Detroit and Buffalo are very similar being located at bottlenecks of the Great Lakes Waterway and the southernmost places along Lake Erie that are good to cross into Canada. Buffalo was slightly larger in 1900 (~350k to 285k) but Detroit is now 3 times larger than Buffalo due to the auto industry. If the auto industry started somewhere else, they would probably be about the same size as each other today.
Except the Platte is not navigable, which cuts out half of the reason to value urban riverfront property. It could serve as a source of water for the city at its founding, but that was of limited value. Today, most of Denver’s municipal water supply comes over the mountains from the Western Slope, right? a distance of some 100 miles. Not such a slamdunk location in that light.
—former Denverite
Except that the Indians had always been paddling their canoes upstream as well as downstream.
Wrong. The connection between the Ohio and Lake Erie, plus the Erie Canal connecting Lake Erie and the Atlantic, formed extremely vital waterways for the western areas of early America. See above my post #10 on why Cleveland was situated where it is. Also, the Ohio was Western Pennsylvania’s main link to the rest of the world, via New Orleans. Two of my great-great-great-grandmother’s brothers from Western Pennsylvania traveled down the Ohio and Mississippi to get work in New Orleans, where they got killed in a barge collision in 1820. Before the railroad over the Allegheny Mountains was built in the 1830s, Western Pennsylvania had almost no connection to the east coast. There was the National Highway from Cumberland, MD to Brownsville, PA on the Monongahela (where they built boats that went direct to New Orleans), but even so it was not easy traveling over the mountains. That was a principal logistical reason behind the Whiskey Rebellion. The reason Pittsburgh is a major metropolitan area, the reason why the British and French went to the trouble of fighting a nasty war over Fort Duquesne way the heck out in the wilderness, is all because of the Ohio River and its strategic and economic importance.
Toronto is located on a protected bay at the southern end of an overland shortcut between Lake Ontario and the Upper Lakes. In the days when trade traveled by canoe and footpath, it was a natural place for a town of some sort. Why wasn’t a town there before the Europeans arrived? Apparently in the 1600s there had been a war, and the area was depopulated, and when numbers of European settlers arrived in the late 1700s, they thought it was largely wilderness, and were able to pick the territory up cheap from the few people who were there.
Interesting point. However, once the industrial revolution was underway (somewhere), it’s likely that some large towns (maybe not cities) would develop at water power points in New England, and shipbuilding towns might still have developed to exploit the timber…but their growth would still have been limited by transportation links to places where food WAS being grown in your scenario.
Which means nothing.
Where does the Ohio river connect with Lake Erie.
A nice story, but it has no bearing on what I said.
bump’s post explains about Houston. It was built on the somewhat navigable Buffalo Bayou–which later dredging made the Houston Ship Channel, creating the busy Port of Houston. Besides the devastation wrought by the 1900 storm, Galveston’s island location limited rail traffic because of the need for bridges. An early Houston motto: Where the railroads meet the sea.
San Antonio is not on any real body of water; the San Antonio river does not impress. Aside from the Gulf of Mexico, we don’t have any–all our lakes are dammed rivers. But the location does have springs, quite important in a rather arid state.
My hometown of Fairbanks Alaska, second largest city in Alaska was sited by accident. A riverboat going up the river got stuck on a sandbar and the captain made the trader unload all his goods so they could refloat the boat. A local goldminer who had made a fairly large strike convinced the trader to stay and set up shop to service the miners. No sandbar, or if the boat had been reloaded more quickly, and no town of Fairbanks.
What about Phoenix and Tucson? Cities in the middle of the desert with no dependable water source?
Phoenix started out as a small farming town with the use of aqueduct water, and grew quickly due to the availability of cheap land and the railroad. Tucson started out as a fort and at the time had reliable river water, and is now a college town. If there are any Arizonans here please help fill in the gaps.
The Colorado river diversion plays a major role in AZ’s growth today, as it does for Southern CA.
Ohio had a pretty large canal system that connected the Great Lakes to the Ohio.
There is at least one place where there was only about a 10 mile portage between Lake Erie and a navigable tributary of the Ohio. At one point it was expected to become a major center of transportation. Unfortunately I don’t think the Chadakoin River would have sustained a huge volume of shipping considering its smallish size.
The Beaver Wars. The Iroquois Five Nations wanted to control vast western territories because of the lucrative beaver fur trade with Britain and France. So they attacked and annihilated the Iroquoian-but-not-Five-Nations nations immediately to their west and south: the Neutral people in Ontario and the Erie and Susquehannock peoples in Pennsylvania. They also fought the Huron nation of Ontario for many years and, while not annihilating them, disrupted them and pushed them west, where they reformulated as the Wyandot nation. While the French had made friends with the Huron from the start, their mortal enemies the Iroquois sought alliance with the British to obtain weapons and strategic support. In Black Robe, the French guy had to travel through hostile Iroquois-controlled territory to reach the friendly Hurons. In Catholic school we were brought up on gruesome stories of the Jesuit Martyrs, who ran afoul of the Iroquois for the same reason. These patterns persisted until the Revolutionary War, in which the Six Nations continued their alliance with the British and hence fought the United States until the Iroquois got the worst of it and then their power was broken.
Northeast Ohio was similarly depopulated by the Beaver Wars, which is what made Cleveland so easy to obtain: The title to it was officially held by the Iroquois, but few people lived there so they didn’t mind selling it, and the deal went through all peaceful and legal-like, unlike the violent theft of most Indian territory in this country.
See post #10. The Erie-Ohio connection was made through Cleveland. The Ohio Canal was built to cross the portage divide at Akron from the Cuyahoga to the Tuscarawas, Muskingum, and Ohio rivers. So you could theoretically take a boat from New York City up the Hudson, across the Erie Canal & Lake, up the Cuyahoga, and through the Ohio Canal to the Ohio-Mississippi. Of course, the sailing ships appropriate for the lake were useless for the canal, and vice-versa for the flat-bottomed canal boats. So it necessarily involved some transshipment. But hey, it was water all the way.
The French when building Fort Duquesne and preparing to colonize the Ohio County accessed it through portage at Presque Isle (Erie, PA on the lake) over to the Beaver River, which took them to the Allegheny-Ohio. But George Washington thought the Cuyahoga was the best route to the Ohio system.
Neither Houston nor Galveston was optimal, although in the early-mid 19th century, Galveston was better suited to it than Houston was, primarily because the harbor in Galveston didn’t require dredging. They still have to dredge out the ship channel all the way from Bolivar Roads to the Turning Basin in Eastern Houston.
Once the ship channel was dredged out, it was much easier to run railroad lines straight to the port than to Galveston, and apparently is very well suited to it, since Houston’s the second or third largest port in the US by tonnage.
That was actually French Creek, rather than the Beaver River. (They’re both tributaries of the Allegheny from the north.) Considering how it was used, the reason for the name French Creek given it by George Washington is obvious. The name has stuck as a reminder of the French and Indian War which was supplied by the eponymous waterway. Its original name of Native American origin was Venango.