Inspired by the Simpsons episode where Jebediah & Co are trekking through the wide open spaces in search of somewhere to settle.
I got to thinking, how did the old frontiersmen know which way to go?
There were no maps, the country was for the most part uncharted and to some degree undiscovered altho’ I imagine the native Americans knew their way around.
But would they have shared this knowledge? after all it was their land that was being taken over so I guess they wouldn’t be keen on giving directions.
This assumes the frontiersmen had a destination in mind. If you were looking for game in those days, the formula was pretty simple… walk around until you find some. West as a general direction was probably a good choice too.
If you didn’t have a map, you tried to follow rivers as much as possible. You needed the water and so did the game.
Frontiersmen were also good at reading the stars and following the sun. More advanced and larger expeditions used sextants and compasses to chart their routes.
Map making goes back hundreds of years to the Spanish in the southwest and southeast. Every group thereafter added bits and pieces to the maps to fill them in.
Although some people probably went off blindly, most, not being stupid, talked to one another and to the Indians as much as possible. The Indians were trading partners from the earliest days and were totally willing to share their knowledge of the land. By the time the Indians were being pushed off their lands by large numbers of white settlers on the other side of the Appalachian mountain chain, the true start of the American frontier, the continent had been extensively mapped. There had been 300 years of history by that time.
I understand what you say here but even so there must at one time (when settlers first arrived) that not a single inch of the North American continent was mapped out.
OK the Native Americans would have a pretty good idea of the lie of the land but despite all that there must have been some"blindly" setting off just on the off chance of finding a decent place, this obviously would have resulted in some settlers getting totally lost and ultimately starving to death or dying of thirst/disease.
This being the case, how did the people following them avoid the same pitfall, they wouldn’t know of the people who went before them and met an untimely end.
I suppose I’m really asking not about the frontiersmen but about the early settlers
Cortez just burned his ships and started marching. He asked the locals where the gold was and they keep pointing him over to the people way, way over there. Sorry, no gold here. It’s a wonder he lived to tell his tale and the natives must have laughed their butts off over this gullible fool. That is, until he killed them, enslaved them or passed along a plauge to them.
I don’t think they just “blindly” set off. It was incremental, and they didn’t go all that far at first. The earliest settlers stayed near Plymouth Rock or wherever they landed. Then some brave individuals would follow the river a little farther than anybody else–maybe a day’s walk , or a week’s hike. Then they’d hike back home, and tell the locals what they found. They had a whole continent full of woods to hunt and gather food, so starvation wasnt a critical problem for one man. Then a generation later, after the frontiersmen had described what was out there, families moved out and started farming.
The really brave men were the ones who set out into the deserts like Arizona,and Death Valley, not knowing where the next water supply would be.
Jim Bridger and Kit Carson, according to histories I have read, had incredible “mental maps” of the western United States and often amazed fellow travellers with their knowledge of what was over the next hill or beyond the next valley.
As I said, the Spanish were the first Europeans to systematically explore the U.S., and this started in the early 1500s. These were military expeditions, funded by the government, and map making was a specific part of their mission. The major ones were de Soto’s expedition in Florida starting in 1539 and Coronado’s trek up from Mexico in 1540. Coronado explored along the Colorado River, which was the main feature on the Gastaldi map of 1546.
Although Cartier visited Canada at around the same time, the real exploration was due to Chaplain, who established a settlement in 1608. Again, he moved along river basins, exploring first the St. Lawrence and then later, with the help of the Hurons, who became French allies, he mapped the Mississippi River basin.
The Dutch founded their New Amsterdam colony in 1624, with a fur trading outpost up the Hudson River at Albany. The local Indians did extensive trading with the Dutch all along the Hudson Valley and westward along the Mohawk. Similar trading helped the Swedish colony along the Susquehanna that everybody forgets about.
The English did have a few colonies in the 17th century, but these were mostly coastal. It was not until well into the 18th century that British settlers moved even 100 miles inland.
The time of the American frontiersman, as we know it today, was in the 19th century, after the Lewis and Clark expedition, which was primarily a mapping expedition that moved along rivers going from one Indian village to the next and using the knowledge of the locals to get along. The push westward by any number of settlers started after the California gold rush in 1848.
So, yes, we are talking 300 years of history.
Every single group that came over, whether Spanish, French, Dutch, or English, whether traders or trappers or soldiers or settlers, utterly relied on the local knowledge of the Indians. Every one of them traded with the Indians in a variety of ways. The land was normally purchased legally as well, even if the terms were not well understood by the Indians or were what we would call fair today.
There were always backwoodsmen of various descriptions. We in the U.S. make too much of the latecomers like Daniel Boone, and know too little of the courreurs des bois, the French “bush rangers” who developed the fur trade. They went into nowhere, but didn’t do it totally blindly. They worked and lived with the Indians. Étienne Brûlé, e.g., who was the first European to view Niagara Falls, was sent by Champlain to live with the Hurons to learn as much of their knowledge as possible. However, there was never much in the way of a French settlement much west of the St. Lawrence.
The latecomers like a certain George Washington, went west methodically and systematically as well. Washington was a surveyor, which was the occupation that bright technical young men went into in the mid-18th century, just as people go into computing today. He surveyed the land in western Virginia (and Pennsylvania, IIRC) to create maps and grids for future settlers. This allowed him to pick out the best land for himself after the Revolutionary War when the government made land grants available.
The notion of frontiersmen pushing blindly into the unknown is myth. People followed routes as safe as they could make them, usually along rivers and with the help and knowledge of the locals. Getting off these main routes were for a few prospectors and hunters, but they went from known bases and tried not to get too far away from safety. Many of those who did, died. Since people died even on the known safe routes, only a few antisocial idiots took too many chances.
Settlers for the entire history of the United States - 1789 on - settled on areas that had already been surveyed and laid on on precise gridworks. They had to. That was how they knew where the boundaries of the lands they had paid for were.
Nobody went off blindly. The Simpson’s Springfield was founded on a gridwork laid out in Washington, D.C. No matter what state it is in.
The relationship between white settlers/frontiersman and native americans were a little more complicated than “us vs. them”. First, almost every tribe wanted access to guns, steel knives, and many other products they didn’t have the ability to produce. Second, they might have wanted the white men as allies against their enemies, or at the very least wanted to prevent the whites from becoming allies with their enemies. So it seems logical that someone of them would assist the whites in some way.
Of course, the idea that the private ownership of land was a new concept in England in the seventeenth century is indeed absurd. Somebody is obviously a bit confused about the significance of the abolition of feudal tenures. Which made no difference whatsoever to the development of surveying.
You should also take into consideration that frontiersmen were out here for a reason. While they explored, they had something of a commercial goal in mind. The early ones were trappers which means they followed the beavers or whatever, which in turn meant following the streams and rivers. The buffalo hunters followed the heard’s migrations.
So the where was pretty much where the game was and that often was up river. When you got your pelts, it was pretty much downriver.
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Keep those two rules in mind whenever you go to Amazon. You will find people accusing authors of things they have no control over in almost every single review.
So. to Linklater.
The material I quoted is from the Publishers Weekly review. It does not necessarily have any relationship to what the author actually said. “17th century” may be be a simple typo for 16th century.
Linklater actually wrote:
He talks about Henry’s sale of monastery land on the next page.
Linklater is blameless.
I apologize for cutting and pasting the PW review without checking its accuracy, but it never occurred to me to do so, or that people would accuse the author for any mistakes made there.
Some used gold and silver for jewelery but did not make tools from the metal because it was too soft. Once the Europeons arrived the Native AMericans started forming knives and arrows out of scrape metal and many lost the ability to make the fine stone tools that they had made so well for centuries. Same goes for pots and pans, many tribes lost the a large part of their knowledge about how to make clay pots and weave baskets once they started trading with the white man.
It’s a wonder he lived to tell his tale and the natives must have laughed their butts off over this gullible fool. That is, until he killed them, enslaved them or passed along a plauge to them. 
