The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers

by Simon Winchester

  Low bridge, everybody down

  Low bridge for we’re coming to a town

  And you’ll always know your neighbor

  And you’ll always know your pal

  If you’ve ever navigated on the Erie Canal

  —THOMAS S. ALLEN, Erie Canal, 1905

  . . . the ties which bind us together would be strengthened and multiplied by these ship-canals, creating another Mississippi from Saint Louis, and Kansas, and Saint Paul, to New York and Boston. It has been well said, that the myriad-fibered cordage of commercial relations, slight in any individual instance, but indissoluble in their multitudinous combination, produces such unity of purpose, unity of interest, intelligence, sentiment, and national pride, and social feeling, and that homogeneousness of population which unites peoples and maintains nationalities. Such will grow up with a power which no sectional feeling can break between East and West, when connected together by these canals.

  —NATIONAL SHIP-CANAL CONVENTION, CHICAGO 1863, FINAL COMMUNIQUÉ

  JOURNEYS TO THE FALL LINE

  The very earliest Europeans to fetch up on the American shores—the brave and sea-weary boatloads of Norwegians, Spaniards, Florentines, Basques, Portuguese, Frenchmen, and Britons—generally took a good long time, once they had landed, to catch their collective breath.

  The basic business of settlement kept them frantic and fearful. The building of houses and stockades, the planting and growing of crops, and the establishment of protocols for hunting unfamiliar animals and for dealing with the often not unreasonably hostile local inhabitants were all very complicated, time-consuming, delicate, and dangerous. So it is perhaps understandable that they didn’t make it a first priority to engage in any serious exploration of the countryside that lay beyond the coasts.

  This began to change in about 1520, when a group of sailors from Toledo undertook an expedition into the lowland coastal forests of what is now North Carolina. Then in 1535 Jacques Cartier did much the same, exploring the interior of what is now Quebec. Half a century on, Henry Hudson was to be found deep into the state of New York. These explorers, and a host of others similarly bent on extending their coastal settlement inland, may on occasion have ventured inland on foot. Generally, though, they traveled into the interiors by the most logical passageways provided by nature: they went by water, along America’s rivers.

  For almost all of them, the pattern of their adventures was similar, no matter the latitude, the weather, the kind of foliage or wildlife, or the varied inclinations of the locals. The Europeans would fashion their canoes, outfit them with supplies, bid tearful farewells to those left behind in the stockades, and then spend many subsequent days or weeks cautiously paddling upstream, pausing every so often to write notes, paint pictures, or gingerly explore the flora or fauna in this creek or that.

  Then, in almost all cases, they would be forced to stop. There would suddenly be waterfalls, rapids, boulders, twists, and turns in the stream that made each promptly non-navigable. The would-be navigators had encountered a topographical phenomenon that is common to most rivers but which seems particularly dramatic in North America, and which proved in each case of singular importance to the eventual human geography of the land they were exploring. Villages and then towns and in many cases cities were thrown up where they had been compelled to halt their boats, and all of them remain today. The men who in essence founded these settlements, canoe-borne venturers all, enjoy varying degrees of fame or notoriety today for their geographically enforced achievement.

  One of their number won his fame for a rather different reason. He was a big, bluff, bearded, heroic, troublemaking, and (so far as his writings were concerned) highly inventive man, Captain John Smith. Geographers know him somewhat for coining the term New England for the territory he later explored and mapped. John Smith is far better known, however, for a singular episode of high romance that occurred during his time as the de facto governor of Virginia.

  He had already been amply prepared for adventure in the Americas, case-hardened by some vivid experiences in Europe, where he had been captured and forced into slavery, had beheaded three Ottoman Turks, and had briefly earned a living as a pirate. On the ship that brought him out to Virginia in 1607, he had been so troublesome that his captain sentenced him to death. He was on the verge of being executed when sealed orders were opened showing that all along the merchants who had sent him planned for him to be one of the leaders of the Jamestown colony.

  Early the following year, after the first true English settlement in the New World had begun, Smith then set sail around the vast expanse of the Chesapeake Bay. He encountered bands of local Indians and was captured by one of the Virginian chiefs, Powhatan. He was about to be ceremonially clubbed to death when the chief’s beautiful teenage daughter, at the time known as Matoaka, intervened—by laying her own head upon Smith’s and preventing her father from smashing down with his war club.

  Matoaka was, of course, Pocahontas. The young girl’s spontaneous intervention saved John Smith’s life—and then led her on a dizzying series of adventures that have since become the stuff of legend and have proved ceaselessly fascinating to generations of novelists, historians, and filmmakers. The young woman was in due course captured by the Britons. She converted to Christianity, took the name Rebecca, forswore her native lifestyle, married an Englishman named John Rolfe, bore a child, moved to London, met King James, settled in Brentford, shopped and went to the theater, and after a year, set off back to Virginia—only to fall ill while sailing down the Thames estuary, die, and then be buried in Gravesend. Outside Saint George’s Church there remains a life-size statue of Pocahontas, the noblest of all the noble savages for whom she has ever since been ambassador.

  Pocahontas and John Smith did meet once again during her sojourn in London. But despite breathless suggestions to the contrary, no serious historian believes they were ever lovers. Perhaps more important, her marriage to the tobacco-farming Mr. Rolfe and the birth in 1615 of her son, Thomas, ensured that her genes have since been spread liberally through a vast swath of contemporary American society: from the Jeffersons to the Reagans, a piece of Pocahontas seems to be just about everywhere.

  Smith’s real significance to history and to the story of America’s eventual knitting together has little directly to do with the saga of Pocahontas. Rather it comes from three separate expeditions he undertook—the first before his near-death moment with the Indians, the second two after his release. In all of them, he tried to venture short distances into the American interior along the country’s eastward-flowing rivers.

  The first try was in the summer of 1607 soon after he arrived from London, when he sailed his boat up the James River—a last-ditch attempt on behalf of the London Company back home to locate gold, to find the so-called Lost Colony of Roanoke, and, of course, to discover the fabled waterway to China with which all explorers of the day were obsessed. He found none of these things. But what he did find held an importance he did not at first realize.

  As he sailed up the James, he came to a point where he could see rising from the plains some distance to the west the pale blue dusting of a long range of mountains. And just a short time after seeing these hills, he found that his progress along the stream was firmly blocked, because the river ceased flowing quietly and serenely and was instead roiled by a series of waterfalls, rapids, and shallows. The city of Richmond now stands almost precisely where he was forced to stop and turn his boats around.

  John Smith repeated this experience on no fewer than three other rivers. Irritated by his lack of westward progress, he sailed back down into Chesapeake Bay and worked his way clockwise around it, venturing into one after another of the great swarm of streams that bled into its vastness. When he sailed up the Potomac River, he was stopped by rapids just a little above where Washington, DC, now stands. When he went up the Rappahannock, he met falls at what is now Fredericksburg; and along the Susquehanna, he came to shallows and falls at a place where there is
now a Maryland town named Conowingo, an Indian word for “at the rapids.”

  Much the same thing had happened to Jacques Cartier, sixty years before. Dangerous waters had stopped him, quite unexpectedly, in his tracks. He had been traveling westward up the Saint Lawrence River and found his way interrupted by what are known today as the Lachine rapids.* He turned around. A small way station was later built for such explorers as decided to portage around the rapids; the camp became consolidated into a village, and in time what is now the city of Montréal arose, partnered by topographic accident with Richmond, Washington, Fredericksburg, and a score of other places.

  A pattern was emerging. Crude maps readily showed it. There was a ragged line to be drawn across this corner of the American colonies, linking a variety of places where the behavior of the rivers suddenly and dramatically changed. The phenomenon repeated itself time and again, and the puzzlement and annoyance it first caused would eventually prompt the beginning of a phase of engineering that would alter the face of America for all time.

  The phenomenon, now well known to geographers wherever it may occur, is the appearance of what is known as the fall line. In the eastern part of America, it is a line marking the place where the hard rocks of the Appalachian Mountains give way to the plains formed of the sediments that were eroded from them. Hard rocks make for steep slopes down which rivers tumble in narrow, fast-running streams, impossible to navigate. But when the river reaches the fall line, there is a sudden moment of transition, a final set of cliffs over which to tumble, a last moment of white water and spray—and then the rivers broaden, they still, they run smooth and silent and deep, and as they near the sea, they start to become estuaries, all entirely friendly to boats and boatmen.

  When upstream explorers—Smith, Cartier, and Hudson first, then a host of others—reached the fall line, it became a customary necessity for them to stop, to change their cargoes onto different and more suitable conveyances, to stay overnight or over a week, to pick up guides or stores or victuals. To provide such services to them all, merchants gathered, and this coalescence of people, larger and larger each traveling season, gradually became the makings of a town.

  The cities of the eastern American fall line are well known today—Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, Fredericksburg, Philadelphia—even though the part that the very similar accidents of geology and river behavior played in their origins may have been long forgotten. Hints of the origins can still be spotted, though. Invariably there will be a bridge in each city, spanning the river that brought the first boatmen here hundreds of years before. Cast your eyes over the parapets, and the stream below will quite probably be running through the bridge fast and furious. This is where the first sailors stopped, and the speed and temper of the river are the reason why.

  The same kind of demarcation line—made by subtly different geologies but resulting in similar topographies—also affected and afflicted most of the other English colonists who had arrived in more distant places. Once their settlements were up and running in the New England possessions, they began to explore and push up the rivers, just as John Smith had done in the Chesapeake.

  Men long forgotten did the exploring. Edward Winslow went up the Connecticut River in 1632, was stopped by fall-line rapids, and settled at Hartford. Walter Neale went up the Piscataqua. Simon Willard sailed up the Merrimac. Bangor in Maine turned out to be the city waiting to be built on the fall line of the Penobscot; Augusta was that city at the rapids on the Kennebec; the town of Fall River would be erected near the rapids of the Quequechan.

  And perhaps the most economically and historically important of them all—there was the Hudson River and the point where it, too, crossed the line. This was where it became suddenly inconvenient for Henry Hudson, an Englishman then exploring for the Dutch, to pass any farther northward by sail. Here he stopped—and by his simple brief presence inaugurated the beginnings of the city that would become the New York State capital, Albany. As it happens, his discovery inaugurated a whole lot more besides.

  So on all of these rivers, beside all of these halts, there were now settlements to create. And upstream of them all there now were mountains to cross. How best to do this—especially when it was realized just what was to be found on their other side—was to become a dominant business of the America of the late seventeenth century.

  It was a business that would be dominated by the awe-inspiring immensity of the great rivers that would then be discovered—rivers that made the eastern streams puny by comparison. And it was also a time when men would start to become obsessed by a need to link all these newly found rivers together in a great vortex of travel, trade, and settlement. They would do this in large measure by the construction and use of what to America would be a wholly new invention: the canal.

  THE STREAMS BEYOND THE HILLS

  Surprisingly few of America’s big rivers empty directly into the sea. A lot of small ones do, particularly all of those that drain down from the Appalachians into the Atlantic. But they are somewhat modest rivers; some of the rivers waiting to be found in the America of the sixteenth century were true monsters, and it so happens that most of them keep their distance from the ocean.

  In that simple geographic sense, the making of the North American continent has been achieved rather differently from elsewhere. Most of the iconic European rivers—the Rhône and the Rhine especially, as well as the Thames, Shannon, Danube, and Seine—do empty into oceans. The Amazon does too, and the Plate and the Orinoco. The Niger, the Gambia, the Congo, the Nile, and Kipling’s “great grey-green greasy Limpopo,” all ease out into the Atlantic Ocean, the Mediterranean Sea, or the Indian Ocean. The Yangtze and the Yellow Rivers spend themselves in the East China Sea, and all of South Asia is watered by rivers, from the Indus in the west to the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and the Irrawaddy in the east, which disgorge themselves into the Arabian Sea or the Bay of Bengal. Even Russian rivers—the Lena, the Ob, the Yenisei, the Volga, and the Black Dragon (which is shared with China), end in oceans. And Canada’s—the Saint Lawrence, the Fraser—do too.

  But the same is palpably not true for the United States.

  Of all the great, face-of-the-nation, visible-from-space, known-by-all rivers that dominate the American landscape—the Ohio, the Tennessee, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the Colorado, the Arkansas, the Snake, the Platte, and the Columbia—just three of them open directly into salt water. Most of the shorter East Coast rivers do, but most of the continent’s big boys do not. They simply flow into other rivers. They are huge tributaries, or tributaries of tributaries, that feed into the supergiants that then do the work of carrying their waters on and into the oceans.

  With so few American rivers reaching the sea, the others simply did not exist in the minds of any passing mariners. Those could not be seen and so were left undiscovered for much longer than their size and subsequent importance might suggest. Instead the Europeans first discovered the three rivers that did drain directly into the ocean—the Colorado,* the Columbia, and the Mississippi.

  The Mississippi was the first of the three to be seen. A sinuous line approximating its position had already been marked on Spanish maps made as early as 1513; it was most probably first properly viewed six years later, in 1519. There was the certain and definitive encounter with the river twenty years later still, when Hernando de Soto, plundering and destroying his way across the southeastern quadrant of the country, stood on a limestone bluff just south of where Memphis lies today and, astonished, saw the great brown river unwinding slowly hundreds of feet below. These men, the first Europeans definitely to see America’s defining river, assembled crude log barges and managed to cross the stream, which at this point was “almost halfe a league broad,” and as an English translation of one the conquistadores’ diaries had it,

  . . . if a man stood still on the other side, it could not be discerned whether he were a man or no. The River was of great depth, and of strong current; the water was alwaies muddie; there came down the River
continually many trees and timber.

  The Colorado, fifteen hundred miles away in the Far West, was next. Its delta was spotted from the sea in 1536 by a Spaniard exploring the Gulf of California. Just as with the Mississippi, its first major exploration was made from overland, when Francisco Coronado heard rumors from local Indians of a large river across the desert: he accordingly went, saw the lower parts of the Grand Canyon, but, for some inexplicable reason, left distinctly unimpressed. Perhaps rivalry played a part: perhaps he suspected that de Soto was stealing his thunder by managing to cross the much more impressive Mississippi back east. It has never been made clear just how much the two great conquering expeditions knew of each other: de Soto certainly heard rumors of Coronado’s journeys in the desert, but of the reverse, little is clear.

  The third of the big sea-reaching rivers, the Columbia, which gets to the Pacific Ocean in today’s Oregon, was not to be found for fully two more centuries, and when it was discovered and sailed into, the explorer was not an outsider at all, but a homegrown American.

  The Royal Navy’s George Vancouver sailed past its entrance in the spring of 1792, as did an American fur-trading sailor named Robert Gray, aboard a merchantman named the Columbia. But then, while at anchor close to where Seattle now stands, these two men exchanged notes, Gray insisting he had seen muddy river waters dirtying the seas off Cape Disappointment. The world-traveling Captain Vancouver sagely expressed his doubts. But something then prompted Gray to turn back, to investigate the suspect waters, and eventually to find the chain of sandbars that marked and protected what he surmised was a river entrance. He lowered a small boat and in short order sailed past the sandbars and in through a safe passage, into the estuary of the most important river on the American West Coast.

  He named the river for his ship; only a small tributary stream was named the Gray. George Vancouver, who then used Gray’s charts to make a journey up the river a short while later, is by contrast memorialized almost everywhere, the presence of two cities of Vancouver, one in Canada and the other nearby in Washington, being a rather overgenerous memorial to one man’s failure to find the most important geographic feature in the region.