Gathering the Bones XXIII: The Royal Proclamation of 1763, Manifest Destiny, and The Reality of 19% Grades

 

Lana Del Rey? I'm so old I remember when "Lana Del Rey" was an ironic comment on "Lana Del Rey." But I guess she decided not to go away, and I'm grateful because that means I can post  an original version of the John Denver chestnut: 

Almost heaven, West Virginia/
Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River
Life is old there, older than the trees
Younger than the mountains, growin' like a breeze

The story, as I have it, is that at some vague point in the Eighteenth Century, vast numbers of Scotch-Irish migrated  from, you know, Scotland or Ireland or around about there, to the crestline of the Appalachians. For it was at this clear, geographic line that they were barred from going further by the Royal Proclamation of 1763. George III by this action set himself against the westward drive of the American people that is such a large part of its essential nature, a Western drive bound up in the natural progressiveness of the American spirit, about which I can no longer even. The drive naturally soon resumed after the matter of the Revolution was dealt with, but by this time the Scotch-Irish had settled into the "Appalachians," where their Elizabethan accent persists unchanged to this day, denoting the antiquity of their origins and the oldness of their nature, as otherwise indicated by their charming habits of old time country music, square dancing, and making and consuming illegal alcohol products.

Did anyone ask how the burghers and tenant farmers of Ulster were transformed into frontier hunters and pioneers by the simple act of crossing the Atlantic? I hope not. We're talking about Scotland here, at least in part, and remember the Rob Roy guy? Can't be tougher than Liam Neeson, and they're all like that, so I'm glad that's settled. 

I would, if I were minded to be a revisionist here, point out that modern Northern Ireland, close enough to old Ulster, is a territory of 14,330 sq km, with, today, a population of 1.93 million. For those Scotch-Irish who arrived in America at Philadelphia, they were arriving in a city whose modern greater metropolitan area is reckoned at 13,230 sq km with a population of 6.33 million. This imaginary revisionist, whom I am not, would wonder how these Scotch-Irish ended up on the crest line of the Appalachians. The argument, as far as I understand it, is that English America to the crestline's east was already full up, which is a bit difficult to understand when the population of all four of the colonies into which the metro area extends at least in part, was 360,000. Admittedly, the 600,000 estimated for the much smaller are of Ulster does indicate that Northern Ireland was fuller, and perhaps we shall take this 360,000 as being enough to fill up the area by the standards of America's vast expanse, although leaving 360,000 hands to cultivate 1.3 million hectares by hand and horse seems hard labour by any standards. 

It hardly needs repeating, however, that I am no revisionist and intend to imply no implications. Do you know that New Deal era photographers were an unwelcome sight in Appalachia because of their tendency to take pictures that made the good people of Appalachia out to be "dark."

 Black Irish, no doubt. In Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age imaginarium, the peaks of the Appalachians are the old Pictish Isles that lay beyond Atlantis, yes, that's as in the Picts of Scotland, give or take a few earth shattering cataclysms. While that's just pulp fiction, everyone knows that the Picts were Scythians, and that the Scythians were from Asia's Siberian bit, from whence the ancestors of the First Nations split off to go east, instead. What about that, hunh?

So, anyway, the Appalachians:

It's fashionable to make jokes about American politicians from Ohio who claim to be "hillbillies," but the Allegheny plateau province of the Appalachians extends well into Ohio. Campbell Hill near Bellefontaine has an absolute elevation of 472m,  is 195m above the local level, and to the eye looks well west of the geographical centre of the state. It's true that this isn't mostly "holler" country, but it's not not "holler" country, either. 

Geologists have come to the rescue of country song writers with an account of the Appalachians that emphasises that they are old, old mountains. The range is thought to have had its ultimate origins in the Grenville orogeny that straddled the billion-year BCE mark. Levelled down by erosion in subsequent eras, the last remnants of this early range were then lifted from below by the subduction of the Iapetus Ocean beneath the North American plate, an orogeny also almost now eroded away. A final orogeny, during the Carboniferous, gave the region its  underlying coal (and salt) belts and mountains that are still in the process of eroding away, producing the sediment infill of the coastal plain to the east and the Allegheny and Cumberland plateaus to the east. (This is one of the I'm-not-sure mutually contradictory narratives explaining why the western plateaux have less relief than the hill-and-valley province.) For tourists who have gone to see the more spectacular vistas in the Appalachians, the idea that they are a coherent mountain system is at least made plausible by the continuity of a fault line marking the western edge of the hill and valley province, the Allegheny Front. The author of the Wikipedia article on same is adorably salty about this new-fangled woke geological jargon. 

One might think that the Allegheny Front marks the Eastern Continental Divide. It emphatically does not. The Continental Divide runs "close" to the Front, but the Front is penetrated by a number of tributaries of the Juniata, by the Potomac. No waterway breaks the Front from east to west, and the completely insane proposal for a canal from the Chesapeake to Pittsburgh envisioned a 1961 feet change of elevation from the navigational head of the Potomac to Brownsville on the Monongahela, accommodated by 246 locks over 70 miles.  

Speaking of which, this is the Monongahela, a 210km river running south to north from, counting tributaries that extend its length, very nearly the Virginia border to its junction with Pittsburgh, where it joins the Allegheny, the main headstream of the Ohio River, says Wikipedia. This sounds a bit fanboyish --what about the Missouri?-- but at least as far as the Monongahela and Allegheny are concerned, the latter river comes by its senior partner status honestly. It is altogether a bigger river, and is more economically important. Yes, the Monongahela is joined at Brownsville by the broad from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, or Baltimore, really. But the Allegheny, although not navigable far above Pittsburgh, cuts a route to within  24km of the shore of the Great Lakes at Erie, Pennsylvania. The tributary in question, the Venango, or French Creek, was the route of the Venango Path, running from Erie to Fort Le Boeuf at modern Waterford, PA. From there, during the brief high water of French influence in the Ohio country, French troops and supplies went by water down to to Fort Duquesne at Pittsburgh. Saliently, in a last ditch effort to retain Pittsburgh, the French colonial government of Illinois called out "the Illinois militia," in exactly the same way that the defence of Canada relied on the Canadian militia, giving us some insight into the trajectory of the Illinois country in 1758, and the importance of Pittsburgh to Illinois. Looking at the subsequent history of Pittsburgh as the American steel city, uniting coal from the Appalachians with iron ore coming down the Great Lakes from Minnesota. 

By flickr user "Truello" = Andy from Pittsburgh, USA - "kayaker" sur flickr, CC BY 2.0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6427587

In contrast to the Allegheny, the human history of the Monongahela is dominated by its navigation. The river name appears to refer to its precipitous and dangerous banks. Despite this, the Nemacolin Path does follow the course of the river down to Pittsburgh, and not the  Youghiogheny, the promising-looking tributary that rises in Maryland and which joins the Monongahela just above Pittsburgh. Like the Monongahela, the Youghiogheny defies all the apparent logic of the Appalachian orogeny by reaching the Ohio after obliquely clipping through the ridges and rises of the orogeny, and like the Monongahela, it has difficult and precipitous banks. Unlike the Monongahela, however, it has a series of rapids, and is better known as recreation country than as a significant logistical route, even if George Washington elected to cut off from the Nemacolin Path and descend the Youghiogheny in his consequence-fraught 1754 trip to Fort Duquesne. The navigation of the Monongahela is so important to the people who live along its banks that the historic importance of Brownsville is attributed to its brief heyday as the location of a boatyard that built keelboats that descended the Monongahela to Brownsville and from there to New Orleans at the turn of the Nineteenth Century.

Brownsville is definitely past its better days, 

but there is no way that the "historic district" along Main Street/U.S. 40 at the bridge dates from 1820. The town's decline is much more likely to have begun with the interstate network bypassing Route 40. Brownsville is one of the major excavation sites for understanding the Monongahela Culture, the easternmost extension of  the 1050--1635 Fort Ancient Late Woodlands archaeological horizon that precedes the "Mingos," generally seen as an Iroquoian ethnogenesis out of western outliers of the Haudenosaunee. Whether the Monongahela were Iroquoian-speaking is a matter of some contention, and the Mingoes are also a bit of a puzzler. Perhaps they were an abrupt reset after the collapse of the brief-lived Ohio Confederacy? 

We have, once again here, a westward link on a north-running river, albeit one that promptly reverses course as the Ohio. This makes more sense than appears, because Route 40, the National Road, does not turn north to Pittsbugh, but rather ascends a measured 19% gradient through Malden to Blainesburg in Washington County, a tiny borough that remembers the days when the wagon  trains used to knock off for the day after the grueling climb. Back on the Appalachian plateau, the road then proceeds to the outskirts of Wheeling,  where it descends to cross the Ohio, still in Virginia as this was reckoned in 1753, although the town traces its history to a 1769 founding and explains the 1779 outbreak along the frontiers as the much-delayed First Nations reaction to this violation of the Royal Proclamation. Exactly why Pittsburgh and Nemacolin's Castle/Brownsville aren't also violations requires us to define the 1763 boundary line. 

Which, as we've seen, is impossible. It's worth noting that looking west from Brownsville's Fayette County, the name of the adjacent region is explained as being due to George Washington owning much of the county, having surveyed it in 1770. It is therefore of some small interest that the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion began in Washington County, with a tavern in Brownsville named as the place it was planned. Who else here heard about the Rebellion first in Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea's Illuminatus! trilogy, as a campaign waged by Adam Weishaupt, the impersonator who replaced George Washington at behest of the Illuminati, to crush the libertarian impulse that drove the American Revolution? Check out the Wikipedia article, which vaguely identifies the Whiskey Rebellion as something that happened in "Western Pennsylvania," admittedly with name checks of the counties and towns involved, Brownsville appearing, confusingly --I'm not sure that the people who write about the era are aware of the specifics of the name change-- as Redstone Old Fort. 

The caption describes this as an aerial view of the Blue Mountain
and Kittanning Mountain tunnels on the Pennsylvania
Turnpike. By formulanone - I-76 Blue Mountain and Kittatinny Tunnels
Aerial, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=149817269

Most comment on the Whiskey Rebellion note the importance of whiskey as a product that could be moved across the difficult roads between the west and the coastal ports, which, fair enough. None  talk about the Gaps of the Alleghenies, the four rivers that break through the Allegheny Front and which were highlighted in the old turnpike days as the only routes by which wagons could reach the plateau. This post has gone on at length about Nemacolin's Path, but probably the more important were the gaps that served by the multi-route Kittanning Path from the Juniata to Kittanning, Pennsylvania, because Kittanning was under First Nations control in 1755, and would continue to be after Pennsylvania retroceded the 1758 Treaty of Easton. It also omits Forbes Road, the route that takes Rohr's Gap from Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and which is usually taken as the decisive manoeuvre of the Seven Years War in Pennsylvania (where the Seven Years runs from 1755 to 1758, plus 1762/3.) The Wiki has some nice pointers for the off-road adventurer who wants to explore where the Forbes Road might have run, the actual route being long lost. Having followed up at one point to a fuller discussion, I can report that the people who do this for fun read a lot of turnpike promoter literature, the idea of reopening the Forbes Road being out there in the Nineteenth Century alongside other visionary schemes for commercial crossings of the Appalachians. 

The Westward Expansion did not halt on the crest of the Appalachians. There was no crest of the Appalachians. It held on the impenetrability of the ridge and valley country that made it so that there was no money in crossing the Appalachians, apart from fur trade money. (The economics of pack trains, cattle drives, and to some extent wagon trains is weird, since the motive power comes out of the grass that grows along the way.) As a practical matter, there is no crossing of the Appalachians for bulk cargos like grain, and no road worth settlers' taking. The American West was opened via the Mississippi and the Erie Canal, and largely thanks largely to steam navigation, notwithstanding a mule named Sal making forty miles a day on the Erie Canal. Route 40 was good for pelts, and whiskey, but you get to Ohio via Chicago or Buffalo, which is why eastern Ohio is a backwater, except insofar as it served by the Ohio River. Which is the real reason why the Appalachians are the Appalachians, "older than the trees."