The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers

by Simon Winchester

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  * Edmund Gunter’s chain—invented by this Welsh preacher-astronomer in 1620—became a vital helpmeet for the early physical unification of America. It was a set of a hundred iron links, marked off in groups of ten by brass rings. Its total length was an exact sixty-six feet. Ten square chains, easily measured out, make an acre. Six hundred forty acres—equally easily measured, by the slow and steady process of what is still called chaining—make a square mile.

  * Precisely how the 36 section squares in a township are numbered has tended to vary with fashion. Most commonly section number 1 is sited at the southeast corner. Often sections 1–6 are then numbered in a westward direction, sections 7–12 going eastward, 13–18 back again, and so on. This back and forth is known as boustrophedon numbering, after the plowing pattern of an ancient Greek farmer behind the oxen. It is a system often used by flight attendants delivering food and drink to first class passengers.

  * This was in 1792, when Lewis had applied to join a cross-country expedition planned by a Frenchman named André Michaux—a botanist best known now for having brought the ginkgo tree to America. Jefferson refused to let Lewis join his party, saying he was too young. Lewis had made no attempt to join an even earlier venture, in 1785, when a Connecticut opportunist named James Ledyard had the entirely eccentric idea of trying to cross the country from west to east, but only after first traversing the entirety of Russia. He was arrested and kicked out of Siberia, was found weeping beside a road in Poland, died of an aneurysm in Egypt, and was buried in a sand dune. Jefferson had met the man and laconically noted in a diary that “thus failed the first attempt to explore the west.”

  * In late March 2013, two B-2s from Whiteman were ordered to fly seven thousand miles nonstop to the Korean peninsula and to drop test bombs on a local training range—all to display American readiness to a North Korean leader who was behaving somewhat tiresomely.

  * Spanish conquistadores crossed portions of the Great Plains’ southern tier in the sixteenth century. Fur traders—most of them French—knew something of the region, too, had built small trading camps, and had made maps and left diaries. David Thompson, a Welsh-born Canadian explorer, also reached the plains in what is now North Dakota in 1797, almost a decade before the Americans. There is still understandable vexation among Canadians that the reputation of Thompson—who went on to become the first white man to travel the entire length of the Columbia River—has been overshadowed by that of Lewis and Clark, whose explorations were scarcely any more arduous.

  * Horses were an unintended gift from Europe. The wild horse populations of North America had long since been hunted to extinction, and when sixteenth-century Spanish conquistadores like Coronado imported the animals, they found great favor with the native population, whose nomadic habits were quickly and profoundly changed—the buffalo being a special victim of their hunters’ expanded range. Of the thirty-odd Plains tribes, it was the Comanche of the southern plains who took to the horse with the greatest enthusiasm, a man often owning as many as thirty. The Sioux in the north had a rather more moderate equine appetite, though they were invariably to be seen mounted.

  * Scholars who study such matters claim that Clark employed no fewer than twenty-six other spellings of the tribe’s name.

  * Sculptures are scattered along the expedition’s route, from the Dakotas by way of Montana and Idaho out to the Oregon coast, though there is one at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame in Texas, another at the old International Fur Exchange building in Saint Louis, and one with Lewis and Clark by Monticello, where the expedition was conceived.

  * Including four magpies, a prairie hen, and what Clark called a “barking squirrel”—a prairie dog. Three of the magpies and the hen failed to survive the rigors of the trip.

  * Academic parsing of the Lewis and Clark papers is still a major industry, with assertions like this—Clark’s “certainty” at having seen the Rockies here—being endlessly analyzed. One writer insists that the mountains Clark saw that day were in fact the Bear Paw range, outliers of the Rockies to the north of the Missouri (a direction that hardly squares with the southwest bearing that Clark mentions here). Most analysts, however, seem content to accept his vision, and to share in his excitement at seeing for the first time mountains of which only the Indians knew.

  * Samuel Lewis was the man chosen in 1806 by William Clark, postexpedition, to produce the first-ever map of America that showed both coasts and a reasonably accurate interior—the first map of the true United States. He had a business connection with the great British cartographer Aaron Arrowsmith, whose great maps of the world, of Canada, and of India remain classics of their kind. Samuel Lewis—no connection to Meriwether Lewis—remained preeminent on the west side of the Atlantic.

  * Robert Owen’s final grand gesture was the creation of an immense and ruinously expensive cooperative community in Hampshire called Queenswood, in which seven hundred people lived, their inner quadrangle illuminated by “koniophostic light,” with conveyor belts bringing food from central kitchens to their dining halls. Couples moved in. A first baby born at Queenswood was formally named Primo Communist Flitworth. But the community never really prospered and closed after only a short while. Owen then changed gear once again and provided valuable help in settling the rival US-Canadian claims to Oregon territory, then tried in vain once more to sell his socialist ideas in Paris, where he died in 1858 and was buried in the grounds of a deconsecrated church.

  * A mid-nineteenth-century malaria epidemic in the Mississippi Valley acted as a powerful recruiting sergeant for the settler movement.

  * The South Pass, through which scores of thousands of migrants on the California, Oregon, and Mormon trails passed westward, was actually first discovered by Robert Stuart and his party of Astorians going eastward, heading from John Jacob Astor’s Pacific headquarters in 1812. The first town on the western side of the pass was Pacific Springs; here the trails parted ways, a pile of quartz marking the way to California, a written sign showing the direction of Oregon.

  * British papers wrote extensively of the migration. In 1843 the Edinburgh Review, which took a keen interest in American expansion, warned that anyone thinking of heading west could expect to meet Indians “of more than Scythian savageness and endurance, who cannot be tracked, overtaken or conciliated.”

  * Despite his rousingly corny slogan—“Free land, free silver, free men, Frémont”—he lost the race for the presidency, losing even California.

  * The miseries of the Dust Bowl years proved the fallacy of his notion that crops somehow manage to produce their own rain.

  * The No-Name, the Emma Dean, the Maid of the Canyon, and Kitty Clyde’s Sister. The first two would not survive the journey.

  * They were found in the wrecked stern of the boat a day later. All the clothes and food aboard had gone forever.

  * A Texan explorer named Clyde Eddy did manage to shoot this rapid in 1927, along with a black bear named Cataract, from the New York zoo; and Rags, an Airedale from the Salt Lake City dog pound.

  * Descendant of two American presidents—the second and the sixth—and author of the famous autobiography The Education of Henry Adams.

  * So named because it was assumed that Cartier was on his way to, or h
ad indeed found, China.

  * The claim that the Colorado reaches the sea is these days somewhat fanciful. So much water is now extracted by irrigation canals and as drinking water supplies for Los Angeles and San Diego that the river reaches the Gulf of California in Mexico more often as just a smear of damp sand. It is hard to remember that until the first dams were built in 1908, there was a moderately healthy paddle-wheeler service to Yuma and beyond.

  * The C&O eventually built its own canal, 185 miles long, which went all the way up to Cumberland, with seventy-four locks, eleven aqueducts, and a total rise of six hundred feet. But it was obsolete by the time it was completed: the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad got to Cumberland first.

  * Following his success with canal construction in England, Latrobe, a Yorkshire-born classical architect, came to America, where he was appointed one of the lead designers of the United States Capitol building—both before and after its partial burning by British troops in the war of 1812.

  * As Count Rumford, while living in Bavaria, where he acquired the title, Thompson became fascinated by the phenomenon of heat and the science of thermodynamics. He won lasting repute for inventing a more efficient fireplace, a coffee percolator, a highly nutritious soup of pearl barley and sour beer, thermal underwear, and the dessert known today as baked Alaska.

  * Hawley’s uncommon predictive ability extended well beyond his homeland. “A marine canal, the most noble work of the kind . . . would be cut across the Isthmus of Darien,” he wrote in his thirteenth essay, published shortly before his release in 1808. He had foreseen the Panama Canal more than a century before its opening.

  * In a rare misstep, Jefferson declared consideration of the canal to be “little short of madness,” and asked supporters to return in a hundred years, when it might be a more suitable time.

  * Today there are just fifty-seven locks, thirty-six of which are numbered. Efficiency and rerouting put paid to the remainder.

  * The New York Central tracks had been built on a very tight curve through the same defile that is occupied by the Mohawk River and the Erie Canal. On the night of April 19, 1940, the passenger express to Chicago was running twenty minutes late out of Albany, and its driver approached the curve at the ill-advised speed of nearly sixty miles per hour. The engine came off the track and plowed into a rock wall, causing terrific damage and thirty-one deaths. By ironic chance, a senior New York Central official was on the footplate, and while the driver and firemen were killed, he lived on quite uninjured, passing away at the age of 102.

  * Drew County is that kind of a place: the Historical Society lists among its most distinguished residents the first man to observe and prove that a squirrel can run down a tree faster than a bolt of lightning.

  * Over its 2,300 miles, the Mississippi deviates just a little over five degrees in longitude between source and sea, making it almost die-cut straight. Only the Nile is straighter, with a deviation of a mere four degrees over almost twice the Mississippi’s length.

  * There are two numbering systems on the Mississippi, and both increase the numbers going upstream, not down with the flow of the waters. From Head of Passes to the town of Cairo, Illinois, locations are given in RMs, river miles, counted up from the south. But at Cairo, which is at RM953.8, the system begins all over again, with Cairo now at zero and points like Saint Louis, Saint Paul, and Lake Itasca being given RM numbers, too (Saint Louis is at RM195). Other American rivers, like the Ohio, are counted down from their sources; this makes for much bewilderment among first-time navigators. In all cases, the mile numbers are painted white on buoys or lights that mark the edge of the navigation channels.

  * Nature is not alone. Human greed is also responsible, the main culprit being an otherwise heroic figure, Henry Shreve (the founder of Shreveport, Louisiana), who is better known for designing the grande-luxe stern-wheeler river steamers and for clearing a legendary 150-mile-long logjam on a Mississippi tributary. But in 1831, to allow his steamers faster passage upriver, he cut a deep channel through a hugely inconvenient oxbow bend, unwittingly changing the flow of the Mississippi and making it significantly more likely to pass down into the Atchafalaya.

  * This lowering of the pressure of high-speed air is an example of the Bernoulli effect, a principle of physics that became central to the much later design of the airfoil and the invention of heavier-than-air flying machines.

  * Unlike the British engine, which was named Locomotion No. 1 and for its historic first journey hauled seven hundred people in thirty-three coal wagons, taking two hours to cover the twelve miles between the mining town of Stockton and the port city of Darlington.

  * One of whom invented the cowcatcher, a uniquely American railroad symbol.

  * The wristwatch was born on the World War I battlefields from the need for officers and senior NCOs to synchronize their “over-the-top” orders in the trenches.

  * The climactic closing scene of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s classic movie 49th Parallel, released in the United States as The Invaders, was shot at Niagara and illustrates Theodore Judah’s permanent way handiwork to advantage.

  * Germans—“Dutchmen” in the local parlance—had settled Dutch Flat in their thousands after a discovery there of placer gold. It was one of the many finds in the Sierra Nevada foothills that followed the famous sighting of nuggets at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, the event that can fairly be said to be responsible for the sudden growth of San Francisco and the utter economic transformation of California.

  * Not to be confused with the cliffs on the small Chilean island, named for the Dutch city of Hoorn, near the southern tip of the Americas—but in their own way, quite as dangerous.

  * The Exclusion Act, passed into law in 1882 at the height of a wave of anti-Chinese sentiment, stayed on the statute books until 1943.

  * Arguments over the gauge took a year to settle: Lincoln signed another Railroad Act in 1863, setting the gauge as the standard used at the time in Britain on the Liverpool and Manchester line, and then everywhere else in the United Kingdom.

  * With articles such as “Convicts on New York Roads: 250 Prisoners in 9 Camps Building Highways” and a less-than-prescient “Roadside Gasoline Stations a Menace to Traffic, Says NJ Highway Chief,” together with ads for the Solvay Company’s National Road Binder and Barrett & Company’s Patented Paving Pitch, it was a rollicking read for many.

  * The only successful modern invasion of the land territory of the United States came in 1941, when Japanese forces took a thousand miles of the Aleutian Island chain in Alaska. The contiguous United States has been attacked—on September 11, 2001—but never invaded.

  * Roosevelt had, for instance, overseen the planning of the Taconic State Parkway, the beautiful, winding 125-mile road that connects New York City to the farms of the Hudson Valley—which happens to be my preferred road to take to and from Manhattan. The design of the picnic tables, my family always remarks, was FDR’s.

  * Holiday Inn was one of many. Kemmons Wilson opened his first motel in Memphis in 1952. The standard appearance of the Interstate highways reflected his view that all roadside motels should be similar also, and he began planting them at busy intersections as fast as the roads were built. He had fifty Holiday Inns in 1958; ten years later, a thousand.

  * Aviation prizes did much to stimulate early flying. Lord Rothermere at the Daily Mail got fliers to cross the Channel and then the Atlantic; the owners of New York’s tony Brevoort Hotel and of the Bulova Watch Company both gave the prizes that were won by Charles Lindbergh when he reached Paris single-handed; and Tokyo’s newspaper Asahi Shimbun offered $50,000 for the first nonstop crossing of the Pacific. American fliers won the contest, but were paid only half because they were not Japanese.

  * The great French aristocrat who had played such a heroic role in the American War of Independence had returned to America as a distinguished graybeard a half century later to perform what was essentially a yearlong victory lap. He was lauded by all. Having his portrait pain
ted by Morse was seen as something of a distinction, but being given twenty-three thousand acres of public land in what is now Tallahassee was probably more welcome.

  * The case was, however, fought out again famously in the US Supreme Court in 1853, in the now classic and widely cited O’Reilly v. Morse. Though in the main Morse was declared to be the inventor of the telegraph, the crucial chapter 8 of his claim, demanding rights to the future of his invention, was rejected by the Court as being “too broad”—a ruling often still employed today in cases concerning software inventions and discoveries.