Of even less interest than my lifelong obsession with golf course architecture is my ever-growing fascination with watersheds, which is sort of golf architecture writ large. I spent a decade in Chicago explaining to locals that Chicago’s suburbs had to be the site of a lesser Continental Divide between the Great Lakes / St. Lawrence watershed and the Mississippi Valley. I was greeted with blank looks until finally a local yachtsman told me that there was an immense monument to the French voyageurs Marquette and Joliet in the inner suburb of Portage, IL where they carried there canoes about a mile from one vast watershed to the other. That’s why Chicago exists.
The investor’s website Credit Bubble Stocks cites a 2010 paper on “Portage: Path Dependence and Increasing Returns in U.S. History” by economists Hoyt Bleakley and Jeffrey Lin on the importance of portages or waterfalls in the locations of cities of America: e.g., Washington, Philadelphia, Richmond, Augusta (Georgia), Chicago, South Bend, Louisville, the Quad Cities, Sacramento, Albany, Montreal, Edmonton, Ithaca (NY), and Lowell (MA).
America’s Founding Fathers, such as Washington, a surveyor by training, and Franklin, were obsessed with these kind of geographical questions. The American Revolution might not have taken place if the Founders weren’t aware of these geographic shortcuts in the vast interior that made London’s restrictions on settlement west of the Appalachians so much more intolerable.
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That’s FATHER Marquette, to you, son. Perhaps Vatican II had thoroughly debased parochial-school education by the time you were in grammar school, but Fr. Marquette’s discoveries figured prominently in my history lessons.
http://www.unz.com/isteve/whats-my-most-boring-obsession/#comment-569616
Years ago, as we drove the road that crosses Everglades Narional Park to Flamingo, we passed a sign that read, “Continental Divide, Elevation 6 feet.” Of course there has to be one, I had just never thought about it.
Right because who can forget the sons of liberty dumping tea into the Cumberland Gap. Yea the Proclomation of 1763 was a sore spot but the founding fathers were far more interested in the lands that made up the Northwest Ordinance than they were the lands beyond the Appalachians.
Since you’re interested in this stuff (I am too):
Wikipedia has a list of cities on the fall line, where rivers transitioned from navigable to non-navigable.
Akron is at the location of an Indian portage between the Cuyahoga and Tuscarawas rivers. By using the portage they could go from Lake Erie to the Ohio River.
About four years ago, Ohio put signs on I-71 marking where the Ohio River watershed meets the Lake Erie watershed. It is surprisingly close to Cleveland, i.e. Most of the state Darin’s to the river rather than the lake.
Really? This sounds exactly like my dad, constantly talking and reading about the early explorers of the Americas, especially the written accounts of their encounters with Indians, but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone into golf architecture… Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
You didn’t by chance collect antique glass bottles as a kid?
Right because who can forget the sons of liberty dumping tea into the Cumberland Gap. Yea the Proclomation of 1763 was a sore spot but the founding fathers were far more interested in the lands that would make up the Northwest Ordinance which they knew far less about than the lands that now make up Tennessee and Kentucky to which access was increasingly granted. In fact “surveyor” Washington himself got 20000acres of that land for his services. Intensity of support for the revolution and proximity to the 1763 line are basically inversely related. By 1776 anyone with any kind of clout had had their concerns about trans-Appalachian lands resolved. Maybe a few Scots-Irish joined a continental army levy but the issue of the 1763 line merited only a clause in the declaration attached to a complaint about restricted immigration to the US. Something tells me the immigration restrictions lead to the rvolution argument won’t play well here.
I’m always astounded remembering how ball-busting Anglo’s and Euro’s just walked out into vast wilderness spaces like they owned the f***ing place. In my stomping grounds, I think about De Soto’s expedition scrambling around the Deep South in hot, boggy, hilly, insect-infested terrain.
It’s funny how city centers shift, based on modes of transportation at the time. The Chattahoochee used to loom really large in Atlanta’s urban layout (Johnson Ferry Rd, Powers Ferry Rd). Now, the interstate highways are like the old rivers and the city center is concentrated around the nexus of I-75/I-85.
In retrospect, somebody should have stopped Eisenhower from building the highway system.
Maybe Sailer can go plunging in one.
Maybe Siskel and Ebert were right.
Right there in the title you announce that this post is going to be 30% more boring than your usual boring posts. And yet we click and read anyway. That’s how much we love you.
(And, as a bonus, the post is not boring at all.)
Watershed anomalies can be interesting. For example the tiny portion of Canada that drains to the Gulf of Mexico, or the even tinier portion of Italy that drains to the North Sea.
And here I was thinking your post would be about the unsung virtues of Natty Light, Steve.
Some of New York state is in the Mississippi catchment – so we Northeasterners are actually learning about our own local community when we read Huckleberry Finn.
watersheds are at least 1000 times more interesting than golf architecture or, indeed, golf (or any sports — sorry!), so…more watershed posts, please! (^_^)
Watersheds are great. Fascinating to follow on a map of England the line separating the North Sea rivers from the Irish Sea ones.
“Right because who can forget the sons of liberty dumping tea into the Cumberland Gap. Yea the Proclomation of 1763 was a sore spot but the founding fathers were far more interested in the lands that made up the Northwest Ordinance than they were the lands beyond the Appalachians.”
That depends on whose Founding Fathers you are talking about. If you are referring to the powdered-wig types in Boston, that’s one thing. But some of us refer to the Founding Fathers as John Sevier, Issac and Evan Shelby, et al who led America’s first amphibious invasion and subsequently became the first governors of Tennessee and Kentucky. They didn’t have much interest in Ohio, except to march up there and kick Chief Cornstalk’s ass for terrorizing the Virginia frontier. And, yes, they took more than a casual interest in the watersheds west of the Appalachians, that’s how they successfully pulled off their invasion. So Steve, you’re in good company.
Here is where your weird obsessions combine. ..at Ridgemoor Country Club (mostly Langford and Morneau with 18 by Tillinghast) there is a plaque marking the high water mark of ancient Lake Michigan from the last ice age that marks the continental divide between the Great Lakes warershed from the Mississipi watershed. Of course reversing the Chicago River changed that but still.
Review of Ridgemoor – fun but overtreed. Halfway house is touched 5 times, so it is one of the the best lubricated membership. Ridge CC (on the same terminal morraine but on the South Side) is of corse the leader in the clubhouse for drunkest membership).
Oh, crap, something went wrong with my links at 7:51am. Here’s the first one, the amphibious invasion that knocked the Indians out of the Revolutionary War.
http://historyconnections.info/vf/vfdata/rankin/madison_pioneers/Lanford_Slaughter/Slaughter_Francis_1779ChickamaugaExpedtn.pdf
And the second one, the attack that opened the Ohio watershed for settlement.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Point_Pleasant
Scott Sumner normally fixates on monetary policy (NGDP LPT!), but he waxes geographic on the “driftless area” here.
hbd chick is right – watersheds are way more interesting than golf course architecture.
Did you know that you live within 50 miles of a continental divide – the one dividing “drains to the Pacific ocean” from “drains to nowhere”? Yup – Lancaster and Palmdale are in a very large endorrheic basin which covers most of Nevada and Utah too.
I guess you have a point old white man and I was overly snide in my response so I can see how you want to prove me wrong, but Steve mentioned two founding fathers by name both of the powdered wig variety or at least beaver hat variety in Franklin’s case. So you can’t really blame me for dealing with those founding fathers. That’s especially the case when you talk about reasons for the revolution starting because it was the powdered wig types that were the motive force behind declaring independence. Franklin especially was far more interested in the upper mid west states because he realized you could feed a continent with the calories produced in that farm land. This is far less true of the more Appalachian areas. The point stands that as far as the reasons for independence as articulated in the declaration the western lands were a footnote like immigration restrictions. That was my only point I don’t know enough about the three men you mentioned to dispute what you say.
Add New Orleans to the list of cities that started out as canoe portages. In this case, it was from Lake Pontchartrain/Bayou St. John to the Mississippi River. It’s not really a watershed, though. Just a shortcut to the interior that was easier than paddling upstream in the big river.
Interesting about Portage, Illinois. The (sub-)continental divide continues up to Portage, Wisconsin, where the French explorers portaged from the Fox River (which flows to the St. Lawrence) to the Wisconsin River, (which flows to the Mississippi).
Google says I may be the person who brings Jonathan Meades to Steve Sailer’s attention.
look! an article about watersheds!:
This 19th Century Map Could Have Transformed the West
(^_^)
Hopefully, I’m not coming at this so late I get marked as a spammer, but PA has fascinating watersheds. Most of the state drains into either the Ohio, the Susquehanna, or the Delaware, except for tiny parts that feed into Lake Erie, the Genessee River, or the Potomac.
http://www.lyco.org/Portals/1/ConservationDistrict/Images/PA-Watersheds-lg.gif
Go nuts!