Gathering the Bones, XXXII: Get Your Kicks on Route . . . Er, 40, It Turns Out

At least if your musical tastes are as lowbrow as mine (it's a brain chemistry thing, I swear!), the "suggested next video" that appear in the personal playlist feature was an exercise in self-abnegation. I would play the Silencer' version of "Wild Mountain Thyme," which does speak to me, and after a few choices out of my frequently-viewed list, there's Ella Roberts' "Loch Lomond." The self disgust came from thinking, "OMG, the AI thinks I like this shite!" The despair it provoked about the way the world was going came from the fact that the AI couldn't learn, no matter how many times I stopped and refreshed at the first note of Ella Roberts' overblown Gaelic kitsch, it just could not learn. Nowadays it gives me this, which is still not the version of "Northwest Passage" I ever search for, but is at least in the first place not bad, and in the second, one that leans into the moment. (Future readers: You may not believe that Donald Trump managed to shine up Canadian nationalism, but trust me. It happened.) 

Maryland has an NHS designation for "Historic Inns on the National Road." This
is the Tomlinson Inn at Grantsville. Built around 1818. James K. Polk
slept here! By Generic1139 -
Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/
w/index.php?curid=21602442

All that being said, "Loch Lomond" is so popular for good reasons.  "You'll take the high road/I'll take the low road" is a lyric meditation on mortality. The whole thing is genuinely affecting. It's sad that it has to be yoked to young love, Culloden, the Rising of '45, the Highland Clearances, but now in the fashion of the Internet I will turn it on its head and talk about high roads, low roads, the '45, and the National Road that the Federalists built from Cumberland, Maryland, over the Cumberland Narrows to Redstone Creek and on to Vandalia, Illinois via Wheeling, West Virginia, in way of having an argument about whether the Constitution allows the Federal government to fund "internal improvements," as opposed to lying down on the (privately built, toll-gated) freeway to die. 

I know where I'm putting my money!

You know who believed in an interventionist state? Prince William
Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1721--1765)!

So if you're like me, you read "Cumberland Narrows" and pulled out a map to try to figure out how that  mountain pass that American historians like to imply was discovered by Daniel Boone on his way to Kentucky without saying anything so egregiously false could be linked to a place in Maryland, even given that weird pan handle that Maryland has going on, and which turns out to follow the valley of the Potomac. (Wikipedia allows that Thomas Walker "brought it to the attention of settlers" in 1750, and later notes that the first written account comes down from the 1670s, at which time the Gap appears to  have been occupied by a Muskogean-speaking group at odds with what I am just going to throw my hands in the air and call the "Powhatan" paramountcy so that I don't have to sort out three-vowel strings to provide the most respectable but probably inaccurate label to a political power that will be immediately recognised by calling it the Powhatans. 

Anyway, this isn't about the Cumberland Gap, which is 458 miles driving distance from the Cumberland Narrows, thank you Google Maps, which is apparently not currently offering a metric conversion on at least the first and second skins of the search return because if they do the Presnit might get "Gulf of America" mad. 

So the "Cumberland Narrows" and "the Cumberland Gap" are different passes from Atlantic tidewater over the Appalachians into the Ohio basin. It would be super neat if Route 66 ran through the Cumberland Gap, but the road in the song is one of the United States's (it's weird how American media from the Fifties hardly ever uses "America." Maybe all those Latin Americans who are upset about the appropriation of "America" have a point) other great historic roads, the old Santa Fe Trail.

Why the confusion? Here's where "Bloody Cumberland" comes in. If skimming C. G. Grey's space-filling editorials from deep winter, deep Depression numbers of The Aeroplane have taught me anything, it is that the road that Cumberland built down the Great Glen of Scotland from Inverness to also new-built Fort William both colonised and civilised the Highlands, going to show that colonisation and atrocities are good, and that Scots are bad.  Inset is a random picture from the "Great Glen Way." And it's not just Cumberland and the Highlands [insert plagent bagpipe solo here], mind you. If you were alive in 1750 and naming things, you would be fresh off the last two years of the 1740--48 war, in which the question on everyone's lips was, "Where will Saxe strike next?" Tearing up the roads and canals of "Flanders," Saxe was pushing the "natural hexagon" of France all the way to the borders of the Dutch Republic: Roads, rivers, fortresses. If you read the sociologists of the era, you would know that building roads into barbaric fastnesses brought "luxuries" to warlike aristocrats and civilised them. If you read the historians, you would know that that was how Rome worked. 

Brownsville from the Washington County bank.
The county iso-named because President Washington held
so much land there, and the Whiskey Rebellion was plotted
in Brownsville, although it was still called Redstone at that
point. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it!
By VitaleBaby (talk) (Uploads) -
Own work, Public Domain,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/
/index.php?curid=49782004

So the weird thing about Route 40 is how little you hear of these themes. Because what you do hear about Route 40 is that it was built along Braddock's Road, the WAGON ROAD built to carry General Braddock's army from tidewater to what is now Pittsburgh, was in 1755 "Shannopin's Town," and which is always referred to as "Fort Duquesne." I've already pulled another of the little bits of geographic ledgermain that llitter this narrative, by the way. "Redstone Creek" and "Redstone Old Fort" appear in this narrative like people aren't sure where they are, which is true to a point in that there are plenty of "Redstone Old Forts" along the right bank of the Monongahela, as SECC builders frequently put up enclosures of red-band stone. But since in fact Route 40 descends to the old ford of the Monongahela at Brownsville, Pennsylvania, the location at which Braddock's Road branched off to Pittsburgh isn't mysterious at all. (Even if the old exit from Route 40 to Pittsburgh didn't descend to the Monongahela, that was not the route taken by Braddock's expedition.)

What's weird about all of this? Well, first there is the fact that you have to take in more geography than you maybe want in order to understand what is going on here.  Pittsburgh, which is where the Ohio originates as the junction of the north-flowing Monongahela and south-flowing Allegheny, is connected to Lake Erie by an easy portage, the Venango Path. This makes Pittsburgh a particularly strategic location, and probably a good place for making iron, just saying. Second, the Ohio is a good river route as far down as Louisville, Kentucky, where it passes over the Falls of the Ohio and enters a sort-of-"Middle-Ohio" region where the valley narrows and is often faced with bluffs. The substantial French presence in the Ohio is based on the Wabash, a river with its own short portage from the other end of Lake Erie, but joining the Ohio below the falls. The head of navigation on the Wabash, Kekionga/Fort Miami/Fort Wayne, is

It's hilarious to see the historians and archaeologists of 
Louisville pretend that nothing happened here between 1492
and the birth of the "the first White child in Louisville" 
in 1785. The Falls of the Ohio Archaeological Society
even had a journal for awhile in the early 2000s, but 
now exists mainly as a lot of rules of conduct. 

320 miles from Pittsburgh, and since there is no water navigation without portage above the falls, we can reasonably talk about an "Upper Ohio Basin," which nobody does, and see that the French presence in Pittsburgh might make strategic sense, but was a huge leap forward for the French in the Ohio basin, which is why the Anglosphere was so upset about it and I don't understand why the English language historiography doesn't  make more of it!

Or, you know, maybe I do. Apart from the notorious Colonel Thomas Cresap, he of  Cresap's War, twenty years before Braddock's moment, the most important name in this story, the man who built a wagon road across the Cumberland Narrows, is known to history as "Nemacolin, a hereditary chief of the Delaware nation.." Thanks, Wikipedia. There was no such thing as a hereditary chief in those days, although certainly the woman who appointed and named Sachem Nemacolin amongst the Leni Lenape, inherited the right to do so from her mother, or an aunt. The Wiki goes on to propose that he was the "son of Checochinican," and was "chief of the Fish Clan of the Turtle tribe," which is also not how things worked. In any case best guess is that he was born in what was formerly New Sweden and grew up in Shamokin. Silence covers the whole problem of the engineering work that went into turning "Nemacolin's Path" into the basis for a brigade-strength military operation.  Someone named Thomas Brown was operating Nemacolin's trading post at the ford by 1785 his sale of land to Jacob Bowman was documented by a deed of sale, and he was buried in Christ Church at Brownsville in 1797. Bowman is credited by the Wiki as "founding" a trading post, which gives the post three founders. 

"When Brown travelled to or acquired these lands is murky." No it's not. We know who 
owned it in 1755: Nemacolin. We know who owned it in 1785: Brown. Brown's sales were!
never challenged in court, so they were legal. If there were no deeds, than there was a will.

I'm not going to be too picky. At some point Bowman or one of his heirs built an architectural folly on the site, named it "Nemacolin's Castle," and gave history a concrete handle on Brownsville's past. It's a lot more than you can say about many early American towns!

It's not like there's anything weird or unprecedented about Indians building and operating wagon roads in 1755. The French sources acknowledge that this was how the Venango Path was opened up so that they could build and garrison Fort Duquesne, and if this war had any single trigger, it was  Charles de Langlade's destruction of the trade goods of the "suffering traders" (Croghan and partners) at Piqua on the Miami, 241 miles west of Pittsburgh. The overland reach of goods ultimately disembarked on the Atlantic shore is amazing, and for all the reliance on water transport, the overland portions were critically important. 

The National Road was built to carry goods, because there were goods to carry, and it was built by Indians, and by Indians who owned horses and who had learned the skills required to be teamsters, and, presumably, cartwrights, even if the carts were simple by the standards of Russell's Flying Waggons. But, you know, if you inquire into the details with too much energy, you might find out that Nemacolin was the father or uncle of Thomas Brown. And once that door is opened, perhaps you'll next be wondering who George Washington's uncle might have been.