A Change Of Pace

Over a month ago I pledged a return to regular posting on American Voyages.  I wanted to share with my readers some thoughts on what direction the politics and culture of the continent were headed in, mostly spurred on by a flurry of political commentary from all fronts in the wake of the United States Federal government shutdown.  Then, now, and as I hopefully will remain true to form for, I was and am for keeping this blog free of too much current political commentary.  Why?  Democracy has enough angry voices out there already!  All joking aside, however, in general I try to view current events in light of a broader historical lens.  This is probably due to several factors, notably an academic background in the humanities.  Yes, a philosophy student can direct all possible energy to making bold statements about post-modernism or attempt to disprove everything that came before said student, but my own intellectual journey has found an exploration of the past, with an examination of the organic development of humanity, to be far more helpful in coming to thoughts about things in general. 

That's what I had been trying to accomplish in coming to a statement about where language and the political culture surrounding language have come to.  Why?  The why is simple.  People these days fight about everything from minimum wage to military spending (and yes, most of it revolves around money), but the thing that seems to get people, even people who could care less about all the other issues out there, very riled up.  I say this because time and again I see a mother in a grocery store talking to her kids in Spanish, or some men working together again talking in that apparently taboo language, and nearby listeners almost fly into a red hot rage over the issue!  "Speak English!"  "This is America!"  Then of course, the party in target usually apologizes, in English no less, and moves on, to no avail.  Heck, Spanish is nothing, you should see the reactions I get to when I mumble to myself about how expensive gas is, en Francais, here (or even worse, in some heavily Anglo-centric place in Ontario).  A personal mumble, barely audible to most people, is tantamount to treason for some people.

Needless to say, this tends to make me irate.  Now, while I have every intention of continuing a historical overview of the history of how we came to this place linguistically on this continent, I might as well come out and say it for all those who were wondering:  Half of this country was speaking Spanish before 1848 and a Mexican presence everywhere from California to Kansas evolved on this soil at about the same time an English-American one did (to say nothing of how many native tongues were around).  For that matter, most of the people who get mad at the "Spanish threat" are buying into an old cultural imperialism despite the fact that their ancestors were probably considered second class to anything even remotely resembling a northern European, if the standards consider even other Germanic languages to be on the same level as beloved English.  There.  I said it.  Now let me say this.  English is not going anywhere.  People around the world consider fluency in it to be desirable or at least profitable (believe it or not, especially in Latin America).  English really is an amazing language with an incredible literary history.  I say this as a person of Irish Catholic and French-Canadian heritage. 

So why put off the history posts?  They take a lot out of me.  I can rant on easily like I did tonight, but I want American Voyages to be a place of learning, not diatribe.  When I write these posts, I like them to be informed, and trust me, the next few posts in this series enter a period of remarkably complex history.  Here we will see French make a thrust to the Canadian shores of the Pacific, Spanish encounter the United States again now in the friendly territories of Cuba and Puerto Rico, and native tongues get diminished everywhere.  We get to see English change into so many regional variations in both countries, and we have a lot of fact checking to do.  Each and every post, if I try to do it well, takes a lot out of me. 

And let's face it, you all really come here just for the nature photography, right?  Well, maybe not.  It has been a while since I talked about the primary focus of this blog though: the land around us, and not just where the people have gone on it.  The statistics indicate that A.V. has been opened to a much broader reader base even on an hourly basis, probably thanks to social media advertising, but also thanks to botanical and historical organizations out there.  I need to get this thing hopping again, and the heavy posts are going to have to take a backseat until we can get things up and running.  I want to share our wonderful corner of the world, after all, with the world.  In particular I would like to thank The Hardy Palm International journal, based in Vancouver, of taking note not of my diatribes, but of my coverage of fun things like trees growing where they ought not.  Wait a minute, palms, that sounds wonderful, let's go there next.

"I Don't Understand You": A History Of Linguistic Diversity In Colonial North America: Part Three, Canada Continued.

These days we tend to hear an annoying little voice calling out for Quebecois liberty.  This voice has shut up a bit ever since it might have come to its senses and realized that things could be much, much worse for the otherwise fine people of Quebec, which probably has something to do with the fact that a decent majority of her people feel that they are being treated well enough as part of a united Canada and all of them know that they have the right to not only speak French and exist as they otherwise wish throughout the nation.  More on this towards the end of the post, along with the other side, which it turns out is just as bitchy as the Francophones are over "my rights".  First, just how did we manage to get to this point, anyway?

Well, the Canada of the 1770's was a very uncertain place, full of French-speaking people expecting deportation/cultural annihilation.  French anything was certainly not in vogue back in London, to say nothing of how it was openly hated and feared in the rest of English-speaking North America.  Think about things from the American perspective, especially from the viewpoint of a backcountry Pennsylvanian or Virginian: the French were the enemy, sending those terrifying Indians to attack you for no other purpose than to either kill you outright or terrorize you into leaving your land to the beavers so they could just... profit.  That's right, they did not even want to settle down in your vacated clearing and cabin.  Maybe their allies would retake some of that property, but even they would be more than likely to return to ancient lifestyles rather than set up shop in your hard-earned dwelling.  1763 was supposed to have changed all that.  1763 was supposed to be the time where London could tell France to pack up and move on and let people freely expand into that desirable western frontier.  New colonies could even spring up along the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes, where they could connect economic opportunities with the distant Hudson's Bay Company. 

Why would the newly appointed authorities of New France, be it in Quebec or Louisiana, want anything else?

Well, for one, London wanted control.  Liberty was all well and good, but imagine how it looked from an office overlooking the Thames when confronted by the image of a set of colonies slowly growing into something far more expansive than merry old England.  If nothing else, imagine how the people in such offices viewed the revenue potential of such a vast enterprise.  Such income could easily pay for any war that these colonies would get into in the future, let alone what they had already cost the motherland in that war leading up to the victory of 1763.  Now, imagine that if the colonists got their every wish and could expand as far they wanted to across the continent.  Levying a tax on such a vast population would be difficult, and the freedom-minded people might even say no...  In fact, they already had been not even 10 years after that victory had been achieved.  More than this though, mother Britain knew that she could not indefinitely keep the winning streak she was on without a nation getting a bit overwhelmed by almost constant fighting.  She needed to keep large reserves of the American prize open as potential bargaining chips down the road.  After all, Canada was won only at the cost of turning down an even more profitable prize: Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean.  Canada was just an option, and not a trophy or a purpose, for London.

So for control, for an open hand to play, for so many things, Canada was not just given to the Americans in its entirety.  Provided that they give allegiance to a new crown, the French-Canadians could remain as they were, and this was, and has ever since been, because of the vision of one man:  Lord Guy Carleton.

Unknown artist, public domain, reference number C-002833 from the National Archives of Canada.

As I said, he is the savior of the entire concept of French-Canada, and next to George Etienne Cartier is probably the only reason that there are any French-speakers left on the continent.  He made the Quebec Act of 1774 possible, and he also saved our behinds from being taken over by the Americans during the invasion of Quebec that was one of the first strategic offensive moves of the American War for Independence and the first official take-over attempt by Americans to dominate Canada.  You would not figure Guy to be fond of anything foreign, however.

You see, Guy was Protestant, and he was Anglo-Irish, meaning that he was the product of centuries of an imperial attempt to impose English dominance over the island next door.  He was also a veteran of the Jacobite wars over in Scotland, yet another exercise in said imperialism.  By all accounts, nothing French or especially Catholic should have been in any way appealing to him to let live.  That said, we know little of his earlier conviction and personal beliefs regarding English cultural sentiments, but we do know that he was a social climber and cared very much about his military career.  Even if he was not interested in an imperialistic patriotism, he was very much interested in making the right moves.  To speak out on behalf of the conquered French-Canadians was a risky move that one would not expect of a career obsessed officer.  In the end, however, he did just that.  In the end, the Protestant Anglo-Irishman asked London to let the French-Canadians not only speak French and be Catholic, but even to judge themselves according to their own civil laws.  He also put his life on the line to defend Quebec from American attack.

Now the next part is very important.

But wait, you say, Americans of the period soon learned to love the French, especially after they would come to save the day at Yorktown and later even embrace a revolution of their own.  True, but also remember that prejudice built up over generations and hundreds of years is not something to be so easily reversed.  For anyone of British, and then by extension, American, heritage, things French were the rival at best and the enemy at worst.  When we get to language in the United States, we will also cover feelings about things Spanish, but rest assured that in Anglo-American history, both cultures were not exactly well-loved ever since the reign of Henry VIII, and yes, religion complicated matters further.  Why bring this up in a topic about language in Canada?  Well, the battleground on the topic has already existed there for much longer, and now to look at the results, we turn back to Canada.

One can pretty much be certain that loyalty was almost then guaranteed in this new Canada.  In 1775 and again in 1812, any notion of joining the crusade for freedom with the Americans was pretty much junked.  Why take chances with, at best, an unknown foreign government in the colonies, and at worst, a government that would echo the sentiments of her citizens and expunge anything French from the land?  Guy offered security and potential profit: whereas Paris once controlled the economic destiny of New France, she was now joined into a network of free-enterprise with an empire that spanned the globe.  If we consider the Quebec Act to be the political birth of Canada, then we would also have to say that the Quebecois of 1775 where positively thrilled to be Canadian, and in 1812, they pretty much confirmed that notion to curious Americans.  By 1867, when Canada came into an official existence more along the lines of what we know her to be today, French was alive and well in a Canada that had since come to also embrace English and manage to somehow not extinguish languages spoken by her native peoples.

As I have rambled on a bit in this post, we will continue down this track, which does get a bit bumpy, next post.

"I Don't Understand You": A History Of Linguistic Diversity In Colonial North America: Part Two, Canada.

The French came to North America for profit, just like the Spanish did, but they were not interested in a complicated venture of mining and looking for cities made of gold.  For one, there were no grand empires denoting any sort of mineral wealth in these parts, whether they landed in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, Florida and the Carolinas, or later along the Gulf Coast.  They did, however, find that if they demonstrated that they could play nice with the locals, the locals would offer them the other fruits of the interior, namely pelts.  Later on, settlers would come, just as they did down in Mexico, and just like what happened in Mexico, the settlers found they had an easier time of living when the neighbors were at peace.  Colonial policy thus took on a role of negotiator rather than exterminator, at least as long as the other side was willing to talk.  French settlement, however, also never really took off with the intention or effect of transforming the entire land; New France was a thing mostly of the river ways.  The backcountry was reserved for commerce and exploration.

This is not to say that the French language did not spread there.  Here, as in Mexico, missionary efforts found that the people were more responsive to their own language in which abstract concepts could better be disseminated.  The lust for Latin which was becoming part and parcel of Counter-Reformation Catholicism only played a ritual role here in a land of very different patterns of belief.  What's more, the Jesuits were the primary troops deployed in the effort, and the teaching philosophy of Matteo Ricci had now been widely introduced into efforts to spread the faith through the Society beyond the tried and trusted techniques favored by the other orders back in Europe.  On the commercial front, the voyageurs and fur-traders agreed that business went smoother when they decided to learn the language of the market rather than induct the other side into the fine art of French.  The imposition of French language and culture never became a legal mandate by the authorities, if for no other reason than it never had to be imposed; things just worked too smoothly the way they had since the 16th century.  That and, well, as had been noted above, the spread of French anything into the heart of the continent was a mix of small scale settlement and large scale commercial operations.

Thus instead of coming as a conquering force, the French world entered the scene as a new partner at best, and a manipulator at worst.  Since the primary efforts, if not goal, of the settlers was commerce, French expanded far faster than any other European language did anywhere in the New World.  By the end of their first century in Canada, Frenchmen could be heard speaking their native tongue from the Atlantic north to the treelines and across the breadth of the land to the Rockies, perhaps as far south as Tejas.  Remember how they got along well with the locals for the most part?  Well, they got a long really well, and those exploring and trading men often adopted both the lifestyle and even family of the folks they came across.  Just as was the case in Mexico, where two worlds met in a marriage and produced a new people born of both, the Mestizos, here were born the Metis.  As was the case in Mexico, these children did, and still do, speak the languages of both parents.  In the American westward expansion of the 19th century, frontiersmen and settlers would often encounter French speakers, the Firstborn among them, as far afield as Utah and Idaho.  More on the Metis in another post.

Public Domain.  The painting, The Trapper's Bride, is a work by Alfred Jacob Miller, an American artist who had a fondness of the subject matter of the northwestern frontier.  While a lot of 19th and early 20th century historical paintings have an extreme air of Romantic illusion to them, this one seems very real.  You have a bunch of the locals amused by the French trappers who are positively enraptured by their rugged and free way of life.  That, and a pretty face.

Unlike in Mexico, fortunes changed hands for French-speakers relatively soon after foundations had been laid for a permanent presence there.  The English won sovereignty of the land after they chose it as a victory prize in the French and Indian War.  Something remarkable happened, though, that had never before occurred in Anglo-French rivalry: tolerance.  In 1763, when Quebec, Montreal, Detroit, St. Louis, and New Orleans had to officially raise the British flag, everyone expected that deportations would occur, language and customs suppressed for those who remained, and the place would start looking a lot more New York than New France.  This is what went down when the Acadians were forcibly removed from Nova Scotia not even a year prior, and back in Britain cultural transformation of a defeated foe had long been in vogue, especially in Ireland, and more memorably in 1745 in the Scottish Highlands.  Just as what had happened in Mexico, however, something in the individualistic, idealistic North American air got to someone and made them say no.

His name was Guy Carleton, and he is the savior of my people's culture. 

Come by next post for more!

"I Don't Understand You": A History Of Linguistic Diversity In Colonial North America: Part One, Mexico.

Aside from the multitudes of languages and language families that existed among the First Born before colonization, popular imagination tends to view North America as being divided between a Spanish south, English center, and French north which has been largely confined to modern Quebec.  In fact, there was a decent concentration of Dutch, Swedish, Russian, German, Gaelic, and even Greek speakers who settled the continent alongside the "big three".  This resulted, along with settlement patterns and military control of territories, in a severe disruption of communication in what was otherwise a complex network of trade corridors and relatively stable alliance set-ups that could ultimately bring people, goods, and ideas from one ocean to another.  Whereas Geronimo and his Apaches found themselves imprisoned in Florida in a different world, looking at a Gulf of Mexico and sweating in the humidity, something they could not even imagine from living in their distant Arizona, the Apaches a few hundred years before would have been decently informed about and may have even seen on some trade or military expeditions.  Colonization resulted in the continent becoming very compartmentalized, ironically an issue which affects politics in relation to language in the present day.

Let's explore who came and what happened piece by piece.  First we can take a look at New Spain.

This portrait of San Bartholome de Las Casas hangs, suprisingly, in the Senate wing of the United States Capitol Building.  More on this man below.

Spanish colonization did not take over everything from San Francisco to Cape Horn overnight.  The Caribbean islands were the first lands in which settlement and language dispersal happened, with the Spanish making their first concentrated and serious colonization efforts in Cuba after having made minor settlements in Columbia and Venezuela.  The Spanish desire for conquest was primarily fueled by lusting after gold and riches, but colonization was based off of taking advantage of trade with interior peoples and establishing a foothold for Roman Catholicism in the New World. 

While on the surface, the spread of the Spanish language would seem to be a practical way of standardizing trade and commerce and making conversion to a new faith much easier, such cultural domination happened only gradually.  Missionaries trained themselves to speak various languages and traders simply relied on existing trade networks and set-ups.  Part of this was due to the work of one man, San Bartholome de Las Casas.  Simply put, Las Casas was disgusted by what he saw as the brutal conquest that Spain was participating in against the people living with him, admittedly as his own slaves, in an exciting New World where he pledged to make a life of freedom and prosperity.  His viewpoints were hard to keep to himself, and he eventually spearheaded efforts to protect the native population of Mexico from cultural annihilation.  Together with the effects that Malinche had previously had on softening the heart of Hernando Cortez, this meant that Spanish colonization started to become a much more complicated affair than just mere conquest.

Missionary efforts were helped quite a lot by this mutual exploration, though sometimes they resulted in Catholicism simply being absorbed into existing religious practices.   Due to this and other reasons, Spanish efforts did start to turn toward cultural dominance.  Spanish did not become imposed on the populace of New Spain until 1696, but legislated cultural transformation became policy throughout the 18th century, and missionary efforts which went along with military expeditions into the northern frontiers of Alta California, Tejas, and the Rio Grande valley followed this policy, especially after the Jesuits were expelled from all Spanish dominions.  While the Franciscans who followed them were not particularly fond of cultural domination, they followed the law in spreading the take-over of Spanish language and customs.  Mexican independence, followed by strong native democratic participation in the new nation, eventually resulted in a reversal of imperialistic cultural and linguistic directives.

Thus the Spanish language has not completely replaced common usage of indigenous languages in Mexico even in the present day.  While most if nearly all non-Spanish speakers in Mexico are functionally bilingual, the majority of pre-conquest languages have survived with enough speakers around to keep them alive.  The Mexican government, in fact, recognizes 68 languages in addition to Spanish as national languages, complete with all the legal rights for those language users shared by Spanish users.  This has been law since 1917.

Native culture has indeed remained dominant in some areas of southern Mexico, and Mexican culture would not be the same without them, to say nothing of how it would be without heavy infusions from the languages of those cultures into Spanish. While efforts to diversify and protect different languages have met with, let's be honest and say completely racist efforts of suppression in the United States and Canada, Mexico simply has such an inter-mixed population that such a thing would be unthinkable there.  The same cannot be said for the rest of Latin America, but that is another story for a different day, and beyond the scope of this blog, at least for now.

Next post we travel 2,300 miles northward to New France and see what happened with French in the New World.

Language In North America

This has been a long time in coming, but now seemed like a good time to discuss the matter of language on our fair continent.  First, a few key points:

1. The United States of America does not have an official language.  There are practical and historical reasons for this, which we will get into.  The state of New Mexico actually has two official languages, English and Spanish.

2.  Nearly a quarter of the people on this continent do not speak English as a first language, BUT:

3.  Many people in Mexico learn English, and as a second language, rather than as a foreign language, the most popular choice for which is French.  In my own experiences in Morelos, Guerrero, The Federal District, Chihuahua, and Baja California, I found that every person I ran into either spoke English or knew someone who did.

4.  English is not going anywhere, stop worrying.  People in China, which trumps our three countries in population all together, are learning it despite clearly being in a position where they now have the commercial and political clout to tell us to speak Mandarin and Cantonese. 

Feel better?

5.  Many of the founding fathers spoke multiple languages and considered a working knowledge of Latin and Greek to be an essential mark of a gentleman's intellectual prowess. 

6.  In present times, several hundred thousand people in the United States and Canada do not speak English, French, or Spanish as a first language, if at all, in daily use, and they have been speaking these tongues before speakers of those three tongues ever arrived on our shores. 

7.  Many if not most consumer products will have an instruction or warning label in our three predominant languages.  In Canada this is required by law; everything thus has French and English on the label.  In the United States, this is promoted by private businesses and often features multiple choices beyond even the big three.

8.  Of all the current political topics on the table, language is the one issue that seems to raise the ire in even the most politically apathetic people.  I have lost count of how many times I have been threatened with bodily harm just for speaking with someone in Spanish, or, heaven forbid, French.  

So let's start with those bold, declarative statements for now.  I want to be careful about how I introduce such a topic without causing panic (and why yes, immigration will also be on the table, probably next week) and to promote the fact that these posts, and this blog, is not attempting to be the grand avatar of some horrid political agenda.  Rather, I hope to bring some clarity to otherwise cloudy places of knowledge for you guys/you all/y'all.  I'm going to go slowly on this one, and break it down into digestible portions of history, politics, maps, etc.  Oh, expect maps.  Expect many maps.  I like maps.  Let's start with this one:

Source cited in image.  As we can see, Maine is clearly the coolest state to live in.  Not that I am biased or anything.

A nice map we have here.  Yes, we do see a lot of Spanish, but remember, this is a map with a title that should disarm hostile opposition.  In each and every one of those counties, excepting maybe some in the hinterlands and present political frontiers, English is the main event spoken outside of the home, and is definitely available even there.

Damn Foreigners And Their Donuts

My apologies, but the internet has been shaky for me at best these last few days.  I intended to finally post on some big issues, namely immigration and language, but if the cogs and wheels inside this modern typing machine can't bother to move properly until later in the evening when my brain is spent, well... it's not as if immigration and language will stop being issues in North America tomorrow or the next day anyway.  In any event, for those of us wondering what particular group will be the topic of discussion, that would be the Spanish speaking peoples to the south of us.  While I am loathe to give a preview of a post that I have no plans on getting to on a holiday weekend, my readers can probably figure out where a bilingual French-Canadian ex-pat will stand on the issues.

Hint:  The United States has no official language, and this peculiarity is kept in place by people on both the political right and left of this country, and has been kept so by such people since its founding.  Just as French speakers in Canada tell the Alliance for the Preservation of English in Canada, however, English probably is not going to go anywhere.  On the topic of culture, even though Mexican-American and Puerto Rican kids enjoy copious amounts of their traditional cuisine at home, most of the ones that I know make a grand charge to the nearest McDonald's whenever they can get the chance to, just like any other American kid.  Amazing.  No, no, don't be alarmist and think that this blog is going to turn into some political podium for the encouragement of opening the flood gates to foreigners who want to take away our apple pie and soak up welfare funds, and on the other side don't think that I am totally against the American concept of assimilation.  That's the amazing thing about the United States of America!  This country takes the world and (gasp) tries to make it work together.  Yes, it tends to get turned into something else in the name of opportunistic capitalism, but more often than not this is worthy of a laugh in and of itself.

In that line of thinking, and considering that we are now just that much closer to July 4th, take a look at this amazing scene in southern Ohio:

The fabled city of Portsmouth, Ohio.

That's right, those hills in the background are actually Kentucky, and that is indeed a Tim Horton's which has made an advance on behalf of Canada this far south.  I was in complete shock when I saw one this far from the maple frontier, hitherto thinking that they were only to be found within two counties' distance of the Canadian border.  Before I go ahead saying "assimilate this" and having y'all shake in your boots, be aware that as with all things imported into this country, even Tim's is not immune to Americanization: you can get a coffee in a dangerously large, totally patriotic extra extra extra large mug. 

Expanding the Horizon

The very first post on American Voyages defined North America as everything consisting of continental Canada, the United States, and Mexico, but technically speaking, such limits are not really being fair to what North America really encompasses.  In truth, our continental plate extends as far east as half of Iceland and as far west as parts of Russia and Japan.  Now of course, a blog about North American geography, history, etc. would be rather silly if I took some time to cover Hokkaido or Siberia, but my recent reading into everything botanical regarding Florida got me thinking about some of our outlying nearby continental islands, namely Cuba and the Bahamas.

Both places have been historically linked to the rest of North America, in some cases in far stronger ways than with the rest of their Caribbean neighbors.   Cuba was the departure point of choice of Spanish explorers and colonizers for expeditions into Mexico and Florida, and the island was lusted after for years by the United States during the late nineteenth century.  Though the current embargo keeps Cuba at arm's length from the United States, she has decent diplomatic relations with both Canada and Mexico.  The Bahamas pretty much experience economic vitality because of trade and tourism links with the United States.  Both nations feature a climate and biodiversity remarkably similar to that of southern Florida.  I have been fortunate enough to see this up close and personal in the Bahamas, but my only experience thus far of Cuba has been of a few distant glimpses of a mountainous coast from the Straits of Florida.  There are no reasons why we can't occasionally talk about her though, especially since I have some rather controversial posts about language coming up this week.  You know, posts about, gasp, that dreaded Spanish language everyone here seems to be afraid of.

Oh, and for those of us wondering, this would be where North America technically ends down south:

Thanks USGS!  This map and all sorts of fun stuff can be found here.

Defining the Not-Midwest: Settlement Patterns

"You know, I like Buffalo.  It's not quite northeast, not quite midwest, but its own sort of thing."
-Anonymous friend from Albany.

In recent years, the citizens of West Virginia have been getting uppity.  No longer content to be labeled anything along the lines of "Appalachian" or "borderline southern", the residents have desired to be counted in the census as, wait for this, midwesterners and southerners.  In the north, particularly in the panhandle, the cultural essence of the state shares much in common with the neighboring parts of Pennsylvania and Maryland, right down to local accents and dialects, and even restaurants and common retail outlets.  For whatever reason, and the next few posts will be about theorizing why this is the case, they have instead opted to be considered midwestern, which they think Ohio pretty much is.  Now, Ohio at least has been called this before.  So?  What's the problem?

Well, West Virginia is, uh, due north of the Carolinas, and south of Pennsylvania and New York.  It lies roughly half way into the eastern timezone.  It was a part of Virginia until the Civil War.  Need I go on?  Apparently I do, because it seems that inclusion in the midwest is one of the most desirable things out at the current time; heartland affiliation is passionately sought after by conservatives claiming to be American traditionalists.  That's right.  I brought politics into this.  Why?  Because they are screwing with geography and don't need to!  For the next few days, I am going to go in depth as to what I think the Midwest consists of, and to be up front and honest, I am excluding Michigan, a good third of Ohio, and most assuredly, I am excluding anything to their east.  Now, why?  Well, I am not trying to do this because I dislike the right, the left, or anything called the heartland.  I am trying to do this because I think there is more regional diversity to this country than often gets recognized.  I am doing this because history and geography deserve to be more than just political wands and magic spells.  I am doing this because I LOVE Michigan, northern Ohio, southern Ontario (and look, I just attacked a boundary), and western New York.  I think these places are unique areas that deserve more than being ignored by greater political camps who only use them to their advantage.  East coasters, midwesterners, you have great lands!  East coasters, midwesterners, don't pass these ones off as more of what you are, and come visit us!  Well, with that out of the way...

Let's start off the series with (and note, I am not using the word "lesson" here) a look into Euro-American settlement of the lands beyond the Appalachian crest.

I realize that this is a mess of map, and that some of the colors look alike.  Let's code it down, then, starting with teal.  Teal, in the valleys west of the Blue Ridge mountains in Virginia, is essentially where the cradle of western expansion lies.  It was from these valleys that the already rustic pioneer population made tracks towards Kentucky, following men such as Daniel Boone through Cumberland Gap, which is the red dot between the two states.  Following, and often with the initial Virginians, would be immigrants from Pennsylvania, including many Germans and other European immigrants who had already been settling there for about 70 years.  The expansion from Cumberland Gap started in 1775, and took off almost overnight.  By 1792, enough people had settled in Kentucky for it to become the first state west of the eastern seaboard.  By 1812, as you can see from the lighter blue on the map, the Kentuckians had spread out along the waterways of the Ohio, Tennessee, Scioto, Miami, Wabash, and finally Mississippi-Missouri rivers.  Today, the southern portions of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois bear a culture and attitude that was handed down to them by these pioneers.  They are in many ways the first midwesterners, and together with later immigrants who arrived in Chicago and from the National Road, mingled with them, and are the modern midwesterners.

As you can see, however, they did not make it all the way north.  From the upper Potomac and historic core of Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia, a great immigrant port, we have those brown arrows and lines, which consisted of migrants of what have since been referred to as the "midlanders".  With the exception of the Mormons and some religious groups from New England, most of the minority Christian religious groups settled this region, and often started here as well.  Their accents and dialects of American English are markedly different from the Virginians and Kentuckians, without much of a drawl of the south, or the nasal characteristics of the north.  The people of this region that did end up constantly pressing west took the valley road down to Virginia and mixed in with the groups in the south that moved past the Cumberland Gap.  Those that stayed often slowly moved into the interior of the Appalachians and Allegheny Plateau.  They followed the valleys and ridges, often along rivers such as the Delaware and Susquehanna.  Others cut further west on the Potomac and raced ahead of the National Road that began construction in 1811.  They settled in places like Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Cumberland, Altoona, and into Ohio.  From around Columbus and eastward, they mingled with the Kentucky crowd, and founded cities like Indianapolis and Vandalia.  In the parts of Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and a tiny bit of the southern tier of New York, they remained a more distinct culture and maintained their dialect and accents.  These regions are also dominated by a staid adherence to colonial architecture, almost as if Philadelphia extended out with the migrants.

Further north still was another great gateway of American expansion, New York City.  From here we see a dark blue stream emerge, with migration that began during the American revolution, and that really got underway after the construction of the Erie Canal.  Unlike the wilderness pioneers of the Cumberland route, or the small town and farm mentality of the National Road expansion, these settlers would be largely urban, extremely diverse, and continue as a stream of immigration well into the 1890s.  Here the American and German majorities would be joined by large groups of Irish, Italian, and Polish settlers.  In the first half of their colonization, and this is key now, they would settle in the areas around Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Erie, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, and would pretty much settle most of interior New York, lakeshore Pennsylvania and Ohio, and nearly all of the lower peninsula of Michigan.  Starting with waves of Irish immigrants who started coming to the United States (instead of formerly to just Canada) in the 1840's, the second half of this migration found European immigrants, notably those listed above, also coming to these areas.  More and more, however, the great destination became the interior gateway of Chicago, wherein they settled and spread out across the west to help form part of the modern midwestern culture.  Again, however, such a mixing did not largely happen in Michigan, northern Ohio, and so on.  These areas are to this day largely devoid of Kentuckian influence.

Of particular note are two sub-groups that took part in the early stages of this migration.  The bright yellow stands out a bit, in more ways than one.  As you can see, it starts in Connecticut and joins the Erie Canal route, but then promptly leaves the lakeside migrant routes in northeastern Ohio.  You see, back when the 13 colonies were chartered, they tended to have no western boundary and theoretically shot all the way to the Pacific.  The shore colonies from Delaware northwards were hemmed in by their western neighbors in this regard, but a few of them claimed land beyond the Appalachian frontier anyway.  Connecticut claimed the north shore of Ohio, and until 1800, when it gave up its claim, sent its emigrants to the area.  The "northwestern reserve", to this day, feels like a little bit of New England, with much of the architecture and city plans a spot on match for those back home in the "Constitution state".  The salmon arrows (sorry, I realize salmon looks almost like pink, I have a limited color selection to choose from) that extend from Albany and Buffalo towards Canada are the routes taken by the loyalists of the northeast as part of their exodus from the United States.  Much of southern and eastern Ontario, and a good portion of the land around Montreal, contains the descendants of these people.  Of course, they were not fortunate in having a canal to escape on.  By 1812, they had been joined by Americans taking the water level route through New York, and they with other immigrant groups, mainly from the British Isles and some from Germany, formed the cultural area that has since become southern Ontario.  The region, of course, has many similarities with Michigan and many more with western New York, with the key difference being obvious.

Finally, we have the pink lines representing French colonization.  The French were very compact in their colonization process, probably because they were largely frontiersmen looking to trade and hunt with the native peoples.  Their path of settlement is quite linear compared to the other migrant pathways, and they usually stuck quite densely to the waterways, especially along the St. Lawrence and Detroit rivers.  Much of their presence in the interior of the continent outside of Canada is now largely in names of cities,counties, and rivers, with the exception of places such as northern Maine, the eastern upper peninsula of Michigan, the metro-Detroit area (where many family names are still French), and scattered locales such as Vincennes, Indiana.  Though largely an evaporated influence, the French-Canadian-American presence still adds something unique to parts of the interior, notably southeastern Michigan.

So how do we know how much this has impacted the land, aside from romanticizing the effect immigration has had on this country largely considered to be a melting-pot in which immigrants are absorbed into the American cultural machine?  Well, we could stop to remember that absorb is perhaps a less effective word in describing the evolution of a nation that was essentially added to by all these peoples.  We drink far more coffee than tea, spaghetti is a common place dinner, more perogis are consumed here than anywhere else on earth outside of Poland, and Lutherans and Catholics far out populate Episcopalians.  That said, Lutherans are going to be a lot more common west of Lake Michigan than east of it, perogis are common menu items in Detroit and Buffalo, and you will be hard pressed to find a Tim Horton's in the United States outside of western New York, northern Ohio, or Michigan.  Interesting cultural coincidences, no?  Still skeptical?  Well, come back for the next few days as we delve into this a bit deeper.  You can also check out this interesting linguistic map in the meantime.

Now, I am sure my cultural familiarity with the places and peoples mentioned will be contested, but I can at least be counted on to be an authority on things Michigan, western New York, and Ontario, having lived most of my life in one of these three places.  Come by tomorrow to read more of why I think the Lakes/Nearwest region is unique, and of course, check out this earlier post that explains what I think is unique and special about the actual Midwest.  As always, feel free to leave comments, even and especially if you want to tear me apart on this.  My blog is not a place for totalitarian academic speeches, it is a place where perspectives are shared.