Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Topik 1999). Compounding this pattern was the confusing system of metes
and bounds to measure property, inherited from England, which became
increasingly out of date as the need to standardize and commodify the new
environment became ever more pronounced.
The rationalization of unknown spaces in the emerging nation was made
explicit by the famous Township and Range system proposed by Thomas
Je
erson and adopted by the 1785 Land Ordinance, later to become the
U.S. Public Lands Survey System. One of history's clearest examples of
Enlightenment rationalization of space, the Township and Range system
“drained out all substantive content from space and replaced it with empty,
exchangeable units of measurement” (Crang 2005:203). In dividing the terri-
tory west of the Mississippi into townships of six square miles, the system
brought these spaces into a distinctively Enlightenment frame of conscious-
ness and expedited the conduct of ordnance and cadastral surveys essential
to the protection of property rights. Just as they had done on the oceans,
the discourses of the grid simultaneously re
ff
ected and transformed the
ontology of land space in early modernity: “In urban and rural America, the
imposition of a grid had made the creation of transferable property easier.
Space had been made a standardized commodity abstracted from ecology
and topography” (Cresswell 2006:62).
East Coast cities desperate to carve out hinterlands for themselves sought
access over the formidable barrier posed by the Appalachians. By far the
most successful of these attempts was the Erie Canal in upstate New York,
completed in 1825. The waterway, 40 feet wide, four feet deep, and 363 miles
long, greatly accelerated the movement of goods from the Midwest to the
East and the
fl
flow of immigrants to the West, and propelled New York to
hegemonic status within the American urban system. Canals were sup-
plemented, as in Britain, by a growing network of improved roads, mostly
built by turnpike companies; the largest and best known of these was the
Cumberland, later National, Road that stretched from Maryland to the Ohio
River in 1817. By 1820, all cities along the Atlantic coast had been linked by
improved roads (Pursell 1995).
Westward expansion of people and capital were manifested in the unfold-
ing of the American “frontier,” a term loaded with ideological overtones,
which generated new geographies of centrality and peripherality as the mid-
continental agrarian regions were incorporated into the circuits of capital
centered in the east. The frontier became the primary metaphor of progress,
civilization, and national unity, albeit one purchased only at the cost of
exterminating indigenous peoples by the millions. The di
fl
usion of Europeans
across the continent and the retreat of native peoples thus formed two sides
of one process: one group's time-space expansion was the other's time-space
contraction. As the “frontier” expanded westward, the human costs multi-
plied exponentially. The introduction of the horse—unknown prior to the
European arrival—accelerated not only the movement of people, goods, and
information, but also of disease, as “Smallpox raced along the network
ff
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