Wired into Nature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Schwoch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Communication Networks ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
Electronic Communication ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
White House ◽  
Atlantic Seaboard

This book is a study of the telegraph in western North America, concentrating on the latter half of the nineteenth century. A number of distinguished books and articles have been written about the telegraph and the nineteenth-century American experience. For the most part, however, this scholarly work is geographically partial. The standard histories of the American telegraph are stories of the East Coast and the Atlantic Seaboard, the growing Midwest, and service to urban areas. This book looks toward the West. The narrative includes landscapes and ecosystems, meteorology, surveillance, and containment and conflict with Native Americans. Major themes include the high ground, the signal flow, the state secret, and the secure command. Opening with discussion of the first attempts to bring the telegraph to the Trans-Mississippi West, the book concludes with the consolidation of the secure command of electronic communication networks in the White House during the Spanish-American War, detailing the transformation of electronic communication networks from continentalism to globalism. The terrain of the narrative incudes the Great Plains, the Southwest, the Pacific Coast, the Rocky Mountains, the border with Mexico, and the subarctic and arctic areas of North America. This book presents an interpretive approach that centers on environmental, climatological, military, and surveillance issues as key factors in the history of electronic communication networks.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Schwoch
Keyword(s):  
Communication Networks ◽  
North American ◽  
Electronic Communication ◽  
Spanish American ◽  
Contemporary Society ◽  
Spanish American War ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
White House ◽  
Electronic Networks ◽  
The North

The chapter opens with discussion of the secure command of electronic communication networks in the McKinley White House during the Spanish-American War. The chapter then discusses the legacy of how and why the telegraph wired into nature on the North American frontier, the shaping of electronic networks for security and surveillance, and the implications of that legacy for contemporary society.

Tracing the Fur Trade

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert J. Cromwell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Historical Archaeology ◽  
Pacific Northwest ◽  
Fur Trade ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
Interethnic Relationships

The origins of historical archaeology in the Pacific Northwest of North America in the mid-twentieth century concentrated on the excavations of British terrestrial fur trade forts, but little synthesis and inter-site comparisons of available data has been completed. This chapter presents a comparative typological analysis of these early-nineteenth-century British and Chinese ceramic wares recovered from the Northwest Company’s Fort Okanogan (ca. 1811–1821), Fort Spokane (ca. 1810–1821), Fort George (ca. 1811–1821) and the Hudson’s Bay Company’s Fort Vancouver (ca. 1825–1860). This study helps to reveal the extent that early Victorian ideals gave precedence to the supply of British manufactured goods to these colonial outposts on the opposite side of the world and what the presence of these ceramic wares may reveal about the complex interethnic relationships and socioeconomic statuses of the occupants of these forts and the Native Americans who engaged in trade with these forts.

North America

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Pierotti ◽  
Brandy R. Fogg
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Homo Sapiens ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
The Other ◽  
Intermountain West ◽  
Reciprocal Relationships ◽  
Historical Relationship

This chapter explores the historical relationship between Indigenous Americans and wolves illustrated through the stories of Indigenous peoples of North America, especially on the Great Plains and the Intermountain West. Tribal accounts have not been previously employed in scholarly examinations of the origins of “dogs” or studies of domestication. All the Plains tribes examined closely (Cheyenne, Lakota, Blackfoot, Pawnee, Shoshone) have stories characterizing wolves as guides, protectors, or entities that directly taught or showed humans how to hunt, creating reciprocal relationships in which each species provided food for the other or shared food. Indeed, evidence from tribes suggests a coevolutionary reciprocal relationship between Homo sapiens and American Canis lupus that existed until at least the nineteenth century.

Maize Productivity in the Eastern Woodlands and Great Plains of North America

1999 ◽  
Vol 64 (3) ◽  
pp. 499-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sissel Schroeder
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Nuclear Family ◽  
Eastern Woodlands ◽  
Resource Productivity ◽  
Maize Productivity ◽  
Mean Size ◽  
The Mean

Archaeologists and ethnohistorians have long been interested in quantifying potential maize productivity for late prehistoric and early historic Native Americans of the Eastern Woodlands. Maize yields obtained by Native Americans using traditional farming techniques in the nineteenth century are compared to yields obtained by nineteenth-century Native Americans using plows, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century farmers in Illinois and Missouri. The result is a notion of average resource productivity for maize that is more reasonable and modest than previous estimates. In this study, the mean yield of maize for nineteenth-century Native American groups who did not use plows was 18.9 bu/acre (stdev=4.1) (1,185.4 kg/ha [stdev=254.1]). Yields on the order of 10 bu/acre (627.2 kg/ha) probably are closer to the average prehistoric yields that were available for subsistence purposes. The mean size of gardens cultivated by nineteenth-century Native American families without plows was .59 acre (stdev=.45) (.24 ha [stdev=.18]). These newly compiled data are used to generate a model of nuclear family household economy and minimal and maximal garden sizes given different levels of maize productivity and consumption. Population estimates made on the basis of previous assessments of high rates of resource productivity will need to be reevaluated.

Nutritional Success on the Great Plains: Nineteenth-Century Equestrian Nomads

2003 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph M. Prince ◽  
Richard H. Steckel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Varied Diet ◽  
The Face

Native Americans have often been portrayed as merely unfortunate victims of European disease and aggression, but data on human stature show—and travelers' accounts and skeletal records confirm—that the equestrian Plains nomads were ingenious, adaptive, and nutritionally successful in the face of exceptional demographic stress. Much of their extraordinary achievement can be attributed to a rich and varied diet, a modest disease load other than epidemics, a remarkable facility at reorganization following demographic disasters, and egalitarian principles of operation.

Native American Networks

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chad Anderson
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
North America ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Cultural Beliefs ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Native North America

Networks describe how people and places are connected. In Native North America, these connections took the form of kinship, trade, and various forms of alliance—all of which overlapped in ways that make it impossible to analyze one category without considering the others. At a basic level, all of these networks depended on the communication of information, which circulated as fact and rumor across the continent. Varying by region and topography, Native peoples traveled by canoe, foot, and (from the colonial period onward) horseback along trail networks that linked diverse Native American towns and facilitated both continental and transatlantic trade and communication. The study of networks, whether in the form of trade, kinship, or Native-defined alliances, allows historians to transcend typical boundaries of analysis, such as borders drawn by European cartographers. Throughout the 18th century and even into the 19th century, these borders were fictions, as Native Americans continued to control much of the continent. An abundance of archaeological evidence reveals the exchange networks that spread material items and cultural beliefs long before the colonial period. Some of the most well-known pre-Columbian networks involved agriculturalist settlements often grouped under the label “Mississippian,” which thrived along the Mississippi and its tributaries from approximately the 11th through 16th centuries. But other networks crisscrossed the continent, from the Great Plains to the Southwest. These long-existing but shifting networks facilitated the later spread of European trade goods. To varying degrees, following the arrival of Europeans, Native peoples participated in a new system of exchange, capitalism, which commodified the natural world and has drawn considerable attention from scholars. Political power in Native North America was dynamic, organized by kinship networks that were both local and regional in importance. Families belonged to larger groups known as clans, which facilitated connections beyond the village. Typically, Native peoples traced these clan origins to some other-than-human ancestor. Kinship did not necessarily represent biological connections. Through ceremonies, Native peoples created what scholars call “fictive kinship” to create networks across distances and even into Euro-American communities.

Landscapes, Ecosystems, and Prevailing Westerlies

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Schwoch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Eastern North America ◽  
Technical Expertise ◽  
Western North America ◽  
Relative Lack ◽  
Riverine Systems

For the telegraph in the mid-nineteenth century, eastern North America held an abundance of trees for telegraph poles; ample riverine systems for transporting telegraph poles and equipment; a growing system of railroads, post roads, and canals; and established telegraph entrepreneurs. None of this was available in western North America. Centered on the Great Plains, this chapter discusses the challenges of the high ground: the lack of trees, the extremes of climate and topography, the relative lack of navigable riverine systems and other transportation conduits, the reliance on trails, and the lack of technical expertise for establishing the telegraph in the Trans-Mississippi West. The chapter concludes with the completion of the Transcontinental Telegraph in 1861.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Schwoch
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
National Security ◽  
Communication Networks ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Electronic Communication ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Privacy Concerns

The Introduction lays out the narrative themes of the book, defines the narrative scale and scope of the book, and offers a brief trajectory of present-day issues relevant to the study, including surveillance, government policy on Native Americans, corporate and government practices regarding national security for electronic communication networks, privacy concerns, environmental issues, and climate change.

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