raids of the
Confederate cavalry. The river routes required no
watching, and the immense superiority of the North in
steamboat building gave it all the equipment it could
need.8 From the southern boundary of Illinois the Mis
sissippi led through the Confederacy to the Gulf, while
just to the east the Tennessee opened a highway to
northern Alabama and the Cumberland into Tennessee.
The parallel course of these three rivers therefore made
the obvious line of advance for the Federals ; and the
Ohio, commanding the entrance to these three routes,
was the natural objective of the Confederates. Hence
the importance to the Southern cause of gaining the
adherence of Kentucky, and the inevitable invasion of
its neutral soil by both armies. A Confederate army
under Polk entered Kentucky and secured the Mis
sissippi by a strong position on the bluffs at Columbus
near the Tennessee line, but Grant anticipated any
further moves by seizing Paducah, which commanded
the mouths of the Tennessee and the Cumberland.

302 GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR
Thus the Ohio line of defense was lost by the Confed
erates ; the latter therefore drew their line from the
Mississippi, where they strengthened the fortifications
at Columbus, New Madrid, and Island No. 10, eastward
near the Kentucky boundary across the Tennessee and
Cumberland rivers at Forts Henry and Donelson to
Cumberland Gap, which opened a route of communica
tion with Virginia and, through the Valley of East
Tennessee, with Georgia and Alabama.
The fall of Forts Henry and Donelson before Grant's
combined land and naval force, and the defeat at Mill
Spring, on the upper Cumberland, of the Confederates
placed there to hold the connection with Cumberland
Gap, compelled the Southern army to evacuate Nash
ville, abandon the fine of the Cumberland, and fall
back to their second fine much farther south along the
bend of the Tennessee. The vital points in this line
were Corinth, the junction of two great railroads con
necting the Mississippi and the Gulf with Virginia and
the Carolinas, and Chattanooga, the southern gateway
in the Appalachian wall. The highway of the Ten
nessee, immediately after the fall of Forts Henry and
Donelson, brought the Federal transports and gunboats
up the river to Pittsburg Landing, but the battle of
Shiloh fought here retarded the proposed advance upon
Corinth. This point was occupied in a few weeks, how
ever, and then the battles of Iuka and Corinth along
this line in the fall of 1862 and the battle of Stone
River or Murfreesboro, Tennessee, represented the
efforts of the Federals to advance east to the mountain
gap at Chattanooga.

GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR 303
This point was of the utmost importance to the Con
federates. It commanded the approaches to Atlanta
and the South Atlantic states, and controlled the inter-
montane bypath up the Great Appalachian Valley to
Virginia and central Kentucky.9 Through this Shen
andoah Valley of the West, the Confederates could
throw their invading armies over the Cumberland Moun
tains into central Kentucky by minor passes, eluding
the Federal forces at Cumberland Gap, threaten Frank
fort and even Cincinnati, then retreat, driving their
captured horses and long wagon-trains of plunder from
the rich Bluegrass country, and vanish along the old
Wilderness Road into the mountains again, into whose
fastnesses few dared to pursue. Even if the invasion
was made by the plains across the middle Cumberland
River, as in the case of Bragg's raid in 1862, the Val
ley of East Tennessee was the safe line of retreat.
Thus it enabled the Confederates, so long as they held
Chattanooga, to make a safe flank movement against
the Federals in the Mississippi valley, just as the Shen
andoah highway gave them this same advantage in Vir
ginia and Maryland. But in compensation, the Ten
nessee River in the West, like Chesapeake- Bay in the
East, gave the Federals easy lines of advance upon the
Confederate flanks.
The Federal invasion southward up the Tennessee
River was accompanied by a corresponding advance
down the Mississippi, because the wedge thus driven into
the enemy's territory along the smaller stream rendered
insecure or untenable their outlying positions on the
Mississippi. Moreover, certain physiographical pecu-

304 GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR
liarities of this river determined that the Confederate
withdrawal downstream should be measured by long
stretches, because only at rare intervals did its banks
present points which could be strongly fortified. The
river winds in gigantic meanders across its vast flood
plain, only now and then washing the base of its east
ern bluffs, from the top of which its course could be
commanded by elevated shore batteries, but whither the
fire from passing gunboats could not penetrate. Such
points of natural defense were found only at Columbus,
Fort Pillow, Memphis, Vicksburg, Grand Gulf, and
Port Hudson ; and here the Confederates concentrated
their efforts at fortification as the price of their hold
upon the river. One of these positions relinquished,
they had no choice but to fall back, no matter how far,
to the next similar point.10 Only Island No. 10, by its
midstream position and geographical location near the
fortified point of New Madrid, gave them a secure base
of another kind whence to contest the passage of the
Federal flotillas.
When the loss of Fort Donelson and Fort Henry
left the Confederate position at Columbus like a remote
island in an enemy's sea, it had to be relinquished, and
New Madrid and Island No. 10 became the river out
posts. When these fortifications also succumbed to a
combined attack of Federal infantry and fleet, the
Confederates dropped back to Fort Pillow, which in
turn was rendered untenable, owing to the Federal
occupation of Corinth far to the south, and had to
be abandoned for Memphis. When Memphis yielded
to the Federal fleet, the Mississippi was opened four

GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR 305
hundred miles down to Vicksburg; but this almost
impregnable position on the bluffs two hundred feet
above the Mississippi long resisted attack.
Meanwhile the Mississippi was being conquered up
stream also from its mouth. After the control of the
navigable course of the Tennessee was secured, the
next problem of the war in the West was the command
of the Mississippi, whereby this part of the Confederacy
might be cut in twain, much as British control of the
Hudson in the Revolution had divided the forces of
the colonies. The coast blockade which was maintained
along the whole seaboard of the southern states might
thus be extended up the river highway on their western
flank.11 The fall of New Orleans before Farragut's
fleet gave the key of the river into Federal hands ; but
the two Union fleets from Memphis and New Orleans
failed to take Vicksburg, and the long stretch of river
running through the enemy's country was difficult to
control with this stronghold in the center unreduced.
So the fleets fell back, the one northward to Helena
and the other south to New Orleans. The Confederates
seized their opportunity and fortified Port Hudson, a
few miles above Baton Rouge but below the mouth of
the Red River. The five hundred miles of the river
now under their control between this point and Helena
was to them the most important section. The Red
River and the Arkansas brought them men and supplies
from the trans-Mississippi states, which constituted the
granary of the South, and gave them a secure line of
communication through Texas and Mexico with Gulf
ports.12

306 GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR
But lines were drawn tighter upon the Mississippi.
Arkansas Post near the mouth of the Arkansas River
was in a position to threaten the communications of
Federal army and fleet operating from the north against
Vicksburg ; hence it had to be reduced. A land force
of 30,000 troops and a flotilla proved just equal to the
task, the control of the Arkansas River passed to the
Federals, and this artery of the Confederacy was tied
up. The Red River, however, the more important
avenue to Confederate resources in the West, was safe
so long as Vicksburg and Port Hudson, north and south
of the river's mouth, were held by southern forces.
The problem of the war in the West was the capture
of Vicksburg. Its position was almost impregnable in
consequence of the bluffs to north, west, and south;
the only chance was to attack from the rear by difficult
avenues of approach. But when Grant's generalship
accomplished this maneuver and the gunboats were
maintaining a blockade on the river, the fate of Vicks
burg was sealed. Five days after the fall of this strong
hold, Port Hudson also yielded, and the Mississippi was
a Federal stream bisecting the western Confederacy.
The next move of the war aimed to divide the re
mainder of the Confederacy along the line of the Appa
lachians by securing Chattanooga, and thus controlling
the lines of communication northward along the valley
of East Tennessee with Virginia, and eastward around
the southern foot of the mountains with the South At
lantic states. The battle of Murfreesboro was a con
flict for the approaches to the Chattanooga gap, just as
the battle of Mill Spring in southeastern Kentucky had

GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR 307
for its prize the strategic point of Cumberland Gap.
The battles of Chickamauga, Lookout Mountain, and
Missionary Ridge in the corrugated uplands of northern
Georgia gave this passway of the southern Appalachians
to the northern armies. The Gulf states were cut off
from the Atlantic states of the South, the theater of
the war was now reduced to the Atlantic plain, and the
national forces closed in around Richmond from the
south as well as from the north. Stoneman's raid with
a Federal army up the valley of East Tennessee from
Knoxville, over the Great Smoky Mountains by the
Watauga River, down to the Yadkin in North Carolina,
and thence along the old pioneer line of communica
tion to the New River and the Valley of Virginia, ac
complished the destruction of bridges and railroads
along the natural line of Lee's retreat from Richmond
and hastened the surrender of the last Confederate
army.13 The Civil War is characterized by an astonishing
number of battles fought by combined land and naval
forces. Gunboat and infantry charge united in all the
great operations along the Cumberland, Tennessee,
Mississippi, Arkansas, and Red rivers. The western
streams were valuable not only as waterways for trans
ports but as avenues of naval attack. The same phe
nomenon of combined military forces of land and water
is to be noted in almost all the coast attacks. The sea
board cities of the southern states were protected by
their prevailing location at the inner end of deep estua
ries or bays, which were guarded by island fortifications
at the entrances, while often a wide zone of swamp on

308 GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR
the land side made difficult any approach from the rear.
Hence the attack was usually made by the Federal fleet
upon the outer island forts, which were reduced and
straightway occupied by land forces from the northern
transports. These then aided in maintaining the block
ade of the city port in question, which, however, was
rarely taken unless like Beaufort, North Carolina, it
occupied an exposed position on the outer coast. Only
Newbern at the head of the Neuse River estuary, Plym
outh near the mouth of the Roanoke River, both in
the Sound region of North Carolina, and New Orleans
yielded to coast attacks in spite of their retired posi
tions. In all these amphibious military operations we
seem to see reflected the combination of land and water
location in the places attacked.
To the political geographer, the success of the Fed
eral side in the Civil War means the preservation of
the large political territory. The evolution of political
areas is marked by advance from the small to the large,
from the city-state or local principality to the national
kingdom or world-empire ; it is characterized by increas
ing aggregation of territory, which minimizes the total
amount of political boundaries, extends the area of fra
ternal feeling, and lessens the artificial barriers to com
mercial and social intercourse. From the standpoint
of political geography, therefore, the disruption of the
Union would have been a retrograde step, just as the
defeat of the Transvaal means an advance even for
the Transvaal itself, because of its absorption into a
larger territorial body.

GEOGRAPHY OF THE CIVIL WAR 309
NOTES TO CHAPTER XIV
1. Shaler, History of Kentucky, p. 232.
2. V. A. Lewis, History of West Virginia, pp. 320-325, 373-375, 355,
386, 396. 1889.
3. F. V. Emerson, The Shenandoah Valley and the Civil War, Journal
of School Geography, June, 1901.
4. War of the Rebellion, Official Records, series i. vol. xii. part ii. pp.
21, 22.
5. E. C. Semple, Mountain Passes,Bull. Amer. Geog. Society, nos. 2 and
3. 1901.
6. War of the Rebellion, Official Records, series i. vol. xxvii. part ii.
pp. 302-305.
7. Fiske, Mississippi Valley in the Civil War, p. 1.
8. Ibid. pp. 107 and 194.
9. E. Kirke, Chattanooga the Southern Gateway of the Alleghanies,
Harper's Magazine, April, 1887.
10. Fiske, Mississippi Valley in the Civil War, pp. 181, 182.
11. Ibid. p. 112.
12. Ibid. p. 183.
13. War of the Rebellion, Official Records, vol. xlix. part i. pp. 330-
332.

CHAPTER XV
GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OP IMMIGRATION
In the expansion of the United States from a narrow
seaboard strip in 1783 to a broad continental territory,
three factors have been operating, — an abundant sup
ply of free land due to continued acquisition of ter
ritory, a large foreign immigration, and the building
of railroads. These factors have been mutually inter
active. The free land has attracted immigration, and
such additions to the population have increased the
pressure upon our political boundaries, causing them
to give way and then to be reconstructed far beyond
the original line. The railroads have opened up the
land we had and made it accessible to the throng of
settlers. But the most potent and persistent factor
has been always the presence of farm, field, and forest
to be had for the taking. This has stimulated natu
ral increase of population, lured foreign settlers, and
encouraged the construction of far-reaching railroad
lines, while it has educated native and alien alike to the
large ideas of land-holding which have kept the people
spreading, till the expansion of the settled area from
decade to decade has almost kept pace with the growth
of population.1
The barrier of the Atlantic and the early geograph
ical isolation of the American continent made a basis of

DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION 311
natural selection in the first colonists coming to this
country. Immigration was voluntary except in the
cases of slaves and the indented servants who were im
ported for the distinct economic purpose of supplying
the labor much needed in a new land. Even in the
opening years of the nineteenth century, the long voy
age across the ocean in a sailing vessel and the rela
tively high cost of the passage were still deterrents to
the indigent and thriftless ; but in recent decades arti
ficial influences of all kinds have stimulated and assisted
emigration from Europe, while fast steamers have con
verted the ocean barrier into an open highway. The
consequence is that in 1900 the whites of foreign birth
and those of foreign parentage born in the United
States comprised one third of our total population. In
the North Atlantic division, which includes New Eng
land, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, these
two elements represented very nearly 60 per cent, of
the population, and in the Dakotas, Wisconsin, and
Minnesota the proportion ran from 60 to 77 per cent.2
Great as has been the immigration into the United
States since 1820, and steadily as it has increased, it
has been only commensurate with the abundance of
free land and the opportunities for work. By far the
larger portion of these aliens have been unskilled
laborers ; but a new country with untouched resources,
with forests to be cleared, land to be reclaimed, mines to
be developed, and roads to be made, demands not so
much skill as energy. Hence these crude foreign ele
ments have served their purpose well, have contributed
to the economic growth of the country, " quickened

312 DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION
the pace of our development, and made us do things
rapidly and on a large scale," 3 while every advance of
the frontier of settlement or expansion of our political
boundary has subjected them more and more to the
most American of American conditions, abundant land,
and accelerated their evolution from European peasants
to self-reliant, enterprising American citizens.
The land has been our great solvent. This steady
European invasion of the United States has had no
terrors for us, because our vast territory has enabled
us to take in and assimilate. The powerful trans-
Atlantic influences to which the country has thereby
been subjected4 have been diluted in their mere distri
bution over a wide area, weakened by their remoteness
from their source, neutralized in part by each other ;
and all the time the 3,025,600 square miles of land and
the free institutions of this oversea republic have been
asserting the potency of the American environment.
Those immigrants who have settled upon the farms have
rapidly assimilated American standards of life, political,
social, and economic, even where, as in some Norwegian
centers in Minnesota, they have retained their own lan
guage ; but those who, like the Russians and Italians,
have crowded into cities, have been less Americanized,
have transferred a bit of Europe to United States soil, be
cause in the congested districts of a New York or Chicago
the immediate influence of our continental area is lost.
The most striking fact brought out by the map
showing the geographical distribution of our foreign
population in 1890 is the paucity of alien elements in
the southern states, due to the presence of that most

DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION 313
alien of all aliens, the negro. In this regard, the South
presents a sharp contrast to the remainder of the coun
try. The great bulk of the old slave territory is
almost lacking in foreign elements. A narrow hem of
immigrants along the Gulf coast, an occasional spot
along the seaboard of Georgia and South Carolina, and
a ragged band of varying width within the old slave
periphery defined by the Ohio and the Mason and
Dixon Line, bear witness to the accessibility of all
coast regions to their oversea neighbors and the char«
acter of every land frontier as a zone of assimilation.
To counterbalance this foreign element in the frontier
portions of the old " border states," the free states just
north of the line show the effect of contact with the
old slave territory in the considerable negro population
of their southern counties. Maryland, with the largest
percentage (7.9 per cent.) of foreign born of all the
old slave states in 1900,5 has a long frontier of contact
with the old free states and an extensive coast on the
• Atlantic. Texas, with 5.8 per cent.j and Florida, with
3.7 per cent., are young states with large unexploited
resources inviting immigration, and are accessible from
the Gulf. Louisiana, with 3.7 per cent., has a long
coast-line and the port of a great inland waterway ; it
affords, moreover, a climate attractive to the Mediter
ranean peoples of Europe and a natural market for the
fruit trade, a form of commerce for which these people
show an appetency. In all the other southern states the
percentage of foreign born is insignificant. Only an
occasional mining center in the southern Appalachians
shows the presence of the immigrant laborer.

314 DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION
In the remaining portions of the United States where
conditions of climate and soil permit settlement at all,
the foreign born element is universally found. But
here again the highest percentages are shown by the
coast regions and especially by the vicinity of important
harbors like the Puget Sound district, the lower Colum
bia, and San Francisco Bay on the Pacific, and all the
seaboard of the New England and middle states on the
Atlantic. Here speaks the accessibility of the coasts.
All immigrants, except those crossing the borders from
Canada and Mexico, must enter this country by the
seaports. Many find their enterprise and money ex
hausted by the time they reach the gateways of the land.
Such are therefore stranded in or near the ports, whence
they gradually spread to the nearest cities; for the
land thereabouts has long since been taken up. The
cities alone offer numerous openings for the predomi
nant unskilled labor of the immigrant, and also employ
ment in their particular trades for the skilled artisans.
Hence the region of the coast and the region of the'
large cities show a high percentage of foreign born.
The states of the North Atlantic division, which have
passed from the agricultural to the industrial stage of
development and therefore show great concentration
of population in urban centers, and which moreover
are nearest to the teeming sources of our immigrant
supply in Europe, show a higher percentage of foreign
born than do the states of the Pacific coast. In Rhode
Island 31.4 per cent, of the total population is of alien
birth, in Massachusetts 30.2 per cent., Connecticut 26.2
per cent., New York 26.1 per cent., and New Jersey 22.9

DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION 315
per cent. New Hampshire, with its short coast-line and
industrial centers restricted to the southeast portion of
the state, has nevertheless 21.4 per cent. Maine, which
in relation to the rest of New England is a backwoods
state with only limited industrial development and hence
few cities, has only 13.4 per cent, of its total population
of foreign birth,6 in spite of an extensive coast-line. But
as we have seen before in the history of this common
wealth, other geographical conditions of an unfavorable
character have neutralized the advantage of an excellent
seaboard. If to these percentages is added the quota
of .the native population of foreign parents in each
state, the figures are found in every case to be doubled.
Thus these two elements combined comprise more than
half (50.9 per cent.) of the population of the northern
Atlantic states.7 During the past decade this section
has experienced a greater influx of foreigners than ever
before, due to a decided change in the character of
immigration. In recent years 50 per cent, of all the
immigrants reaching the United States shores have
come from Austria-Hungary (including Bohemia), Italy,
Russia, and Poland.8 These people, emanating from
conditions of retarded economic development, recruit
the lowest class of laborers. Hence the sweat-shops
and cruder manufactures of the big cities, as also the
mines and railroads of this section offer them the
readiest opportunity to gain a livelihood.
Next to this concentration of immigration along the
accessible region of the northeastern coast, we observe
on the map an irregular inner zone of sparser foreign
element, succeeded by an increasing proportion of for-

316 DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION
eign to native born from the interior towards the land
frontiers. This is especially noticeable in the north
central states, reaching from Ohio to Nebraska and from
Missouri to the Canadian border, though the phenom
enon can be detected also in New England and New
York. Ohio shows a growing proportion of foreigner
to native from its southern to its northern boundary.
In the next three tiers of states toward the west, the
same increase from south to north is observed. The
scanty proportion of one to five per cent, in southern
Illinois and Missouri swells to thirty-five per cent, and
more in northern Michigan, Minnesota, and North
Dakota. In the successive stages of our colonial and early
national development, we have noticed the stratification
of native and foreigner from the east towards the
west, the later comer in general being located farthest
towards the setting sun, on the abundant lands beyond
the outskirts of continuous settlement. But in 1840,
after the area of settlement defined on the north by the
border of Lake Erie and the southern extremities of
Lakes Huron and Michigan (42° N. L.) extended to the
margin of the arid belt,9 the frontier lay no longer
towards the west but towards the north ; and thither
turned the immigrant. Hence the outlying states along
the Canadian boundary show a very large proportion of
foreign born, — North Dakota 35.4 per cent., Minnesota
28.9 per cent., Wisconsin 24.9 per cent., and Michigan
22.4 per cent. And if we combine with these the native
Americans of foreign parentage, the figures run from 56.7
percent, in Michigan to 77.1 per cent, in North Dakota.

DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION 317
In this region of the northwestern frontier we find
particularly those nationalities who, like the Scandi
navians, only recently began to come to this country,
or who, like the Germans, have made especially large
contributions to our population in the past few decades.
The Scandinavians did not send any considerable num
bers before the decade ending 1870, when they com
prised 4.7 per cent, of the total immigration. This
proportion rose to 10.8 per cent, in 1890, and fell again
to 8.7 per cent, in 1900 with the general decrease of
the arrivals from northern Europe and the increase
from eastern and southern Europe. The Scandinavians,
therefore, except such as tarried by the Atlantic sea
board, located well towards the northwest frontier, where
in 1890 they constituted 42 per cent, of the total for
eign born in North Dakota, 34.45 per cent, in South
Dakota, 46.05 per cent, in Minnesota, 19.21 per cent.
in Wisconsin, and over 20 per cent, in northern Illi
nois, in Iowa, and Nebraska. The Germans, who be
tween 1860 and 1890 comprised from one fourth to
one third of our total immigration, constitute from 27
per cent, to 54 per cent, of the aggregate foreign born
throughout this area except in the far-away Dakotas,
which are remoter from the great German center along
the western shore of Lake Michigan. The Scandi
navian center, representing a later immigration, lies
farther west along the upper Mississippi.10
The average percentage of foreign born in these
outlying states of the central West (21.5 per cent.) is
approximately reproduced (20.7 per cent.) in the young
states and territories between the Rocky Mountains and

318 DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION
the Pacific. The general remoteness of the Cordilleran
district from the areas of older and denser settlement is
reflected clearly enough in these figures, but even more
plainly in the foreign born combined with the native
born of foreign parentage. These two elements to
gether constitute from forty to sixty per cent, of the
total population in all the far western states except
Oregon and New Mexico, both of which had a con
siderable native population — American and Spanish
respectively — in proportion to their arable soil, when
the gold fever stimulated trans-Rocky expansion in the
fifties. The presence of the unprogressive " greaser "
in New Mexico, and Oregon's more limited geographical
advantages compared with nature's munificence to other
Pacific states, have discouraged immigration.
Owing to the predominant aridity of this western
country, the foreign elements have found their best
opportunities in the extensive mining regions of the
Rockies, the Great Basin, and the Sierra Nevada, where
at different points they constitute over thirty-four per
cent, of the population ; but they are distributed also
among the few irrigable valleys of the interior, and
form a large continuous area of alien settlement along
the Pacific seaboard, on the fertile slopes of the Coast
Range, and in the long fruitful valleys just behind.
Here field, orchard, vineyard, and garden offer con
genial employment to Italians, Swiss, and Chinese.
The foreign elements in trans-Rocky America, how
ever, do not represent only the outermost strata of
European immigrants who have moved westward from
the Atlantic ports of the United States. They include

DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION 319
a large number of aliens whom the Pacific highway has
brought from its farther shores to our western coasts,
and who are only scantily represented in the eastern
sections of the country. Here, therefore, in the case of
these trans-Pacific immigrants we find an inverted west-
to-east stratification, densest in the accessible regions of
the Pacific coast, growing sparser with some regularity
in the successive tiers of states towards the interior, and
disappearing almost wholly in the eastern Mississippi
valley, but appearing again in scattered patches about
the large cities of the Atlantic seaboard,11 whither they
have come by the long sea route around Cape Horn or
via the Suez Canal and Europe.
China, Japan, Australia, and the Pacific islands have
all, according to their ability, sent contributions to our
population. China out of its abundance has given
most. Immigration of the Celestials began soon after
the discovery of gold in California. The first came in
from near Hawaii, where they already formed a con
siderable part of the laboring class. Between 1848
and 1852 some ten thousand arrived, and in the latter
year the number leaped to twenty thousand, but soon
declined to a few thousand annually. They found
their first employment in the placer mines, either as
under-laborers or working abandoned claims for them
selves. Later, as the country became more densely
populated and the crude industries of the mining camp
became diversified, the Chinese supplied the laboring
class which the phenomenally rapid growth of Cali
fornia under peculiar geographical conditions had not
permitted to develop among the American population.

320 DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION
Measured in terms of comfort, money, and time,
California was nearer to China than to the Mississippi
prior to 1869, when the first overland railroad was
opened. The easy, cheap ocean voyage from Shanghai
or Canton to San Francisco Bay made an open high
way for the Mongolian coolie, while the long caravan
journey from the Missouri, measured in months and
leagues, the expense and hardship of such travel, and
the barrier of mountain and desert, kept out the large
influx of Americans from the eastern states which
might have yielded a laboring class. Moreover, those
who came found such wealth of opportunity in the
mines, the agricultural resources of the free lands, and
in commercial ventures, that every American became
his own master, and employees did not exist as a class
except among the Chinese. These sturdy workmen,
therefore, formed the sub-stratum of rough labor in
the new state ; on them rested the burden of cutting
down forests, opening roads, reclaiming rich swamp
lands, harvesting crops, acting as domestic servants,
and in general developing the abundant resources of
the young Pacific commonwealths.12
The Pacific as a geographic factor in the history
of Chinese immigration has not operated with its full
power, owing both to restrictive legislation in this coun
try, beginning in 1855 and culminating in 1882 in the
Chinese Exclusion Bill, and also to peculiarities of the
Chinese themselves, the absence among them of Chi
nese women and the family life, and the annual return
of large numbers to their original home. Their immi
gration was first curtailed, then arrested, while the

DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION 321
Chinese population which had effected an entrance be
fore the barriers were raised has lacked natural increase
and has been regularly depleted by repatriation. Thus
the factor of the Pacific highway has been steadily
weakened so far as Chinese immigrants are concerned,
and with a few more extensions of the Exclusion Bill
it will be nullified.
The returns of the Twelfth Census show a total of
89,863 Chinese in the United States proper as against
107,488 in 1890. Their distribution illustrates their
relation to the Pacific. Over 75 per cent, of them are
located in the trans-Rocky states and territories, and the
heaviest proportions are found in the seaboard com
monwealths. California heads the list with 45,753,
which, however, represents a 35 per cent, decrease since
1890. Oregon follows with 10,397 and Washington
with 3629, the smallness of the last figure being due to
particularly violent local agitation against the unwelcome
visitors. Outside the limits of the United States pro
per, Alaska, with over 3000 Chinese, and Hawaii, the
great cross-roads station of the Pacific, with nearly
26,000, demonstrate the uniting influence of an ocean
upon its bordering lands. The second tier of states
from the Pacific, including Arizona, Nevada, Idaho, and
also Montana, which owing to its close approach to
Oregon properly belongs to this group, have only from
1300 to 1700 each ; while in the next tier to the east
the figures drop to 300 and 600,13 thus showing the
attenuation of the geographic influence of the Pacific
in proportion to the distance from its coast.
The distribution of the 24,326 Japanese in the

322 DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION
United States in 1900 illustrates the same principle.
Of this total 96 per cent, are found in the western
division, where the largest numbers are located near
the seaboard in California (10,151), Washington (5617),
and Oregon (2501). But these figures sink into in
significance beside the 61,111 Japanese in Hawaii.14
California in 1890 claimed also nearly one third of the
5984 Australians settled in the United States. Our
immigrants from the Hawaiian group and the other
Pacific islands are distributed chiefly in the Pacific coast
states. Here not only relative proximity but doubtless
also similarity of climate has influenced the choice of
the home-seekers. Many of the Pacific Islanders, ow
ing to their mid-ocean position, have found it almost
as easy to reach New York and Massachusetts; but
Hawaii, which is only five days distant by steamer
from San Francisco, has felt all the attracting power of
California and the western states.15
A frontier, as we have seen, is always a zone of
assimilation, but the intensity of the assimilation varies
under different geographic conditions. A sea frontier,
in consequence of the accessibility of the average coast
to all the ships of the world, shows a degree of ethnic
mixture not attained on a land frontier. China, which
in consequence of geographic conditions and of na
tional characteristics engendered largely by these condi
tions has almost no aliens in its vast interior, shows a
considerable representation of the leading commercial
nations of Europe and America in its great seaports.
The delta region of ancient Egypt was the first part of
that peculiarly isolated country ever to see foreigners

DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION 323
peacefully settling within its boundaries. That was
when under Psammetichus I. the Greeks settled in
Naucratis and Sais. Later the Nile delta became the
cosmopolitan area of the Mediterranean, while the ethnic
simplicity of middle and upper Egypt was almost un
touched. So to-day the streets of Alexandria and
Cairo echo many languages. The southern seaboard
of France has various Mediterranean elements in its
population, with an alarming amount of the Italian
constituent. Greater New York contains Russian,
Polish, Italian, German, and Chinese towns within its
city limits. Boston, New Orleans, and San Francisco
can show almost as multifarious ethnic elements. A
comparison of all the maps showing the distribution of
our foreign born according to their nationality,16 proves
how varied is the mixture of population along our
Pacific and northern Atlantic coasts.
Along a land frontier, on the contrary, the assimila
tion is as a rule limited to the two contiguous elements.
The close proximity of the two areas, however, the
similarity of climatic and hence of economic conditions
which usually prevails, and the intercourse across the
boundary in spite of trade restrictions, all stimulate the
shifting of population back and forth across the line.
Any special advantage offered now by this, now by
that side, will be the signal for migration. The large
German population in the Baltic provinces of Russia
to-day records the Teutonic expansion under the Sword
Brothers eastward across the Niemen and Duna as far
as Lake Peipus in the thirteenth century, while Slav
place names in eastern Germany attest not only the

324 DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION
expansion of Prussia over Polish territory, but also an
earlier Slav encroachment towards the west, when these
people extended to the River Elbe. Lately persecuted
Russian Jews and German-Russians, restive under the
harsh Russification process which has been going on in
the Baltic provinces, have sought refuge across the
boundary in Germany. The different frontier zones in
Switzerland are strongly assimilated in language and
race to their French, German, and Italian neighbors.17
So, too, the northern land frontier of the United States
is in no small degree Canadian, as the southern is
strongly Mexican.
There were 77,853 Mexicans in the United States in
1890. Of these, 74,766 were in the southern tier of
states along the Mexican border, and, with few excep
tions to be specially explained, the largest proportions
were found in the southernmost counties in those states.
Even these large figures take no account of the strong
infusion of Mexican blood in this border population
which originated in the days of Spanish and Mexican
supremacy here, and has been augmented ever since by
a steady tide of immigrants in sombrero and zarape
from across the line. Of the 7164 Mexicans in Cali
fornia in 1890, over thirty-five per cent, were located in
the two southern tiers of counties, the proportions in
creasing towards the coast about Los Angeles and
San Diego.18 The only other considerable area of these
people was found about San Francisco Bay, where a
little over two thousand were distributed in San Fran
cisco, Santa Clara, and Alameda counties.19 Here
speaks the accessibility of a seaboard country which

DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION 325
draws not only from trans-oceanic sources of popula
tion, but also from the neighboring coasts of its own
continent and its own hemisphere ; for movements of
population tend to follow the coastwise trade. Mexico
therefore contributes inhabitants both to the sea and
the land frontier of California.
The 11,534 Mexicans in Arizona in 1890 were found
chiefly in the two southern tiers of counties, and New
Mexico's 4504 were located chiefly in Donna Anna
and Grant counties in the southwest corner of the state,
and in Lincoln County, also on the frontier. A line
of Mexican element extended northward from these
into Bernalillo County, which forms one of the rural
areas contiguous to Santa Fe, then east into San Miguel
County about the old Spanish town of Las Vegas, and
north across the Colorado boundary along the old line
of communication, now the route of the piedmont rail
road, as far as Denver. The old Mexican centers and
the old routes have still the power to attract.
Texas counted 51,559 Mexicans among its citizens
in 1890. In all the counties along the Rio Grande,
except those arid sections almost without inhabitants,
they were found in numbers varying from one to seven
thousand, and constituted from twenty-seven per cent.
to fifty-five per cent, of the total population. They were
distributed in considerable numbers also in the second
tier of counties and in the whole southeastern corner
of the state, whither they came by sea as well as land.
The old Spanish administrative center of San Antonio
in the interior of the state has also become a gathering
place for Mexicans, who are strongly represented in

326 DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION
Bexar and the adjoining counties.20 But otherwise the
Mexicans in Texas are a conspicuous phenomenon only
along the land frontier.
The zone of assimilation characteristic of every politi
cal boundary is further illustrated in the case of our
Mexican frontier by the incursions into United States
territory made for many years by Mexican outlaws and
Indians to steal cattle and horses, by the hot pursuit of
the tireless Texas Rangers down to the Rio Grande and
across the line, and the unrecorded battles or rope-end
administration of American justice on Mexican soil. In
the stirring days of the seventies and early eighties the
security of the border settlements depended upon the
sleepless vigilance of the Rangers, their skill in trailing
the marauders through the brush of southwestern Texas
and over the plains of Mexico, the tenacity of purpose
which kept them days and nights in the saddle on a
dash of three or four hundred miles, and their grim
disregard of international law which put a certain finality
upon their accomplished tasks.
Our other southern neighbors, though not in imme
diate contact with our frontier, have contributed ele
ments to our population ; and their distribution is inter
esting as illustrating the geographic control of location
and climate, the accessibility of coast regions, and the
tendency of population to follow the coastwise trade.
In 1890 the census returns gave 23,256 immigrants
from Cuba and the West Indies. The Gulf states
claimed 13,300 ; 21 of these 12,282 fell to Florida alone,
and 10,396 were distributed in the southernmost county
of Monroe, which comprises also the Florida Keys, the

DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION 327
stepping-stones to Cuba. Here they make up nearly the
total foreign population. They are strongly represented
by 1313 individuals also in Hillsboro County, which
encloses Tampa and Tampa Bay, the great southern port
for commercial intercourse with Cuba.22 This county
contains also a goodly sprinkling of Spaniards, who
have evidently drifted in here from the southern island.
The attraction of a congenial climate, similar to that
from which they came, and geographical proximity have
drawn thither these Cubans and West Indians. The
7235 of them in the northern Atlantic states show the
effect of the great seaports and ship lines of this section.
Over one half of the number are grouped about New
York, Staten Island, and the western end of Long Island.
This Caribbean district sends only a small contingent
to the Pacific coast states, owing to the barrier of the
Panama Isthmus.
In the distribution of immigrants from Central and
South America, on the other hand, our two opposite
coasts are more nearly on a par ; and the Gulf seaboard,
owing to the marked eastward projection of Brazil,
loses its advantage of proximity for all immigrants com
ing from points south of the Equator. For such the
port of New York is quite as near as New Orleans. The
very small number of immigrants from Central and
South America in the United States reflect our unde
veloped relations with the southern part of the Western
Hemisphere, where our political ascendency has no par
allel in our almost rudimentary commercial and social
intercourse. Of the five thousand South Americans
in the United States in 1890, about 30 per cent, were

328 DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION
found in the Pacific coast states, chiefly along the sea
board, and 35.8 per cent, in the North Atlantic divi
sion, also to large extent in or near the leading ports.23
The Gulf states had only about 10 per cent. The
1192 Central Americans in this country in 1890 showed
the same general distribution. The presence of a con
siderable number of immigrants from Cuba, the West
Indies, Mexico, Central and South America in Missouri,
Hlinois, and Ohio, states bordering on the Mississippi
and the Ohio, shows the geographic control exerted by
the great central river system in the distribution of
these southern elements, and the repelling influence
of a harsh climate farther north.
The influence of immediate contact along a frontier
upon immigration from the neighboring land is more
strikingly illustrated in our experience with Canada than
with Mexico. In the north a longer frontier, border
ing moreover upon the most densely populated belt of
Canada, a greater similarity in race elements, and the
close proximity of superior economic conditions, all com
bined to produce the great exodus from Canada into
the United States which has been going on for the past
forty years. We notice here two outgoing currents.
One sets strongly from the coast regions of eastern
Canada to our northern Atlantic states, where Cana
dian immigrants are densely distributed along the
whole littoral from Passamaquoddy to Raritan Bay.
Hither they have come in vast numbers from New
foundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and French
Canada to find work in the great manufacturing centers,
especially in those of New England, where in 1890 they

. DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION 329
often formed from 20 to 60 per cent, of the foreign
born population.24 There were 207,601 in Massachu
setts, 93,193 in New York, 52,076 in Maine, 46,321 in
New, Hampshire, 27,934 in Rhode Island, 25,004 in
Vermont, and 21,231 in Connecticut.
But not all the British Americans in these states
were deposited by this coastwise current. The northern
borders of New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and
Maine make a long line of contact with the Canadian
boundary, and have been the scene of that frontier
ethnic assimilation which we have come to know.
Owing to the extreme narrowness of the United States
territory in this northeastern corner, moreover, some
of these border Canadians doubtless found their way
by land routes southward to the Atlantic coast and
contributed to the strong representation there.
The map showing the distribution of Canadians in
this country according to the Census of 1890 shows
how our northern neighbors spread over into our terri
tory all along the frontier from the St. Croix River to
Puget Sound, the distribution growing sparser from the
border towards the interior, except where it increases
again along our northern Atlantio coast. This incoming
tide from Canada has met and mingled with that larger
west and north bound current of European immigrants
from the Atlantic ports. Hence our Canadian border,
in point of ethnic elements, forms an exception to the
rule of land frontiers inasmuch as it presents a varied
mixture of nationalities, unlike the simple Mexican and
American constituents along our southern boundary.
The distribution of British Americans in the United

330 DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION
States is much denser along the eastern half of the
frontier than along the western stretch beyond the head
of Lake Superior. The eastern half is contiguous to
the older, more densely populated provinces, and hence
to more abundant sources of immigrants than is the
western ; and from New York to northern Minnesota,
the Great Lakes have facilitated and guided this north
ern immigration. The deep indentation of Lake Michi
gan has placed a large colony of Canadians in Illinois,
in the very heart of the Northwest, and brought them
within easy reach of the middle Mississippi and Mis
souri. The southern rims of Lakes Ontario and Erie
have a strong Canadian population. The two peninsu
las of Michigan, being enclosed by Lakes Huron, Mich
igan, and Superior, are Canadian across their whole
width, and there is only a slight paling of color from
east to west on the map to show the increase of Ameri
can influence towards the interior. The whole line of
the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes has helped this
stratification towards the west, bringing the wheat-fields
of Dakota and Minnesota and the forests of Michigan
near the centers of population in eastern Canada.
The proportion of Canadians to the total population
is greatest in the frontier states, and in this group is
greatest in those older states which, owing to geo
graphic conditions, have still a large backwoods area,
like Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the Adiron
dack region of New York, or in the newer states to the
west which have been recently reclaimed from the
wilderness. Such regions in their extensive forests
offer congenial employment to Canadian lumbermen,

DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION 331
practiced in the woods of Canada, or further west in
the prairie lands provide farms for those of agricultural
tastes. The first motive has located Canadians in the
forests of Maine, the Adirondacks, Michigan, and Wis
consin ; the second has distributed them in central
Minnesota, in North Dakota along the Red River of
the North, and in the rich grain lands of Iowa. In
North Dakota they form 12.61 per cent, of the total
population and 28.29 per cent, of the foreign born.
They are more strongly represented than any other
alien people in every section of Montana, except in the
two great mining counties, Silverbow and Lewis and
Clark, which have attracted large numbers of Germans ;
also in the one frontier county of Idaho ; and in Wash
ington they form nearly one fifth of the total foreign
born, being distributed most densely along the eastern
and southern shores of Puget Sound. One center of
greater density is found immediately on the land fron
tier, and another about the head of the inland sea,
showing the tendency to coastwise expansion.
This tendency is demonstrated also by a continuous
band of Canadian elements along the whole Pacific
coast south to the Mexican boundary and by the loca
tion of all the denser centers immediately on the sea
board or at points like Portland and the Willamette
valley readily accessible therefrom.25 The old pioneer
highway down the great Pacific Valley has also con
tributed to this distribution along the Pacific slope.
All. these coast states offer in their farming, grazing,
and timber lands congenial employment to Canadian
settlers. The isolated area of greater density in north-

332 DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION
ern California on Humboldt Bay is to be explained by
the important lumber industry of Humboldt County
and by the port of Eureka, the best along this whole
coast between the Golden Gate and the mouth of the
Columbia. The culmination of Canadian immigration into the
United States was reached in 1890. The accessions to
our population from this source amounted to 59,309
between 1850 and 1860 ; and every decade thereafter
they increased rapidly till the returns of the Eleventh
Census recorded the number as 392,802. During the
last decade they have dropped suddenly to 3064. Nor
do these small figures tell the whole story ; they have
to be supplemented by certain statistics compiled by
the Canadian government, which show that the United
States is furnishing annually a larger proportion of the
total number of immigrants into Canada than any other
country. Over 12,000 American settlers crossed the
line in 1900 ; the number rose to 17,987 in 1901, and
to 24,099 in the fiscal year ending June 30, 1902,
when the figures were larger than those from the whole
of continental Europe.
The United States then has lost to its northern neigh
bor about 55,000 citizens in the past three years ; and
even these reports are not complete, for they do not
include a large number of settlers who treked across
the border in their own wagons. The sudden turning
of the tide of migration is due to the exhaustion of our
supply of free arable land. This fact marks a crisis in
the relation of our population to our area. Abundance
of free land gave the United States the distinguishing

DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION 333
characteristic of a youthful country; but the fierce
rush to the Cherokee strip in 1893 and the ten appli
cants for every one of the fourteen thousand home
steads opened for occupation in the Kiowa-Comanche
district in 1901, the recent invasion of our Indian re
servations by American cattlemen, and this efflux of
American farmers across the northern border, all indi
cate that the United States has attained its majority.
Canada is now the lusty junior of the North American
continent. Its vast area gives it great capacity for
assimilation. As the only country in the North Tem
perate Zone now offering free land to home-seekers,
it is retaining its own citizens, drawing a stream of
emigrants from the United States, and is destined to
attract the great tide of agricultural immigrants from
Europe which until now has flowed into our own west
ern lands.26 The progressive policy of a great Canadian
statesman, moreover, is taking advantage of this ten
dency. Canadian immigration agents are at work in
most of our states ; wonderful exhibits of Canadian
grasses and grains are made at our state and county
fairs; posters illustrating the northward bend of the
isothermal lines west of Lake Superior and the amelio
rating effects of the warm " Chinook " winds are dis
played in market-places and school-houses ; and finally
the transfer of the migrating American is made as
simple, comfortable, and cheap as possible. The con
sequence is that thousands of settlers are crossing the
border to choose homesteads from the abundant graz
ing and farming lands of the Canadian Northwest.
The American emigrants are mostly from the border

334 DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION
states of the Dakotas, Montana, Minnesota, Wisconsin,
and Michigan ; from interior regions of uncertain rain
fall like Kansas and Nebraska ; and from some of the
older states like Ohio, Illinois, and Missouri, where land
has risen in value and will sell for a good sum which
can be reinvested in the cheaper land of Canada for the
rising generation. Many of the emigrants are people
who had moved to the United States from the older
provinces of Canada.27 The number includes also a
goodly sprinkling of Germans, Swedes, and Norwegians
who have been in the United States long enough to
learn the principle of prairie farming, and hence are
a vast improvement over the raw immigrants from
Europe. These people are drawn from that part of
our country which has received the largest portion of
the vigorous, moral Teutonic stock of Europe. When
we yield them up, therefore, we lose our best.
Nor is this all. Most of the male adults are practical
farmers.28 Their knowledge is their best capital; but
they carry with them household effects, farm stock,
and agricultural implements by the carload, while then-
pockets are well lined with cash. They go to take up
free homesteads by the quarter section and buy im
proved lands in the vicinity, till they own often as much
as four thousand acres. The 1661 persons who went
from Nebraska in the year ending June 30, 1901, to
settle in Manitoba and the Northwest Territories took
with them 154 carloads of effects and $1,762,050 in
capital. During the same period North Dakota lost
2203 of its citizens who took out with them 384 car
loads of effects, and Minnesota 2060 persons of the

DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION 335
farming class, representing a cash capital of over two
million dollars.29 All the emigrants are described as
belonging to an excellent class of citizens and as being
people of comfortable if not abundant means.
Such people we can ill afford to lose. And yet these
are just the people who are alert to new advantages and
who will seek them without hesitation. Migration is in
their blood. Their local attachment is small. Bred in
the large opportunities of a new country, they desire
the same advantages for their offspring. Their table of
square measure runs in terms of quarter sections and
square miles. They want big farms and ranches for them
selves and their children, and thus are unwilling to adopt
the cramped standards of size and the intensive agricul
ture of a denser population and an older civilization.
The demand that faces us, therefore, is more arable land
on American soil. The amount and character of this
American emigration proves that the demand is not a
fanciful one. In the light of these facts, the recently
proposed scheme of a national system of irrigation in
the arid states of the West, whereby millions of acres
may be reclaimed for cultivation, is not premature. It
may even be called urgent.
NOTES TO CHAPTER XV
1. Richmond M. Smith, Emigration and Immigration, p. 56. New
York, 1890.
2. Twelfth Census, Bulletin no. 103, Tahle 23.
3. Richmond M. Smith, Emigration and Immigration, p. 62. New
York, 1890.
4. Ratzel, Politische Geographie der Vereinigten Staaten, p. 355. 1893.
5. Twelfth Census, Bulletin no. 103, Table 23.
6. Ibid. Table 8.

336 DISTRIBUTION OF IMMIGRATION
7. Ibid. Table 23.
8. Ibid. pp. 13, 14.
9. Eleventh Census, Population, part i. map of distribution of popula
tion in 1840.
10. Ibid. pp. cxlvi. and cxlvii. maps 13 and 14.
11. Ibid. Table 16, p. 437. Also Twelfth Census, Bulletin no. 103,
Table 16, p. 23.
12. Richmond M. Smith, Emigration and Immigration, pp. 236-246.
13. Twelfth Census, Bulletin no. 103, p. 23, Table 16.
14. Ibid.
15. For statistical basis of these conclusions, see Eleventh Census, Popu
lation, part i. Table 32, p. 609.
16. Ibid, maps 10-15.
17. W. Z. Ripley, The Races of Europe, chap. xi. 1899.
18. Eleventh Census, Population, part i. Table 32, p. 606.
19. Ibid. Table 33, p.. 612.
20. Ibid. Comparison of Table 4, p. 41, and Table 33, p. 660.
21. Ibid. Table 32, p. 606.
22. Ibid. Table 33, p. 615.
23. Ibid. p. cxxxvi. and Table 33.
24. Ibid. p. cliii.
25 Ibid. Table 33, California, Oregon, and Washington.
26. J. D. Whelpley, The Isolation of Canada, in the Atlantic Monthly,
Aug. 1901.
27. Canadian Report of Immigration, part ii. pp. 146 and 175. Ottawa,
1901.
28. Ibid. pp. 116, 138, and passim.
29. Ibid. pp. 158, 161, 154.

CHAPTER XVI
GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OP CITIES AND
INDUSTRIES
A country in the germ, like the human embryo, passes
rapidly through all the lower phases of development
before it evolves to the type of the parent stock. Such
was the history of colonial America. The settlers who
came to people this country brought their best capital
in the elements of European civilization. As exponents
of this civilization they represented the forces of hered
ity. What transformed them was their environment,
always the most potent factor for a young growth. The
wide surrounding wilderness necessitated a return to a
primitive type of living in order to cope with primitive
conditions, but it generated a new order of adaptability,
which is the strongest guarantee of a higher develop
ment. The men who learned the law of the wilderness
gained the secret of its mastery. For the products
of English garden and farm they accepted the savage
commissariat of game, maize, and berries ; for the busy
London shops, Indian barter ; for carriage and cart on
well-built road, the highway of the streams with swift
moving canoe or the blazed trail through forest and
glade for the noiseless tread of moccasined feet.
Their settlements reflected in part the needs of de
fense which dictated the isolated, inaccessible sites of

338 CITIES AND INDUSTRIES
towns in the militant past. Fear of Indian attack
located their first homes on Roanoke, Jamestown, Man-
hattan, and New Orleans islands, hike the ancient Medi
terranean cities of Tyre, Alexandria, Syracuse^ ancLthe
Ionian colonies off the Asia Minor coast ; or it placed
their stockaded forts on hills or eminences as best pro
tected against unexpected assault, like the Tuscan towns
, crowning high spurs of the Apennines, or the walled
" burg " or citadel which characterizes the mediaeval
cities of Germany. Danger of aggressions from rival
colonies along the coast suggested a retired location at
the inner end of long, narrow inlets or estuaries^ accord
ing to the instructions given the Jamestown settlers,
"just lis the same motive of security located Rome, Ephe-
sus, Smyrna, Troy, and Athens well beyond reach of
the Mediterranean pirates.
Such were the temporary concessions made to the
militant conditions of their savage environment by the
early settlers. In conflict with the moulding influ
ence of this environment were the commercial needs
and purposes which an industrial, commercial people
had brought with them from their trans- Atlantic homes.
Firearms and the strength of increasing numbers soon
emancipated them from rigid geographic control in the
selection of their village sites. Still encircled by their
stockades, however, the settlements lined up along the
rivers to the head of navigation in order to command
the sole means of communication with the interior, while
their accessibility to the coast guaranteed the trade with
the mother country, the constant source of the com
mercial influence. At the meeting-points of sea and

CITIES AND INDUSTRIES 339
inland navigation grew upjfoe, large towns, tho^e^jth
the best harbors and the easiest, most extensive lines of
communication with the back country gradually gaining
preeminence. For a long time, however, there was
sligttaistinction between the small harbor and the large
entrepot ; differentiation had not yet gone so far. The
evolution of seaports in this country has been marked
by increase of size attended by decrease of number.1
f The colonial cities of America were essentiallv com- \
( _  „......»— — ^-~.;— _ j )
mercial centers, not industrial^ _They were markets
wnerethe country's new products were exchanged for
the manufactured wares of England. The colonies as
a whole were still in the agricultural stage of develop
ment. Only in New England had the geographical
conditions of an excessively glaciated surface, abundant
water-power, and accessibility by sea to outside sourcesA
of raw materials, curtailed the agricultural period and
introduced the industrial. The New England towns
became therefore manufacturing as well as commercial
centers, but the products of their artisan labor were
limited in variety, simple in character as a rule, and
formed but a small part of the total exchanges. New
York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and later New Orleans
became the typical commercial ports of a highly pro
ductive agricultural country.
The industrial phase of city development began with
the close of the Revolution and the effort to gain in
dustrial as well as political autonomy. It advanced
most rapidly in those parts of the country where, from\
conditions of soil and topography, arable land was'
limited in supply and soon felt the competition of other

340 CITIES AND INDUSTRIES
agricultural areas more favored by nature ; where the
labor thus released from the farm sought other outlets
for its energy, and where the laboring class thus formed
received largest accessions from European immigration ;
where an invigorating climate stimulated the hvrman
' energy jie^e^aj;y^JEoxJ3ie--su«ta4ne4~4abor of manufac
ture ; and where superior routes of communication with
other parts of the country, whether by sea, river,"lake,
or land, facilitated exchanges between such industrial
centers and the agricultural areas. These conditions
are found in the northeastern part of the United States,
shading off in intensity towards the south and west,
increasing towards the Atlantic coast. Hence the ac
companying cartogram shows that three fourths of the
one hundred and sixty cities of the United States, each
having a population of twenty-five thousand or more,
fall within a zone lying between thirty-seven and forty-
three and a half degrees north latitude, and stretch
ing from the ocean on the east to the ninety-seventh
meridian just beyond the Missouri River on the west.
It is impossible to separate the commercial and indus
trial aspects of a city because of the close inter-relation
between the two ; now one aspect, now the other pre
dominates, or again they may be equally strong, each
contributing its part to the city's growth. The area
of greatest urban development in the United States is
the area of most abundant elements of production —
labor, capital, water-power, fuel, and raw material of all
kinds — as also of most numerous and varied routes of
communication, not only with different parts of this
country but also with Europe. Hence commercial and

r \

\^cro

CITIES AND INDUSTRIES 341
industrial activities are blended in all these urban centers
in varying proportions which are determined largely by
geographical conditions.
The modern city is essentially a point for collecting,
producing, and distributing commodities of all kinds.
Its location must be as accessible jis possible. The site
of the metropolis is at the cross-roads of the great world
thoroughfares, where its markets can receive the pro
ducts of all continents and all climes. All seaport towns
are on the world's greatest and cheapest highway, the
ocean. This is their first and greatest advantage. Their
f urtbjr__aW©lopmeirt - depends upon the area, fertility,
and population of the back country which* they cbm-
mand^and their means of communication with the same.
xhe country for which Liverpool is the entrepot is
limited in extent, but vast in its content, in the amount
and value of its products and in the size and demands
of its population. Adelaide and Melbourne are good
ports, but their growth will be limited by the desert
character of the interior of Australia. New York and
San Francisco are on opposite sides of the same country,
command therefore the same area, and have equally good
harbors ; but while New York is connected by cheap
waterways and almost level railroads with the interior,
for San Francisco the high freight rates over the Rocky
Mountains are prohibitive except for merchandise of
small bulk and large value, and the arid plains and high
lands of the West can never support the same density
of population as the fertile region which lies within the
range of attraction of the Hudson River port. Moreover
San Francisco's trans-oceanic connections are longer than

342 CITIES AND INDUSTRIES
those of New York, and the outbound cargo to the
Orient finds a far more restricted market than the highly
progressive countries of Europe offer to the commerce
of our Atlantic cities.
Coast cities develop because they are middlemen in
the commerce of all the bordering continents. Cities
located on a land frontier share in the trade only of two
countries, their own and their neighbor's. Differences
of geographical location, climate, soil, and degree of
development tend to differentiate the products of the
two communities and hence stimulate exchanges. Com
merce between the two will depend upon the amount
and kinds of their respective products. Interior cities
are merely local distributing-points, whose commercial
activity is determined by their command of routes of
communication, and the contrast in economic develop
ment of the areas which they serve.
In the light of these general principles, let us ex
amine the geographical distribution of urban centers in
the United States. Of the twenty large cities having
a population of 175,000 or more, nine (Boston, Provi-
"dence, New York, Newark, Jersey City, Philadelphia,
Baltimore, New Orleans, and San Francisco) are located
> on the coast, five more along the northern lake frontier
(Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee),
and five on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers (Pittsburg,
Cincinnati, Louisville, St. Louis, and Minneapolis).2 The
twentieth city in this group is Washington, the national
capital. Though many of these owe their size in part
to their industries, nevertheless commercial facilities
have made an important contribution to their growth.

CITIES AND INDUSTRIES 343
The development of the large seaports in the United
States reflects the advantages of a trans-oceanic market
and of coastwise trade with other parts of the American
continents. The active commerce which has long ex
isted between New Orleans and the northern Atlantic
states by sea would have been prohibited by the high
freight charges of inland transportation, whether by rail
or by river and canal. Four out of the six cities with
a population of over 500,000 are located on the Atlan
tic coast, and the fifth, Chicago, is accessible from the
ocean to sea-going vessels through the St. Lawrence
River, the Canadian canals, and the Great Lakes. The
same rule holds on the Pacific slope. West of the
Rockies there are eight cities with a population of 30,000
or more, and six of these (San Francisco, Los Angeles,
Oakland, Portland, Seattle, and Tacoma) are located on
the seaboard ; two (Salt Lake City and Spokane) in the
interior. Though climatic conditions and the great
fertility of the western coast region favor increase of
population and hence of urban centers, nevertheless
trade with the Yukon has been the making of Seattle,
just as Asiatic commerce has stimulated the growth of
San Francisco and Portland. Los Angeles will begin
to exploit this field of wealth on a larger scale when the
government improvements on the deep-sea harbor at
San Pedro are completed. i,J
The rities.-along_±he Great Lakes, though located on
the inland periphery of the United States, yet enjoy
the advantages of water transportation for a brisk
interior coastwise trade with eight states of the Union
and foreign trade with Canada. The most populous

344 CITIES AND INDUSTRIES
and productive provinces of Canada are located along
the borders of these Lakes. Hence a considerable part
of our large commerce ($157,585,695 in 1902 3) with
our northern neighbor moves across this Lake frontier
and is forwarded by our Lake cities. The long chain
of inland seas gives a wide range in the distribution of
these exchanges. Chicago's markets in Canada stretch
from Quebec to Port Arthur, and Canada lumber seeks
the furniture factories at Chicago or Grand Rapids as
readily as it does the wood-pulp mills of northern New
York. The cities on the Ohio and Mississippi are located
on the outer margin of the urban industrial area and on
the inner margin of the southern and_ western agricul
tural section. It is not a chance fact that StTLouis
has developed the largest mercantile hardware house in
the world. The city stands near the southwestern apex
of the industrial peninsula, and the farming, mining,
and grazing interests of the wide surrounding territory
demand hardware more than any other one class of
commodities. The two chief items of capital on a
Texas or Nebraska ranch are so many heads of cattle,
so many miles of wire fence. This same distributing
function characterizes also in a less degree the ten cities
with a population of over twenty-five thousand along
the Mississippi, the seven on the Missouri, and seven
on the Ohio.
An active., commercial center necessarily jpossesses
several of the qualifications of ^successful manufactur
ing town. Situated on the focus of converging routes
of communication, it commands abundant raw materials

CITIES AND INDUSTRIES

345

of various kinds and also an extensive market for the
sale of its finished products. Its commercial interests
insure the accumulation of capital necessary for indus
trial enterprises. Its labor" supply, the last important

0 to 20 per cent in cities of 2,500 + inhabitants.
20 " 40 " " " " " " " "
40 " 60 " " *' " " " " lt
60 *' SO " " " " " " " "
-g0 •{• « '* " " " " " "

PER CENT. OP POPULATION IN CITIE8 HAVTN& AT LEAST 2500
INHABITANTS
factor in production, will depend upon the density and
character of the surrounding population, and the con
ditions of climate under which its laborers must work^
The urban development of a country is a fairly accurate
index of its industrial progress. The accompanying
cartogram 4 shows the striking contrast in point of city

346 CITIES AND INDUSTRIES
life between the North and South on the one hand and
the East and West on the other. It is a climatic line
(approximately 37° N. L.]_which divides the urban
North- from the rural South, the area of abundant
skilled white labor from the area of unreliable, un
skilled negro labor. Even when skilled workmen are
imported from the North to some particularly favored
center, of industry in the South, an enervating climate
¦makes their labor far more difficult and less efficient.
Even the entrepreneur does not escape the paralyzing
touch of heat and moisture.
The contrast between the East and West in point of
industrial and urban development is based upon a dif
ference of geographical conditions and density of popu
lation. The territory lying east of the ninety-seventh
meridian and north of the Potomac, Ohio, and Missouri
Compromise Line contains about sixty per cent, of the
total population of the United States, but comprises
only about twenty-two per cent, of its land area.5 Be
yond the margin of aridity, stock-raising, agriculture,
and mining employ most of the inhabitants except in
Colorado, California, and Washington, where again cer
tain geographic influences raise the proportion of the
^urban population. But in general, conditions of prevail
ing aridity limit the number of people the country can
support, while the exclusion of all but costly railroad
transportation across long stretches of desert and over
mountain barriers discourages industrial progress and
its concomitant urban development.
We distinguish three great areas of the United
States in relation to cities: 1. The highly developed

CITIES AND INDUSTRIES 347
industrial area in New England and the middle states
with predominant urban life (68.2 per cent.). 2. The
Mississippi valley area with very successful agriculture
and strong commercial and industrial centers in its
northern half, where the urban population constitutes
38.5 per cent, of the whole.6 3. The great West, de
voted chiefly to grazing and mining, with sparse popu
lation and a few cities as distributing-centers, some of
them, however, combining industries closely related to
their geographical conditions.
The area of intensest urban and industrial develop
ment is found in New England and the middle states.
This development has been due to special local causes
besides those general ones before enumerated as operat
ing in the whole urban zone from the Atlantic to the
Missouri River. The local advantage earliest felt was
the water-power of New England and that developed in
central New York with the construction of the Erie
Canal. The whole Atlantic slope of_the_Appalachian
Mountains naturally generates water-power. The rivers
draining east cross an upland of resistant rock from
which they descend to the coastal plain as cascades or
rapids. This " fall line " stretches from the Delaware
and Schuylkill southward as far as northern Georgia and
Alabama, retreating farther and farther from the coast.
In the lower courses of the New England streams, rapids
and falls occur within a short distance of tidewater.
Besides this advantage of accessibility from the coast,
as opposed to the long tortuous avenues of approach
formed by the rivers of the most southern states, New
England's water-power comes from concentrated falls

348 CITIES AND INDUSTRIES
due to the predominance of hard metamorphic rocks
like granite, while in the middle and southern states
softer rocks give rise to shoals and rapids, often too
long and too wide to be utilized without heavy outlay.
This is especially true of the larger streams. The Sus
quehanna has very little power economically available.
In the southern states there are numerous abrupt falls
on the small head streams, which, however, are subject
to violent freshets due to the steep slope and heavy
rainfall. In New England and part of the middle
states, on the other hand, a more advantageously dis
tributed rainfall, a larger precipitation in the summer
and autumn than in the winter and spring, compensates
for the evaporation during the heated term, and in
terior lakes of glacial origin regulate the flow of the
drainage streams all the year round. Hence water-
power wasjmore readily^ available in the North Atlantic
states.7 There it was developed earliest and most ex
tensively, though it was brought into requisition also
for simple industries along the southern Piedmont. In
1870 it was used as much as steam in' all the Atlantic
coast states. In New England it furnished 70.3 per
cent, of the total power used for manufacturing pur
poses, in the middle states 50 per cent., and in the
southern 49.8 per cent, of the total employed in these
different sections, though the water-power utilized in the
southern states amounted to less than'half that employed
in either of the other sections.8 This was doubtless a
result of retarded industrial development quite as much
as less favorable geographic conditions in the mountain
streams, as recent progress goes to prove.

CITIES AND INDUSTRIES 349
Local water-power determined the beginning of Lewis-
ton, Manchester, Lowell, Lawrence, Pawtucket, Water-
bury, and Fall River in New England, and a line of
towns along the Erie and Ohio canals. It has been an
important factor in the localization of the textile in
dustry, the manufacture of hosiery and knit goods, and
of wood pulp and paper. The cotton industry has cen
tralized chiefly in the water-power localities of New Eng
land and latterly in the, Piedmont region of South Caro
lina, North Carolina, and Georgia. Though steam has
become more important as an industrial force, never
theless 32.6 per cent, of the total power used in New
England for cotton manufacture comes from falls, and
34.8 per cent, in these three southern states.9
Abundant water-power, accessibility to the raw ma
terial, low cost of living, and peculiarly free conditions
of labor (unrestricted employment of women and chil
dren, retarded development of labor unions) have
brought about a rapid advance of cotton manufacture
in the South, and started a migration of the industry
from New England to the southern Piedmont. This
has been a movement not only of the factory but also
of capital. The water-power of the Piedmont region,
estimated in 1880 at over 300,000 horse-power, though
greatly developed in the past decade, will attain its full
utility with its more general transmission in the form of
electricity to desirable factory points. This has already
been done successfully in Columbia, Pelzer, and Ander
son, South Carolina. On account of the scattered distri
bution of this water-power, derived from relatively small
streams as opposed to the concentration at Niagara and

350, CITIES AND INDUSTRIES
the Sault Sainte Marie, its remoteness from the com
mercial belt of the seaboard, and the recent period of
its utilization, no cities of any considerable size have
grown up with the industrial development to which it
has contributed. In South Carolina, where this elec
trically transmitted energy has been most extensively
employed in the South, and where the value of the cot
ton-mill products ranks second only to those of Mas
sachusetts, urban manufactures nevertheless constitute
less than forty per cent, of the total of the state reck
oned in value of products.10
Power transmission and distribution by the use of an
electric current has robbed water-power of that immo
bility which was its greatest disadvantage. It promises
to give rise in the vicinity of large falls to urban centers
of manufacture with an entirely new physiognomy,
marked particularly by the lack of a congested factory
district and by a predominance of the suburban charac
ter. The wide distribution of possible plant-sites, as
opposed to the crowding of the mills about the falls as
we see them in Minneapolis to-day, is limited only by
facilities of transportation. And even the style of the
buildings is modified, for massive walls to support heavy
machinery are no longer necessary. Where smaller
heads of water are used for the generation of electricity
at commercially inaccessible points, as in the Sierras, the
tendency is to concentrate this motive force at distant
urban points in the lowlands, where raw materials and
means of communication become determinants of the
localization. Water-power has been in many industries superseded

CITIES AND INDUSTRIES 351
or reinforced by steam, but in paper and wood pulp
manufacture it has remained supreme, constituting two
thirds of all the power used for this purpose in 1900.
The localization of this industry is instructive as show
ing the power of geographic control. The factors de
termining it are proximity to the supply of spruce and
poplar, the timber chiefly used in making wood pulp,
and found in its greatest abundance near our northern
frontier and in Canada ; water-power to operate cheaply
the heavy grinding machinery ; clear water for mixing
pulp ; and an adjacent market in the newspaper presses
and publishing houses of the large northern cities.11
Hence we find this industry localized along the Kenne
bec, Little Androscoggin, and Connecticut rivers ; in
Coos County in northern New Hampshire ; in Saratoga,
Washington, and Jefferson counties in New York at
the outskirts of the Adirondack Mountains, where water-
power is abundant and the local supply of wood can be
supplemented readily from the Canadian forests by the
St. Lawrence River and the Champlain Canal; and
in Outagamie County, Wisconsin, where the abundant
water-power north of Lake Winnebago and west of
Green Bay, clear streams from the gravel-covered sur
face of an old glacial area, an almost inexhaustible
forest of northern woods, and proximity to the large
Lake cities, which are made economically nearer by cheap
water transportation, offer all the conditions necessary
for the successful conduct of this industry.
Where sfea,T" *gT"»a +!ia pla.™* nf wa.W-pnwfir in the
operation of manufactures, fuel becomes an all impor
tant factor in „the localization of industries, especially

352 CITIES AND INDUSTRIES
where it is foundj^aj^jrjHU the other raw material
fundamental to industrial progress, or "where the two

can be readily brought into conjunction by cheap trans-
portation. The anthracite coal-fields and iron-mines of
the eastern Appalachians in Pennsylvania explain the
numerous industrial towns of that section. These owe
their origin or development to blast-furnaces, rolling-
mills, and foundries. Canal communication with the
lower Delaware and Hudson, freight cars moving for
the greater part of the way on a downward grade from
mines to seaboard have brought fuel and iron at low
cost to New England and the middle states, and
furnished the chief basis for the later industrial develop
ment of this section. Accessibility to the Pennsylvania
mines explains the activity of iron and steel shipbuild
ing from the coast of Virginia to that of Maine, wherein
the Chesapeake Bay and lower Delaware River districts
contest the primacy.
The momentum of an early start and an extensive
market have combined to keep eastern Pennsylvania an
important area of iron and steel production ; but rivals
elsewhere have pushed it hard. The barrier of the
Appalachians, as we have seen in a previous chapter,
and the consequent higher freight charges across them,
soon after the Revolution stimulated the exploitation
of mining resources on the western slope of the moun
tains, and gave rise to industrial centers along the
southern head streams of the Ohio. With the intro
duction of coke instead of anthracite as a fuel in blast
furnaces, and the increased use of ores from the Lake
Superior mines, the center of the iron and steel indus-

CITIES AND INDUSTRIES 353
try has migrated across the mountains to the Connels-
ville district, spreading from the sources of the Ohio
northwestward to Lake Erie, developing Johnstown,
Pittsburg, McKeesport, Duquesne, and Newcastle in
Pennsylvania, Youngstown, Cleveland, and numerous
other towns in Ohio. Connelsville grew up about its
coke-ovens, which furnish forty-eight per cent, of all
the coke manufactured in the United States. Ohio
owes its phenomenal industrial progress to its position
midway between the ore barges on Lake Erie coming
from Superior mines, and the coal arriving by canal,
river, and rail from the fields of western Pennsylvania
and West Virginia.
But this westward migration of the iron and steel
industry did not stop at Cleveland. Other Lake ports
were accessible to the northern ores and to Pennsylvania
coal and coke. Hence we find this industry contribut
ing to the growth of Buffalo, Lorain, Detroit, Mil
waukee, Chicago, and Joliet, the last getting its raw
materials by the Chicago drainage canal or short haul
on the railroad from Lake Michigan. The presence of
iron, steel, and fuel have stimulated in this vicinity the
establishment on a large scale of related manufactures,
such as iron pipes, machinery, engines, and locomotives.
Combined with a supply of hard woods from the adja
cent northern forests, they have given rise to yet other
industries. The whole line of the Great Lakes has
seen a wonderful production of steel ships and barges
for the Lake trade, while a broad zone of cities between
the Lakes and the Ohio are making agricultural imple
ments and farm-wagons for the grain belt near by.

354 CITIES AND INDUSTRIES
The manufacture of the latter articles, which must
stand heavy freight charges on account of bulk and
weight, is largely localized in the state of Illinois, which
makes 41.5 per cent, of the total, and in Ohio, Wis
consin, and Indiana. The industry migrates westward
in the wake of expanding grain lands. This tendency
is to be noticed in the falling off in value of the pro
ducts in New York and Ohio during the last decade, and
the increase in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan.
The potency of iron ore and coal in giving rise to
urban centers is demonstrated in the mineral belt at the
foot of the Appalachian Mountains in northern Ala
bama, where the mere names of some of the recent
towns and settlements — Birmingham, Sheffield, Bes
semer, Irondale, Ironton, Dolomite, Newcastle, Connels-
ville, Carbonville, Coalberg, Coal City, and Coaldale —
suggest the cause of their existence. Jefferson County,
which comprises most of the far-famed Birmingham
district, ranks fourth among the iron and steel produc
ing counties in the United States. It is surpassed only
by Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, Mahoning
County in eastern Ohio, and Cook County (Chicago) in
Illinois. \ This development has come in spite of adverse
)or conditions, an enervating climate, and the lack
i of a cheap waterway to the sea. Yet Alabama pig iron
is exported to England, continental Europe and Japan,
and Alabama coal is beginning to compete with the
Pittsburg product in the markets of New Orleans.
The whole of the Birmingham district is already
dotted with industrial points, as yet only in the initial
stages of their development, which promise to make it a

CITIES AND INDUSTRIES 355
second Allegheny County. Many lines of manufacture
related to the iron and steel industry are already spring
ing up.12 Five years ago an old abandoned farm ad
joining the blast-furnaces of the Tennessee Coal and
Iron Company some six miles west of Birmingham was
selected as the site of a new town named Ensley. In
1898 the streets had not been laid out, but were merely
indicated by lines extending in some cases through fields
which still showed the furrows of the plough. Now at
the beginning of 1903 Ensley is an incorporated city
with an estimated population of 10,350. It has one of
the largest plants in the United States for the manu
facture of wire nails and fencing, employing a thou
sand men ; and a big establishment for the manufacture
of steel cars is in process of construction.
Proximity to the abundant forests of the Appalachians
to the north and the maritime pine belts to the south,
and a location in the center of a vast non-industrial area
will further insure a brilliant future to the Birmingham
district. Its railroad facilities are excellent, but it needs
water transportation to tidewater at Mobile to remove
its chief handicap. Its destined industrial and urban
development will more than justify the proposed canal,
declared feasible at least along the Valley River to
Bessemer, and the improvement of the Warrior River
for six-foot navigation, whereby communication can be
made southward through the Tombigbee and Mobile
rivers to Mobile Bay.13 It is claimed that such a water
way would reduce freight charges on iron eighty , per
cent. All the industrial centers which we have considered

356 CITIES AND INDUSTRIES
in relation to iron and coal production have had a close
geographical connection with the Appalachian Moun
tains : they have been on the slopes of this upland area
or have been readily accessible to it by rail, canal, and
ocean on the east, or by the Great Lakes, rail, and Ohio
River on the west. They may be called the cities of
the iron belt, but some of them overlap the next or
agricultural belt, and hence show industries sprung
purely from the products of farm and field, just as some
of the outermost towns of this zone, in turn, coincide
with the few marginal manufacturing points of the
grazing belt beyond. There is just one spot where all
these belts overlap, where the industries emanating from
the products of mine, forest, grain-field, and cattle ranch
> all come together, and that is Chicago. Hence its
growth from a village of two hundred and fifty inhabit
ants in 1832 to a metropolis with a population of a mil
lion in 1890 and over a million and a half in 1900.
Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, located in the great cen
tral wheat region, rank among the first four of the flour
producing states, but they yield the primacy to Minne
sota, which combines proximity to the spring wheat crop
of the Red River valley in the United States and Canada
with the water-power of the upper Mississippi. As flour
and grist mills answer chiefly only local demand and do
not belong by nature to city industries, we find them
widely distributed ; only those large establishments pro
ducing for a big domestic and foreign market contribute
to urban development. Hence Minnesota's 14.1 per
cent, of the country's total production gauged by value
means a strong localization ; and the fact that nearly

CITIES AND INDUSTRIES 357

five eighths of the state's product comes from the
mills at the Falls of St. Anthony indicates the power
of geographic control in specializing the industry and
stimulating the development of Minneapolis. [See
map showing productive areas of principal commercial
staples in chapter xvn.] ~" ~
Proximity to the great central grain-fields has favored
the production of malt liquor in St. Paul, Milwaukee,
Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, though a local de
mand from a large German population has also con
tributed to the result ; and the same factor of location
has been operative in the manufacture of distilled liquors
in Illinois, Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio, the four chief
states in this industry, ranking in the order named.
The increased production toward the margin of the
western and southern agricultural area is noticeable.
Distilled liquors, owing to their relatively small bulk
and large value, can bear the cost of transportation far
better than the raw materials from which they are made ;
hence the industry shows a strong tendency to localize
near the grain supply.14 It has been a marked factor
in urban development only in the case of Peoria and
Louisville. In Kentucky especially it is distributed in
small establishments in the rural districts, generally
wherever a large spring or stream of limestone water
has furnished this desirable ingredient of the Bourbon
product. There has been a steady westward migration, follow
ing the advance of population, of all industries based
upon cereal production; and these have been closely
attended in their westward course by the allied industry

358 CITIES AND INDUSTRIES
of slaughtering and meat-packing. The herd and the
cattle ranch naturally precede the corn and wheat field
in the order of economic development. Hence we find
that whereas flour and grist milling is most highly
specialized on the Mississippi, slaughtering and meat
packing has its most striking localization farther west
on the Missouri. Here, however, an arid climate has
reinforced the effects of later settlement.
The historical geography of this industry is instruct
ive. It began, as we have seen, in the early backwoods
farms beyond the Alleghenies with the salting of hog
products for export down the Mississippi to New Orleans
and thence to the eastern seaboard cities. The Ohio,
Illinois, and eastern Mississippi valleys were the chief
stock-raising region of that day. Hogs especially ran
wild in the " range " feeding on roots and nuts, or were
fattened in the sty on corn. The salt came chiefly from
the abundant mines on the Great Kanawha to the river
towns. After the opening of the Ohio and Erie Canal,
Cincinnati could command also the product of the
Ontario mines in central New York ; hence its supply
of salt was assured. Its hams and bacon had a large
market, particularly in the South.
The industry arose in Cincinnati in 1818 and had its
chief center there till 1861-62, but numerous packing
establishments sprang up in Columbus, Chillicothe, Cir-
cleville, and Hamilton, all of which were located on the
Ohio canals ; in several towns along the Ohio, notably
Louisville, along the Wabash, Illinois, and Mississippi
rivers; and in Chicago, where the industry began to
develop in earnest only after 1850.16 In 1862 the center

CITIES AND INDUSTRIES 359
migrated westward from Cincinnati to Chicago where
it has remained ever since, though the most striking
industrial specialization is found beyond on the Mis
souri. The slaughtering and meat-packing business had come
in the mean time to include the preparation of cattle and
sheep for the market, and the ranching frontier had
been pushed farther west. Sheep are now raised ex
tensively in the upper Rocky Mountain states where
pasturage is abundant, and cattle range the prairies of
Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Dakotas. Extended
railroad systems and the introduction of refrigerator
cars for the transportation of meat render it more eco
nomical to kill on the border of the cattle belt and save
freight costs on waste product. First St. Louis, then
Kansas City, Kansas, and finally South Omaha, Ne
braska, developed as packing centers. Each of the
last two surpassed St. Louis in 1900, but both together
hardly equaled Chicago in the value of their products.16
Chicago's location near the margin of the grazing lands
to the west and the corn area just to the south, and her
unsurpassed means of transportation, especially for the
export trade, has assured her the primacy. An impor
tant part of the commercial activity of the city centers
about her stockyards, packing establishments, and the
dozen or more considerable industries which have de
veloped to utilize the waste products of the slaughter
houses. Some of these are the manufacture of soap,
candles, glue, fertilizer, gelatin, brewer's isinglass, gly
cerine, ammonia, bone-meal, neat's-foot oil, felt, pepsin,
and knife-handles.17

360 .CITIES AND INDUSTRIES
The strong localization of the slaughtering and pack
ing industry in the central West is indicated by the
fact that the solid block of six states in the corn belt —
Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, Indiana, Missouri, and Iowa
— inl900 yielded together 77 per cent, of the total pro
duct of the United States reckoned in value. Illinois
led with 40.1 per cent, of the total, a decline from the
46.3 per cent, of 1890, while Kansas advanced from
10.3 to 11 per cent., Nebraska from 5.5 to 10.2 per
cent., and Missouri from 3.4 to 6 per cent, in the same
decade. A line of cities on the Missouri River, fron
tier posts of the urban area, manifest a very intense
specialization in this industry, for it yields to South
Omaha 96.3 per cent, of the value of all its manufac
tured products, to Kansas City, Kansas, 88.4 per cent.
jujd to St. Joseph 60 per cent.18
Each frontier belt tends to pass more or less rapidly
through all the stages of economic evolution, from ranch
to field and from field to factory. The rate of progress
is determined mainly by the extent of the zone-in ques^
tion, the quantity and quality of its arable soil, and the
geographic conditions regulating competition. In the
pastoral and agricultural stages competition hastens, in
the industrial it hinders incipient development. Beyond
the Great Plains, whose corn and pasture lands support
the packing industry of the central West, lies the vast
territory between the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra
Nevada, a region of scattered but productive agriculture
where irrigation is possible, of wide cattle ranges, and
abundant mines. It is a land of limited population,
which the live-stock interest tends to distribute widely,

CITIES AND INDUSTRIES 361
but which the mines and intensive agriculture depend
ent upon irrigation canals tend to concentrate in certain
small, favored areas, while wide stretches of desert and
bare mountains are left wholly uninhabited. These
facts seem to be the explanation of the rise in urban
percentages in many of the far western states as seen in
the cartogram ; but the striking urban development of
Colorado, California, and Washington is determined in
great part also by certain other geographic conditions.
Colorado's cities and towns have naturally sprung up
in the vicinity of its mines and of its upland water sup
ply for irrigation. This state, in addition to gold, silver,
' copper, and lead, has also an abundant supply of iron and
coal, the essentials of manufacture, found notably along
the one hundred and fifth meridian at the eastern base
of the mountains. Remoteness from the centers of man
ufactures east of the Mississippi, the lack of cheap water
communication, and the prohibitive freight charges on
the bulky and heavy commodities required by a mining
and agricultural population not only in this state but
also in the vast intermontane territory behind it, have
combined to exclude competition and force the industrial
development of Colorado. Denver's geographical loca
tion at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, near three of
the natural passways to the Far West followed by the
Union Pacific, the Denver and Rio Grande, and the
Santa Fe railroads, has made it a distributing-point for
a large hinterland. It has a population of 133,859.
Just to the south Pueblo, with a similar location and a
population of 28,157, and Leadville (population 12,455),
within the mountains, have a predominant industrial

362 CITIES AND INDUSTRIES
development growing out of their mines. But the Colo
rado urban industries include also extensive smelting
works, the manufacture of iron and steel, of foundry
and machine products to answer the local demand;
slaughtering and packing, due to the adjacent live-stock
area; and flour and grist milling which avails itself of
the abundant grain crops near by.
On the Pacific seaboard, also, remoteness from the
eastern manufacturing centers and the consequent lack
of competition early gave an impulse to industrial devel
opment. The presence of trans-oceanic markets on the
populous coasts of Asia, and coastwise trade along
the western shore of the American continents widened
the market which inland was limited for most commod
ities by a mountain barrier. Abundant products of
forest, ranch, field, orchard, and vineyard furnished
many of the raw materials of manufacture. However,
the lack of coal and iron and of the cheap and reliable
labor developing with a dense population have proven
great drawbacks, but have not sufficed to counterbalance
certain local advantages. In Washington and Oregon
abundant water-power, especially on the Columbia and
Willamette rivers, has in part compensated for the lack
of coal for many years. Recently local mines have pro
duced fuel of only fair character. California is finding
a valuable substitute for coal in the products of its
extensive oil-fields in the south, and in the generation
and transmission of electrical energy from the plunging
streams of the Sierra Nevada in the region of abundant
rainfall in the north. From the Colgate power-house
on the North Yuba River in the Sierras northeast of

CITIES AND INDUSTRIES 363
Sacramento, electricity is transmitted 218 miles to San
Francisco. On its way it crosses sixteen of the most
populous counties of the state, and side lines run the
street-cars in Oakland, operate a flour-mill in Stockton,
and various industries in Sacramento, Benicia, and San
Jose.19 In the state of Washington, electric fights,
street railways, and motors in Seattle and Tacoma get
their power from the Snoqualmie Falls some seventy
miles away. It is proposed in the near future to pro
vide all the Puget Sound cities with electricity in a simi
lar manner, as their proximity to the steep slopes of the
Cascade Range and the more abundant rainfall in this
northern latitude simplify the problems of generation
and of transmission.
The Pacific coast states, like Colorado, are industrial
epitomes in consequence of their isolation ; but the list
of their leading manufactures marks them still a frontier
country where land is abundant and the resources of
forest, pasturage, and field are still ample. Lumber and
timber industries, flour and grist milling, and slaughter
ing are prominent in all three states. In Washington
and Oregon fish canning and preserving, which springs
from the run of the salmon in the northern streams,
is balanced by the canning of fruit and vegetables in
California. Allied to these industries are planing-mills,
paper and wood-pulp mills in the northern states, where,
in consequence of a heavier rainfall and more recent
exploitation, timber is most abundant, breweries and
distilleries, tanneries and saddleries, and shipyards
especially for the construction of wooden vessels. Car
construction and repair-shops tell of the western termini

364 CITIES AND INDUSTRIES
of the great continental railroads. The preeminence of
sugar and molasses refining among the industries of Cali
fornia points to the proximity of the Hawaiian Islands,
whose raw sugar seeks San Francisco as the nearest
port of entry into the United States.
All of these industries are due to abundant raw
materials.' The manufacture of foundry and machine
products, on the other hand, in spite of the high prices
of coal and iron, has developed to large proportions
purely as a result of geographical isolation in response
to a local demand for mining tools and machinery.
This has been the case especially in California, though
to no small degree also in Washington and Oregon.
The year following the discovery of gold in California
(1849) saw the first foundry established in that state;
and in 1860 San Francisco alone had fourteen foundry
and machine shops. The stimulant of a strong local
demand has brought the industry now to such develop
ment that even in the face of existing disadvantages
certain lines of its products not only control the local
markets but also enter the markets of the world. The
next step has been the rise of iron and steel shipbuild
ing, and the construction of the battle-ship Oregon.
The marked industrial character of the cities in the
Pacific coast states is indicated by the fact that urban
manufactures constitute from 59 to 66 per cent, of the
total industries of this section. There is far less of the
" neighborhood industry," production for local consump
tion, which characterizes all the states between the
Sierras and the Missouri River except Colorado, and
most of the region south of the Ohio River, and which

CITIES AND INDUSTRIES 365
reduces their proportion of urban manufacture to 30
per cent, or less. And yet it is safe to say that the
industrial and hence urban development of the Pacific
coast region will make strides in the future. Already
the acquisition of the Philippines and an increased trade
with the Orient is having its effect. This whole region
is a base of supplies for the Yukon country, whose de
velopment is still in its infancy. Oil from southern
California and coal from the south Alaskan fields
promise to solve the problem of fuel. The opening of
the Isthmian Canal will some day bring Alabama ores
or pig iron to the Pacific ports ; and though it will also
break down the barrier of eastern competition, the
mechanical skill which has accomplished so much under
adverse conditions can be trusted to hold the market
which it has preempted. NOTES TO CHAPTER XVI.
1. Compare list of ports in Brownell's History of Immigration between
1818 and 1840.
2. Twelfth Census, Population, Table 6, p. 430.
3. Annual Review of the Foreign Commerce of the United States for
1902, Table, p. 4368.
4. Twelfth Census, Bulletin 149, p. 21.
5. Ibid, based upon tables 5, 6, 16, 17
6. Ibid. Table 22, p. 10.
7. For exhaustive discussion, see article by Prof. G. F. Swain in Tenth
Census, Water-power of the United States, vol. i., Introduction.
Also W. M. Davis, Physical Geography of Southern New England,
Nat. Geog. Monographs, vol. i., no. 9 ; and Israel Russell, Rivers of
North Armerica.
8. Twelfth c/ensus, Bulletin 247, pp. 23, 24.
9. Twelfth CAnsus, Bulletin 244, p. 7.
10. Ibid. Bulletin 140, Table 5.

366 CITIES AND INDUSTRIES
11. Twelfth Census, Bulletin 244, p. 17.
12. Ibid. Bulletin 117.
13. Doc. no. 88 of House of Representatives, 55th Congress. Report of
1898 entitled "Waterway between Warrior River and Five-Mile
Creek, Alabama."
14. Twelfth Census, Bulletin 180, pp. 7, 21, 22.
15. Ibid. Bulletin 217, pp. 29, 30.
16. Ibid. Tables, p. 31.
17. Ibid. p. 33 and Bulletin 190, p. 13.
18. Ibid. Bulletin 244, Table lx. p. 21.
19. Ibid. Bulletin 247, p. 14.

CHAPTER XVII
THE GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OP RAILROADS
The internal commerce of any country is based upon
geographical conditions of size, location, zonal extent,
and various topographical features tending to modify
soil and climate. The larger a country, the greater in
general are its chances of a diversified surface, contrast
of climate, and hence the multiplicity of products which
leads to exchanges. Large extent means wide climatic
variation such as that between New England and
Florida, Minnesota and Louisiana. China's location
between the twentieth and fifty-fifth parallels gives it
a basis for internal commerce similar to that of the
United States between the twenty-fifth and forty-ninth.
Mere zonal extent is not enough, however. Russia's
long stretch from the fortieth to the seventieth parallel
affords no advantages equal to those of China and the
United States, because so much of the area falls within
the polar and sub-polar region ; yet in view of its mo
notonous lowland surface, only this great extent makes
possible an internal Russian commerce between the
forested north and the grain-fields and cattle pastures
of the south. Everywhere along its southern border,
from the Black to the Japan Sea, Russia is gradually
enlarging its limits, with the result that it is diversify
ing its products, as the cotton-fields of Russian Turkestan

368 DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS
show, while it is striving to secure for the same an outlet
to the sea. In the widely distributed British Empire,
the distinction between internal and foreign commerce
is lost ; but the enormous size of that commerce, how
ever it may be classified, has its basis in the area and
the almost unlimited variety of geographical conditions
embraced within the British possessions.
No other continuous political area in the world, with
the possible exception of China, shows so many differ
ent geographical divisions distinguished by different
staple products as the United States. The accompany
ing cartogram makes six such divisions. We would add
an Appalachian section of coal, iron, and lumber, and
insert a purely live-stock section in the arid belt of the
Great Plains, between the ninety-ninth meridian and
the Rocky Mountains, which should be distinguished
from the Cordilleran area "of live-stock and mining
products. Thesejfcwo with the Pacific coast section are
divided approximately by meridional lines. The Great
Plains section marks an area of aridity due to remoteness
from the Atlantic and Gulf winds. The Cordilleran
is also an area of scant rainfall due to the enclosing
mountains, but is also a mining region in consequence
of the outcropping of valuable strata in this area of
upheaval. In the Pacific coast division, proximity to
the ocean and exposure to its mild western winds have
also created another climatic section running across the
axis of the zones. East of the ninety-ninth meridian,
on the other hand, latitude exerts its full influence in
drawing the dividing lines between the spring wheat,
corn, and cotton sections. Only the uplifted belt of the

DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS 369
Appalachians cuts across the grain of the parallels.
The division formed by New York and New England is
further distinguished as the area of excessive glaciation.
This section, together with New Jersey and Pennsyl
vania, has reached most intensive industrial development,
and is therefore dependent upon the rest of the country
for subsistence and raw materials.
With this specialization of products, no section is self-
sufficing and each depends upon all the rest. The stock
of the Rocky Mountain states moves now to the packing
houses on the Missouri and Lake Michigan which are
feeding New York, Boston, Halifax, and London ; now
to those on the Pacific coast which are furnishing meat
for the growing Hawaiian, Alaskan, and Asiatic trade.
The Columbia and Puget Sound regions send their
lumber, canned fish, and wool to supply the East and
get in exchange the finished merchandise which goes
to swell the current of commerce. Cotton moves from
the Gulf states to supply the spindles of New England,
and coal from the Pennsylvania mines goes down to
supply the plantations of the South. " The statistics of
internal trade movements show that both the outgoing
foreign and the domestic commerce of the country
depend principally upon the industries engaged in the
production of these staple products. These industries
are known as the fundamental or extractive industries,
and include agriculture, mining, stock-raising, lumber
ing, and fisheries. Manufactures and merchandise con
tribute a comparatively minor portion of the total
tonnage carried in a given year. The dividend-earning
tonnage of the western roads, for example, is found

370 DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS
chiefly in the volume of the grain and cattle shipments.
Lake transportation is supported primarily by ore, grain,
and coal freight. The southern railroads rely on cotton,
lumber, coal, and fruits for their prosperity." 2 Manufac
tures and merchandise constituted only about eighteen
per cent, of the total railroad tonnage originating on the
lines in the fiscal year ending 1899.
The vast scale of this geographical specialization of
products involves enormous movements of freight. It
has brought about the evolution of the American rail
road system. Among the six sections laid down on the
cartogram, the most central position is held by the corn
and winter wheat division. This, as we saw in the last
chapter, is also the area of greatest urban and industrial
development, manufacturing activity decreasing from
the east towards the western limit. It is the area of
greatest concentration and distribution of products. It
contains eight out of the eleven leading grain markets
(Chicago, St. Louis, Toledo, Milwaukee, Kansas City,
Cincinnati, Peoria, and Detroit, named in the order of
their importance) of this country, and all of the four
or five most prominent stock centers, as we have seen.
It is the area of most extensive coal, iron, and steel
production, which with bread and meat constitute the
fundamentals in modern economic life. Hence in this
important central division the greatest movements of
internal commerce occur ; it has become the channel of
practically all the great trunk fines reaching from the
interior to the Atlantic seaboard. This channel is
constricted on the north by the downward bend of
the Great Lakes and the geographical location of the

DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS 371
Mohawk depression, and on the south by the rough
upland of the Cumberland Plateau, the determining line
of the Ohio valley, and the central gaps of the Appala
chian Mountains. Norfolk and Boston, together with
all the intervening ports, are its eastern termini on the
Atlantic coast. To the west, nine different railroad
lines extend to the foot of the Rockies within the limits
of the thirty-seventh and forty-third parallels, so that
a railroad map of Kansas and Nebraska looks like a
striped fabric. The meridional division of the sections
of production in the Far West allows to the six over
land railroads a wider north and south distribution, so
that their course is determined chiefly by the best passes
through the Rocky Mountains and the location of the
few good ports on the Pacific. One road will ship east
ward fresh fruit from southern California and wool from
Arizona, while a more northern line will bring these
same products from Oregon and Montana.
The great breadth of the United States and its highly
favored interoceanic position has given to its railroads
a predominant east-and-west direction. The expansion
of the American people from seacoast to the interior,
and from the interior on to the sea again, has been re
peated in the history of American railroads, but at a
tremendously accelerated rate. The star marking the
center of population was poised on the summit of the
Alleghenies in 1830 while infant railroads only here
and there were crawling up the first easy grade of the
Atlantic coastal plain. Twenty-one years later a line of
rails stretched through central New York to Lake Erie,
and the Baltimore and Ohio road had reached an equally

372 DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS
western point in Piedmont, West Virginia (79° W. L.),
close on the trail of the star, which was moving down
the sunset slope of the Allegheny Plateau towards Park-
ersburg and the Ohio. But eight years after that, an
overland express drew in to fue shores of San Fran
cisco Bay, while the star still lingered in the valley of
the upper Ohio.
Railroad development in the United States proceeded
with amazing rapidity, so that it soon outstripped that
in all other countries. The great size of our territory,
its long distances, made railroad communication more
necessary than in Europe. Its simple continental build,
yielding long stretches like the Atlantic plain, the
Mississippi valley, the prairies, and the Pacific valley,
was favorable to railroad construction because of the
relatively few obstacles which it presented.3 Moreover,
the oneness of our country, as opposed to the political
dismemberment of Europe, was conducive to the oper
ation of great through lines and that consolidation of
interests which early appeared.
In the first decade of their history, these roads, which
in forty years were to rib the continent with steel, were
merely accessories to established routes of water travel ;
or they united some adjacent interior town with the sea
board ; or they served as a short cut across the land be
tween two ports which had previously established active
intercourse by more devious coastwise communication.
Among those railroads whose objective was an estab
lished waterway, we find the short line running sixteen
miles from Carbondale to Honesdale (1828) and con
necting the Lackawanna coal-mines with the Delaware

DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS 373
and Hudson Canal ; the line of seventeen miles from
Albany to Schenectady, opened in 1831 to accommodate
passengers on the Erie Canal by saving them the long
detour of the waterway between these two points ; the
road southward from Saratoga to Schenectady (21.5
miles) opened in 1832, and the branch off this line from
Ballston to the Hudson at Troy (25 miles), completed
in 1835 ; the road from the head of Lake Cayuga south
ward to navigation on the Susquehanna River (34 miles),
opened in 1834 ; the railways over the high land be
tween Philadelphia and Columbia on the lower Susque
hanna (81 miles), and the Portage Road over the summit
(2491 feet elevation) of the Allegheny Mountains (36
miles) just east of Johnstown, both opened in 1834, to
form links in the canal route joining Pittsburg and
Philadelphia ; the Baltimore and Ohio, which in 1833,
after a piecemeal construction, extended to Harpers
Ferry (81 miles) on the Potomac, and there tapped the
canalled river whereby passengers avoided the long
de*tour of water travel around the end of the Potomac
peninsula ; the short independent road from Harpers
Perry up the Shenandoah Valley to Winchester (32
miles), opened in 1836 ; the little roads in Louisiana
from Port Hudson on the Mississippi (21.5 miles) north
east to Clinton, opened in 1833, from Bayou Sara in
the same vicinity to the town of Woodville (27.5 miles),
opened in 1842, and that from New Orleans running
eight miles to Carrollton, opened in 1835.4
All these roads, with the exception of two, are dis
tinguished by very short length, which emphasizes their
merely auxiliary character. But the last one to be

374 DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS
mentioned in this class, the road between Boston and
Albany (1842), owing to the lack of inland water
ways in New England, had to strike two hundred miles
across hill country and river valley to reach the grow
ing western commerce which was coming out by the
Erie Canal. This road, therefore, owing to the side
tracked position of Boston in relation to the great inte
rior routes of the country, had to leave the convenient
level of the tidewater and lowland, and take a more
difficult upland course to the debouchment point of
the Erie Canal. Hence in point of length, which is the
measure of urgency, it resembles the Baltimore-Potomac
and the Philadelphia-Columbia lines ; all three tap
established routes to the productive trans-Allegheny
country. The second class of early railroads comprises those
aiming to connect inland points with the seaboard, which
commands the world's great waterway. They are
characterized as a whole by greater length than the first
class. Among them we find the germ of the Boston and
Albany, the road running from Boston to Worcester
(44 miles), opened in 1835 and extended to Springfield
in 1838 ; the line from Boston to Lowell (26 miles) in
1835 ; from New Haven to Hartford in 1839 and
extended along the easy route up the well-populated
Connecticut valley to Springfield in 1844, to Greenfield
in 1846, to South Vernon on the Vermont border in
1849, whence it branched off up the little Ashuelot
River to Keene, New Hampshire, in 1851 ; the road up
the Housatonic valley from Bridgeport, Connecticut,
forming a conjunction with the Boston and Albany

DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS 375
route at West Stockbridge on the New York state line
in 1842 ; the Philadelphia and Reading road (98 miles)
and a branch from Lancaster on the abeady established
Columbia and Philadelphia line running off 54 miles to
Harrisburg, both opened as early as 1838, and that in
spite of competing canals ; a line from Portsmouth at the
mouth of the James River in Virginia running 80 miles
back from the coast to Weldon, North Carolina, opened
early in 1835 ; one from Charleston, South Carolina, to
Hamburg on the Savannah River opposite Augusta,
opened in 1833, when its 135 miles made it the longest
continuous line in the world, and extended by a branch
to Columbia in 1840, whereby the cotton of the inte
rior could be more readily concentrated in the chief port
of the southern Atlantic seaboard ; and finally another
road subserving a like purpose, opened in 1841 through
out the 192 miles between Savannah and Macon, Georgia.
The third class of early railroads was designed to con
nect coast points, and therefore, from Pamlico to the
eastern end of Long Island Sound, had to compete with
the inside coast passage of canal and bay and the high
way of the open ocean. But the circuitous ocean route
from point to point and the slow progress through the
canals, winter storms on the outside passage and ice
blockade on the inner channels, necessitated more direct
and reliable communication. Hence we find the early
development of what we may call the coast or " fall
line " raiboad. The dates of construction of this geo
graphical line of roads, made piecemeal by different
companies, as were all early ventures of this sort, are in
structive as indicating the intensity of water competition,

376 DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS
which varied with the directness of the sea route. The
raiboad from Boston to Providence appeared as early as
1835, because it cut off the long detour of the sea-way
around Cape Cod. It was supplemented in 1837 by a
road from Providence to Stonington, Connecticut, which
landed passengers and goods at the entrance of the
protected course of Long Island Sound and thus avoided
the dangerous navigation around Point Judith at the
southern extremity of Rhode Island. Otherwise this
road, which ran along within two miles of the coast in
order to avoid the hundred feet elevation line of the in
terior, did not greatly shorten the distance between
Providence and Stonington. The Sound route from
Stonington to New York is safe and direct. Hence we
find the railroad from New York to New Haven did not
open till 1849, and that from New Haven to New
London till 1852. Along the eastern shore of Massa
chusetts, also, where exceptional maritime conditions
had produced a race of seamen, railroads developed
somewhat slowly in competition with coastwise com
munication. The Eastern Railroad, consolidated from
several minor lines running dbectly northward near the
coast, was opened between Boston and Portsmouth,
New Hampshbe, in November, 1840, and extended two
years later to Portland, Maine. This road served the
manufacturing area of eastern Massachusetts and com
peted with the longer sea route around Cape Ann ; but
its branch running from Beverly out to Gloucester and
Rockport on the extremity of this peninsula was not
constructed till 1847. Plymouth waited for rail con
nection with Boston till 1846.

DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS 377
South of New York Bay, more devious sea routes
between the leading tidewater cities, due to the long
projections of the New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and
Carolina peninsulas, and incidentally the location of the
national capital on the medial one of the series, early
determined the construction of a chain of railroads across
their base. The deep-running estuaries of this stretch
of coast necessitated the location of the railroad approxi
mately along the " fall line " from New York south to
Goldsboro, North Carolina ; but there it left the one
hundred foot elevation line and dropped down to Wil
mington at the mouth of the Cape Fear River.
Following this road in detail, we find that the earliest
link in the chain reflected the active intercourse between
New York and Philadelphia. It ran from Camden, on
the Delaware River just opposite Philadelphia, 64 miles
to South Amboy on Raritan Bay, was begun in 1830
and finished in 1834, four years before the completion
of the Delaware and Raritan Canal. In 1839 a second
railroad (31 miles) was opened between Bordentown
and New Brunswick, the termini of the canal, parallel
to the first road in its eastern half. A fine opened
between Jersey City and New Brunswick (34 miles) in
1838 completed the communication with the Hudson
River and New York.
From Philadelphia southward the railroad, following
closely the line of one hundred feet elevation, was
opened in 1837 through Wilmington, Delaware, to
Baltimore; there it connected with the Washington
branch of the Baltimore and Ohio, which had already
been in operation three years. From Washington the

378 DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS
Potomac, owing to its southward course as far as Acquia
Creek, long persisted as a link in the line of communica
tion between the national capital and Richmond. A road
was opened in 1837 between Richmond and Fredericks
burg on the Rappahannock near the bend of the Poto
mac, but not till 1872 was the line extended to Wash
ington and the steamer trip from Acquia Creek dispensed
with. A writer in 1873 deplores this as the sacrifice of
" one of the most pleasurable features of the trip between
Washington and Richmond." [See map of Vbginia
rivers, chapter xiv.J
From Richmond a short line (22 miles) was finished
southward to Petersburg in 1838, to complete connec
tion with an existing road (since 1833) which ran closely
along; the one hundred foot elevation line across the base
of the deep peninsula of southern Virginia directly
southward through Emporia to Weldon, North Carolina.
Difficulty of communication down the rivers of North
Carolina, the long detour around Albemarle Sound,
Chesapeake Bay, and the James River had undoubtedly
dictated this cut-off road. The continuation of the line
southward through Goldsboro to Wilmington was not
made till 1840, a fact which reflects the slow economic
development of North Carolina at that time.
To the geographer the interesting fact in this long
chain of railways from New York City to southern
North Carolina is its close adherence to the fine of one
hundred foot elevation. This is the line marking cities,
mills, and the head of navigation on the rivers or their
estuaries, retreating farther and farther from the sea
board from the mouth of the Hudson southward. This

DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS 379
western limit of the coastal plain presented few problems
to railway building beyond the bridging of the wide
drainage streams, which in early days were crossed by
ferries from station to station. The smooth, even slope
of the Piedmont upland and the broad trough of the
Appalachian Valley also offered few obstacles. Hence
as the development of the hill and interior valley country
progressed, these natural longitudinal routes were traced
by a line of rails from northern Georgia to the Potomac.
The Piedmont road, now the Southern system, runs at
an elevation between five hundred and one thousand
feet from Manassas Junction, whence it connects with
Washington, southwest through Culpeper, Orange,
Charlottesville, Lynchburg, and Danville in Virginia ;
Greensboro, Salisbury, and Charlotte, in North Caro
lina ; Spartanburg, Greenville, and Westminster, in
South Carolina, to Atlanta, Georgia.
Piedmont railways are a feature of every map. They
mark the limit set by nature to economic construction
of great routes of transportation along the flanking
plain. Their elevation varies with the magnitude of the
mountain system which they trace, and the surface fea
tures of the plateau base which they traverse. We see
the piedmont railroad of the Atlantic slope reproduced
in the piedmont line at the eastern foot of the Rockies,
running from Calgary (3388 feet elevation), at the base
of the mountain wall in western Alberta, southeast
through western Montana, where along the sources of the
Missouri River, the Yellowstone, and the Big Horn it
rises at times to an elevation of five thousand feet;
thence south along the Laramie Range to Cheyenne,

380 DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS
and still at the same altitude along the eastern base of
the Colorado Rockies through Denver and Pueblo to
Las Vegas, whence it turns westward across the moun
tains by the old Santa Fe Trail to the valley of the Rio
Grande, to follow this stream southward to El Paso.
Only the long, gradual upward slope of the Great
Plains, which places the foot of the Rockies at a con
siderable elevation, renders possible a railroad of such
length at such an altitude. The steep grade of the Alps
and the Himalayas from the Po and Ganges respectively
eliminates the piedmont plain as a physical feature ;
hence the piedmont railways run along at a very low
altitude. In the case of northern Italy, the deep reen
trant valleys of the Italian lakes conspire with the slope
to force the railroad almost down into the plain of the
Po. In northern India the piedmont railway begins
at Peshawar at an altitude of only 1165 feet in the
northern corner of the Punjab, falls to an altitude of
820 feet at Ludhiana, — though Simla at the terminus
of a branch road only about sixty miles northeast of
this point lies at an elevation of 7116 feet, — to 700
feet at Rampur and to 255 feet at Gorakpur, where the
Ganges begins to encroach still more upon the base of
the Himalayas.
But unless a mountain system presents an almost
insuperable barrier, as in the case of the Caucasus and
the Himalayas, a piedmont railway, owing to the less
fertile and productive character of the country which it
traverses, unless valuable mines supply the motive for its
early development, will in general be antedated by trans-
montane roads, because the over-mountain country with

DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS 381
its different climate and products offers a better field for
commerce. This was true' in the United States in the
case both of the Appalachians and the Rockies. Espe
cially is this the order of development when beyond the
mountains lies the sea. The purpose to reach Pacific
ports pushed both the American and Canadian overland
roads. The period from 1830 to 1860 saw six railroads con
structed across the Appalachians at various points be
tween the Mohawk valley and northern Georgia, where
the upland system dwindles away into low hills offering
little obstruction to railway building. The roads fol
lowed with slight variations the lines of least resistance
settled upon by the old trails of Indian, trapper, and
western pioneer, and the later routes of proposed canals
which were constructed in whole or in part, or were
abandoned altogether as impracticable. From New
York to the southern boundary of Virginia the lower
altitude and dissected character of the Appalachian sys
tem afforded the first routes for railways which were
economically possible ; but from Virginia southward for a
stretch of three hundred and fifty miles, the massive wall
of the Great Smoky Mountains effectively discouraged
the construction of a railway over this barrier till 1882.
The route which saw the only through canal system
across the Appalachians saw naturally the first trans-
montane railroad. From the little seventeen-mile road
from Albany to Schenectady as an embryo developed
the different stages of westward railroad advance along
the line of the Erie Canal. Year by year the links in the
chain were added, — Utica and Schenectady in 1836,

382 DISTRD3UTI0N OF RAILROADS
Syracuse and Utica in 1839, Auburn and Syracuse in
1838, Rochester and Auburn in 1841, Rochester, Lock-
port, and Niagara Falls in 1838. In 1843 a traveler could
cross the state of New York by rail from Buffalo to Al
bany, but he was carried by sixteen different companies.
In 1851 the Hudson River railroad completed rail con
nection between the Atlantic seaboard and Lake Erie.
To New York belongs the honor of having con
structed also the second railroad across the mountains.
The Erie road, taking advantage of the dip in the
mountains south of the CatskiUs, started from Piermont
on the lower Hudson, taking seven years to crawl over
the Highlands to Port Jervis on the Delaware, whence
it pushed rapidly westward along the valley of the
Susquehanna and its western tributaries, and over the
second watershed to Dunkirk on Lake Erie, in 1851,
nowhere reaching an elevation of eighteen hundred
feet. Thus in this year New York had two lines from
the harbor of the Hudson to the western lake.
The Erie was followed closely by the Pennsylvania,
and Baltimore and Ohio raiboads, opened respectively in
1854 and 1853. The impracticability of a canal be
tween the Potomac and the Ohio forced the development
of the more southern road. It reached the old pioneer
station of Cumberland, at the northern bend of the
Potomac, as early as 1842 ; but from that point the
discouragement to construction over the rough surface
of the Allegheny Plateau and the high altitude to which
it had to ascend (2620 feet) retarded its completion
to Wheeling and the Ohio till January of 1853. The
Pennsylvania line extended westward from Harrisburg,

DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS 383
which since 1838 had had rail connection with Philadel
phia, followed the canal route up the Juniata River to
Huntingdon and Hofidaysburg, passed thence over the
summit, of the mountains to Johnstown and down the
valley of the Conemaugh River to the Allegheny, and
down this stream to Pittsburg. Difficulty of construction
over the main crest of the mountains delayed the road
for two years, so that through connection was not made
till 1854.
With the completion of these four roads across the
mountains, the competition of rail and waterways began,
but at first very slowly. In 1852 the through freight
east on the Erie Canal was twenty-six times that carried
by the Central and Erie lines, but in 1853 it was only
fifteen times greater. In one year more the absolute
decline of tonnage on the canal began to be alarming,
so much was being diverted to its rivals. In Pennsyl
vania the inadequacy of the canal system as a transit
route over a mountainous country had long been ap
parent, and its early (1857) purchase by the raiboad
company eliminated the last vestige of competition it
might have offered. •
In the mean time, the opportunity for a railroad around
the southern extremity of the Appalachians along the
route known to the early Cherokee traders was being
exploited, and a chain of many links from Savannah and
Charleston through Atlanta and Chattanooga, the two
" gate " cities, to river navigation at Nashville was com
pleted in 1854, while another line from Chattanooga
through Stevenson, Alabama, to Memphis opened con
nection with the Mississippi in 1858. The lack of river

384 DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS
communication along this east and west route, the
impracticability of Gallatin's proposed canal, the adapta
tion of the face of the country to railway building, and
the need of access from the southern states of the Mis
sissippi basin to the Atlantic seaboard, all combined to
push the construction of this southern line.
Chattanooga had now a central position on a great
route east and west, and in its rear lay the Appalachian
Valley, affording a natural route of communication with
the northeast. Hence we find that the next trans-
montane line, though starting in Virginia, had Chatta
nooga for its objective. From its seaboard terminus,
Norfolk, at the entrance of Chesapeake Bay, it ran
westward along the low watershed between the James
and Roanoke rivers to Lynchburg, which it reached in
1854. Thence it passed through the Blue Ridge by
the water-gap of the James, turned southward up the
Valley of Virginia by the path of the old Wilderness
Road to Bristol on the upper Holston, in 1857, and
down the valley of East Tennessee to Knoxville and
Chattanooga by 1858. Though so late in being con
structed, its value as a link in the great through road
between New Orleans and the eastern cities was soon
appreciated. Subsequently it became a main trunk line
from which one branch turned off eastward at Morris-
town up the French Broad River to Paint Rock, on the
western slope of the Great Smoky Mountains, in 1861,
and there in 1882 formed a junction with a line which
came up from Salisbury on the eastern piedmont rail
road and crossed this forbidding range by way of Swan-
nanoa Gap and the upper valley of the French Broad.

DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS 385
Another branch from the Tennessee valley railroad
turned westward to Cumberland Gap, and there united
in 1890 with another line passing down to central Ken
tucky ; and a thbd quite recent one turned westward a
little farther north at the elbow of the New River in
western Vbginia, passed down that stream for about
thirty miles, and. over the watershed to the Tug Fork
of the Big Sandy by the old war-trail of the marauding
Shawnees, and continued down that river to the Ohio
and the railroads traversing its banks.
In the mean time, however, before these branch roads
from the Great Valley thoroughfare had multiplied the
rail routes over the Appalachians, another road was
planning to utilize the pioneer trail from the western
sources of the James over the mountains to the Green
brier branch of the Kanawha. As early as 1857 a road
passing along the head streams of the Shenandoah and
the James had reached the base of the main Allegheny
range at Covington. The extension to navigation at
Huntington on the Ohio was undertaken entirely by the
state of Virginia, which still cherished its old dream of
being a great transit region, a dream which the river
paths of the Virginia mountains had awakened in the
minds of Washington and Jefferson. The difficulty
of construction down the New River canon and the
interruption of the Civil War retarded the construction
of the work till 1873.
Three out of the four earliest trans- Appalachian rail
roads, as we have seen, followed the routes of finished
or unfinished canals ; and even after reaching the in
terior basin of the country, the railroads continued to

386 DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS
search out the domain of the waterway as if to challenge
its competition. The geographical facts are these. The
waterways, whether lake or canal, traced the line of
least elevation and hence least resistance. The west
ward trend of the Great Lakes brought the terminus
of the water route near to the natural concentrating
channel of the Mississippi River, and the western canals
united the Lakes with the Ohio. Both lakes and canals,
Ohio and Mississippi, were dotted with the largest cities
of the western country. Commerce had been started in
its course along these waterways. The limitation of
canal navigation, due to shallow draft vessels and the
short open season in these northern latitudes, soon
proved a serious stumbling-block as western resources
were developed and commerce grew. The lines of traffic
which the canals had created the railroads fell heir to ;
the transmontane roads did not begin to come into their
full heritage, however, till railways began to spread
over the interior basin between the Ohio and the Lakes,
and the produce of western .farms could be loaded
first into freight cars instead of canal-boats. Thus the
strategy of transportation patronage lay in the question
of reloading. When railroads by their wide expansion
had gained this point, by their rapidity and reliability
they surpassed their rival. Hence we find the western
trunk lines seeking the path of the waterways.
Just as ihe Ohio was the first western state to follow
the example of New York in canal building, so now she
was the first to imitate her in the construction of rail
roads. Here again geographical location on the con
stricted area between free navigation on the Ohio and

DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS 337
the Great Lakes was a potent factor in transportation
development. It made a short passway for the steel
arteries of commerce as before for water channels. The
Mad River railroad, begun in 1832, was opened in 1848
between Sandusky on Lake Erie and Dayton, a city
which already had canal communication with the Lake
through Toledo. This road in connection with a previ
ously (1846) completed line, the Little Miami between
Springfield and Cincinnati, which was also in canal
communication with Toledo, formed the first through
line from the Ohio to Lake Erie. A second line in
operation in 1851 connected Columbus with Cleveland,
and a third opened communication between Cleveland
and Pittsburg in 1852.
Thus Ohio had three railroads across the state from
north to south when the New York trans-Appalachian
lines began to push westward along the southern rim of
Lake Erie, from Buffalo to Erie, Pennsylvania, in Feb
ruary, 1852, from Erie to Cleveland later in the same
year, and from Cleveland to Toledo in January, 1853.
This was the last link in the line between New York
and Chicago, because the approximation of the heads
of Lakes Erie and Michigan had some years before
suggested the plan of a railway short cut across the base
of the Michigan peninsula. This line, first projected
to run from Monroe just north of Toledo over to New
Buffalo (a suggestive name) on Lake Michigan opposite
Chicago, was pushed half of the distance to Hillsdale in
1843; but when reorganized under a new company
was diverted to Chicago and the road from lake to lake
opened in 1852 with the eastern terminus at Toledo.

388 DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS
No sooner had the New York roads connection with
the lines of the Lakes and the Ohio basin than an enor
mous increase of their commerce ensued. To this the
state of Ohio contributed a large measure. In spite of
slack water navigation on its canals, traffic had previ
ously followed its drainage streams, owing chiefly to the
different areas of production in the state. About two
thirds of the wheat had sought an outlet by the Lakes
and the Erie Canal ; corn, which was grown largely in
the southern part of the state, and all other provisions
went out by the Ohio River to New Orleans, whence
they were transported to the Atlantic seaboard. Of
the exports of beef from Cincinnati in 1851, the year
prior to the through railway communication with the
East, 97 per cent, went down the river and only 2 per cent.
northward to the Lake. Of the Indian corn, the river
traffic got 96 per cent, and the Lake 3 per cent.; of the
flour, the former got 97 per cent, and the latter 1 per
cent. Lard, pork, and bacon sought these outlets in
about the same proportion.5 A small quantity of all
these articles supplied the demand in the growing city
of Pittsburg. The heavy movement of provisions to
the South was due in part to the fact that animals could
not be slaughtered till cold weather had set in, when
navigation on the canals was closed. Hence the provi
sion trade was readily diverted to the raiboads, and with
the growing demand in the eastern markets attending
increase of population and of industrial development, it
soon came to constitute an important part of the through
traffic. When the Pennsylvania road completed its connection

DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS 389
•with Pittsburg, its rail communication with Cleveland
was already established. The next year after the Balti
more and Ohio came into Wheeling saw a line opened
from Bellaire in Ohio, nearly opposite Wheeling, west
ward to Columbus ; and another road, branching off
northwestward from this at Newark, established com
munication with Sandusky and the Shore line in 1856.
Thus the region of the Ohio and the Lakes was rapidly
drawn into the sphere of influence of the four eastern
roads. But beyond lay the Mississippi, and already the traffic
of this great waterway was being tapped by the Chicago
and Rock Island railroad, which was completed in 1854.
Prior to this time the canals from Lake Michigan had
had little influence in directing the Mississippi trade
eastward to the Lake route. All the produce along its
western tributaries and most of that from its eastern
bank went down the river to New Orleans. The cur
rent of the Illinois River carried southward most of
the products of central Illinois, and only those from the
northern part of the state sought the Lake outlet. But
from this time the stream of traffic was deflected at right
angles toward the eastern markets. Between 1855 and
1856 Chicago became the center of roads radiating to
the Mississippi, — to Galena, Alton, Burlington, Quincy,
and the mouth of the Ohio. In 1858 the Milwaukee
and La Crosse road struck the Mississippi higher up.
The next step was to the Missouri, from Hannibal to
St. Joseph through northern Missouri, in 1859, and an
extension of the Galena line through Iowa to Council
Bluffs in 1866.

390 DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS
The intense localization of our industrial and urban
development in the northeastern part of the United
States, the concentration here of our great commercial
ports, and the distribution of our chief foreign
markets across the Atlantic yet farther east in Europe,
were the main factors in determining the early east-
and-west direction of our principal railroads. When
the Mississippi valley was finally opened to the eastern
lines, railroad building progressed rapidly, finding in
its gentle slopes and low watersheds slight obstacles to
construction. The bridging of its wide streams was one
of the most serious problems. We notice to-day certain
large features of raiboad distribution in the United
States. The most striking of these is the coincidence
of the area of intensest urban development with that of
the greatest railroad development. Here the network
of steel rails is thickest. It tells the story of incoming
raw materials and of outgoing finished commodities, of
many mouths to feed, bodies to clothe, houses to build,
and of many factories to be supplied with fuel. We
notice particularly how all the great lines from the
Northwest have to turn the corner sharply at Chicago,
owing to the deep indenting inlet of Lake Michigan,
and thus produce a congestion of railroads which has
been the making of that city. We next observe a
thinning of this steel network in the agricultural South
and the arid West ; the occurrence of certain " vacant
spots " where the mesh becomes still wider, spots already
familiar as areas of sparse population, in the swamp
region of southern Florida, in the lumber region of
northern Maine and Minnesota, in the barren Ozark

DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS 391
Mountains of Missouri and Arkansas, and in the rough
upland of the Cumberland Plateau in West Virginia,
Kentucky, and Tennessee. The few railroads which
enter the latter region, with only one exception, strike
across the axis of the Appalachians, indicating their
primary character as transit lines. The western base of
this mountain system, owing to the irregular limit of
the Allegheny and Cumberland plateaus, has developed
no well-defined piedmont railroad such as outlines the
eastern foot of the Appalachians.
We notice lastly beyond the eastern margin of the
arid belt a marked predominance of east-and-west roads
and a sudden decrease, almost a cessation of railroads
running north and south. West of this limit we find
only three such roads, — the Cordilleran piedmont
already mentioned ; a second line running south from
Helena and Butte, Montana, diagonally across the axis
of the Rocky Mountains and down the head stream of
Snake River to Fort Hall, whence along the western
base of the Port Neuf and Wahsatch ranges to south
western Utah it forms the piedmont road of this rim of
the Great Basin ; finally the Pacific Valley line running
from Puget Sound along the old trails from the Nis-
qually to the Columbia and from the Willamette to San
Francisco Bay, and on up the San Joaquin valley to
Mojave in southern California.
Across the belt of the Great Plains many lines strike
out boldly for the Rocky Mountains, following some
times the banks of the parallel drainage streams, more
often seeking the solid ground of the watersheds be
tween. Only six pass the mountain barrier and reach

392 DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS
the Pacific; but in view of the youth of the country, its
arid and mountainous character, and the sparsity of its
population, this number speaks eloquently for the power
of attraction of two opposite coasts. Its situation be
tween two oceans makes of the United States a great
transit land; hence the amazing development of the
transcontinental lines. The alternative of this over
land transportation from New York to San Francisco, a
distance of three thousand miles, is a voyage over four
times as long around the Horn. The wide separation
of the Baltic and Pacific coasts of Russia, with the
choice of a long voyage through arctic or through tropi
cal seas, has forced upon the Muscovite the construction
of the great Siberian raiboad. A similar situation in
Canada called forth its overland road. All these great
lines had a political as well as a commercial motive ; the
political was immediate, however, and the commercial
was largely a matter of faith in the future. The Rus
sian and Canadian lines were purely government under
takings ; but in the United States political urgency
dictated a gigantic system of land grants and subsidies to
the transcontinental roads, which, owing to the character
of the country which they traversed, were most ex
pensive in construction and along certain stretches could
probably never count upon the support of local traffic.
These overland railroads, for a great part of theb
way, keep to the old California, Oregon, Santa Fe and
Gila River trails. The more northern ones follow for
shorter distances the footsteps of Lewis and Clark and
other early explorers. But the engineer straightens the
routes which nature made and avoids detours which were

DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS 393
the trader's only paths. The zonal distribution of these
transcontinental roads is interesting. We find two
northern lines starting from the western extremity of
Lake Superior and contained for all their distance be
tween the forty-sixth and forty-eighth parallels. In the
stretch from the Red River of the North to Puget
Sound eight cross-lines connect them with the Cana
dian railways of the Northwest Territories and British
Columbia, arteries through which so much, rich Ameri
can blood has been poured into the infant giant of the
Far North. The main fines are dotted every few hun
dred miles with a railroad plexus, — Duluth, Fargo,
Moorhead, Helena, Spokane, Tacoma, and Seattle, all
of them falling near the forty-seventh parallel, and
marking the dbectness of the connection between the
eastern and western termini.
The same phenomenon is observed in the other over
land routes. The next one to the south takes its course
almost along the forty-second parallel from Chicago
through Council Bluffs, Omaha, Cheyenne, and Ogden
to the northern end of Great Salt Lake ; thence it devi
ates from its adopted path, sending one branch off along
the old Oregon Trail to the Columbia and Portland,
another southwest by the California Trail to San Fran
cisco Bay. These two Pacific branches from the Salt
Lake oasis promise in the near future (1904) to be
augmented by a third, which will follow approximately
the old Spanish Trail southwest across the Mohave
Desert and Cajon Pass to Los Angeles. Thus Salt Lake
City will become preeminently the railroad center of the
Great Basin. Already it is entered from the east by the

394 DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS
fourth trans-Rocky railroad, which, adhering closely to
the thirty-ninth parallel, moves straight across the
country from St. Louis through Kansas City, Pueblo,
and Gunnison to the Green River just below the outlet
of Desolation Canon, and thence turns sharply north
ward to join the Wahsatch piedmont road at Utah Lake.
The destiny of the Salt Lake oasis as a concentrating
point is assured, because for a stretch of almost two
hundred miles across northwestern Arizona the impass
able canon of the Colorado River acts as a barrier to
deflect overland railroads either northward towards Salt
Lake or southward below the outlet of this mighty
trench. Hence we find the next overland route lead
ing directly west along the thirty-fifth parallel from
Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Mojave, California, where
it unites with the Pacific Valley line. This Santa Fe
system is the only road across the great western high
lands which has to make a distinct bend, either north
to Pueblo or south to El Paso, to establish its eastern
connections. The desolate expanse of the Llano Esta-
cado of northwestern Texas, flanked on the west by
the barren mesa-dotted highlands of eastern New Mex
ico and on the east by the undeveloped area of the
Indian Territory, has not proved an inviting field for
railroad enterprise.
Farther south, the Gila River depression, the gap in
the mountain wall at El Paso, the grass highlands of
central Texas, and direct connection with the earlier
roads eastward from the Mississippi valley around the
southern end of the Appalachians, have determined
the line of the remaining transcontinental route. This

DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS 395
also adheres pretty closely to one parallel, the thirty-
thbd, near which it leaves the Mississippi River and
passes through Dallas and Fort Worth in Texas ; but
then it drops southward one degree for the mountain
gap at El Paso and the easy route over the Sierra Madre
Plateau, followed by Cooke's wagon-trains in 1846. It
strikes the thirty-third parallel again on the Gila River,
and this line it keeps to southern California, where
mountains deflect it north to Los Angeles and bar it
from San Diego, its natural Pacific terminus.
The striking facts in these overland railroads are
their distribution in northern, central, and southern
pairs; the directness of the lines of connection from
east to west ; the development of an interior concen
trating point in the Salt Lake oasis and of two mar
ginal ones on the Pacific. One of these is located near
the Canada boundary about Puget Sound, which receives
three of the American transcontinental roads and is in
close communication with the Canadian Pacific where
it issues from the mountains at the mouth of Fraser
River; and the other is near the Mexican frontier at
Los Angeles, which to its two overland railroads will
in the immediate future add a third coming down from
central Utah. This last Pacific entrepot is as yet only
in its infancy, but the acquisition of its new link with '
the East and the improvement of the harbor of San
Pedro Bay will do much to stimulate its development.
To San Francisco remains always the advantage of its
central location and its direct line of communication
with the northern Atlantic seaboard.
The Pacific coast is remarkable for the fairly even

396 DISTRIBUTION OF RAILROADS
distribution of its active ports along all its great length,
— Seattle and Tacoma at about 47° 30' N. L., Portland
at 45° 30', San Francisco at 37° 45', and San Pedro, the
harbor of Los Angeles, at 33° 45'. In this it presents
a striking contrast to the Atlantic coast, which has all
of its important seaboard points crowded together be
tween Boston (42° 20' N. L.) and Norfolk (36° 50' N. L),
a stretch of five and a half degrees of longitude as
opposed to nearly fourteen degrees between extreme
ports on the Pacific. The explanation of this pheno
menon is to be sought in the various geographic influ
ences already discussed, which have determined economic
development and railroad distribution in the whole north
eastern section of the United States. Until the last few
years the active Atlantic ports were contained within
even narrower limits; the inclusion of Norfolk repre
sents a recent expansion from Baltimore southward, con
comitant with growing commercial activity in the south
ern states., But the great seaport development which
the future holds for the eastern half of our country is to
occur along the Gulf coast, whither the interior railroads
are already turning to seek an outlet. The discussion
of the causes of this belongs to the next chapter.
NOTES TO CHAPTER XVII
1. From Internal Commerce of the United States, Summary of Com
merce and Finance, January, 1901.
2. Ibid. p. 1630.
3. Ratzel, Politische Geographie der Vereinigten Staaten, p. 533.
4. Poor's Manual of American Railroads, issues of 1880-1890, for these
and subsequent dates and statistics.
5. Poor's Manual of Railroads, 1881, p. xvii.

CHAPTER XVIII
THE UNITED STATES IN RELATION TO THE AMERICAN
MEDITERRANEAN
Measured in terms of length and configuration of coast
line, which are the determinants of a seaboard base, and
gauged by the productiveness and extent of the contigu
ous hinterland, the United States has a greater claim to
strength as a Gulf power than as a Pacific. Its foothold
upon the western ocean measures only 1810 miles, and
except for a narrow coast strip, excessive aridity limits
the productiveness of the country naturally subsidiary
thereto. The deep inlet of the Gulf of Mexico creates
for the United States a southern seaboard measuring
1852 miles, back of which lies the rich Mississippi basin,
its slope emphasizing the leaning of the country towards
the Gulf.1 The Pacific coast, in view of natural disad
vantages, has achieved an amazing development ; and
yet this is only a promise of what is to come. The pos-/
sibilities of our Gulf development have never up to
recent years been recognized or utilized. The narrow
circle of the Caribbean lands has formed the natural
field of its foreign commerce. Their products too, like
those of the Mississippi valley, are agricultural though
tropical. Countries where pack-trains of mules and
broncos are the prevailing means of transportation do
not offer conditions for extensive exchanges. Where

398 THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN
the Gulf ports have sought outside markets in Europe,
they have suffered from the competition of the com
mercially developed centers lying between Massachu
setts and Chesapeake bays. The southwestward trend
of the Atlantic coast from Cape Cod to the extremity
of Florida brings Tampa Bay, our most eastern port on
the Gulf, in the longitude of Sandusky, and Corpus
Christi in that of Fargo, North Dakota ; so that wheat
from the famous Red River Valley takes a shorter trip
to England than do the products of the Texas fields.
The potential advantages of the Gulf coast over the
Atlantic seaboard lie at present only in its greater
proximity to Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean
coast of South America ; but with the opening of the
proposed interoceanic canal this advantage will extend
to the whole Pacific coast of the two continents. Already
with the forward step of the United States into the
Greater Antilles since the Spanish War and the surer
outlook of piercing the Isthmus, we notice a shifting
of our commercial center of gravity towards the south
and the promise of a new historical era for the Ameri
can Mediterranean.
The Gulf-Caribbean basin was the first part of the
Western Hemisphere to be actively developed. The
wealth of the Spanish possessions in Mexico and Peru
made it a thoroughfare for galleons from Vera Cruz or
the port on the Isthmus, where they had received the
burdens of heavily laden mules bringing gold over the
highway from Panama. This old preeminence passed
from it, to be revived for a season when the tide which
set toward California in 1849 took largely this channel

THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN 399
till the opening of the overland railroad ; but it will
be fully restored only with the construction of the
Isthmian Canal. This historical rise, decline, and rise
again of great sea basins is no new thing. The ascend
ency that once belonged to the Baltic has been lost and
so far never regained; that of the Persian Gulf pro
mises to be restored when the inlet becomes the termi
nus of German and Russian railroads. The sleep which
descended upon the Mediterranean at the middle of the
fifteenth century was broken by the shouts of de Les-
seps' workmen on the Suez Canal, but the old maritime
energy has not been fully restored to its bordering
lands. The Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf re
gained their importance when they became avenues to
the Pacific, and it is this world ocean which is to deter
mine the final significance of the Caribbean Sea and
Gulf of Mexico.
The two Mediterraneans are alike in many respects.
Both wash the shores of three great land masses with
their tideless waters. Both have two basins each, a north
western and a southeastern ; but the Gulf of Mexico
manifests a resemblance also to the Black Sea. Like the
latter it lies apart from the marine path of interoceanic
travel and is such a land-locked sea that Spain, prior to
the loss of Mexico, was geographically in a position to
block American commerce passing out into the Carib
bean Sea, just as Turkey from its bi-continental location
can bar Russia from the iEgean. Both Mediterraneans
have seen their several basins, like so many segregated
land areas, follow different lines of historical develop
ment, resulting largely from differences of geographical

400 THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN
location. Each sea has an outer or Latin basin. In
the Old World Mediterranean the inner basin has been
marked above everything else by the constant recur
rence of Asiatic influences emanating from the Phoeni
cians, Syrians, Persians, Saracens, and Turks ; in the
New World sea, the inner basin gets its stamp from the
youngest, freshest, most progressive civilization of the
Anglo-Saxon race. Thus these two present the most
marked contrast, and are in a large sense representative
of their respective hemispheres.
The two Mediterraneans, though interesting as areas
of differentiated local development, focus upon them
selves the attention of the world at large because by
their east-and-west extension and location in or near the
belt of the northeast trade-winds, which was so long the
pathway of circum-mundane travel, they form links in
the chain of oceanic communication around the world.
Both being inlets of the same ocean, they extend the
reach of theA-tlantic from Suez to Panama. But at
these extremities a slender belt of sand and a low line
of hills block the path of navigation. These narrow
necks of land have debarred the Atlantic side of their
respective hemispheres from intercourse with the same
countries — the rich, historic lands of eastern Asia ;
and both have pointed to the expensive and dangerous
alternative of doubling a great continent by a long
voyage. The American isthmus was discovered because
the Asiatic one existed ; in trying to avoid Suez, the
early mariners ran afoul of Darien.
The American Mediterranean, in spite of its more
southern location between the tenth and thirtieth par-

THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN 40i
allels, is quite as near to the center of maritime activ
ity in North America between Baltimore and Boston
(39° 20' to 42° 20' N. L.) as the Straits of Gibraltar
(36° N. L.) to the leading ports of Europe between the
forty-ninth and fifty-fourth parallels, at Le Havre,
Antwerp, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Bremen, Southampton,
London, and Liverpool. And though the Atlantic en
trance to the Suez route is located so far north, its exit
into the further ocean at Aden (12° 45' N. L.) falls
almost as far south as the Pacific end of the proposed
Panama Canal (9° N. L.).
Both Mediterraneans therefore seem destined by na
ture as great transit basins ; but whereas in the Euro
pean body of water one narrow, easily guarded channel
secures connection with the main Atlantic, in the Ameri
can a dozen or more straits of varying breadth and
depth afford free access to the commerce of the world.
The Gulf of Mexico, almost encbcled by the sweep of
broad land masses from the extremity of Florida to the
tip of the Yucatan peninsula, backed everywhere by a
hinterland of abundant resources, has nevertheless only
one direct avenue of approach from the Atlantic, Florida
Strait ; and the control of this is shared by the United
States, Cuba, and the British Bahamas just outside
the passage. The Yucatan Channel, the natural line of
communication between the mouth of the Mississippi
and the Isthmus of Panama, connects the Gulf with the
Caribbean. This sea presents a marked contrast to the northern
basin. A narrow rim of isthmus lands on the west and
of islands on the north and east make it appear like a

402 THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN
mirror in a delicate frame. The thickly strewn islands
of the Lesser Antilles border it on the east for four
hundred miles, affording harbors and passages in plenty
for vessels bound for Caribbean ports or for the Isthmus ;
for this is the focus of navigation lines in the American
Mediterranean. On the north the land frame is more
continuous. For twelve hundred miles the rather com
pact line of the Greater Antilles forms the containing
wall from the western point of Cuba to the eastern end
of Porto Rico, except where broken by the Windward
and Mona passages. Hence this northern rim of the
Caribbean presents the more highly strategic positions
from the military standpoint,2 and to the United States
the more important locations from a commercial, because
its channels form the natural avenues of approach for all
vessels from New York seeking the Isthmus of Panama.
Europe first gained a foothold in the Western Hemi
sphere along the Atlantic or island rim of the Caribbean
Sea, and there she longest maintained her claim. Until
five years ago, this eastern marge belonged to Europe
and monarchy, the western to America and democracy.
Wedged in between Spanish Cuba and Porto Rico, re
publican San Domingo presented as much of an anomaly
in its colonial surroundings as formerly democratic
Switzerland in the heart of feudal Europe. The only
exception to be found on the mainland shore is in British
Honduras. Of the original Spanish empire in America,
Cuba and Porto Rico alone remained to the descendants
of the first discoverers ; but now they too have slipped
from the nerveless grasp of a decadent despotism.
North of these lie the Bahamas, which England appro-

THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN 403
priated when her colonists settled the Carolina coast near
by, and which now are island remnants of vast con
tinental possessions reaching to Florida and the Missis
sippi. To the south is Jamaica, which Cromwell took to
adorn the cap of the Commonwealth. In the Lesser
Antilles, British, French, Dutch, and Danes have estab
lished themselves at the cost of Spain. Formerly even
Sweden was represented by the island of St. Bartholo
mew. The British possessions in this group are most
numerous and extensive, though the French hold the
two largest and most densely populated islands, Guade
loupe and Martinique.
Islands are detached areas physically and are detach
able areas politically. They tend to fall to the nearest
political domain ; this is what we may call the politico-
geographical law of gravity. But the attraction of a
larger and stronger country may prove more potent
than that of a nearer but smaller land. According to
this law Corsica belongs to France, Sardinia and Sicily
to Italy, though Sicily in its checkered political career
has experienced the sway of Carthaginians, Romans,
Saracens, Spaniards, and Italians. The recent Cretan
war was in certain aspects an expression of this politico-
geographical law of gravity. The American annexa
tion of Hawaii illustrates the same principle. Cyprus
acknowledged once the supremacy of Phoenicia, later
that of Turkey, which holds the near-by coast of Asia
Minor and Syria ; but recently it was alienated to Great
Britain, which was operating on another geographical
principle, the control of strategic points on a trans
continental waterway. Hence the world at large, and

404 THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN
especially the most interested parties, have looked to
see the Greater Antilles obey the law of their geograph
ical location and fall to the United States ; and there
are some who anticipate that the same great magnet
will eventually draw to itself the other fragments of
European empires in the Caribbean Sea.
The isolation which makes an island readily detach
able, and its prevailing small size, which renders it easily
controlled from within and, with the exception of those
occupying important strategic positions, less an object
of conquest from without because of its limited re
sources, have combined to maintain European powers
in the West Indies. " Such a parti-colored sample card
of political areas as is afforded by the Antilles is the
expression of the geographical independence of islands ;
it makes a contrast to the magnitude of the political
territories which we elsewhere find in America." 3 This
bizarre arrangement would be impossible on any conti
nent to-day. But these island fragments of broken
empires are found everywhere. Tiny St. Pierre and
Miquelon off the southern coast of Newfoundland are
all that remain to France of its vast Canadian domain.
The Channel Isles are the last geographical evidence of
England's former dominion in France, as Cuba and
Porto Rico were of Spain's supremacy in continental
America. First detached from the common history of
Mexico, Central America, and Peru, they are now de
tached in turn from the destiny of theb mother country
and follow the law of their geographical being. Al
though only Porto Rico has become a part of the
United States, the limited suzerainty established over

THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN 405
Cuba by the terms of the treaty regulating her foreign
relations brings the island in effect under the operation
of this principle.
The expulsion of Spain from the Antilles is only the
finishing touch in an historical process which has been
going on now for a century, and which the United
States has constantly aided and abetted. The only as
tonishing thing is that an operation which was so early
accomplished on the mainland should have been arrested
when extended to the islands. Geographical location
and isolation have been two factors in bringing about
this result.
West Florida was acquired from Spain by the natural
expansion of the American people, just as Texas was
from Mexico. But there is a vast difference between
proximity and contact. Cuba, although so near the
mainland, has felt the isolation of an island environ
ment. The hundred-mile stretch of Florida Strait con
stituted an absolute boundary. This was sufficient to
bar an influx of American immigration like the steady
lapping of the human tide across the Mexican border.
Isolation robbed Cuba of adequate support from Ameri
can volunteers in its uprisings. Filibuster expeditions
by sea could be more readily checked at the port of
departure or arrival than the silent slipping of resolute
men across a land frontier several hundred miles long.
Moreover, the peninsula of Florida, which seems almost
to bridge the sea to Cuba, was in fact almost wholly
inoperative as a connecting link because of its extensive
swamp lands, which render the lower third of the penin
sula almost uninhabitable. There was here, therefore,

406 THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN
no chance of an increasing population which should
outgrow the narrow limits of a peninsula and overflow
into adjacent islands, as exemplified everywhere else by
peninsula history. By the everglades of Florida and
the barrier of the Strait, Cuba was removed nearly three
hundred miles from the American frontier of settlement.
Nevertheless the interest of the United States in Cuba
was close. By its size and location it presented a par
allel to Ireland's politico-geographical relation to Eng
land. Its acquisition by a strong foreign power was
always to be dreaded. When in 1823, it seemed that
Cuba and Porto Rico were to be the price of England's
support of Spain in a war with France, John Quincy
Adams thus wrote to our minister at Madrid : " These
islands are natural appendages to the North American
continent. One of them, Cuba, lying almost within sight
of our shores, is an object of transcendent importance
to the commercial and political interests of our Union.
It commands the entrance to the Gulf of Mexico and
the West Indian seas. The character of its population,
its situation midway between our southern coast and
Santo Domingo, its safe and capacious harbor of Havana
fronting hundreds of miles of our coast destitute of such
ports, the nature of its productions and its wants fur
nishing the supplies and needing the returns of a com
merce immensely profitable, give to Cuba an importance
in our national affairs with which no other foreign coun
try can be compared. Such are the interests of that
island and this country — geographical, moral, and politi
cal — that, in looking forward to the probable course of
events for half a century, it is impossible to resist the

THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN 407
conviction that the annexation of Cuba to the United
States will be indispensable to the Union itself. . .
The transfer of Cuba to Great Britain would be an event
unpropitious to the interests of the United States."
The annexation of Cuba was a constantly recurring
proposition from 1807, when the seizure of the Spanish
colonies in the Gulf region by either England or France
seemed probable, up to 1898. But the United States
had committed itself to a continental policy which it
was loath to abandon, though statesmen again and again
declared for island expansion. Jefferson advocated the
acquisition of Cuba, because it could be defended with
out a navy, but opposed any further seaward advance
beyond the mainland.
The influence of the slave power came in to com
plicate the question, forbidding the liberation of Cuba
by Mexico and Colombia in 1825 because the prox
imity of the island to the southern states made it an
undesirable neighbor if a free-soil republic ; Hayti was
near enough. Later this very proximity, the adapta
tion of Cuba's products to the plantation system, and
hence its ready incorporation into the body politic of
• the South, became reasons for its acquisition as a slave
state in the view of the Southern party. This of course
was opposed by the North; but from 1848 till the
Civil War, repeated offers to purchase the island and
numerous filibuster expeditions for its conquest at
tested the eagerness of the party in power to annex the
island. After the war, between 1867 and 1869, the advent
of a spirit of expansion led to plans for the acquisition

408 THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN
of San Domingo and the Danish Isles ; but the Ameri
can people as a whole were apathetic about the advan
tages to be gained and the old continental policy was
not abandoned. Nevertheless, from the time (1868)
Cuba began to make a sustained effort to secure her
freedom, the United States became deeply concerned
for the fate of the island.4 The Cuban question, which
had been almost perennial since 1807, now became a
daily one in the discussions of the President and his
cabinet. Cuba lay just at our doors, and everything
which influenced it fundamentally touched our commer
cial interests, which had been growing steadily since
1850. The peace and prosperity of this market of pur
chase and sale were of moment to our country. More
over, the proximity of our shores made the United States
a natural base for filibustering expeditions, which, in
spite of deeply aroused sympathies, the government was
bound to prevent. Our ports became the refuge for
Cuban exiles, the home of the Cuban Junta. Persecu
tion started an exodus of Cuban subjects to the United
States, where they became naturalized. Consider the
large proportion of these people in the southern coun
ties of Florida. From their adopted home they returned
to transact business in Cuba, but their naturalization
papers did not always outweigh their Spanish names
and swarthy complexions to save them from mistreat
ment at the hands of Spanish officials. Thus the close
relations, ethnic, commercial, and political, which grew
out of geographic conditions, had their logical conse
quence in the expulsion of Spain from her last foothold
in the Western Hemisphere.

THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN 409
From the war with Spain the United States issued as
a Caribbean power. Hitherto limited to the segregated
basin of the Gulf of Mexico, by her vbtual protectorate
over Cuba, the pledge of naval stations on its coast, the
possession of Porto Rico and the two small islands in
the Virgin Passage, she now has a base of twelve hun
dred miles along the northern rim of the Caribbean.
This base will doubtless be extended in the not remote
future by the purchase of the Danish Isles. The posses
sion of St. Thomas will give us control of the Anegada
Passage, the doorway for most of the steamship lines
from Europe and the last important channel into this sea
from the north.
The American advance into the West Indian sea de
rives its great significance from the paramount interest
of the United States in an interoceanic canal which
shall connect the Atlantic and Pacific shores of the
country and secure closer communication with our new
island possessions in the Orient. The war which gave
us Porto Rico, and thereby raised our geographical
status in the American Mediterranean, created also a
more urgent necessity for a perfected transit route to
the Pacific, magnified our interest in the canal, and at
the same time increased our power to control it.
The configuration of that part of the North Ameri
can continent which forms the western rim of the Carib
bean Sea complicates the question of the location and
construction of a transit channel. Nature unequivo
cally limited the Suez Canal to its present site; but
geographical conditions in this western Mediterranean
are quite different. The American isthmus is about

410 THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN
fourteen hundred miles long, extending from the Isth
mus of Tehuantepec in Mexico to the Atrato River in
western Colombia. For the southeastern stretch of six
hundred miles the width of this isthmus is compara
tively narrow, varying from a minimum of barely
thirty miles to a maximum of one hundred and twenty
miles, contracting to this last width again farther north
at the Bay of Honduras and at Tehuantepec.
The outlines of the map therefore would indicate
numerous possible canal routes. A broad ridge of seven
hundred feet elevation, too high and wide to be cut,
eliminates Tehuantepec, though its nearness to the
United States speaks eloquently in its favor. This was
the line of Eads's proposed ship railway. A mountain
range disposes of the Bay of Honduras. In southern
Nicaragua, the San Juan River and Lake Nicaragua,
forming links in an interoceanic route, and a passway
over the mountain divide at only 153 feet elevation
promise better conditions ; they involve, however, a
rather long (184 miles) transit route and the construc
tion of artificial harbors at the termini. Three possible
lines, known as the Panama, San Bias, and Caledonian,
terminate in the Gulf of Panama on the Pacific side.
The first, with a summit elevation of less than three
hundred feet and a width of thirty-six miles, though
necessitating a canal of forty-nine miles, seems to have
most in its favor. The last two have the advantage in
shorter length and superior ports on the Atlantic ; but
the height of the dividing ridge (681 ft.) would involve
a tunnel canal which would outweigh the other advan
tages. Still farther south, the Atrato River, which is

THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN 411
only seventy miles from tidewater on the Pacific at the
nearest point, offers a possibility.5
In the early days of Spanish supremacy the long
Atrato valley was a natural transit route especially be
tween the Gulf of Darien and Peru, but Philip II.
issued one of his genial decrees forbidding the naviga
tion of the river on pain of death. The San Juan
River was a regular line of communication for Spanish
vessels plying between Cuba and Granada on Lake Nic
aragua up to 1639 ; and again in 1850, when the rush
of the gold-seekers to California put a strain on Isthmian
transportation, this route was brought into requisition.
Likewise the Chagres River, which is navigable for
skiffs and light-draft vessels halfway across the Panama
Isthmus to Cruces, was opened in 1534 for the Spanish
trade, served later for California emigrants, guided the
surveyors of the Panama Railroad, and later the engi
neers of the Panama Canal. Thus history repeats itself
along even an insignificant watercourse which serves an
important connection.
Owing to the threefold predominance of water on
the earth s surface and the consequent development of
marine transportation as commerce tends more and more
to encircle the world, an isthmus soon loses its impor
tance as a link between land masses, and becomes in
stead a barrier between water areas, which political and
commercial exigencies require to be converted into an
artificial strait. The Isthmus of Panama served as a -
passway for the aimless wanderings of the primitive
tribes of Central and South America and was a factor
in early ethnic distribution. It may carry the road-bed

412 THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN
of the intercontinental railroad which some day in the
remote future is to connect the United States and the
seaboard of Argentina. But in all this interval of cen
turies it has acted only as a barrier to interoceanic
/navigation. The supreme interest of the United States in an
Isthmian Canal, the strength of her geographic location
in relation to the same, her natural office as guarantor
of the neutrality of the channel and the political stabil
ity of the country through which it passes, finally the
abundant wealth, the resources of the Anglo-Saxon
republic, and the steadily developed aptitude of its
citizens for vast enterprises, all combine to lay the task
of its construction upon the United States. The
geographic influences which brought forth the fisher
men of Gloucester, the spinners of Rhode Island, the
fur-trading expansionists of the Far West, and the
courageous manufacturers of the Pacific states have
been only so many remote antecedent causes, stable,
persistent, of the American control of the Isthmian
project to-day.
This control involves naval supremacy in the Ameri
can Mediterranean. No other country has here a base
so broad and full of natural resources. The long sweep
of mainland and islands from the Rio Grande to St.
Thomas leaves little to be desired, except the possession
of the Danish Isles. The recent extension of the
American coast-line following the acquisition of Porto
Rico and the Philippines, the rapid expansion of Ameri
can foreign commerce, and the creation of a trans-Pacific
colonial trade, finally the construction of the Isthmian

THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN 413
Canal, which will constitute in effect a bit of American
seaboard, must call forth a navy whose strength shall be
commensurate with the importance of our extra-conti
nental interests. Such a navy will insure our command
of the Caribbean Sea.
Great Britain's holdings in these waters are numerous
and well distributed for naval control. Especially
Jamaica, by its almost central location in the Caribbean,
occupies a strategic position similar to that of Malta in
guarding the approaches to the Suez Canal. The
limited resources of England's West Indian possessions
are compensated for by the political and maritime
ascendency of the British Empire. France's positions
are all on the outskirts. So are those of Denmark,
though the pivotal location of St. Thomas at the angle
of the Greater and Lesser Antilles lends it no small
significance.6 The position of the Dutch, also, near this northeast
angle in St. Martin (half French), St. Eustatius, and
Saba Isle, and in Buen Ayre, Curagao and Oruba off
the northwest coast of Venezuela, gives them a near
and remoter base in the approaches to the Isthmus of
Panama. This excellent distribution reflects the interest
of Holland in an alternative line of communication
with her vast colonial possessions (730,000 square miles)
in the East Indies, should the Suez route be at any time
impassable for her. The holdings of the French
and British in the Caribbean Sea also gain an added
significance when viewed in relation to the territories
of these nations in the Orient. Only the Danish Isles
lack this character of way-stations and hence could be

414 THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN
transferred to some other country without loss of pres
tige to Denmark. Now Germany, the rising young
colonial power of Oceanica, is accredited with designs
upon a coaling-station either in St. Thomas or Curacao,
a rumor which gains color also from the astonishing
strides of German trade in Central America and the
exploitation of this field by the German merchant
marine. While the United States has abundantly proven her
political ascendency in the American Mediterranean, and
while her naval strength there has been sufficient in the
past and will undoubtedly be made adequate to the needs
of the future, she does not show the commercial develop
ment in this region which her proximity and facility of
communication, the adaptation of her exports to the
needs of its population, and her extensive importation of
its tropical products, would lead one to expect. The bal
ance of trade with the countries and islands bordering
on the Caribbean is almost always against the United
States. The proximity, however, has been in the past
perhaps more apparent than real, in consequence of the
concentration of the industrial and commercial activities
of this country in the northeastern states. The distance
by sea from New York to Vera Cruz, Mexico, or to
Greytown, Nicaragua, is over two thousand miles. New
Orleans is little over half as far from Greytown and only
788 miles from Vera Cruz ; but the export trade of our
Gulf seaboard has only recently begun to be an impor
tant factor in our foreign commerce. Canada, which,
besides speaking the same language as ourselves, is con
tiguous to our area of greatest development in point of

THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN 415
industries and commerce, raiboad, lake, and marine
transportation, is the best customer that the United
States has except Great Britain and Germany. In 1901
the United States furnished 61 per cent, of Canada's
total imports for consumption.7
In the countries south of our border, most of them
speaking other languages than our own, the record of
all but the recent past is far from satisfactory, though
the last few years have marked the beginning of a
change. But in general the growth has been slow and
the rate has been retarded with every increase of dis
tance from our frontiers. In contrast to our active trade
with Canada, Mexico, which is equally near and enjoys
raiboad as well as ship communication, has purchased in
general only about 40 per cent, of her imports from the
United States. However, this proportion rose to 50.6
per cent, in 1900, and to 54.3 per cent, in 1901. In
the last year only the American and German trade
showed a decided increase, while almost every other
coimtry showed a decline.8
One change for the better in American business
methods in Mexico is undoubtedly due to our recent
acquisition of former Spanish possessions. Prior to the
Cuban War we were distinctly a one-language people.
Our geographical isolation has operated against our be
coming linguists. Marked ethnic differences have pre
vented any but limited affiliation with the nations south
of our border, and they are our only neighbors speaking
a different language except the negligible quantity of
the French habitant. Now we have a large number of
Spanish-speaking citizens, and the importance of Spanish

416 THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN
is growing in our consciousness. Fully half of the
American trade circulars now sent to Mexico are written
in that language, and many business houses are employ
ing young Mexicans or Cubans as traveling salesmen,
with excellent results.
The Central American states, which are a little more
remote from us than Mexico, though readily accessible
by water, have gotten only about 35 per cent, of their
imports from us ; in the year 1900, however, the propor
tion showed a pronounced rise in the more important
states. We supply 33 per cent, of her imports to
Colombia, 27 per cent, to Venezuela ; and to the West
Indies, whose trade is naturally reserved for the various
mother countries, only about 20 per cent.9
In South America, especially that portion lying south
of the Equator, our commercial situation is yet more dis
couraging. The bold eastern projection of the conti
nent which brings Cape St. Roque some forty degrees
of longitude, or twenty-six hundred miles east of New
York, has the effect of placing New York, Hamburg,
and Liverpool at about equal distances from South
America and therefore so far on an equal footing of
competition in the markets south of Pernambuco on the
Atlantic side and all along the Pacific coast. But almost
all the steamship lines to South American ports are
controlled by European capital. They carry European
merchandise to the southern markets, exchange their
cargoes for rubber, coffee, wool, and hides, which they
bring up to our Atlantic seaboard cities, reload there
again with grain and provisions, since the United States
exports to Europe so much exceed the imports from that

THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN 417
continent, and having reached the home ports, after
making the vast circuit (Plymouth, Montevideo, New
York, Plymouth — fifteen thousand miles), take on a
fresh cargo for South America again. By this system,
New York's goods shipped to Montevideo by way of
Europe are at a disadvantage, in competition with Eng
lish or German merchandise having direct steamship
connection with the port of destination. The obvious
remedy for this condition is to build up a native mer
chant marine. In all Gulf and Caribbean countries
with which the United States now have adequate steam
ship communication, they have won a reasonable share
of the commerce.
The construction of the Isthmian Canal, whereby an
almost due south route will be opened from New York
and New Orleans to Callao (the port of Lima) and Val
paraiso, will greatly favor United States trade on the
Pacific coast of South America over that of England
and Germany ; and by establishing communication with
the trans- Andean railroad, in which only one short link
of forty-six miles remains to be completed, it will bring
American products into the rapidly developing temper
ate belt between Valparaiso and Buenos Ayres, and
make them compete with European goods in the better
populated districts of Argentina, Paraguay, Uraguay,
and southern Brazil.
The steady industrial and commercial growth which
has been going on in the southern states in the past
decade has been suddenly accelerated by our increasing
interests in the Caribbean. Already our close relation
with Cuba and Porto Rico is tipping the balance of

418 THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN
commercial activity more towards the Gulf seaboard.
The evidence is to be had in the statistics of exports
and imports for New Orleans, Galveston, Corpus Christi,
Mobile, Pensacola, Tampa, and Key West.10 New Or
leans, as the focus of converging trade lines in the
Gulf and the natural outlet of the Mississippi basin,
promises to become one of the great exporting points of
the world. In 1901 it supplanted Philadelphia in the
third place in the list of grain-exporting cities, being
outranked only by New York and Baltimore ; and in
the fiscal year ending 1902, its grain exports were 36
per cent, higher than those of Philadelphia and very
nearly equal to those of Baltimore.11 The last two years
have seen the total foreign commerce of the Crescent
City increase 56 per cent.
The rapidly growing importance of the Gulf seaboard
is further attested by the eagerness of certain big rail
road systems of the Mississippi valley to reach New
Orleans. Their purpose reflects the existing trend of
exports away from the Atlantic seaboard cities and to
wards the Gulf ; and the consummation of projected
railroad combinations centering about Memphis and
Fort Worth will start a new current of grain away from
Chicago and the East to the Mississippi port. A sug
gestion, made recently by the president of a great
northwestern raiboad system having its southern termi
nus at St. Louis, that the United States government
improve the Mississippi to secure twelve-foot naviga
tion from New Orleans to the mouth of the Missouri, is
another straw showing the drift of the commercial cur
rent towards the Gulf. There is now every promise

THE AMERICAN MEDITERRANEAN 419
that the southern seaboard will come into its own, and
that the geographical location of the United States in
the American Mediterranean will be exploited to the
full limit of its possibilities.
NOTES TO CHAPTER XVIII
1. Ratzel, Politische Geographie der Vereinigten Staaten, p. 17.
2. Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power, p. 303.
3. Ratzel, Anthropogeographie, p. 575. 1882.
4. For relations of the United States to Cuba, see Albert Bushnell
Hart, Foundations of American Foreign Policy, pp. 108-133. 1901.
5. Report of the Isthmian Canal Commission, 1899 to 1901, pp. 69-72.
Washington, 1901.
6. For strategic aspects, see Mahan, Interest of America in Sea Power,
chapter viii. 1897.
7. Review of the World's Commerce for 1901, p. 129. Washington,
1902.
8. Ibid. p. 131.
9. American Commerce in Mexico, Central and South America, p. 605.
Summary of Commerce and Finance, August, 1901. Washington.
10. Statistical Abstract of the United States for 1901, passim. Wash
ington, 1902.
11. Bulletin No. 12, Series 1901-1902, Export of Domestic Breadstuffs,
etc. Bureau of Statistics, Washington, 1902.

CHAPTER XIX
THE UNITED STATES AS A PACIFIC OCEAN POWER
Historic areas of civilization are most naturally indi
cated by the seas which they encompass. The iEgean,
Mediterranean, the Atlantic, Pacific mark eras of pro
gress, of which the seafaring nations of the world have
been the first apostles. Every maritime expansion of
civilization draws with it in its train the smaller water
area which constituted its previous field, operates for
a long time under the influence of the latter, and while
robbing it of its former preeminence, contributes finally
to its absolute activity. . This has been the history of
the iEgean in relation to the Mediterranean, of the Medi
terranean and Baltic-North in relation to the Atlantic.
We speak of the Pacific as the " ocean of the future,"
but this means in reality the final expansion of the
maritime field by which it embraces this last great basin
and advances to active exploitation of the world ocean.
For the sea is always one. The little harbor of Batum
at the innermost corner of the Euxine is just as much a
port of the world ocean as New York, Honolulu, or
Hongkong. When the commercial and maritime drama of Europa
was shifted from the stage of the Mediterranean to the
Atlantic, those nations who had the front seats got most
out of it, as we have seen. They furnished the best

A. PACIFIC OCEAN POWER 421
trained actors in the stirring scenes of exploration, col
onization, and trade, and drew in the largest rewards.
Their advantages were fundamentally the product of geo
graphical location. The same principle must hold on the
" ocean of the future ; " but the development of the world
ocean will mean the exploitation of the Pacific from
the basis of the Atlantic. The preeminence which the
Atlantic has gained will long dominate the Pacific, and
geographic conditions make it doubtful whether this
supremacy will ever pass to the larger basin. Therefore,
those countries which have a foothold on both these
oceans possess the vantage-ground ; and their potential
strength will be in proportion to the length and proxim
ity of their two ocean frontages and the resourcefulness
of theb respective hinterlands.
A narrow ocean, near-lying continents, remote water
sheds, long navigable river systems, accessible inland
regions, a large back country to draw upon — that is
the Atlantic field. A vast ocean, remote continents, a
few, fall-broken rivers, mountain walls hugging the
coast, an inaccessible interior, limited back country —
that is the Pacific field. The Pacific, though twice the
size of the Atlantic, has a drainage basin less than half
as large. The reason for this disparity lies in the fact
that the primary highlands of Asia, Australia, North
and South America are situated on the Pacific coasts
of those continents. In Australia and South America
the mountains rise directly from the sea, and only short,
plunging torrents erode their slopes, while all the ex
tensive drainage is in another dbection. In the north
ern continents the watershed is a thousand miles or

422 A PACIFIC OCEAN POWER
more inland, and thereby furnishes almost the whole
drainage area of the Pacific ; but this location of the
divides does not mean navigable streams to the coast.
The unfavorable character of our American Pacific
rivers has been explained. Those of Canada are no
better. Only the far-away Yukon, by sweeping around
to the north of the coast range, affords a navigable
course for steamers of light draft for 1370 miles to
Forty Mile Creek, where the international boundary line
of Canada and Alaska crosses the river ; but the nature
of the country through which the Yukon flows and its
ice-bound condition most of the year render it of little
commercial importance except to the Klondike miners.
The Asiatic rivers of the Pacific are much more im-_
portant. The Amur with its tributaries affords hun
dreds of miles of navigable waterways, but the sharp
northward bend of its course just before reaching the
ocean discharges the stream into the Okotsk Sea, where
its port is frozen six months of the year. The next
great river, the Hwang-ho, though flowing with a slug
gish current through the great plain of eastern China,
is too shifting in its course to be relied upon for navi
gation. The Yangtse-kiang alone is comparable to the
great streams of the Atlantic. It is navigable for one
thousand miles from its mouth and admits even ocean
going vessels six hundred and thirty miles up to Han-
Kau, where they take on cargoes of tea and silk for
Europe and America. In the Si-kiang and Mekong navi
gation is much impeded by rapids. Therefore of all the
rivers flowing east and west into the Pacific, only the
Yangtse-kiang affords a good route of communication

A PACIFIC OCEAN POWER 423
between seaboard and interior. Hence we find it lined
with free ports all the way from Shanghai, on the coast,
and Chin-kiang, at the head of its estuary, to Ichang,
a thousand miles up its course.1 The Yangtse-kiang
is the one valuable river adjunct of sea power in the
Orient ; hence the discerning eye of the English early
appropriated it as the British "sphere of influence."
China, by reason of its long irregular coast-line stretch
ing through twenty-one degrees of latitude, the posses
sion of the one navigable river of the whole Pacific, its
central geographical location in the temperate zone, and
its large territory of abundant resources, has a strong
position on the Pacific; but dominated by a nomad
people from the inland steppes of Asia, bred to isola
tion by the great sweep of mountains behind them, and
unreceptive to the vitalizing influences of the Atlan
tic civilization, the Chinese have not profited by the
advantages of their location. Russia's frontage on the
Pacific finds its value much reduced by its subarctic
situation. Japan has central location, a long island
base, and the spirit of progress which is developing at
a wonderful rate the maritime activity of the kingdom ;
but it lacks area and population, important factors in
political and commercial strength. England's posses
sions in India, Australia, New Zealand, North Borneo,
New Guinea, Hongkong, and Malacca give her a broad
enough base in the Pacific ; but their scattered loca
tion, remoteness from the national centre of strength
in the Atlantic and also from the storm-center of the
" problem of Asia," between the thirtieth and fortieth
parallels, all combine to reduce the value of her Pacific

424 A PACIFIC OCEAN POWER
position, though the maritime strength of Great Britain
makes her at present the greatest factor in the Eastern
Question. China is the only power on the western shores of
the Pacific to whom geographic conditions might have
given political and commercial preeminence, except for
the one thing needful, contact with the Atlantic. This
the United States has, besides the requisites of a long
Pacific coast-line, central location in the temperate zone,
and a large territory of abundant resources. To balance
the teeming plains of eastern China, it has the long
Pacific Valley with its enterprising if not dense popula
tion. A coast-line of 1810 miles, which rises to 8900
miles if all the inlets, bays, estuaries, and islands are in
cluded, a few evenly distributed ports for larger vessels
and numerous safe roadsteads for smaller craft, yield
a fair degree of contact with the sea from San Juan
Strait to the excellent harbor of San Diego, in spite of
the mountain range which faces the coast.
The great advantage of the United States is its inter
oceanic location. This it shares with Mexico, the Cen
tral American republics, Colombia, and nominally with
Chile, which has stretched a narrow tape of territory
around the southern extremity of the continent to the
Atlantic entrance of the Straits of Magellan ; but obvi
ous geographic limitations of climatic situation, natural
features, and size restrict the political and commercial
ambitions of all these countries, even if we ignore the
inferiority of their Latin-American populations. To
the north, a neighbor of the same Anglo-Saxon blood
as ourselves has also a broad frontage on both oceans,

A PACIFIC OCEAN POWER 425
and as part of the British Empire has also like ourselves
mid-sea islands in the Pacific to serve as way-stations to
the opposite coasts. British Columbia, with its one
thousand miles of seaboard and its excellent harbors, oc
cupies a fine position in relation to trade with China and
Japan, Russia and Manchuria. It has also considerable
natural resources, especially coal of good quality which
rises in importance because of its scarcity along the
United States littoral. British Columbia has moreover
the resources of all Canada at its back; but when full
weight is given to all these favorable conditions,2 the
disadvantage of a location too far north, and hence the
restriction of area adapted for the support of a dense
population and the production of superfluous wealth
which may enter the markets of the world as capital,
place British Columbia and Canada far behind the
United States in the rivalry for the commerce of the
Pacific. The first weak foothold of the young Republic in the
far-away station of Astoria at the mouth of the Colum
bia River, and that early trade in furs with China, seemed
prophetic of the destiny of the nation. The never aban
doned purpose to widen the frontage on the western
ocean, the obstinate debate of the " Oregon Question,"
and the conquest of California, committed the United
States to the career of a Pacific power. Wide though
the ocean is +- ten thousand miles at the Equator,
eighty-five hundred at the Tropic of Cancer between
Hongkong and Mazatlan on the Mexican coast, and
forty-seven hundred and fifty between Yokohama and
San Francisco approximately along the thirty-seventh

426 A PACIFIC OCEAN POWER
.parallel ¦/- and sparse though the islands are for a belt
of two thousand miles off its American shores, the mere
presence of the United States on the Pacific has been a
sufficient reason for concern in all matters pertaining to
this ocean.
This w,as the ground on which Russia in 1867 pressed
Alaska upon us, strengthening our base on the Pacific
and weakening that of her hereditary enemy in British
Columbia by placing this English colony between the
fires of American enterprise on both its northern and
southern borders. The " ten marine leagues," moreover,
which fix the width of the long " panhandle " of south
ern Alaska, cut off a thousand miles of the natural
Pacific frontage of British Columbia ; while the posses
sion of the peninsula and the Aleutian Islands gives our
Pacific base a reach of over four thousand miles from
San Diego to Attu, three hundred miles beyond the in
ternational date-line of the one hundred and eightieth
meridian, and only six hundred miles from the nearest
Japanese islands. The acquisition of Alaska gave us
Russia for a near neighbor in Bering Strait. The own
ership of the Pribilof Islands in Bering Sea, which the
seals have adopted as theb breeding-grounds, made us
the most interested party in the controversy of the seal
fisheries, and involved us in negotiations with Russia,
Japan, and England, which resulted in the Paris Com
mission of 1895.
The vast importance of our Alaskan territory is de
veloped, however, only with our advance as an acknow
ledged world power in the domain of the Pacific by the
acquisition of the Philippines. The cause lies in our

A PACIFIC OCEAN POWER 427
increasing need of coal. This Alaska can furnish in
abundance and of an excellent quality. There are out-
croppings of various grades in the islands of the " pan
handle," on the mainland at White Horse Pass near
the railroad from Skagway to the Yukon trail, and on
the seaward slope of the Mount St. Elias Range ; but
the first field with promises of real commercial impor
tance is found farther north along the coast, just east
of the mouth of Copper River and behind the island of
Kayak. This coal is the best found on the whole Pacific
seaboard, and is almost equal to the standard Albion
Cardiff coal of Wales. The seams are thick and exten
sive, but the lack of a protected harbor near the mines
puts a serious obstacle in the way of the English com
pany now developing them. Coal is found also under
commercial conditions at Kachekmak Bay off Cook Inlet
at the extremity of the Kenai Peninsula ; but the most
extensive and important coal-field in Alaska lies still
farther west towards the extremity of the long slender
Alaska Peninsula and on Unga Island, cropping out in
numerous seams at Chignik and Portage bays on the
Pacific, and Herendeen Bay on Bering Sea. Herendeen
and Portage inlets almost nip the peninsula in two, leav
ing only a five-mile neck of land between them, so that
these two locations are virtually one. The coal ranks
next in quality to that of Kayak, and is equal to any
mined farther south. Because of the situation of this
field near protected harbors, an important matter in the
wide sweep of the Pacific, and its location on the great
circle of navigation constituting the shortest route for
steamer lines between the United States and any part of

428 A PACIFIC OCEAN POWER
Asia, it assumes paramount importance. Portage Bay
will be a coaling-station three degrees of longitude
farther west than Honolulu and one equipped with its
own mines, from which coal will be delivered to deep-
sea vessels at low cost.3 Situated in the latitude of
Glasgow and exposed like it to mild oceanic winds,
these Portage Bay mines have a winter not more severe
than that of Philadelphia ; so climate will interpose no
obstacle to their development.
The possession of the Philippines, which lends a new
importance to our neglected province of the north, was
the signal for us to profit by certain other advantages
which lay at our door or within our hands and had been
ignored. Dewey's victory in Manila Bay made impera
tive the annexation of Hawaii, Wake Island, and the re
tention of Guam, the southernmost isle of the Ladrones
group, so that a direct mid-ocean line of communication
between the home shore and our oriental colony might
be assured. Just as England on the route between Lon
don and India acquired first the remote extremity in
the Orient, and then filled in the intermediate points —
Gibraltar, Malta, Cyprus, Suez, and Aden — which were
to secure her long line of communication, so the United
States had to turn her attention to getting way-stations
across the Pacific. Far back, between 1841 and 1867, she
claimed Wake, Christmas, and Midway islands by right
of discovery, but entered into active possession of the
first only recently, when its geographical location be
tween Guam and Hawaii indicated its natural province
as a Pacific cable-station.
Since 1889 the position of the United States as a

A PACIFIC OCEAN POWER 429
Pacific power had been attested by its share in the tri
partite government of the Samoan Islands. This share
was converted into the absolute ownership of Tutuila
and Manua in 1899 by the acquiescence of England
and Germany. The fact that the superior harbor of
Pango-pango on Tutuila was ceded to the United States
as a coaling-station as early as 1872, but was not actively
occupied till 1898,4 bears witness to the American
change of policy. The whole Samoan group is of
great strategic value. It is situated at about 14° south
latitude and 170° west longitude, on the direct path
from Puget Sound to Sydney, Australia, and on a line
from the Isthmus of Panama to east Australian ports.
Herein lies its significance for the United States.
The island world which, like a vast continental neb
ula, occupies the expanse of the Pacific, becomes more
and more ratified in the direction of the American
mainland, till it finally leaves a wide gap of ocean space
between the outlying groups of Hawaii and the Paumota
Archipelago on the two Tropics and the mountain-
bound coasts of the Western Hemisphere. Neither
North nor South America finds at its western door
natural stepping-stones for advance into the Pacific.
Hence the Hawaiian group, the only place in the whole
Pacific north of the Equator and east of the continental
islands festooning the coast of Asia where the nebula
has condensed into a constellation, by theb location,
their magnitude, and their isolation become the para
mount strategic position west of the American shores.
They afford the first ocean-station on a trans-Pacific
line of communication.

430 A PACIFIC OCEAN POWER
Political gravitation has drawn the Hawaiian Islands
to the dominion of the United States. Their location
in relation to the American shores at an early date made
them a place of call for New England trading-vessels
on their way to the northwest coast or to China. Their
situation at the great cross-roads of the Pacific tended
to make their population a precipitate of all the races
traversing this ocean, but the American element pre
dominated. An island environment suffers always from
the limitation of its size, especially in commerce. Eng
land had to go out in search of the markets of the
world. Where she found none, she created them by
forming colonies. Japan is on the same keen hunt to
day. Cuba cannot survive without the markets of the
United States. The nearest market is the logical one
because of economy in transportation. Hawaii from
the beginning of its sugar culture needed American
buyers. In 1851 a strong effort, emanating from the
Islands themselves, was made for annexation ; but the
United States Senate refused to ratify the treaty offered
by the Hawaiian Parliament, and instead promised pro
tection. Meanwhile trade between the two countries
was growing and with it the sentiment of annexation in
Hawaii, while the big Republic held to its continental
policy. Sugar became the chief interest of the Islands ;
it was almost wholly in the hands of Americans, who
formed the monied and the ruling class, but who found
a naturally remunerative industry almost hopelessly
crippled by the heavy duties on their products at the
port of San Francisco. Annexation would make them
rich, so the agitation was kept up. Here again that

A PACIFIC OCEAN POWER 431
extra-territorial expansion which had fixed the destiny of
West Florida and Texas was doing its work. In 1876 a
compromise was effected. The chief Hawaiian products
were admitted to the United States free of duty, and
the United States was given a naval station in the vicin
ity of Honolulu. The barrier was beginning to fall.
The Islands were commercially within the sphere of the
United States, and the United States had advanced to
the strategic outpost on the Hawaiian shores. This
status of overlapping boundary was maintained until
1898. In the mean time, however, this country was not so
indifferent to the fate of Hawaii as it seemed. Twice
it interfered in Hawaii's behalf with England, and in
1850 it warned off the French. In 1843, when there
was danger of acquisition by England, Daniel Webster
declared that no other power ought to get possession
of these islands either by conquest or for the sake of
colonization. There was much of the dog in the
manger in this attitude. Prior to our acquisition of
the Philippines, Hawaii possessed far greater political
utility for British Columbia than for us, because it was
the one East Pacific station on the long intercontinental
sea route between Vancouver and Sydney. From a mil
itary standpoint, however, it was quite as important to
us ; because Hawaii as a coaling and naval station, two
thousand and eighty miles from San Francisco and
not more than twenty-five hundred from any point on
our western coast, in the hands of any foreign power
would have been a standing threat.5 So held, it would
have paralleled the Bermudas, which were the source of

432 A PACIFIC OCEAN POWER
discomfort enough to us in the Revolution and the War
of 1812. Hawaii in our hands, every one else is neces
sarily excluded from the field, except where the British
are entrenched in their port at Esquimault, near Victo
ria on Vancouver Island.
The Hawaiian Islands, Wake Island, and Guam form
to Manila a line of communication lying between the
narrow limits of the thbteenth and twenty-first paral
lels. The American termini of this line are located at
San Francisco (38° N. L.), Los Angeles (34° N. L.), and
Panama (9° N. L.), to all three of which Honolulu holds
a central position. The preeminence which it now
enjoys as the focus of the great commercial routes of
the Pacific will be only enhanced with the opening
of the Isthmian Canal, because it will lie in the path of
an increasing file of vessels moving along from Pan
ama to China, Japan, or Asiatic Russia. At the western
end of this island chain of communications are the
Philippines, by reason of which the United States
has now become an Asiatic power. This large group,
scattered over an area measuring one thousand miles
from north to south and half as far from east to west,
is located wholly within the tropics, and distributed
around it in a wide-sweeping semicircle are the oriental
countries whose vast populations make the markets of
the East.
To these markets the United States supplies about
ten per cent, of the imports and the commercial coun
tries of Europe fifty per cent. Asia and Oceanica are
increasing their imports, and a fair share of the incre
ment falls to American merchants. Especially is this

A PACIFIC OCEAN POWER 433
true in Japan, where the American trade is advancing by
leaps and bounds, and now ranks closely behind that of
England. Exports from the United States to Asia have
grown from $11,000,000 in 1870 to $64,000,000 in
1902; those to Oceanica have increased from $4,335,000
in 1870 to $34,000,000 in 1902, and the last figure does
not include some $19,000,000 worth of merchandise
sent to the Hawaiian Islands but not included in this
report since their annexation.6 The total commerce of
the United States with Asia and Oceanica rose from
$138,000,000 in 1892 to $173,000,000 in 1897 and
to $287,000,000 in 1902.7
These commercial achievements of the past thirty
years have been carrying the United States inevitably
forward into the maelstrom of Asiatic affairs, because
there lay the center of our new interests. The prox
imity of Cuba to our shores was the far-away deter
minant which placed the stars and stripes in the Philip
pines and accelerated the progress of history ; but this
or some other base, perhaps on the Chinese mainland,
would have been our destiny. The commercial strength
of the American Republic was bound sooner or later to
find a political expression in that international struggle
for existence, which is a struggle for space, going on in
Asiatic territory. A chain of historical events, largely
geographical in theb causes, determined that the Philip
pines should be the channel of American influence in
the East. The detachable character, inner weakness,
and protected isolation of every island group maintained
Spain in her insular possessions here, as in the Antilles ;
so that the blow which despoiled her of one took all.

434 A PACIFIC OCEAN POWER
Now this same protection against international entan
glements which is yielded by an insular position accrues
to the United States, makes 'her situation in the Orient
analogous to her continental location at home, and gives
her the best possible base from which to protect her
interests. These interests, chiefly of a commercial nature, are
well worth guarding. The needs of the Orient are those
of an old, crowded country which, however, has not ad
vanced into the modern industrial stage of development.
The demand comes therefore for grain and flour, refined
oil, wood and leather manufactures, tobacco, cotton goods
of all kinds, agricultural implements, and all forms of
iron and steel manufactures. These the United States
can provide ; and the advantages arising from abundant
natural resources, the extensive organization of industry
which reduces the cost of production, and the superior
character of our industrial methods, enable the Ameri
can merchant to compete in these distant markets with
other nations who operate from a base thousands of
miles nearer. The vast size of the home country, afford
ing a wide field for raw materials, for concentration, and
hence organization of industries, for the development of
transportation facilities, and the maintenance of an ex
tensive and varied domestic market, has been in the past
the dominant factor in the evolution of the American
entrepreneur. The other factor has been his Anglo-
Saxon vigor of character and tenacity of purpose.
Here heredity and environment have combined to do
their utmost, and the result has not been small. The
United States is to-day the world's greatest producer of

A PACIFIC OCEAN POWER 435
manufactures, and as an exporter of domestic products
it ranks side by side with Great Britain.
The Atlantic has given us near access to Europe, and
the " American invasion " has followed. The Pacific
has opened to us, though at longer range, the markets
of the Orient, and the flag has been set up on an out
lying fragment of the Asiatic continent. " Enthroned
between her subject seas," the United States has by
reason of her large area and her geographical location
the most perfect conditions for attaining preeminence j
in the commerce of the world ocean.
If the tree planted by the fathers of the Republic has
lifted its head high and spread its branches afar, due
must be given to the great, generous land which has
nourished and the seas which have watered its wide-
running roots. NOTES TO CHAPTER XIX
1. Mahan, The Problem of Asia, pp. 41, 65, 120. New York, 1900.
2. Colquhoun, The Mastery of the Pacific, pp. 217-225. .1902.
3. H. Emerson, The Coal Resources of the Pacific Coasts, Engineering
Magazine. May, 1902.
4. Colquhoun, The Mastery of the Pacific, p. 43. 1902.
5. Mahan, Interest of America in Sea Power, p. 48. 1897.
6. Annual Review of the Foreign Commerce of the United States for
1902, Table, p. 4342. Washington, 1902.
7. Ibid. Table, p. 4361.

INDEX

Abyssinia, 4.
Acadia, 25 ; French settlements in,
32,35.
Acquia Creek, 378 ; in the Civil
War, 291, 296.
Adams, John Quincy, 401.
Adelaide, 341.
Aden, 401 ; importance to Indian
route, 428.
Adige River, importance to Venice,
251 ; and canals, 262.
Adirondack Mountains, inaccessible
in early days, 58 ; an unpeopled
area, 152 ; Canadians in, 330,
331; paper manufacture in, 351.
Adriatic Sea, 251.
jEgean Sea, Russia barred from,
399 ; in history, 420.
Afghanistan, mountain passes in,
53, 297 ; Russian expansion in,
94, 111, 292.
Africa, coast of, 4, 10 ; early naviga
tion along, 9 ; its rivers as affected
by continental structure, 20, 246 ;
early trade with, 28, 117, 129.
Agriculture, extensive, 43, 44, 46,
64, 149, 165, 281 ; intensive, 335 ;
soil and, 59, 118-120.
Akron (Ohio), 271.
-Alabama, limits Appalachian sys
tem, 38 ; first settlement in, 71 ;
hampered by Indians, 64, 154,
165 ; fertility of, 76, 77 ; rapid
development of, 154 ; immigra
tion to, from Tennessee, 158 ; up
lands of, against secession, 286 ;
in the Civil War, 301, 302 ; cities
and industries of, 354, 365 ; River,
80, 152.
-Alaska, Russians in, 216 ; Chinese in,
326 ; trade of Pacific coast states
with, 365, 369 ; its coal-fields, 365,
427, 428.

""Albany, early settlement, 23, 24, 58 ;
and Erie Canal, 267, 269 ; and
Schenectady railroad, 373, 381.
Albemarle Sound, early settlements
on, 32-34 ; in coastwise trade, 35,
127 ; effect on railway building,
378.
Alberta, 379.
Albiquiu, 196.
Albuquerque, 394.
Aldie (Va.), 297.
Aleutian Islands, 426.
Alexandria (Egypt), 2 ; mixed popu
lation of, 323 ; island location of,
338 ; (La.) 171; the French in,
108 ; (Va.) on water-route, 65,
66, 143.
Allegheny County (Pa.), 354, 355.
Allegheny Front, 55, 56.
Allegheny Mountains, as a bound
ary, 38, 39, 44, 45, 51, 78, 148,
150, 246, 273, 287 ; in the Civil
War, 294 (see also Appalachi
ans) ; frontier of settlement, 59,
62.
Allegheny Plateau, the, 54 ; a water
shed, 56, 65 ; early manufacture
on, 83.
Allegheny River, 63, 71, 87, 99 ; as
a route, 30, 39, 40, 61, 65, 266,
383.
Alps, passes of, 40, 52-54, 203, 204,
251 ; and piedmont railroad, 380.
Altamaha River, 64.
Alton (111.), 389.
American environment and national
character, 76-78, 96, 97, 99.
American Fur Company, 184, 260 ;
rival of the Hudson Bay Com
pany, 205, 207, 208.
American River (Cal.), 218.
Amsterdam, 263.
Amur River, 422.

438

INDEX

Anderson (S. C), 349
Andes Mountains, 4 ; as a barrier,
110, 111.
Anegada Passage, 409.
Anglo-Saxons, character of, 225,
239, 400, 434.
Anticosti Island, 116.
Antietam, 296.
Antilles, 116, 117 ; trade with, 124,
127, 128, 130, 398 ; geographical
importance, 402-405 ; strategic
importance, 413, 433. See also
West Indies.
Antioch, 2.
Antwerp, 294, 401.
Apache Canon, 188.
Apaches, 190, 195.
Apennines, 338.
Appalachian system, a frontier and
a barrier, 37-39, 46, 50, 51, 61,
178, 229-231, 255, 265;. its struc
ture, 38-40, 54, 55, 61, 65 ; its in
fluences on the colonies, 38, 46,
114, 178 ; as barrier between
coast and transmoutano settle-

- -Arizona, 243, 321, 325, 371, 394.
-Arkansas, 152, 158, 165-167, 182,
184, 187, 211, 278, 391.
Arkansas Post, 166, 306.
Arkansas River, 29, 114, 152, 161,
165, 166, 172, 185-189, 207, 249,
262; in Civil War, 305-307.
Army of the Potomac, 298, 300.
Ashland (Wis.), 274.
Ashley, 207, 217.
Ashley Gap, 297, 298.
Asia, Malays in, 6; and the United
States, 240, 432, 433; Pacific
rivers of, 422, 423 ; markets of,
132, 211, 362, 369, 412; structure
of, 228, 421, 429.
Asia Minor, 403.
Assiniboine River, 183.
Assyria, 94.
Astor expedition, 183, 201, 204, 205,
208.
Astoria, 204, 205, 213, 425.
Atbara River, 243.
Athabasca River, 202.
Athens, 338.

ments, 75, 83, 87-89; in Civil ¦ -Atlanta (Ga.), 379, 383

War, 285-287, 300, 302, 306, 307;
passes of, 39, 40, 44, 61, 371 ; riv
ers of, 55-57, 68, 266; water-
power of, 347-350; coal-fields of,
352-356 ; crossed by railroads,
371, 373, 381-385, 394. See also
Allegheny Mountains.
Appalachian Valley, description of,
54-56; settlement of, 58-61, 70,
71; as a highway, 69, 61, 67, 230,
287; in the Civil War, 296-298,
300, 303; and railroads, 379, 384.
See also Valleys, longitudinal.
Appomattox River, 290.
Aquae Sextise, 297.
Arabia, 180.
Aragon, 9.
Arctic Ocean, mentioned, 4, 24, 27,
125, 227.
Area, influence of small, 21, 22, 124.
See also Political areas.
Argentina, 111, 251, 411, 417.
Aricara villages, 204.
Arid belt, a check to expansion, 150,
159,179; effect on railroads, 253,
391 ; and population, 242, '243,
346 ; and grazing area, 358, 368.

Atlantic coast of the United States,
66, 77, 116, 117, 120, 126, 156,
226, 240, 258, 370, 382, 384, 388,
395, 396, 398; in the War of 1812,
134, 135, 142-144.
Atlantic Ocean, its structure, 4, 5,
400, 401, 421 ; influence upon its
bordering lands, 1, 3, 6, 16, 127,
420, 421 ; gives access to Europe,
435; as a barrier, 77, 102, 105,
131, 134, 235, 237, 310, 311; its
islands, 5, 7, 8, 13, 116.
Atlantic plain, 42, 45, 46, 77, 97,
293, 300, 307, 347, 371, 372, 379.
See also Tidewater country.
Atlantic rivers of North America,
20, 21, 114, 116, 247, 248, 252,
256.
Atrato River, 410, 411.
Augusta (Ga.), 375.
Augusta Court House, 60.
Austin, Stephen, 170.
Austria, 95.
Australia, 228, 246, 253, 273, 341,
421, 423, 429; immigrants from,
319, 322.
Azores, 7, 125.

INDEX

439

Bab-el-Mandeb, strait of, 2.
Babylonia, 94.
Baffins Bay, 24, 125.
Bahama Islands, 7, 8, 117, 125, 401,
402.
Balkh, 53.
Balls Bluff, 296.
Baltic provinces, 323, 324.
Baltic Sea, 3, 5, 111, 117, 228, 392,
399, 420 ; canal from Black Sea
to, 277.
Baltimore, 34, 65, 66, 86, 120, 143,
155, 269, 275, 284, 339, 342, 377,
396, 401, 418.
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 371,
373, 374, 377, 382, 389.
Banks, General, 295, 298, 299.
Bannockburn, 297.
Baranof Island, 215.
Barbadoes, 123, 127, 128, 137.
Barbary States, 132.
Bardstown (Ky.), 69, 73.
-Baton Rouge, 107, 305.
Batum, 2, 420.
Bay of Fundy, 32, 146.
Honduras, 410.
Bayou Atchafalaya,108, 263.
Barataria, 263.
Black, 263.
Lafourche, 108, 263.
* Teche, 108, 167, 262.
Terrebonne, 263.
Bear River (Cal.), 218 ; (Utah),
208, 211, 212, 217, 218.
Beaubassin, 32.
Beaufort (N. C), 308.
Beauport, 26.
Beaupre*, 26.
Belfort Pass, 54, 95.
Belgrade, 94.
Bemis Heights, 49.
Bering Sea, 426, 427.
Bering Strait, 426.
Bermudas, 117, 137, 146, 431, 432.
Bessemer (Ala.), 354, 355.
Beverly (Mass.), 83, 376.
Big Bear River, 72.
Big Hill Range, 68.
Big Horn River, 182, 204, 207,
379
Big Sandy River, 67, 75, 278, 385.
Birmingham district, 354, 355 ; ca
nal to Mobile Bay from, 355.

Bitter Root Mountains, 203.
Blackfeet Indians, 184.
Blackfoot River, 203.
Black Hawk Purchase, 164.
Black Mountains, 182, 211.
Black River, 167, 211.
Black Rock, 140.
Black Sea, 2, 6, 91, 111, 367, 399,
420.
Black Warrior River, 248, 355.
Bluegrass region (Ky.), 68, 76, 285,
288, 303.
Blue Mountains (Ore.), 212.
Blue Ridge, 55-57, 59, 60, 62, 114,
284, 292, 293, 295-298, 300, 384.
Bodega Bay, 216.
Boer War, 94, 135.
Bohemia, 95.
Bokhara, 94.
Bon Homme Creek, 100.
Bonneville, 217.
Boone, Daniel, 68, 100, 160.
Boone's Gap, 68.
Bordentown (N. J.), 265, 377.
Border states, their geographical
conditions, 284-289, 313.
Borneo, 423.
Bosphorus, 2, 3, 22.
Boston, its shipping and fishing, 122,
124, 125, 127, 128, 131, 132, 145,
265, 269, 284 ; as a coast city, 323,
342, 371, 396, 401 ; and Albany
Railroad, 374 ; and Providence
Railroad, 376.
Boundaries, 93-96, 169 ; of the
United States in relation to to
pography, 232-235, 241 ; scien
tific, 232-234, 405. See also
Mountains and Rivers as bounda
ries.
Bourbon Isle, 132.
Braddock's Road, 44, 65.
Bragg's raid, 303.
Brazil, 147, 148, 238, 239, 417;
eastern projection of, 327.
Brazos River, 101, 172, 219.
Bremen, 401.
Brenner Pass, 54.
Bridgeport, 374.
Bristol, 11.
British Columbia, 393, 425, 426, 431.
British Empire, 237, 238, 368, 423.
British Guiana,. 147,

440

INDEX

British Honduras, 402.
Brittany, 12.
Brooklyn Heights, 49.
Brownville (W. Va.), 85, 86, 99.
Bruges, 251, 263.
Buda-Pest, 94, 96.
Buenos Ayres, 413, 417.
Buffalo, 140, 268, 269, 342, 353,
382, 387.
Buffalo traces, 67-69.
Bullitt's Lick, 69, 82.
Bull Run, 294, 296.
Burke, Edmund, 47, 48.
Burlington (Iowa), 163, 389.
Burlington Bay, 141.
Burnt River, 212.
Butte (Mont.), 391.
Byrd, William, 45.
Byrd's Fort, 61.
Cabot, John, 11.
Cabral, 8.
Cabul River, 293.
Cadiz, 9, 10.
Cahokia, 30, 97.
Cairo (Egypt), 323 ; (111.), 94, 261,
262.
Cajon Pass, 197, 393.
Calais, 14.
-California, 132, 174, 179, 180, 194,
197-199, 201, 254, 319-322, 324,
325, 332, 371, 395, 398, 411, 425;
early immigration into, 192, 195,
196, 199, 202 ; early communica
tion with Oregon, 201, 202, 215,
218; expansion of Americans into,
201, 202, 217-224 ; expansion of
English and Russians into, 215,
216, 221, 222 ; conquest of, 223,
224, 232, 238; its remoteness, 219,
231, 283 ; a peripheral state, 219-
221, 223 ; its industries, 346, 361-
365.
California Trail, 217, 218, 221, 249,
392, 393.
Calumet River, 29.
Canada, exploration of, 24-31; in
Revolutionary War, 49, 50 ; in
War of 1812, 136, 137, 140, 141,
145 ; and Oregon, 208, 214 ; her
inland waterways, 251, 264, 274,
275 ; her commerce, 343, 344,
351, 356 ; her railroads, 392 ; her

trade with the United States,
414, 415 ; her rivers, 422 ; and
United States contrasted, 237,
238 ; the geographical unity of
the United States and, 235 ; geo
graphical conditions of westward
expansion in, 183, 205, 229, 230 ;
Upper, 136, 138 ; frontier of
United States and, 136, 234, 316,
317, 328, 331; immigrants into
United States from, 314, 324, 328-
332, 334; American emigration to,
332-335.
Canadian canals, 264, 267, 273-275,
277, 343.
Canadian Pacific Railroad, 254, 273,
381, 392, 395.
Canadian River, 185, 187-189, 194.
Canajoharie, 58.
Canals, on transmontane water
routes, 53, 65, 248, 255, 266;
and watersheds, 156, 247, 248,
263-267, 271 ; at river mouths,
262, 263 ; Gallatin's plan for
American, 265 ; in distribution,
of industrial materials, 352, 353,
355, 356 ; and early railroads, 373,
375, 377, 381, 383-386 ; political
effects of, 247, 248, 264, 265, 269;
their relation to water-power and
industries, 271, 347, 349.
Canary Islands, 13, 15, 117, 129,
147; influence on the discovery of
America, 7, 13.
Canoe navigation, 28, 32, 34, 57, 65,
69, 75, 137, 181, 184, 213, 248.
Canons, 57, 67, 196, 197, 212, 230,
249, 385, 394.
Canton (China), 132, 320.
Cape Ann, 122, 146, 376.
Breton Island, 5, 11, 116, 131,
145.
Cod, 13, 21, 125, 143, 145, 376.
Colony, 253.
Fear, 14.
Fear River, 377.
Finisterre, 129.
Girardeau, 100, 160, 161, 282.
Horn, 147, 209, 319, 392.
Mendocino, 194.
Race, 21.
route to India, 8-10.
Sable, 124.

INDEX

441

Cape St. Roque, 4, 147, 416.
St. Vincent, 9.
Verde Islands, their influence
on the discovery of Brazil, 8.
Caribbean Sea, 10, 105, 110, 127,
128, 145, 146, 239, 397-399, 401,
402, 406, 409 ; European hold
ings in, 237, 402-404, 413, 414 ;
United States holdings in, 404,
405,409.
Carlisle (Pa.), 58, 65, 293, 297.
Carolinas, 39, 42, 156, 302.
Carondelet Canai, 265.
Carson, Kit, 195.
Carthaginians, 121, 403.
Cascade Mountains, 210, 213, 250,
363.
Caspian Sea, 2.
Castile, 9.
Catawba Indians, 67.
Catawba River, 56.
Catskill Mountains, 58, 382.
Caucasus Mountains, 2, 52, 380.
Cedar Mountain, 295.
Central America, 229, 236, 398, 404,
411, 414, 416, 424 ; immigrants
to the United States from, 327,
328
Central West, 275, 354, 360.
Centreville, 296.
Chagres River, 411.
Chama River, 196, 197.
Chambersburg (Pa.), 293, 294, 297,
299.
Champlain Canal, 268, 351.
Chancellorsville, 291.
Channel Isles, 404.
Chantilly, 296.
Charleston (S. C), 50, 79, 121, 255,
284, 375, 383.
Chattahoochee River, 152, 154, 265.
Chattanooga, 286, 293, 302, 306, 307,
383, 384.
Cheat River, 60, 83.
Cherokee Indians, 39-41, 57, 63, 67,
68, 70, 80, 88, 150, 154.
Cherokee Strip, 333.
Cherokee traders' route, 39, 63, 157,
265, 383.
Chesapeake Bay, 17, 25, 32, 34, 35,
114, 116, 127, 143, 265, 267, 352,
378, 384 ; in the Civil War, 289,
290, 303.

Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, 56.
385. ' '
Chester Gap, 297, 298.
-Cheyenne, 379, 393.
Cheyenne River, 182.
Chicago, her manufactures, 353, 354,
357-359 ; railroads, 387, 389, 390,
393 ; geographic factors in the
development of, 342-344, 356,
359 ; canal, 272, 353 ; portage, 30 ;
and Rock Island Railroad, 389.
Chicago River, 29, 155, 272.
Chickahominy River, 290.
Chickamauga, 307.
Chickasaw Indians, 154, 157; land
purchase from, 101, 158.
Chickasaw Trace, 97, 98.
Chignik Bay, 427.
Chihuahua, 175, 191, 220.
Chile, 10, 110, 147, 424.
Chillicothe, 358.
China, American trade with, 132,
213 ; absence of aliens, 322 ; com
merce, 367, 368; as a power, 423-
425 ; rivers of, 251, 252, 262,
422, 423.
Chinese immigration, 318-321, 323.
Chinook winds, 333.
Chippewa Creek, 140.
Choctaw Indians, 154.
Chowan Peninsula, 33.
Christmas Island, 428.
Chur, 96.
Cimarron River, 189.
Cimbri, 54.
Cincinnati, 94, 162, 257, 258, 271,
303, 342, 357-359, 370, 387, 388.
Circleville (Ohio), 358.
Cities, geographic factors in location
of, 34, 35, 337-346, 349, 350, 366 ;
and immigration, 314, 315, 323,
328, 329, 340.
Civil War, chapter xrv.
Claiborne (Governor), 103 ; (Wil
liam), 22, 117.
Clark, George Rogers, 73, 88.
Clark River, 203.
Clay, Henry, 170, 172.
Clearwater River, 203, 209.
Cleveland, 269, 271, 342, 353, 387.
Climate, general influence of, 5, 6,
12, 21, 25, 33, 111 ; influence on
subsistence, 26, 77, 102, 229, 238,

442

INDEX

239, 242, 243 ; on immigration,
313, 322, 323, 326, 328 ; industry,
340, 346, 354.
Clinch Mountain, 68.
Clinch River, 69, 71.
Coahuila, 174.
Coal-fields, 352-356, 365, 372, 427,
428.
Coast, environment of, 3, 5, 6, 11-13,
15, 16, 21, 31-35, 37, 42, 46, 67,
118-120, 126 ; of early United
States, 115-118, 132 ; of North
and South, 118-121, 126, 127 ; re
lation to its back country, 106, 341,
397 ; distribution of foreign ele
ments along, 171, 313-316, 317-
322, 324-329, 331 ; operations in
Civil War, 299, 305, 307, 308.
See also Maritime development.
Coast Range, 250, 318.
Coastwise expansion, 216 ; naviga
tion, 265 ; trade of the United
States, its geographic conditions,
115, 126, 127.
Codfish, 124, 125.
Collot, 87.
Colombia, 110, 407, 416.
Colorado, 191, 325 ; geographio fac
tors of industries in, 346, 361-
364.
Colorado River, 172, 192, 194, 196,
197, 202, 203, 232, 249, 394.
Columbia River, 112, 179, 183, 184,
203, 209, 210, 213, 216, 221, 232,
250, 314, 332, 362, 369, 391, 393 ;
its geographie conditions, 202,
205, 206, 212 ; its relation to the
Missouri, 201-204 ; settlements,
^ 204, 205, 208, 215.
""Columbia (Pa.), 266 ; and Philadel
phia Railroad, 373-375; (S. C),
349.
Columbus, Bartholomew, 9 ; Chris
topher, 7-11.
Columbus (Ky.), 301, 302, 304;
(Ohio), 255, 358, 387.
Commerce of the United States,
geographic conditions of internal,
367-370, 380, 381.
Conemaugh River, 266, 383.
Confederacy, 288-292, 294, 300-
302, 305-307.
-Connecticut, 79, 314, 329.

Connecticut River, 17, 23, 24, 122,
351, 374.
Connelsville (Pa.), 353.
Constantinople, 2.
Continental build, and political di
visions, 227-229 ; and railroads,
372 ; and waterways, 246-249,
263-367, 421, 422.
Continental location and develop
ment of the United States, 114-
117, 147-149, 235 ; policy of the
United States, 236, 238, 240, 407,
408, 430.
Cook Co. (111.), 354.
Cook Inlet, 427.
Cooke's trail, 195, 395.
Copper mines (N. M.), 193.
Copper River (Alaska), 427.
Cordilleras, 111, 181, 202, 230, 233,
249, 251, 368.
Corinth (Miss.), 302, 304.
Cornwallis, 50.
Corpus Christi,, 249, 398, 403,
418.
Council Bluffs (Iowa), 164, 21 1, 260,
389, 393.
Council Grove, 190.
Covington (Va.), 385.
Crab Orchard (Ky.), 69.
Crampton Gap, 296, 297.
Creek Indians, 63, 80, 88, 150, 154,
157.
Creole French, 108.
Crete, 403.
Crockett, Davy, 175.
Cross Keys (Va.), 295.
Crown Point, 49.
Cuba, trade with United States, 86,
417, 430, 433 ; geographical and
political relation to the United
States, 401, 402, 404-409 ; immi
grants from, 326-328, 408.
Cuban War, 398, 415.
Culpeper (Va.), 298.
Cumberland (Md.), 266, 382. See
also Fort Cumberland.
Cumberland Gap, 65-69, 230, 288,
293, 302, 303, 307, 385.
Cumberland Mountain, 68, 69, 72,
303.
Cumberland National Road, 254,
285.
Cumberland Plateau, 54, 68, 71, 72,

INDEX

443

76, 85, 152, 278; 285, 293, 371,
391.
Cumberland River, as an early high
way, 69, 72, 86, 96, 155, 262, 278;
in Civil War, 288, 300-302, 307 ;
settlements, 72, 78, 79, 84, 90, 97-
99, 152, 174 ; their environment,
79, 81, 82, 86, 88.
Cumberland Valley (Pa.), 58.
Curacao, 413, 414.
Cuyahoga River, 271.
Cyprus, 20, 403, 428.
Dacia, 94.
Dallas (Tex.), 395.
Dalles, The (Ore.), 250.
Danish Isles, 408, 409, 412-414.
Danube River, 54, 91, 94-96.
Danville (Ky.), 72, 83, 84.
Dartmouth (Mass.), 125.
Davis Strait, 125.
Dayton (Ohio), 387.
Dearborn River, 203.
—Delaware, 136.
Delaware Bay, 17, 32.
Delaware Indians, 42.
Delaware River, 17, 23, 55, 63, 126,.
256, 347, 352, 377, 382 ; and
Chesapeake Canal, 265 ; and
Hudson Canal, 265, 372; and
Raritan Canal, 377.
Deltas, 262, 263.
—Denver, 325, 361, 380; and Rio
Grande Railroad, 361.
Deserts as barriers, 199, 201, 202,
210, 230, 320, 346.
Des Moines River, 152, 160, 163,
164.
Des Plaines River, 29.
Detroit, 29, 30, 79, 134, 136, 138-
140, 269, 342, 353, 370.
Detroit River frontier, 137-139.
Dick's River, 72.
Dismal Swamp Canal, 265.
Divides, in the Appalachian Valley,
56, 67; as boundaries, 233, 235 ;
and canals, 247, 263, 271 ; west
ern, 182, 183, 188, 192, 193, 196,
202, 203, 211.
Dnieper River, 91, 228.
Dolores River, 196, 197.
Dorchester (Mass.), 122.
Drave River, 95.

Dubuque, 163, 164.
Duluth, 247, 273, 274, 393.
Duna River, 323.
Dunkards, 60.
Duquesne (Pa.), 353.
Dutch, in coasting trade, 126 ; field
in America, 16, 17, 22, 23.
Early, General, 294, 299.
East, the, and West contrasted,
156, 157, 242, 251, 346.
East Indies, Atlantic route from
Europe to,3, 10, 147, 413; Amer
ican trade with, 132.
Easton (Pa.), 58.
East Tennessee Valley, 61, 88, 152,
384, 385 ; in Civil War, 286, 288,
293, 300, 302, 303, 306, 307.
Ebro River, 40.
Egypt, 2, 3, 48, 251, 322, 323.
Elbe River valley, 95.
Elkhorn Creek, 72.
El Paso, 191, 380, 394, 395.
Emory, Colonel W. H, 196.
Engadine, 96.
England, remote from Colonies, 47,
48; commerce injured in Revolu
tionary War, 131 ; holds strategic
points, 403, 428 ; its geographical
character, 11, 15, 117, 430 ; its
naval power, 49, 50, 105, 130,
137, 142, 144, 413, 424 ; its naval
bases in War of 1812, 137, 143,
146, 146 ; its commerce, 121.
English, their early explorations in
America, 12, 13 ; geographic con
ditions of their settlements in
America, 31-33, 35, 37, 38, 81,
114 ; their territory in America,
14, 15, 17, 58, 79, 98, 106, 215,
237, 238, 403 (see also Canada) ;
territory in the Pacific Ocean,
423, 424.
English Channel, 2.
Ensley (Ala.), 355.
Ephesus, 338.
Equatorial Current, 8, 117.
Erie Canal, 130, 148-150, 247, 258,
264, 267-271, 273, 373, 374, 381 ;
its geographic conditions, 266,
267, 283 ; its future, 275-277 ;
economic effects of, 156, 269,
270 ; political effects of, 151, 156 ;

444

INDEX

and Great Lakes in distribution
of population, 160, 164, 269, 270 ;
and water-power, 347, 349 ; and
railroads, 383.
Erie Railroad, 382, 383.
Erz Mountains, 95.
Esquimault, 432.
Euphrates River, 1, 20, 94, 111.
Eurasia, relation between topogra
phy and political divisions, 228.
Eureka (Cal.), 332.
Europe, 4, 16, 21, 226, 235, 251,
354, 372, 402 ; influence of size,
structure, and location in, 36, 156,
236, 237, 246 ; its island holdings
in America, 117, 402, 403, 413.
Ewell, General, 297, 298.
Expansion, geographical conditions
of transcontinental in Canada, 183,
203 ; in Russia, 111 ; in South
America, 110, 111 ; in North
America, 51, 110-112 ; in the
United States, 43-45, 73, 180-
183, 185, 187-189, 192, 198, 223,
224, 226, 231, 232, 235, 240, 241,
244, 310, 316 ; continental versus
maritime in the United States,
114, 115, 148 ; extra-continental,
179 ; extra-territorial from the
United States, 96, 99-101, 107,
109, 168-176, 199, 201, 217, 219-
223, 430, 431 ; the spirit of, 44,
45, 72, 156-159, 161 ; commer
cial, 186, 191, 433, 434.
Fairfax (Va.), 290.
Fall line, 57, 150, 290, 347 ; and
railroads, 375, 377, 378.
Fall River (Mass.), 349.
Falls, and cities, 72, 259 (see also
Water-power) ; interruption to
navigation, 67, 72, 139, 140.
Falls of St. Anthony, 260, 350, 356,
357.
Fargo' (N. Dak.), 393.
Faroe Islands, 5.
Farragut, Admiral, 305
Farralone Islands, 216.-
Femme Osage (Mo.), 100.
Filson's map, 72.
Fincastle (Va.), 60.
Finger Lakes, 267.
Fiords, 5.

Fisheries, geographic conditions
stimulating, 5, 11-13, 21, 35 ; on
Atlantic coast, 21, 31, 32, 35,
124 ; of New England, 124-126,
132 143
Flint, Timothy, 160, 161, 167.
Flood plains and settlements, 153,
161,165,166.
-Florida, as a Spanish possession, 37,
104, 106, 134 (see also Florida,
West) ; peninsula of, 116, 401,
405 ; boundary of, 106 ; expan
sion into, 154, 158 ; partly unin
habitable 405, 406; foreign im
migration into, 313, 326, 408.
Florida Keys, 326.
Florida Strait, 401, 405, 406.
Florida, West, 80, 98, 99, 107, 109,
172, 222, 405, 431.
Flour milling, geographical distribu
tion of, 356-358, 362, 363.
Forbes's Road, 65.
Forests, in the Appalachians, 39,
70, 97 ; and population, 153 ;
and industries, 344, 351, 353, 355,
363 ; and shipbuilding, 21, 121-
• 123, 139, 363 ; and Canadian im
migration, 330-332.
Fort Adams, 97.
Ashley, 207.
Aurania, 23.
Barclay, 185.
Bedford, 65.
Bent, 185, 188.
Benton, 182, 247, 261.
Boise, 212.
Boonesborough, 68.
Bowyer, 134, 144.
Chissel, 61, 67.
Colville, 206.
Cumberland, 44, 49, 61, 65, 66.
Dearborn, 134, 139.
Donelson, 302.
Duquesne, 44, 206.
Edward, 49.
Erie, 139, 140.
Frontenac, 30.
George, 140, 205.
Hall, 203, 206, 209, 211-213,
218, 391.
Harmar, 96.
Henry, 302.
Lancaster, 184.

INDEX

445

Fort Laramie, 184, 189, 211, 213.
Ligonier, 61, 65.
Loudon, 61.
Lyttleton, 65.
Maiden, 138, 140.
Mims, 134.
Nassau, 23.
Necessity, 44.
Niagara, 30, 140.
Outianon, 30.
Pillow, 304.
Pitt, 74.
Platte, 184.
Rouille-, 30.
Saybrook, 23.
Snelling, 260.
Stanwix, 49, 63, 64.
St. Asaphs, 69.
St. Louis, 30.
Union, 194, 260.
Vancouver, 204, 214-216.
Vrain, 184.
Walla Walla, 206,213.
Washington, 49.
Worth (Tex.), 395, 418.
Forty-ninth parallel, 234, 235.
Fox Indians, 154, 164.
Fox River, 29, 272.
France, canals of, 252, 277.
Franklin, "state of," 71; (Mo.),
185.
Franks, 95.
Fraser River, 395.
Fredericksburg (Va.), 290, 291, 295,
296, 378.
French, their field in America, 12-
14, 16, 26, 28-30, 32, 35, 37, 61,
104, 106, 109, 159, 404 ; settlers,
their economy, 30, 31, 69 (see
also Fur-trade); and English ri
valry in America, 18, 30, 40, 41,44,
45, 57, 60, 61, 96, 136 ; as neigh
bors to the United States, 102 ;
Canadians, 214, 281, 328, 329.
French Broad River, 56, 69, 71,
384.
French Creek, 30.
Free states, 155, 164, 280, 282-284,
313.
Fremont's expedition, 184, 198.
Frontier, environment of, 82, 230,
231, 244; economic conditions and
economy of, 59, 126, 166, 190,'

360 ; the spirit of, 47, 48, 59, 62,
78, 83, 87, 88, 103, 112, 161, 168
175, 211, 223, 227 ; its tendency
to defection, 79, 87-92 ; an index
of political growth, 76, 151, 152,
156, 159, 161, 169, 176, 178-180 ;
a zone of assimilation, 80, 81, 98,
99, 101, 169, 171, 216, 221, 257,
258, 284, 313, 322-326, 329, 337,
338 ; western advance of, 57-61,
64, 74, 75, 98 ; backwoods fron
tier of 1750, 77, 79, 87, 88 ; of
1790, 71, 72 ; of 1800, 63, 75, 76,
97-101, 178; of 1810, 107-109,
114, 134 ; of 1820, 179 ; of 1840,
179, 180, 316 ; operations in War
of 1812, 134-139, 142 ; contrast
between sea and land, 322-324,
329.
Front Royal, 295, 298.
Fuel, in arid lands, 180 ; and indus
tries, 340, 351-354, 362, 365.
Fur-trade, in Canada and the Colo
nies, 17, 18, 21-27, 31 ; in the
Northwest, 37, 38-40, 80, 112,
162, 215, 264; and expansion, 182-
185, 191, 192, 194-199, 205-208,
260 (see also Rivers and the fur-
trade); economy of the, 25, 26,
30, 31, 81, 205, 206, 222, 230, 281 ;
stations, 184, 185, 205-207, 217;
and agriculture, 206, 207.
Gadsden Purchase, 196, 233.
Galapagos Islands, 147.
Galena (111.), 163, 164, 389.
Gallatin, Albert, 265, 267.
Galveston, 170, 418.
Ganges River, 20, 262, 380.
Gauls, 95.
Genesee River, 40, 63, 269.
Genoese, 4, 16.
Geographical location, influence of,
16, 35, 40, 41, 117, 118, 121, 123,
124, 126, 132, 138, 139, 141, 143,
144, 158, 164, 165, 173, 206, 218,
219, 221, 235, 236, 238-241, 257,
258, 260, 284-289, 307, 308, 310,
313, 320, 326, 404-406, 408, 412,
435. See also Oceanic and Inter
oceanic location.
Georgetown (Ky.), 83.
"kleorgia, 64, 153, 154, 157, 158, 165,

446

INDEX

230, 234, 265, 286, 288, 300, 302,
307, 313, 347, 349, 375, 379, 381.
Georgian Bay, 28, 264.
German Flats, 68.
German immigrants, early, 68, 59,
62, 94-96, 156, 160, 164 ; later,
317, 323, 331, 334.
Germany, 228, 338, 414; boundary
between France and, 95; its Rus
sian frontier, 323, 324; its trade
with Central and South America,
414, 415, 417.
Gettysburg, 298.
Gila River, 192-194, 225; depres
sion, 233, 394, 395; boundary,
232; trail, 192-196, 216, 220,
392,
Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, 15.
Glaciated areas, 43, 280, 339, 361,
369.
Gloucester (Mass.), 122.
Gold Coast, 9.
Goldsboro (N. C), 377, 378.
Goths, 54.
Grain belt, 353-360, 370.
Grand Banks, 12, 13, 124, 127.
Grand Gulf, 304.
Grand Rapids, 344.
Grand River (Col.), 192, 196, 197,
204 ; (Ohio), 271.
Grant, General U. S., 299, 301, 302,
306.
Great Basin, 197, 207, 249, 318,
391, 393.
Great Lakes, exploration of, 24-30,
229, 281 ; as waterway to the
Central West, 79, 159, 180, 230,
248, 271, 285, 356 ; as northern
boundary of the United States,
241, 276 ; as inland seas, 234,
267, 276 ; divides of, 247, 263-
272 ; commerce of, 264, 273-276,
370; shipbuilding on, 258, 274;
military posts of, 30, 63, 80, 129 ;
cities of, 342-344, 351, 353 ; in
War of 1812, 137-141, 142 ; and
Erie Canal route, 164, 266-269,
283, 284, 330, 386, 389.
Great Meadows, 44.
Great Plains, expausion over, 150,
180, 188 ; industries upon, 360 ;
aridity of, 368 ; railroads across,
380, 391.

Great Salt Lake, 194, 207, 217,
393-395.
Great Smoky Mountains, 307, 381,
384.
Greek city-states, 240.
Greeks, as colonizers, 6 ; as naviga
tors, 121 ; as emigrants, 323.
Green Bay, 26, 29, 159, 272, 351.
Greenbrier River, 56, 58, 60, 66, 71,
385.
Greenland, 4.
Green Mountains, 38.
Green River (Utah), 196, 197, 203,
204, 207, 208, 211, 213, 394.
Greenville (N. C), 290.
Greenwich (Conn.), 17.
Greytown, 414.
Gros Ventre Mountains, 204.
Guadeloupe, 403.
Guam, 428, 432.
Guianas, the, 105.
Guinea Coast, 9, 14, 125, 128.
Gulf of Bothnia, 5.
California, 202, 220, 232.
Darien, 411.
Finland, 5.
Guinea, 10.
Mexico, Spanish in, 10, 80,
91 ; French in, 20, 104-
106 ; an indentation of
North American coast, 5,
233, 234, 241, 249, 254 ;
outlet of trans- Allegheny
country, 78, 80, 91, 159 ;
its strategic importance,
398, 399 ; commanded by
Cuba, 401, 406.
Panama, 410.
St. Lawrence, 5, 13, 26, 130,
146, 229, 263.
Gulf coast of the United States, its
geographic features, 396-398,
401; early expansion along, 107,
150 ; immigration into, 313, 326,
327 ; commercial development of,
414, 417-419.
Gulf Stream, 117.
Gunnison (Col.), 394.
Gunnison River, 192, 196.
Hagerstown (Md.), 293, 294, 296,
297.
Halifax, 137, 145, 146, 369.

INDEX

447

Hamburg, 401, 416.
Hamilton (Ohio), 358.
Han-Kau, 422.
Hanover (Va.), 290.
Hanse towns, 3, 16, 121, 124, 251.
Harlem Heights, 49.
Haro Strait, 234.
Harpers Ferry, 296, 373.
-flarrisburg (Pa.), 266, 297, 375,
382.
Harrisonburg (Va.), 296.
Harrod's Town (Ky.), 72.
"Hartford, 23, 374.
Havana, 406.
Havre de Grace, 144.
^Hawaiian Islands, 150, 168, 319,
321, 322, 364, 369, 403,428^429 ;
geographic factors in their acqui
sition by the United States, 429-
432.
Hawkins, Sir John, 14.
Hebrides, 5.
—Helena (Mont.), 305, 391, 393.
Henderson, Colonel Richard, 68.
Henry River, 307.
Herat, Gates of, 54, 111, 292.
Herendeen Bay, 427.
Heri Rud, 54, 292.
Hill settlements, 161, 166, 167, 338.
Himalaya Mountains, 52, 380.
Hindu Kush, 53, 54, 238, 292.
Holidaysburg (Pa.), 383.
Holland, 91, 413.
Holston River, 56, 58, 60, 61, 67-
69, 71, 88, 90, 98, 152, 203, 384.
Honduras, 146.
Hongkong, 420, 423, 425.
-Honolulu, 420, 428, 431, 432.
Housatonic valley, 374.
Houston, Sam, 175.
Howe, General, 50.
Hudson, Henrv, 17, 22, 24.
Hudson Bay, 5, 12, 26, 247.
Hudson Bay Company, its origin,
12 ; its activity in Oregon, 205-
209, 212, 214, 215 ; in California,
222 ; in the Northwest, 230.
Hudson River, 17, 19, 22-24, 31, 35,
40, 41, 106, 126, 137, 141, 151,
230, 247, 256, 263, 264, 268, 305,
352, 373, 377, 378 ; and Cham
plain route, 49, 50 ; and Mohawk
route, 49, 50.

Hudson River Railroad, 382.
Huguenots, 62.
Humboldt Bay, 332.
Humboldt River, 217, 218.
Hungarians, 95, 315.
Huns, 54.
Huntingdon (Pa.), 383.
Hwang-ho, 422.
Iberville River, 98.
Iceland fisheries, 11.
Ichang, 423.
¦-Idaho, 321, 331.
Ilanz, 96.
-Illinois, settlement, 97, 154, 163 ;
boundary, 155, 156 ; immigration
to, 316, 317, 328, 330, 334 ; in
dustries, 273, 275, 354, 356, 357,
360, 389 ; geographical lines of
approach to, 155, 156, 162, 163 ;
country, 73, 74 ; and Michigan
Canal, 155, 389.
Illinois River, 29, 30, 80, 87, 97, 99,
101, 159, 160, 162, 163, 261, 272,
358, 389.
Immigration, chapter xv.
Independence (Mo.), 162, 185-188,
190, 211, 212, 260.
India, 251, 293, 380, 423, 428.
Indiana, 153, 155, 271, 354, 356,
357, 360.
-Indianapolis, 255.
Indian Ocean, 5, 132.
Indians, in fur-trade, 39 ; and Eng
lish colonists, 42, 51, 61 ; effect
on settlement, 66, 70, 80, 81, 85,
88 ; in War of 1812, 138 ; in lead-
mines, 163 ; in Southwest, 174,
190 ; in Northwest, 209, 210, 213 ;
as barriers, 58, 63, 64, 79, 150, 153,
154, 156-158, 167, 168, 265, 338 ;
their economy, 30, 31, 43, 80,
226, 227; their lands, 64, 112,
154, 163, 164, 333.
Indian Territory, 154, 158, 168,
179, 243, 283, 394.
Indian trails, 67, 68, 85, 203, 381,
385.
Indus River, 19, 20, 60, 180, 293.
Innes, Judge Harry, 83, 84.
Inn River, 96, 203.
Interoceanic location, 228, 229, 371,
392, 421, 423-425.

448

INDEX

-Iowa, 162, 179, 211, 261, 317, 331,
360, 389 ; geographic lines of ap
proach to, 163, 164.
Ipswich, 128.
Ireland, 148, 171, 406.
Iron and steel industry, geograph
ical distribution of, 83, 273, 352-
356, 361, 362, 364, 365, 370.
Iroquois, 28, 29, 67 ; as political
neighbors, 58 ; geographical lo
cation of, 40, 41, 63.
Irrigation, 335, 360, 361.
Island environment, 6, 11, 15, 404,
405, 430.
Island fortifications, 307, 308.
Island No. 10, 302, 304.
Islands, American held by Europe,
117, 402, 403, 413 ; few held by
the United States, 116, 117, 235 ;
politico-geographical law of, 403-
405, 430, 433, 434 ; as sites of
towns, 26, 338 ; as oceanic way-
stations, 425, 428, 429.
Isles of Shoals, 124.
Isothermal lines, 333.
Isthmian Canal, 254, 256, 365, 398,
399, 401, 409, 432 ; possible
routes of, 409-411 ; interest of
the United States in, 412, 417.
Isthmuses as barriers, 2, 3, 411, 412
Isthmus of Panama, 2, 254, 327, 389,
400-402, 411, 413.
Suez, 2.
Tehuantepec, 410.
Italians, 312, 315, 318, 323.
Italy, valley routes into northern,
40, 203; and Sardinia, 403 ; lakes
of, 380.
Iuka, 302.

Jackson, Andrew, a frontiersman,
144 ; conquest of the Creeks,
150, 157.
Jackson, Stonewall, 294-296, 298.
Jamaica, 137, 146, 403, 413.
James River, 22, 33, 55, 56, 60, 66,
289, 290, 300, 378, 384, 385.
Jamestown (Va.), 33, 338.
Japan, 354, 423, 425, 426, 430, 432.
Japan Sea, 367.
Japanese immigrants, 319, 321, 322.
Jay's treaty, 87, 92, 110.
Jefferson River, 203.

Jefferson, Thomas, and Louisiana
Purchase, 101, 103, 104, 111, 232 ;
policy toward Europe, 236 ;
policy on internal communication,
264, 385; and acquisition of Cuba,
407.
Jellico River, 61.
Jersey City, 342, 377.
Jews, their geographic conditions in
Palestine, 119, 120.
Johnstown (Pa.), 373, 383.
Joliet (111.), 353.
Juniata River, 39, 56, 59, 61, 65, 71,
266, 385.

Kanawha River, 56, 65, 66, 71, 78,
278, 358, 385.
Kankakee River, 29.
--Kansas, 334, 359, 360, 371.
Kansas City, 94, 185, 187, 233, 248,
334, 359, 360, 370, 394.
Kaskaskia (111.), 30, 73, 97, 152.
Kayak, 427.
Kearny, General, 189, 195, 223.
Kenai Peninsula, 427.
Kennebec River, 23, 351.
Kent Island, 17.
Kenton, Simon, 88.
--Kentucky, 51, 60, 64, 67-69, 71, 72,
74, 76, 81-86, 88, 90, 91, 103, 155,
157, 160, 162, 165, 171, 174, 175,
211, 357, 385, 391 ; elements of
population in, 284, 285 ; geo
graphic conditions in the Civil
War, 284-288, 301, 303, 306.
Kentucky River, 68, 72, 73, 75, 78,
81, 85, 152.
Key West, 234, 418.
Khyber Pass, 293, 297.
Kingston (Can.), 137; (N. Y.), 265.
Kiowa-Comanche district, 333.
Kittanning, 63, 65.
Klondike, 422.
Knoxville (Tenn.), 293, 307, 384.
Labr dor, 11.
Lagos, 9.
Lackawanna River, 266 ; coal-fields
of, 372.
La Crosse, 389.
Lake Borgne, 143, 263.
Cayuga, 373.
Champlain, 41, 49, 50, 134,136,

INDEX

449

137 ; and Richelieu River
route, 18, 141, 142, 268.
Lake Erie, 28-30, 75, 130, 137-139,
151, 152, 155, 178, 247, 264,
267, 268, 270, 271, 274, 316,
330, 353, 371, 382, 387 ; its
isolation in War of 1812,
139, 140, 142.
Huron, 28, 29, 152, 258, 316,
330.
Lucerne, 53.
Maggiore, 53.
Michigan, 26, 28, 29, 155, 156,
163, 271-274, 316, 317, 330,
353, 369, 387, 390.
Nicaragua, 410, 411.
Nipissing, 28, 264.
Of the Woods, 241.
Oneida, 63, 264. .
Ontario, 18, 28, 29, 130, 137-
139, 141, 178, 264, 267, 268,
330.
Peipus, 323.
Ponchartrain, 98, 143, 234,
263, 265.
St. Clair, 137, 138, 152.
Salvador, 263.
Superior, 26, 28, 29, 216,
234, 273-276, 330, 352, 353,
393.
Winnebago, 29, 351.
Winnipeg, 216, 247.
Lakes and settlements, 152, 155,
156.
Lancaster (Pa.), 375.
Land, as military pay, 64, 71 ; ef
fect of its abundance in the
United States, 76, 112, 244, 310-
312, 320, 331, 335 ; and in Can
ada, 333-335 ; exhaustion of free
land in the United States, 332-
335 ; interplay of sea and, 118-
121.
La Plata River, 11.
Laramie Fork, 184.
Laramie Range, 379.
La Salle, 25.
Las Vegas, 186, 188, 189, 325, 380,
Latin races, 239.
Lawrence (Mass.), 349.
Lead-mines (111.), 163.
Leadville (Col.), 361.
Lebanon Mountains, 119, 120.

Lebanon valley (Pa.), 58.
Lee, Jason, 210.
Lee, General Robert E., 290, 291
294-300, 307.
Le Havre, 401.
Lehigh River, 266.
Lemhi Pass and River, 203.
Leontes River, 119.
Les Mines, 32.
Lewis and Clark expedition, 100,
111, 112, 182, 183, 201-204, 230,
236, 392.
Lewiston (Maine), 349; (N. Y.),
140.
Lexington (Ky.), 68, 72, 83.
Liberty (Tex.), 171, 211.
Licking River, 72, 278.
Limestone Creek, 85.
Lisbon, 7, 9, 10, 16.
Little Androscoggin River, 351.
Little Falls (N. Y.), 58.
Little Missouri River, 183.
-fLittle Rock, 166, 171.
Liverpool, 341, 401, 416.
Logan, Benjamin, 69, 88.
Lolo Pass, 203.
Lombard League, 251.
London, 125, 369, 401.
London Company, 33.
Long Island, 117, 125, 327.
Long Island Sound, 17, 31, 35, 116,
128, 375, 376.
Lookout Mountain, 307.
Lorain (Ohio), 353.
L'Orient, 148.
Los Angeles, 197, 198, 218-220,
324, 343, 393, 395, 396, 432.
Loudon County (Va.), 298.
Louisiana Purchase, chapter vr.,
and 160, 232, 236, 282 ; geo
graphic factors in, 87, 92, 99-103,
105, 106 ; influence of, 107, 109,
110, 112-114, 157, 283.
--Louisiana, state of, 109, 165, 167,
168, 172, 201, 278, 313, 367, 373.
Louisville (Ky.), 72, 85, 86, 162,
.246, 257-260, 342, 357, 358.
Louisville and Nashville Railroad,
68.
Lou Lou Fork, 203.
Lovettsville (Va.), 296, 298.
Lowell (Mass.), 349, 374.
Loyalhauna River, 61, 65.

450

INDEX

Lundy's Lane, 140.
Luray Gap, 295, 296.
Lynchburg (Va.), 299, 379, 384.
Macon (Ga.), 375.
Mackerel, 125.
Mackinaw, 28, 134, 139, 208.
Madeira Islands, 7, 14, 129.
Magellan, Ferdinand, 9.
Magellan, Straits of, 110, 254, 424.
Mahoning River, 271.
Mahoning County (Ohio), 354.
-Jtfaine, 13, 16, 33, 116, 122, 142,
143, 153, 234, 235, 249, 329-331,
352, 390.
Malacca, 423.
Malaga, 129.
Malays, 6. ,
Malta, 413, 428.
Manassas, 290, 379.
Manassas Gap, 294, 295, 298.
Manchester (N. H), 349 ; (N. Y.),
140.
Manchuria, 238, 425.
Mandan villages, 182, 183.
Manhattan Island, 17, 22, 49, 58,
338.
Manila, 432.
Manitoba, 264, 334.
Manua, 429.
Marblehead, 122.
Maria River, 183.
"Marietta (Ohio), 96, 257.
Maritime development, geographic
factors of, 5, 6, 35, 115-118, 120,
121, 123, 124, 129 ; in New Eng
land, 117-121, 123-129, 132, 136 ;
in the Middle States, 129, 130.
Marquette, Father, 29.
Martinique, 131, 403.
Martinsburg, 297.
-Maryland, 17, 33, 44, 64, 116, 126,
136, 284, 299, 313, 377; its geo
graphic conditions in the Civil

Massillon (Ohio), 271.
Maumee River, 29, 139, 155, 271;
portage, 30.
Mauritius, 132.
McClellan, General, 290, 291, 295,
296.
McKeesport, 353.
Meade, General, 298.
Medford (Mass.), 122.
Mediterranean, American, 398-402,
409 ; our naval supremacy in, 412,
413 ; our commercial status in,
414-416.
Mediterranean Sea, a nursery of
maritime power, 1-6, 8, 119; rela
tion to the Rhine route, 16, 54 ;
structure of, 399—401 ; its historic
position, 4.°" • cities of, 338 ; and
Garonne Canal, 277.
Mekong River, 422.
Melbourne, 341.
Memphis (Tenn.), 304, 305, 383,
418.
Meramec River, 116.
Merchant marine, in war, 130, 131,
144, 145.
Merv, 292.
Meuse River, 95.
Mexican War, 195, 221, 223, 283;
treaty of, 232.
Mexico, gold of, 10 ; boundary, 93 ;
and Louisiana, 105 ; American ex
pansion into Texas province of,
168-174, 219, 405 ; its interoce
anic location, 229,424; commerce
with U. S., 186, 414-416 ; and
California, 216, 219, 220, 223; and
Cuba, 404, 407; American aid in
its wars of independence, 169, 170,
172, 173 ; immigrants from, 314,
324-326, 328; and United States
frontier, 232, 233, 235, 324-326.
Miami River, 30, 57, 76, 85, 315 ;
canal, 271.
War, 288, 289, 291, 294-296,-j-Michigan, 153, 273, 274, 316, 330,

303.
Mason and Dixon Line, 282, 283,
313.
-Massachusetts, shipbuilding and
shipping, 122, 130, 136; immi
grants in, 314, 325, 329; railroads
in, 376.
Massachusetts Bay, 31, 32, 121.

331, 334, 354, 387.
Middleburg (Va.), 297.
Middle colonies, 41, 64.
Middle states, 109, 314 ; geographic
factors in the industrial develop
ment of, 347-349, 352.
Middletown (Va.), 295.
Midway Island, 428.

INDEX

451

Milk River, 182, 183.
Mill Spring (Ky.), 302, 306.
Milwaukee, 342, 353, 357, 370, 389.
Mimbres Mountains,, 193, 195.
Mimbres River, 193.
Minneapolis, 342, 350, 357.
-Minnesota, 234, 241, 274, 311, 312,
316, 317, 330, 331, 334, 356, 367,
390.
Miquelon, 404.
Missions, 26,, 27, 209, 210, 213.
-Mississippi, 20, 104, 107, 154, 157,
158, 165.
Mississippi River, exploration of, 25,
27-30; in hands of the French, 37;
French trading-posts on, 30, 69,
97; as waterway, 72, 74, 75, 79,
80, 82, 84, 86, 87, 89-92, 94, 97-
99, 139, 160 ; and the Louisiana
Purchase, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107,
109, 112; in war of 1812, 144; ex
pansion upon, 152-155, 157-163,
165, 167, 171, 179, 180, 187, 188r
230-232 ; trade upon, 261, 265,
267, 272, 278, 389, 418; cities of,
342, 344, 356, 358, 386; as a
frontier, 58, 93, 96-99, 101, 102,
201 ; system, 230, 247, 248, 256-
260, 262, 263.
Mississippi valley, 63, 79, 105, 110,
112, 115, 150, 151, 158, 288, 293,
319, 320, 347, 372, 384, 394, 395,
397, 418 ; in the Civil War, 288,
293, 300-307 ; and its railroads,
373, 383, 386-390.
—Missouri, -K2; 162, 153, 2S&, 460,
162", ;W3, J?l, .179, ,1847,ie4;,2rL.
,^-3t67J328-,-334>J60', 389,391;
the foeus of the western rivers,
189,JL607 162f ; population deter
mined by geographical lines of
approach, .ISO-Wr, }M, 1SS ; in
the Civil War,.284,.3S5T
Missouri Compromise line, 164, 168,
282, 283, 346.
Missouri Fur Company, 184.
Missouri River, trade upon, SfT\ in
Louisiana Purchase, 114^142 ; ex
pansion upon, 414; IS^JiiS, 1591
J^D64Vl79=182", JM, -SOl-aejk
-21T; navigation upon, .1877 -188,
S33r247=249p260-262- cities and
industries upon, 344-, 34^,358-360,

§64; ,369; bend of, 16GT 185', 1887
§04f 209; its influence on western
expansion,J^J^l8jr,JS47,28S,
plTi.328^.330.
Mobile, 80, 98, 175, 418.
Mobile Bay, 72, 75, 105, 248, 355.
Mobile River, 265, 355.
Mohave Desert, 197, 198, 393.
Mohawk River, 23, 31, 35, 40, 41,
49, 58, 137, 198, 230, 264, 266,
371, 381 ; and Lake Ontario route,
18, 151, 155.
Mojave (Cal.), 391, 394.
Molasses, 127-129.
Mona Passage, 402.
Mongolia, 154.
Monongahela River, 40, 65, 71, 83,
85, 86, 152.
Monroe (Mich.), 187.
Monroe Doctrine, 216, 222 ; in re
lation to the geographic conditions
of the United States, 236-240.
-Montana, 242, 247, 321, 331, 334,
371, 379.
Monterey (Cal.), 219, 220, 223.
Montevideo, 417.
Montreal, 24, 28, 208, 264, 275.
Moorhead (Minn.), 393.
Moors, 9, 297.
Mora River, 185, 189, 194.
Morocco, 4, 9.
Morristown Heights, 50.
Moscow, 135.
Mountain environment, 62, 72, 89,
152, 153, 281, 285, 286.
Mountain passes, 52-55, 57-59, 65-
70, 72, 119, 157, 186, 188, 189,
191, 193, 196, 197, 202-204, 206,
207, 211, 218, 229, 230, 233, 251,
266, 267, 288, 300-303, 361, 371,
384, 394, 395 ; and their ap
proaching streams, 39, 40, 4^ ; as
determinants of railroad routes,
371, 382, 383 ; their strategic
character, 40, 44, 49, 61, 65, 67,
189, 292-298, 306, 307.
Mountains as barriers, 36-42, 44-46,
50-53, 55, 57, 61, 70, 72, 74, 75,
79, 83, 87, 88, 90, 91, 95, 110,
111, 114, 178, 199-202, 210, 217,
229-231, 250, 254, 286, 292, 293,
297, 298, 320, 346, 352, 362, 380-
383, 391, 392 ; transportation

452

INDEX

over, 83, 84, 86, 87, 89 ; as
boundaries, 44, 94, 95, 232, 287.
Mount Carmel, 119.
Hermon, 119.
Prairie, 166.
St. Elias, 427.
Murfreesboro (Tenn.), 302, 306.
Muscle Shoals, 71.
Muskingum River, 30, 71, 76, 99,
271. f

Nacogdoches, 170, 171.
Nantucket, 117, 125, 144.
Napa Valley (Cal.), 218, 223.
Napoleon, 102, 105, 298.
Napoleonic wars, 141, 151.
Narraganset Bay, 31, 32.
— Nashville, 69, 72, 86, 90, 97, 302,
383.
Natal, 253.
Natchez District, 97, 99, 107, 109,
157, 179.
Natchitoches,- 101, 108, 170, 171.
Naval operations in the War of
1812 ; their geographic condi
tions, 137, 142-148.
Navigation Laws, 128, 132.
Nebraska, 316, 317, 334, 344, 359,
360, 371.
Neekar River, 94.
Nehalem River, 213.
Neosho River, 190.
—Nevada, 243, 321.
Nevada Desert, 202, 217.
New Amsterdam, 17, 126.
Newark (N. J.), 342.
New Bedford (Mass.), 125.
New Brunswick (N. J.), 328,
377.
Newcastle (Pa.), 363.
New England, rivers of, 20, 23, 24,
2§1 ; fisheries of, 25, 35 ; and the
Indians, 41; and expansion, 43,
45, 63, 109, 110, 269 ; elements
in the Northwest Territory, 99,
154, 156 ; elements in Missouri
and Iowa, 160, 164 ; elements in
Oregon, 209, 213, 214 ; in Revo
lutionary War, 50 ; privateers,

ment of, 42, 117-129, 132, 136 ;
geographic factors in industrial
development of, 46, 121-123, 128,
261, 270, 339, 347-349, 352; roads
and railroad's of, 255, 374. See
also Fisheries, Forests, Maritime
development, Shipbuilding, and
Water-power.
Newfoundland, 116, 117, 123, 127,
144, 328, 404.
New Guinea, 423.
¦-New Hampshire, 122, 142, 315, 329,
351 374.
New Haven, 127, 128, 374, 376.
—New Jersey, 50, 116, 136, 154, 265,
311, 314, 369, 377.
New London, 122, 128, 376.
New Madrid, 99, 100, 282, 302,
304.
-New Mexico, 179, 186, 188, 190-
195, 197, 223, 232, 243, 318, 325,
394.
New Netherland, 17.
New Orleans, in hands of Span
ish, 74, 79, 80, 82, 92, 101; island
of, 26, 91, 104; strategic value of,
104, 105 ; territory of, 107-109 ;
as a market, 85-87, 97-103, 162 ;
Americanized, 106 ; in War of
1812, 135, 143, 144 ; immigrants
in, 160, 323 ; trade of, 162, 172,
187, 211, 258, 261-263, 265, 275,
343, 358, 388, 389, 414, 417, 418 ;
as a seaport, 172, 339, 342, 343,
418 ; in the Civil War, 305, 308.
Newport (R. I.), 17, 122, 125, 128,
131.
New River, 56, 60, 67, 71, 61, 90,
203, 287, 307, 385.
New York Bay, 32, 120, 263.
New York Central Railroad, evo
lution of, 381, 382.
New York City, as a port, 126, 128,
130, 264, 275, 284, 339, 341,
342; railroads, 376, 378, 387,
392 ; commerce of, 416-418 ; im
migrants to, 323, 327; and the
Erie Canal, 247, 264, 268, 269,
275, 276.

slavery, 280 ; immigrants in, 311,
314-316, 328, 329 ; geographic
factors in the maritime develop-

131, 144 ; boundary of, 235 ; and-;New York State, 18, 35, 45, 58, 63,

126, 127, 129, 136, 141, 150, 152,
154, 164, 171, 213, 234, 275, 276,
285, 311, 314, 316, 322, 329, 330,

INDEX

'453

344, 347, 354, 358, 371, 375, 382 ;
canals, 268-270, 386. See also
Erie Canal.
New York and New Haven Rail
road, 376.
New Zealand, 423.
Niagara Falls, 139, 140, 268, 273,
349, 382.
Niagara River frontier in the War
of 1812, 137-140.
Nicaragua, 414 ; canal route, 410,
411.
Niemen River, 323.
Nile River, 20, 262; delta, 119,
323.
Ninety-fifth meridian, 109, 115,
179.
Ninety-seventh meridian, 249, 252,
316, 340, 346.
Nisqually River, 214, 391.
Nolan, Philip, 101.
Nolichucky River, 56, 57, 60.
Norfolk (Va.), 34, 35, 127, 143,
275, 284, 371, 384, 396.
Normandy, 12.
North and South, contrast in geo
graphic conditions in, 42—45, 118-
121, 126, 127, 156, 157 ; effect of
same, 257, 258, 280, 281, 346;
intercourse between, 283, 284.
North America, early voyages to,
5-13 ; size and structure of, 20,-
27, 28, 37, 240, 246-249, 409,
421, 422 ; influences of the same,
227-229, 231, 240, 241 ; remote
ness of, 226, 227, 235-238, 240,
241, 244, 310, 311.
North Atlantic basin, 4, 5, 117 ;
American ports of, 342, 343, 398,
401, 418.
North Atlantic Drift, 117.
North Atlantic states, 258, 314, 315,
327-329, 340, 343, 348.
'-North Carolina, 33, 42, 50, 57, 59-
61, 64, 67, 69, 90, 126, 143, 157,
158, 160, 174, 265, 284, 286, 299,
307, 308, 349, 375, 377-379.
North central states, 316, 317, 330.
—North Dakota, 242, 243, 311, 316,
317, 330, 331, 334, 359.
North Sea, 3, 54, 420.
North Temperate zone, 333.
Northwest, the, 25, 40, 42, 66, 112,

141, 150, 155, 160, 235, 264, 284,
330, 331, 390 ; canals of, 272-
274.
Northwest Fur Company, 183.
Northwest Passage, 12, 21, 22, 24.
Northwest Territory, 73, 75, 80, 84,
85, 91, 154-157, 164, 282.
Northwest Territories of Canada,
264, 334, 393.
North Yuba River, 362.
Norway, 4-6, 11, 251.
Norwegian immigrants, 312.
Nova Scotia, 13, 328.
Novgorod, 251.
Nueces River, 179.
Oakland (Cal.), 343, 363.
Oases, 249, 253, 292, 393-395.
Ocean currents, 21, 117, 118 ; as
paths of trade, 145-147.
Oceanic location, 1-16, 117, 228,
229, 237, 239, 420, 421, 423, 424,
435. See also Interoceanic loca
tion.
Oceanica, 429, 432, 433.
Oceans as the world's great high
ways, 263, 338, 341, 374.
Ocmulgee River, 64.
Ocracoke Inlet, 140.
Ogden, 393.
Ogden's Hole, 207.
Ohio, 67, 69, 76, 86, 136, 153, 155,
171, 273, 275, 316, 334, 353-357 ;
geographie conditions of its ca
nals, 156, 270, 271, 358 ; influence
of its canals, 271, 272 ; geo
graphic conditions of its railroads,
386-389.
Ohio River, portages from Great
Lakes to, 25, 28-30 ; portages
from Appalachian rivers to, 39,
40, 56, 57, 65 ; as a boundary, 63,
74, 282, 284, 313 ; as a waterway,
64-66, 72, 75, 84, 96, 154-157,
159, 160, 180, 246-248, 283, 284,
356, 388 ; its control in western
distribution of population, 154-
157, 159, 160, 162, 164, 165, 171,
241, 285, 328 ; its commerce, 86,
99, 187, 259, 261, 262 ; steamboat
building on, 257, 258; settlements
along, 71-73, 75, 82, 85, 87, 88,
97, 134 ; falls of, 69, 72, 73, 85,

454

INDEX

246, 259, 260 ; forks of, 30, 40,
65 ; cities of, 257-260, 342, 344,
358, 386 ; in the Civil War, 288,
301, 302.
-Oklahoma, 243.
Okotsk Sea, 422.
Omaha, 393.
Ontario province, 136, 138.
Opelousas (La.), 167, 171.
Orange River Colony, 254.
—Oregon, 199, 208-214, 218, 318,
321, 322, 362-364, 371 ; its early
remoteness, 201, 218, 231 ; emi
gration to California from, 201,
202, 215, 218 ; early sea commu
nication with the eastern states,
205, 208-210, 214.
Oregon Question, geographic fac
tors in, 201, 202, 205-210, 214,
215, 221, 232, 236, 238, 425.
Oregon Trail, 203, 204, 206, 208,
210-213, 216-218, 392, 393.
Ordinance of 1787, 155, 282.
Orient, 1, 2, 131, 273, 342, 365,409,
413, 423 ; trade of the United
States with, 432-435.
Orinoco River, 19.
Oriskany, 49.
Orkney Islands, 5.
Oruba, 413.
Oswego, 41, 49, 141, 267, 268.
Oswego River, 137.
Ottawa River, 28, 264.
Otter Creek, 68.
Outfitting points on the Missouri,
185-188, 190.
Oxus River, 2, 54, 94.
Ozark Mountains, 152, 391.
Pacific coast of the United States,
183, 221, 222, 231, 232, 239, 314,
397, 424-426; immigration to,
318-322, 327, 328, 331, 332 ;
geographic factors in industrial
development of, 362-365, 369 ;
cities of, 343.
Pacific Ocean, geographic features
of, 4, 421 ; importance of, to
United States, 1, 111, 112, 150,
179, 211, 226, 229, 231-233, 240,
392, 420-425, 435 ; Russia upon,
111, 216, 228 ; islands of, 428,
429; rivers of, 138, 421-423;

United States holdings in, 426,
428, 429, 432 ; ports of the United
States as determinants of rail
roads, 371, 381, 395, 396.
Pacific Valley, 331, 372, 391, 394,
424.
Paducah (Ky.), 301.
Palatine Bridge, 58.
Palomas, 193.
Palos, 9, 10.
Pamir, 54.
Pamlico Sound, 32, 143, 375.
Panama, 432.
Papal meridian, 8, 10, 13.
Paraguay, 417.
Paris, treaty of, 239.
Parsons, Samuel H., 91.
Pascagoula River, 152.
Passamaquoddy Bay, 235, 328.
Passes. See Mountain passes.
Patapsco River, 143.
Pattie, James R., 194.
Patuxent River, 143.
Paumota Archipelago, 429.
Pawcatuck River, 122.
Pawtucket, 83, 349.
Pearl River, 107, 152.
Pecos River, 188.
Pelzer (S. C), 349.
Penguin Point, 146.
Peninsulas of the United States, 33,
34, 167, 228, 265, 377.
-Pennsylvania, as a colony, 18, 34,
39; westward expansion in, 45,
58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 70, 75 ; moun
tain environment in, 89; trade of,
126, 127, 130, 266 ; in the Civil
War, 285, 293, 299 ; industries
of, 273, 275, 352-354, 369 ; canals
of, 266, 383.
Pennsylvania Railroad, 382, 383,
388, 389.
Penobscot Bay, 32.
Penobscot River, 14.
Pensacola (Fla.), 80, 98, 144, 418.
Peoria (111.), 357, 370.
Perdido River, 106, 107.
Peripheral possessions, their tend
ency towards defection, 47, 48,
87-92, 110, 172-175, 219-221,
231, 237, 238. .
Permanent settlements, economy of,
25, 26, 38, 81, 222.

INDEX

455

Pernambuco, 416.
Perry, Oliver H, 139, 142, 268.
Persia, 94, 400.
Persian Gulf, 1, 111, 399.
Pern, 398, 404, 411.
Peshawar, 53, 380.
Peter the Great, 228.
Petersburg (Va.), 289, 290, 298,
299, 378.
Philadelphia, its early trans-Alle-
. gheny routes, 65-67, 87, 255 ; its
trade, 66, 83, 84, 86 ; as a port,
34, 120, 121, 123, 126, 130, 269,
275, 339, 342, 418 ; its railroads,
266, 373-375, 377, 383.
Philippines, 150, 365, 412, 426, 428,
431^35.
Phoenicians, 6, 119-121, 400, 403.
Piedmont belt, 57, 59, 61, 62, 79,
290, 379 ; industries of, 347-349.
See also Railroads of Piedmont
belt.
Piermont, 382.
-Pierre's Hole, 207.
Pine Mountain, 68.
Piscataqua River, 14, 122.
Pittsburg, 30, 65, 66, 84-86, 162,
254, 257, 258, 266, 342, 353, 354,
373, 383, 387-389.
Pittsburg Landing, 302.
Plantations, 34, 43, 44, 128, 165-167.
Plantation system, 59, 164, 280, 281,
285, 287, 288.
Platte River, 182-184, 186, 202-
204, 207, 209.
Plymouth (Mass.), 23, 122, 376 ;
(England), 417.
Po River, 40, 54, 251, 262, 380.
Point Judith, 376.
Point of Rocks, 296, 298.
Poles, 315, 323, 324.
Political areas, influence of large,

46, 48, 112, 134, 135, 227, 231, -Providence, 83, 125, 342, 376.

239, 242-244, 277, 281, 310-312,
332-334, 367-370, 372, 423, 424,
434, 435 ; influence of small, 36-
38, 42, 43, 45^7, 156, 226, 242 ;
scattered and compact, 237, 238 ;
law of increasing, 229, 308 ; im
portance of waterways in large,
251, 255, 256, 259, 301.
Political neighbors, 35, 58, 63, 103,
104, 129, 173, 175.

Population and industry, 340, 345.
346,362.
Portage Bay, 427, 428.
Portages, 27-30, 39, 53, 65, 72, 75,
80, 91, 112, 159, 247, 248, 263,
264; and canals, 263, 264, 271,
272.
Portage railroad, 266, 373.
Port Arthur, 344.
Port Hudson, 304-306, 373.
Port Jervis, 265, 382.
Portland (Me.), 122, 376; (Ore.),
331, 343, 393, 396.
Port Neuf Mountains, 391.
Port Neuf River, 203, 211.
Porto Rico, 105, 402, 404, 406, 409,
412, 417.
Port Republic, 295.
Port Royal, 32.
Portsmouth (N. C), 143 ; (N. H),
122, 376 ; (Va.), 375.
Portugal, 7-10, 16, 129, 148.
Portuguese East Africa, 254.
Potomac River, 19, 22, 33, 39, 44,
49, 55, 56, 59-61, 65, 67, 87, 151,
211, 230, 248, 255, 265-269, 283,
287, 346, 373, 378, 382 ; in the
Civil War, 288, 289, 291, 296-
298.
Pottawatomie Indians, 154.
Powder River, 182, 212.
Powell Mountain and River, 68.
Prairie du Chien, 80, 134, 139.
Prairies, and expansion, 153, 180 ;
and settlement, 76, 160, 163, 186 ;
and railroads, 372.
Presque Isle, 30, 136, 139.
Pretoria, 135.
Pribilof Islands, 426.
Prince Edward Island, 116.
Prince Henry of Portugal, 7, 9.
Privateers, 130, 131, 144-146.

Prussia, 324.
Pueblo (Col.), 361, 380, 394.
Puget Sound, 180, 213, 214,

229,

2~32, 250, 314, 329, 331, 363, 369,
391, 393, 395, 429.
Punjab, 53, 380.
Purgatory River, 185, 188.
Pyrenees Mountains, 40, 52.
Quebec, 13, 26, 145, 264, 344.

456

INDEX

Quebec Bill, 73, 74.
Queenstown Heights, 140.
Quincy (111.), 389.
Railroads of the United States, geo
graphic factors in development
of, 253-255, 310, 370-372, 390-
393, 395, 396 ; three classes of
early, 372-378 ; piedmont, 182,
379, 380, 384, 391, 394; trans-
Appalachian, 283, 284, 370-372,
374, 380-385, 387, 390, 391;
Mississippi valley, 418 ; trans
continental, 194, 196, 231, 233,
320, 363, 371, 381, 391-395.
Raison River, battle of, 139.
Raleigh, Sir Walter, 15.
Rapidan River, 290, 292, 293, 297.
Rappahannock River, 290-292, 295-
298.
Raritan Bay, 32, 120, 265, 328, 377.
Raton Hills, 188.
Reading (Pa.), 58, 375.
Red Cedar River, 164.
Red River, 101, 106, 108, 109, 152,
166, 167, 170-172, 175, 182, 249,
262 ; in the Civil War, 305-307.
Red River of the North, 214, 247,
274, 331, 356, 393, 398.
Red Sea, 1.
Redstone Old Fort, 65, 66, 85.
Remoteness, influence of geograph
ical, 134, 135, 174, 219-221, 226,
227, 231, 232, 235-238, 240, 244,
283, 310, 311, 415. See also Pe
ripheral possessions.
Reuss River, 53.
Revolution, the, geography in, 38,
41, 50, 51, 134, 136, 305 ; debt
paid in land, 64, 78 ; trans-Alle
gheny settlements as factor in,
73, 74 ; sea-power in, 130, 131 ;
geographic factors in causes, 47-
50, 88.
Rhine River, 16, 54, 91, 94-96, 203,
251 262 294.
-Rhode Island, 127, 131, 314, 329.
Rhodesia, 254.
Rhone River, 16, 54, 95, 203, 251.
Ribault's colony, 33.
Richelieu River, 18, 27, 141.
-Richmond (Va.), 67, 289-291, 294,
295, 299, 300, 307, 378.

Riesen Mountains, 95.
Rio Grande, 20, 93, 106, 107, 117,
169, 170, 172, 174-176, 186-188,
191-193, 196, 207, 223, 233, 234,
325, 326, 380, 412.
Rivers, as highways, 19-30, 32, 34,
37, 49, 50, 53, 58, 64-66, 69, 72,
74, 79, 84, 86, 87, 90, 91, 94, 96-
99, 105, 109-112, 137, 139, 143,
154-160, 167, 171, 251, 252, 255,
257, 259, 261, 277, 278, 282, 288,
289, 301, 307, 338, 411 ; and ex
pansion, 23-34, 75, 93-96, 101,
119, 150-152, 160, 165, 179-183,
186, 188, 192-196, 202, 205, 207,
216, 229, 252, 281 ; and the fur
trade, 17, 21-28, 31, 32, 34, 182-
185, 192-196, 198 ; and settle
ments, 22-24, 26, 27, 31-35, 58,
60, 71-73, 76, 88, 90, 98-101, 107-
109, 152, 160, 161, 164-167, 179,
338, 342 ; and transmontane
routes, 39, 40, 44, 52-^57, 59, 61,
64-67, 186-188, 193, 196, 197,
202-205, 211, 212, 218, 230 ; as
boundaries, 63, 64, 93-96, 172,
232-235 ; mouths of, 23, 32, 262,
263 ; in Civil War, 288-291, 300-
307 ; battlefields along, 40, 41, 44,
49, 50 ; commerce of, 259-262,
268 ; steamboat building on, 162,
257-259, 301 ; towns and cities
on, 85, 86, 339, 344 ; far western,
180-182, 184, 185, 187, 202, 249-
255. See also Colorado, Colum
bia, Snake, and Missouri rivers.
River valleys, unity of, 90, 91, 93-
96, 99, 100, 107 ; routes along, 1,
2, 11, 16-18, 28-30, 49, 50, 191,
215. See also Valleys.
Roanoke Island, 338.
Roanoke River, 56, 59, 60, 384.
Robertson, James, 69, 88.
Rochester (N. Y.), 271, 382.
Rockcastle River, 68, 69.
Rocky Mountain Fur Company, 207.
Rocky Mountain states, 317-322 ;
347, 359-365, 369.
Rocky Mountains, 4, 111, 150, 179-
182, 184, 185, 188-192, 196, 199,
202, 203, 229, 230, 232, 242, 247,
249, 283, 318, 341, 343, 360, 361,
368, 371, 380, 381, 391.

INDEX

457

Rome, 54, 91, 94, 95, 121, 338, 403.
Rome (N. Y.), 271.
Roncesvalles, 297.
Ross (Cal.), 216.
Rotterdam, 401.
Rum, 26, 35, 127, 128.
Russia, rivers of, 91, 251 ; frontiers
of, 238, 277, 323, 324 ; commerce+Santa
of, 367 ; as a Pacific power, 423,
425, 426 ; its geographic condi
tions for expansion, 54, 91, 94,
111, 228, 292 ; and for overland
railroads, 392, 399.

Saba Isle, 413.
Sabine River, 106, 109, 167-171, 175,
219, 234.
Sable Island, 13, 146.
Sac Indians, 154, 164.
Sacket Harbor, 137, 140.
—Sacramento, 179, 254, 363.
Sacramento River, 215, 216, 218,
219, 250, 254 ; valley, 221, 223.
Sagres, 9.
Saguenay River, 12, 26.
Salem (Iowa), 163 ; (Mass.), 122,
128, 131.
Salisbury (N. C), 379, 384.
Salmon River, 203, 207.
Salt, 129, 358 ; licks, 65, 69, 82.
-Salt Lake City, 343.
Salt River, 73, 82.
Samoan Islands, 429.
San Antonio (Tex.), 170, 175, 325.
San Bernardino Mountains, 197.
San Bias, 220.
San Diego (Cal.), 194, 198, 220,
232, 324, 395, 424, 426.
San Domingo, 102, 105, 402, 406-
408.
Sandusky (Ohio), 387, 389.
Sandusky Bay, 57, 138.
Sandusky River, 139, 271.
San Francisco, 194, 220, 323, 341-
343, 363, 364, 392, 395, 396, 425,
430-432.
San Francisco Bay, 215, 216, 219,
221, 232, 250, 314, 320, 322, 324,
332, 372, 391, 393.
San Joaquin River, 198, 218, 250,
254, 391.
San Jose (Cal.), 363.
San Juan de Fuca Strait, 234, 424.

San Juan River (Col.), 196 ; (Nic
aragua), 410, 411.
San Lucar de Barrameda, 10.
San Luis Valley, 191, 196.
San Miguel, 187, 188, 325.
San Pedro Bay, 343, 393, 396.
San Salvador, 110, 229.
Fe", 186-190, 220, 325 ; a cen
ter of transcontinental expansion,
192, 194-199 ; trade, 162, 186,
187, 190, 191; trail, 187-190,
380, 392.
Santa Fe" Railroad system, 361, 394.
Santa Lucia, 137.
Santarem, 10.
Saracens, 2, 9, 400, 403.
Saranac River, 142.
Saratoga, 49.
Sardinia, 403.
Saskatchewan River, 183, 205, 214,
216, 229.
Sault Sainte Marie Canal, 273, 274,
349.
Savannah (Ga.), 50, 146, 284, 375,
383.
Savannah River, 375.
Save River, 95.
Saxony, 95.
Scandinavian immigrants, 312, 317,
334.
Scheldt River, 251, 262.
Schenectady, 23, 58, 381 ; and Sara
toga railroad, 373.
Schuylkill River, 23, 266, 347.
Scioto River, 30, 76, 271 ; Shawnee
villages on, 67, 68, 85.
Scotch Highlands, 297.
Scotch-Irish settlers, 59, 60, 62.
Scotland, 171.
Sea basins, geographic control of,
3, 16, 31, 32, 116, 127, 388, 420.
Seaports and inland routes, 3, 120,
126, 269, 340, 341, 371.
Seattle, 343, 363, 393, 396.
Sectionalism, geographic factors in,
79, 109, 135, 136. See also North
and South contrasted.
Seine River, 95.
Selkirk Rockies, 205, 206.
Separatism, geographic factors in,
81, 87, 89-91, 110, 153, 173, 174,
231, 232.
Serbo-Croatians, 95.

458

INDEX

Sevier River, 197.
Seville, 9.
Shanghai, 320, 423.
Shawnee Indians, 67, 68, 70, 85, 88,
385.
Shenandoah Mountains, 287.
Shenandoah Valley, 59, 60, 373,
385 ; in the Civil War, 287, 289,
290, 292-300, 303.
Sheridan, General Philip, 299, 300.
Shetland Islands, 5.

Shipbuilding, geographic factors iriT" "South Carolina, 50, 69, 78, 126,

85, 121-124, 132, 268, 274, 352,
353, 363, 364.
Shippensburg, 58, 65.
Shoshone Mountains, 204.
Shreveport (La.), 171.
Siberia, 228.
Sicily, 403.
Sidon, 119.
Sierra Leone, 4.
Sierra Madre Plateau, 195, 395.
Sierra Nevada, 199, 202, 216-218,
250, 318, 360 ; their water-power,
350, 362, 363.
Si-kiang, 422.
Silver City (N. M.), 193.
Simla, 380.
Sioux City (Iowa), 261.
Skagway, 427.
Slaughtering and meat packing,
358-360.
Slave states, 160, 162, 164, 168,
280-283, 313, 407.
Slave-trade, 14, 128, 129.
Smith, Jedediah, 194.
Smyrna, 338.
Snake River, 203, 204, 206-209,
211, 218, 391.
Snickers Gap, 297, 298.
Snoqualmie Falls, 363.
Soil and subsistence, 5, 6, 13, 15,
21, 26, 32, 33, 43, 46, 112, 118,
120, 126, 153, 239, 339, 340.
Sonoma valley, 218, 223.
Sonora (Mexico), 220.
Sonora Pass, 218.
South, the, its geographic conditions
for expansion, 44, 45, 59, 64, 109,
110, 149, 152, 165, 168, 281 ; in
War of 1812, 136 ; and slavery,
280, 281 ; in the Civil War, 285,
286, 288 ; railroads of, 384, 388,

396 ; scant immigration into, 164,
280, 312, 313; industrial condi
tions in, 346-350, 364. See also
North and South.
South Africa, 253.
South America, 10, 20, 110, 111,
147, 234, 236, 239, 421 ; immi
grants from, 327, 328 ; geo
graphic basis of our commerce
with, 398, 416, 417.
Southampton (England), 401.

143, 157, 158, 165, 300, 313, 349,
350, 375, 379, 403.
--South Dakota, 242, 243, 311, 317,
330, 334, 359.
Southern Pacific Railroad, 233, 254,
394, 395.
South Mountain, 56, 296-298.
South Omaha, 359, 360.
South Pass, 207, 211.
Spain, 9, 10, 40, 117, 129, 174, 403.
Spanish, their territory in America,
10, 13, 16, 25, 37, 63, 70, 80, 96,
101, 103, 105, 106, 144, 169, 170,
399, 404; their control of the
Mississippi River, 79, 80, 87, 90-
92, 99 ; language in the United
States, 415,416; immigrants, 327.
Spanish Trail, 192, 196-198, 216,
393.
Spartansburg (S. C), 379.
Sperryville (Va.), 295.
Spice Isles, 10.
Spokane (Wash.), 343, 393.
Springfield (Mass.), 24, 374;
(Ohio), 387.
Spotswood, Governor, 45.
Stamford (Conn.), 17.
Stanford (Ky.), 69.
Stanislaus River, 218.
Staple products of the United
States, 368-371.
Staten Island, 327.
Staunton (Va.), 60, 295, 299.
St. Bartholomew Island, 403.
St. Charles (Mo.), 99, 100.
St. Croix River, 115, 235, 329.
St. Eustatius Island, 413.
St. Francis River, 153, 161, 165.
Ste. Genevieve, 97, 100.
St. Gotthard Pass, 53, 204.
St. John's River (Fla.), 33, 235.

INDEX

459

St. Joseph (Mo.), 360, 389.
St. Joseph River, 29, 30, 155, 211.
St. Lawrence River, in War of 1812,
137, 138, 141 ; its exploration,
12, 13, 17-20, 24, 26 ; its settle
ment, 26, 27 ; as a highway, 37,
79, 91, 229, 247, 256, 264, 267,
273, 330, 343, 351; strategic im
portance of, 275-277.
St. Louis, early trade of, 85, 97 ; in
War of 1812, 139 ; industries of,
357, 370 ; railroads of, 394, 418 ;
as a commercial center, 162, 184-
188, 194, 204, 208, 344, 359 ; geo
graphic conditions of its river
commerce, 257-261, 342.
St. Louis River, 29.
St. Martin Isle, 413.
St. Mary's River, 115, 134.
-St. Paul, 94, 247, 357.
St. Petersburg, 263.
St. Pierre Island, 404.
St. Thomas Island, 409, 413, 414.
Steam navigation, 109, 151, 185,-
257—259
Stillwater (N. Y.), 49.
Stockades, 81, 337.
Stockton (Cal.), 254, 363.
Stockton, Commodore, 195.
Stone Arabia, 58.
Stoneman's raid, 307.
Stonington (Conn.), 143, 376.
Straits, as strategic points, 2, 3.
Straits of Gibraltar, 2, 22, 132, 401,
428.

Malacca, 2.
Mackinac, 28.
Strasburg (Va.), 295.
Stratification, of English, French,
and Spanish in America, 13 ; of
foreign elements in United States,
136, 315-319, 321, 322, 330.
Sublette, 208.
Suez Canal, 274, 319, 399-401, 409,
413, 428.
Sugar, 25, 35, 127, 129, 430.
Superior City, 274.
Susquehanna River, 17, 22, 34, 39,
55, 56, 58, 63, 65, 120, 126, 143,
263, 266, 267, 348, 373, 382.
Sutter's Fort, 215, 218, 219, 223.
Swamps as vacant spots, 153, 166,

167 ; as barriers, 155, 390, 405,
406.
Swannanoa Gap, 384.
Sweden, 228 ; its early American
colonies, 23, 403.
Sweetwater River, 203, 204, 207,
211.
Swiss immigrants, 318.
Switzerland, 203, 324, 402.
Sydney (Australia), 429, 431.
Syracuse (N. Y.),271, 382; (Sicily),
338.
Syr Daria, 54.
Syria, 2, 3, 400.
Tacoma (Wash.), 343, 363, 393,
396.
Tadousac, 26.
Tagus River, 16.
Tampa Bay, 327, 398, 418.
Taos, 187, 196, 197.
Tecumseh, 150.
Tejend River, 292.
Tennessee, 51, 60, 63, 64, 69, 71, 76,
84, 86, 91, 103, 104, 155, 157, 158,
160, 171, 211, 288, 301, 391.
Tennessee River, 56, 57, 63-65, 72,
75, 80, 87-90, 96, 155, 157, 162,
248, 257, 262, 278 ; in the Civil
War, 288, 293, 300-303, 305, 307.
Tensas River, 167.
Terre Haute (Ind.), 255.
Teton Mountains, 204, 207.
Teton River, 182.
Teutons, 297.

Magellan, 110, 254, 424. --Texas, boundaries of, 93, 106, 233 ;

extra-territorial expansion into,
101, 158, 168-171, 175, 217, 219,
222, 405, 431 ; geographic factors
in acquisition of, 170, 172, 175,
176; independence of, 172-175,
179, 201 ; in the Civil War, 305 ;
railroads of, 394 ; immigration
into, 313, 325, 326; Rangers, 325.
Thames, battle of the, 140.
Thermopylae, 297.
Thirteen Colonies, 38, 115, 118,
239 240.
Thornton Gap, 296, 298.
Thornton River, 295.
Tiber River, 95.
Tibet, 180.
Ticino River, 53.

460

INDEX

Ticonderoga, 49.
Tidewater country and its settle
ments, 34, 39, 42, 57, 59, 60, 62,
150, 290.
Tigris River, 1, 94.
Timpas Creek, 188.
Tobacco, 25, 43, 120, 127.
Toby Creek, 65.
Toledo (Ohio), 271, 370, 387.
Tombigbee River, 72, 75, 80, 152,-
248, 355 ; settlements, 105, 134,
157.
Toronto, 30, 141.
Tortugas, 129.
Toscanelli, 10.
Trade-wind ocean route, 7, 8, 13,
15, 146, 147, 400.
Trans-Allegheny settlements, 51,
54, 70-74 ; their environment
and isolation, 75-84, 86, 88-91 ;
their rivers and commerce, 75, 78,
79, 82-87, 91, 97, 99, 103, 104,
159, 358 ; separatist tendency in,
110, 173, 174, 283.
Trans-Appalachian routes, 39, 40,
63, 65-70, 73, 203, 230, 265-267 ;
their effect upon the distribution
of population, 54, 70-72, 269;
waterways, 382, 383 ; railroads,
370-372, 374, 380-385, 387, 391.
Transvaal, 94, 135, 254, 308.
Traders and trappers, 22, 57, 64,
99, 158. See also Voyageurs.
Trails, 68, 181, 182, 189, 203;
overland, 185-187, 192-198, 210-
213, 216, 221, 233, 260.
Trebizond, 2.
Trinidad River, 171.
Troy (N. Y.), 373 ; (Ilium), 338.
Truckee Pass, 218, 221.
Truckee River, 218.
Tugela River, 94.
Tulare Lake, 198.
Turkestan, Chinese, 54, 367.
Turks, 3, 94, 399, 400, 403.
Turner's Gap, 296, 297.
Tuscan towns, 338.
Tuscaroras, 42.
Tutuila, 429.
Tyan Shan, 54.
Tyre, 338.
Umatilla River, 212.

Unadilla Creek, 63.
Unaka Mountains, 57.
Unga Islands, 427.
Union Pacific Railroad, 232, 361.
Uppersville, 297.
Uraguay, 417.
Urban belt of the United States,
339, 340, 345-347 ; as the chief
railroad belt, 370, 371, 390.
,4Utah, 391, 395.
Utah Lake, 207, 217, 394.
Utica (N. Y.), 58, 381, 382.

Vacant areas, 152-154, 161, 164-
167, 390, 391.
Valcour Island, 49.
Valparaiso, 147, 417.
Valley of Virginia, 59, 60, 67, 287,
307, 384.
Valleys, transverse, 52, 53, 55, 57,
68, 203, 211, 212, 292, 307; longi
tudinal, 55, 56, 59, 61, 67, 68, 70,
292, 293, 296, 297, 303, 331. See
also East Tennessee Valley, Shen
andoah Valley, Appalachian Val
ley, and Valley of Virginia.
Vancouver Island, 202, 431, 432.
Vandalia, 255.
Venezuela, 251, 413, 416.
Venice, 4, 16, 251.
Vera Cruz, 186, 398, 414.
-Vermont, 136, 142, 329, 330, 374.
Vicksburg, 304-306.
Vincennes (Ind.), 30, 80.
. -Virginia, settlements of, 17, 33, 39,
44, 45, 57, 71, 72; westward move
ment from, 59-61, 64, 66, 67, 81,
90, 96, 156, 157, 160, 284 ; rail
roads of, 377, 378, 281, 385 ; in
the Civil War, 286-291, 302, 303,
306, 307. See also Shenandoah
Valley and Rivers in the Civil
War.
Virgin Passage, 409.
Virgin River, 197.
Volga River, 91, 228, 251.
Volney, Count, 77.
Vosges Mountains, 95.
Voyageurs, 22, 25, 28, 85, 182, 183,
229, 264.
Wabash River, 30, 57, 69, 75, 85, 99,
152, 155, 162, 178, 262, 271, 358.

INDEX

461

Wadkin's Ferry, 67.
Wahsatch Mountains, 197, 206, 391,
394.
Wake Island, 428, 432.
Walden Mountain, 68.
Walker, Dr. Thomas, 60.
Walker River, 218.
Wallachia, 94.
Walla Walla River, 209, 212.
Wapato Island, 209.
Warren (R. I.), 125.
Warrior's Path, 68.
War of 1812, 107, 134-149, 272
and the Erie Canal, 267, 268,
276.
Washington (D. O), 114, 135, 143,
144, 248, 266, 288-290, 294-297,
299, 377-379.
Washington, George, 50, 236, 264,
385.
-Washington (State), 250, 321, 322,
331 ; geographic factors in indus
trial development of, 346, Sei
zes.
Washita River, 101, 109, 114, 152,
166, 167.
Watauga River, 55, 57, 60, 61, 90,
174, 307.
Waterbury (Conn.), 349.
Water-power, and industries, 122,
270, 339, 340, 347-351, 356, 357,
362, 363 ; and canals, 271, 347-
349; and electricity, 349, 350,
362, 363.
Waterways of the United States,
246-278 ; their relation to the
continental build, 246-249, 263-
267, 421, 422 ; east and west, 247,
248, 256, 265-267, 276 ; political
effects of the same, 269, 284, 285 ;
north and south, 248, 250, 251,
256 ; distribution of population
as controlled by the, 154-161,
164, 265, 269, 270, 285, 328, 330 ;
improvement of, 262, 263, 277,
278 (see also Canals) ; and com
peting railroads, 252-255, 272,
275, 277, 278 ; and industrial de
velopment, 352, 354, 355.
Wayne, Anthony, 66.
Weldon (N. C), 378.
Welland Canal, 273.
West, the early settlements of, 155,

156, 159, 161, 215 ; space of, 243,
244 ; irrigation in, 335 ; railroad
development in, 253-255, 390.
See also Rivers of the Far West.
Westerly (R. I.), 122.
Western Hemisphere, 237-240, 327.
West Indies, 25, 35, 131, 132, 147,
416 ; early trade with, 118, 124,
127-129 ; immigrants from, 326-
328. See also Antilles.
Westport (Mo.), 185, 187.
--West Virginia, 56, 162, 286, 287,
289, 295, 299, 353, 372, 391.
Westward movement, 25, 52-74,
150, 151, 158, 178, 201, 206, 208,
210, 211, 213, 214, 217, 241, 269.
Whaling, 147.
Wheeling (W. Va.), 255-258, 285,
287, 382, 389.
Whiskey Rebellion, 87.
White River, 153, 166.
White Earth River, 183.
White Horse Pass, 427.
White Plains, 49.
White Sea, 6.
White Water River, 161.
Wilderness, battles of the, 291.
Wilderness Road, 67-69, 86, 90, 96,
255, 284, 303, 384.
Wilkinson, Colonel James, 91.
Willamette River, 179, 202, 206,
209, 210, 213-216, 250, 331, 362,
391
Wilmington (Del.), 377; (N. C),
377, 378.
Winchester, 59, 60, 295, 297, 373.
Wind River, 204, 207.
Winds, westerly, 15, 242, 368.
Windsor (Conn.), 128.
Windward Passage, 402.
-Wisconsin, 153, 163, 164, 273, 274,
311, 316, 317, 331, 334, 351, 354.
Wisconsin River, 25, 29, 80, 138,
139 272
Wolfskill, William, 197.
Wood Creek, 264.
Wood pulp mills, geographic factors
in the distribution of, 344, 349,
351.
Woodstock (Va.), 60.
Worcester (Mass.), 374.
Wyeth, 208.
-Wyoming Valley, 58, 62.

462

INDEX

Wytheville (Va.), 293.
Yadkin River, 56, 59, 60, 62.
Yangtse-kiang, 422, 423.
Yazoo River, 72, 97, 98, 101, 153,
157.
Yellowstone River, 182, 204, 261,
379.
Yokohama, 425.
York River, 289, 290.
Yorktown (Va.), 50.
Youghiogheny River, 39, 44, 65, 83,
152.

Young, Ewing, 195.
Youngstown (N. Y.), 140 ; (Ohio),
353.
Yucatan Peninsula, 401.
Yucatan Channel, 401.
Yukon River, 343, 365, 422 ; trail,
427.
Zonal location, of the United States,
239, 241, 424 ; of Brazil, 238 ; of
the British Empire, 368 ; of China,
367, 423 ; of Russia, 367, 423 ; in
general, 367, 368, 424.

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