Solarpunk Jules

Anti-humanism across the technological spectrum

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:13:02 -0500

One thing that both extremist environmentalist and blind-faith artificial intelligence activists have in common is their belief around humans, and both sides of the technological spectrum have reasons against the existence of humans based on their energy use. The fact is that your average human will consume a baseline of ninety watts of power to stay alive¹ (approximately the same energy use as a low-powered computer), not mentioning all the auxiliary energy needed to clothe, house, transport, and feed them.

Artificial intelligence

Proponents have argued that artificial intelligence is actually less energy intensive than humans, since the energy use of a computer in, say, copy editing is much lower than the energy use in the human learning the same skills. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, argues that the energy needed for AI queries is significantly less than humans: the present energy use is greater for AI models, but that training an AI requires much less energy than raising a human for twenty years.²

Artificial intelligence is currently only used in industries that do not matter in broad terms, like phone lines, or advertisement.³ But companies are actively looking to use it in cultural industries, like modeling, movies, advertising, and article writing. I, personally, believe that is anti-civilizational, in that it actively detracts from human culture toward a cheaper simulacrum of humanity.

Ecological argument

Many ecologists believe that energy use of humans, including transportation and diet, is way greater than can be sustained by our planet. A moderate position in this belief is that human standards of living and energy demand should shrink to match this fact.⁴ This is known as the degrowth model. This self-imposed austerity has its own spectrum, from mindful living to severe asceticism.⁵

Farther than this position is the rabbit-hole that is antinatalism, or the demographic issue, popularized by Limits to Growth, fascists, and other eccentrics. Groups such as the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement believe that it is imperative to avoid having kids, and in some cases, commit suicide, since these are the greatest choice one can make when it comes to individual resource consumption.⁶

Humanist defenses of energy use

Pope Leo XIV has recently put out an epistle arguing that technology in general has a neutral stance, but the current wave of AI growth has not promoted the best ideals: namely, not respecting human dignity, or the environment.⁷ Current doctrine says that humans are endowed with a spirit to create beyond what already materially exists. This mirrors other esoteric thinkers, such as Software Pagan,⁸ who believe that the “struggle against entropy” is the essence that separates living beings from the rest of the material world, and therefore they must continue to live.

2,000 kilocalories per day = 8,368 kJ ∕ 86,400 s∕day ≅ 97 Watts ↩︎
The Indian Express, Sam Altman Unfiltered, streamed February 20, 2026, YouTube, 00:27:50. ↩︎
I started writing this in 2024, when the scope of AI was a lot smaller than it is now. ↩︎
Ted Trainer, The Limits to Growth Analysis of Our Current Situation (The Simpler Way, November 20, 2023). ↩︎
In full disclosure, I am probably on the far end of here. I think about total energy consumption much more than any other issue. I believe simple living, anti-consumption, localism, and other similar lifestyles are the correct way to live with minimal impact. ↩︎
Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, “Q: Is parenthood bad for Earth’s ecology?,” n.d., published in Ecology. ↩︎
Pope Leo XIV, Magnifica humanitas (Holy See, 2026), 101–105. ↩︎
Software Pagan, “Order and Chaos: Indo-European Vitalism and Morality, published April 18, 2025 in The Barrow. ↩︎

The State of Beggary

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

ed.: this text has been reproduced from an article of the defunct Chicagoan magazine.¹

McHoehandle and I stood at the sloppy counter at Louie’s, just making things worse by drinking a Stein of what Louie puts out under the label, and libel, of beer. A few months ago, a report went the rounds that beer was going to follow Middle West Utilities’ lead and go down to fifteen cents. It never did. McHoehandle can afford twenty-five-cent beer. I cannot.

“Do you know,” said McHoehandle, wiping the collar of foam from his lips with the back of his hand, “I am getting tired of this depression.”

“What’s the matter with it?” I asked. McHoehandle works for a university and hasn’t had his salary cut.

“It depresses me,” he said. “I don’t like to think about people who haven’t enough to eat. I have too much.”

“How often do you think about people who haven’t enough to eat?” I asked him. “I didn’t think about them very often, at first. I am very lightly endowed with human pity, and as long as they didn’t stand in front of me and starve I didn’t think about them. But now they’re everywhere. They’re on the boulevards and in the parks. They’re on shady streets in nice neighborhoods and around the corner from expensive restaurants. You can tell they’re starving by looking at them. Their nerve is gone⁠—they don’t even beg. You see a thousand every day. I tell you, it gives a man a turn. Let’s have another beer.”

But you can’t drown the world’s sorrows in Louie’s galvanized beer. I doubt that anything exhilarates when you get into McHoehandle’s mood. I’ve been in it for months. But I’ve been afraid to open my trap. It’s like the plague that knocked Europe into a cocked hat about five hundred years ago. The best people sat around in their ruby-studded castles drinking out of gold goblets and keeping the shades pulled down so they wouldn’t have to see what was going on beyond the moat. If you try to tell people what you’ve seen on West Madison Street or under Wacker drive, they tell you to stow it⁠—aren’t they feeling terrible enough without having to think about that? Sure they are; so you stow it.

I don’t suppose talking about it, especially in this maudlin fashion, does any good. But nothing else seems to do any better. The people who still have a little money left have dumped millions into the relief chests. I suppose there has been a little graft, and a little waste⁠—but not much. There are too many honest people keeping an eye on each other for anyone to make a man-sized haul. Where has it all gone?⁠—and it has all gone. Into thin soup and thin stew, into more thin soup and more thin stew, into the bellies of the starving. When it’s all gone, they’re still starving, every last one of them. And when you think of that, you say to yourself, “What in the devil is going to happen?” But you don’t know the answer to that, so you cut short your ponderations with, “good God” or “it’s terrible,” and go on about your business, if you have any.

At least that was the way I faced the problem until about a year ago, when I was put back into circulation by one of the great, teetering corporations of this city. I had my choice of begging or writing. Begging, I knew, had always been the more profitable enterprise, in flush times anyway. But it meant a great deal of footwork and no less of hat-tipping, neither of which has ever been my special forte. So I decided in favor of a life, while it lasted, of letters.

The position of such a person in the economic maelstrom is in many ways enviable. He does not have a steady income, which is decidedly disadvantageous, from the spiritual standpoint at least; and there is, or was, until recently, a certain embarrassment connected with the inability to provide a business address. On the credit side of being unemployed, however, there are plenty of items. It is, first, a sobering state for a young man who had always assumed, with all young men, that the world was his oyster. Moreover, happy is he bound to be who escapes the exasperating fate of the wage-slave, even if he escapes, perforce, by the back door. And finally, and most importantly, to the man who has lost his job there is thrown back the curtain on golden vistas of perspective: he is able to appreciate the terrors as well as the discomforts of destitution, and to feel them, if only vicariously.

It is no small solace to a man of my kidney to be able to chuck the frigid no of refusal for “I’m sorry, partner, but I’m out of work myself.” The distaste for encountering beggars and having to refuse them has always been acute in me. I have tried various methods, such as ignoring them or crossing to the other side of the street, but no such device has ever given complete satisfaction. Several times a day, and the several grew by bounds as conditions went from worse to worse, I found myself face-to-face with the sad spectacle of a man whose eyes glittered with hunger and whose lips implored a nickel. The plain, peace-loving citizen who does not enjoy abusing these wraiths with the why-don’t-you-go-to-the-proper-place type of sermon has no alternative: he has to say no. And saying no twenty times a day not only tries a man’s patience but tends, after a while, to take the sun out of the sky. The clinging, if erroneous, suspicion that each “No” deprives a life, however unworthy, of its last mote of hope does not add to the cheer of the evening meal.

This stony manner, so indigenous to success in finance, is particularly hard, it seems to me, for the green and tractable young man to assume. And I, although I am aging fast, am a green and tractable young man. I would be of no use behind a wicket, but I have an extremely nifty light gray suit, which a man in Selma, Alabama, sold me three years ago by telling me that I looked like a million dollars in it. The lining looks like the flag Napoleon took at Austerlitz, and the edges of the sleeves and collar are somewhat rubbed down, but I will say that when I wear it, even now, I look like a millionaire. That this was no idle conceit, I realized by checking the number of times I was approached for small coins when I wore the million dollar garment against the number of times I was approached when wearing my less-imposing Richman Bros.² creation of blue serge. The count was so distressing that I have, actually, abandoned the millionaire model altogether.

There are hoboes, of course, in this hobo capital of the world, and begging is a career with them, as gunning is with the Capones and banking with the Morgans. You couldn’t get them to do anything else. About half a million of the professionally tattered blow in and out of the city every year, with stopover privileges. Fifty thousand, I suppose, comprise the home guard, sauntering amiably up and down West Madison, North Clark, and South State streets, sojourning more or less regularly in the county brig, and earning their cigarette money by repeating at local elections. Like the German Army in 1915, every time one of them falls, another fills his place. In the old days, it was a fair gamble that every bum who asked for a bit of change was simply pursuing his chosen vocation, and it did not take the measure of a man to spurn him.

Today, we know that half the feet that shuffle wretchedly along the streets once wore shiny new shoes, at least on Sundays, or reposed under mahogany desks, or even on them.

They stand in the doorways and watch for a kind face⁠—each snarl of refusal brings them a little nearer the nadir of their self-respect. They were not born to the purple of beggary. They wear glasses, so many of them, and it is an obvious truism that few denizens of the blind baggage ever have their eyes examined, the better to read Spinoza or Hegel. They straighten their spotted ties. They wash their shirts and handkerchiefs in the lake each morning. They wipe their wayworn shoes with newspapers, and they brush their dirty clothes with their dirty hands. They try to stop a prospective philanthropist without being seen by the passing crowds, and they do not look up, ever.

These men are no bums. Half the day, they are trying to get work, knowing they can’t, and half the day, they are trying to get money, somehow, to keep them⁠—and too often wives and children⁠—alive. It is pretty sad. Who wants to hear their story, who, hurrying by, has the time or the patience? So it’s just, in a shameful voice, “Can you help me out, mister?” and a worrying world doesn’t differentiate, and the shame in the voice is unheard.

Young men, old women⁠—young men and old women never begged in this country before. A man goes down Van Buren Street, thirty-five perhaps, with a woman carrying a baby⁠— “Can you help me out, mister?” An old man with a roll of newspapers under his arm stands in front of a cafeteria on Wabash Avenue looking in the window, hard; the manager comes to the door and the old man moves on, stumbling. A boy of twenty-five, his cheap blue suit clean and frayed, falls down on Fifty-Fifth Street and doesn’t move; they lift him up; he isn’t drunk; he has no voice and his lips say “Food;” he is carried to a restaurant; he drinks a bowl of soup in one gulp, and falls asleep.

I sit at home at my typewriter; the back doorbell rings all day. Kids eight and ten have cookies. A fat, rheumatic old man has home-made horse-radish. A thin woman in black, thirty or thirty-five, has macaroons. All ages⁠—both sexes⁠—have baskets of sundries. A man plays the violin, very, very badly, in the street. A middle-aged man, with glasses and a white shirt, can repair anything. A little fellow with no chin and red eyes says, “Can you help me out, mister, or are you out of work yourself?” A man of fifty, with a horizontal forehead, looks like a killer, asks for a few pennies to help him buy a drink. I live on the third floor. I quit answering the bell⁠—it doesn’t do any good.

Who tries to differentiate? Who wants to hear a life story these days? Always there is the profound suspicion that they are charlatans, all of them, all professionals. Another year of this and the suspicion will be gone.

Begging was once a good racket, like banking. There was money to be made. They arrested a man in 1929 in front of the First National Bank when they discovered that he lifted himself up on his crutches at the end of the day and swung around the corner where a Cadillac was waiting. He had $40,000 in the bank. If you were deformed, and still not horrible, and you had a good “spot” and took care of the copper on the beat, you made good money. If you were deformed and horrible, you could move through the streets and old ladies in lace collars would give you a quarter and keep their heads averted. There is still some of that, and who differentiates? The old fellow who played his blind violin at the corner of Michigan and Harrison for fifteen or twenty years died a few months ago and the thirty cents in his cup was all he had.

They tell me there are 1,558,843 “gainful workers” in Chicago, a conservative 750,000 of whom are out of gainful work. At least 130,000 families are subsisting entirely on charity. The third winter is coming up. Private and public strongboxes are almost hollow. Relatives and friends are on their uppers, after two years of doubled burden and quartered income. Some of the half million will die this winter⁠— some died last winter and the winter before. The soup lines and the relief stations will be crowded with deserving and undeserving, and there is no one to differentiate. I suppose it would take a lot of money to differentiate, for to differentiate means to investigate. The givers of funds would set up a holler, I don’t doubt, if half their money was used in the administration of the other half. They want to feed people, any people. That is laudable in itself. Giving, this winter, will not be easy for many, and many will have to give. But I think it would be intelligent if as much as half of what money there is, is spent in feeding the people who deserve to be kept alive. I suspect that, generally, three-fourths of the money feeds men whose one contribution to civilization, if they are given a chance, is liable to be the reproduction of their kind.

The communists, or perhaps I should say Communists, are getting along very poorly. Communism, like all great institutions, requires a certain amount of cash on hand, and the exchequer of District 8 is moaning low. Together with this, the Cause has been met so coldly by the nouveau pauvre that plans for the Big Push, purportedly from Moscow, have been indefinitely postponed.

Observation on a modest scale has convinced me that there will be no revolution, even if Hoover is reelected.³ Riots there will be, riots like last winter’s: weak, sporadic, unorganized. This thing has struck so suddenly⁠—three years is an instant in social cataclysms⁠—that its victims are too punch-drunk, too staggered, to fight. It will take a hundred years more of this. It will take a peasantry, and we haven’t had a peasantry for the last sixty-five years. As for the beggars, the vocation boys, they do not make good revolutionists⁠—Communism promises work for all, and that is no attraction.

There is, it is true, a lighter side, much lighter, to the whole business. Among the “upper middle classes,” among those who are reasonably certain that they will have enough to eat, and enough to drink, come what may, or come what may not, it is a very graceful matter to be out of work. It is, I find, actually becoming fashionable. You can readily imagine what socially desirable people were turned loose by the collapse of the better banks and business houses and by reductions in the staffs of newspapers, universities, hospitals, libraries and executive departments of major industries.

The members of this new leisure class rather enjoyed weekending all week, golfing, getting out in the country, lolling around the art museums or the clubs or the zoo. As their ranks increased, they adopted a definite attitude of smug content. They belonged. People who went downtown every day were vulgar. A man with a job was a menace to organized society. It will be too bad if things pick up, because this admirable new social structure will, I am afraid, have to be abandoned. If things go on as they are, however, it will only be a question of how much longer the decent, law-abiding citizens of this community are going to tolerate the employed.

Milton S. Mayer, “The State of Beggary: a Venerable Profession Comes Into its Own,” The Chicagoan, vol 13:1, (August 1, 1932), 15–17 ↩︎
A defunct men’s clothing brand, popular in the 1930s. ↩︎
Hoover was not reelected. Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1932 by an electoral college landslide. ↩︎

River Towns

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This page is a transcription of a text by Marie E. Meyer published in 1926.¹

Much has been said and written about frontier life in Iowa. The grim battles waged by the pioneer against droughts, locusts, prairie fires, and blizzards have long been a favorite topic with the historians, but the role of the Mississippi River has been curiously neglected. Of course the stories of Dubuque, Davenport, Tesson, and Le Claire are well known, but they belong more to the soil of Iowa than to its great river.

Along the western banks of the Mississippi are little towns that have been made and broken by the river. Many are quaint, old-fashioned villages hugging the banks of the river and sheltered by high bluffs from the cold winds that often sweep across the outlying prairies. Quiet and serene, they give the impression of being quite content with their situation, with never a dream of expanding inland. They have an air of permanence, these old river towns. Other settlements may be tentative communities of transient pioneers, but the present inhabitants of the little river towns are the grandchildren of the founders. Facing the river, they seem to belong to it, having no desire to climb the bluffs and live on the prairie beyond. Uneven sidewalks of flagstones, abandoned sawmills, warehouses gauntly fronting the river and slowly sinking into decay, the faint trace of a boat yard, an old boat landing now overgrown with weeds and willows⁠—⁠are all mute evidences of a past that was part of the great river. Drowsing away, living much in the past, these towns seem to be awaiting the whistle of the long silent raft-boat which will arouse them to activity once more.

Rambling, old houses of nondescript architecture line the streets that parallel the river or cling to the steep hillsides of the diagonal coulee. Since lumber was cheap, only the best material was used in the mansions of a generation ago, and the rafts yielded their choicest logs for the homes of the river men. Doors with transoms above and kitchens finished like a steamboat cabin are eloquent reminders of the owner’s occupation. Occasionally, the pilot house or the cabin of an old boat was the beginning of a comfortable residence of later days.

These are not typical country towns, for the farmer and the river man had very little in common. The farmers came to trade and sell their produce, but they were really outsiders, onlookers at the various activities that filled the lives of the river folk. A certain dash, an air of sophistication, and worldly experience born of many trips to New Orleans and Saint Louis distinguished the dwellers of these towns from their rural neighbors.

Transportation of both freight and passengers was made by boat. As late as 1900, several towns in Scott County boasted no railroad connections with the outside world. A hack made daily trips of fifteen or more miles from Le Claire to Davenport during the winter months and steamboats served in the open season. The mail, carried by rail to Illinois towns opposite, was ferried across to the Iowa shore. And crossing the Mississippi in an open boat when the ice breaks up in the spring is no enviable task.

The river man was a type. Just as the sea captain was devoted to his ship, so was the river man devoted to the river and its traditions. An aristocracy of the river was the natural product of the golden age on the Mississippi. The names of captains, pilots, and lumbermen were known from New Orleans to Saint Paul. Sons followed in their father’s wake and, learning river lore from childhood, they often served apprenticeships as cub pilots under men who had been associates of Mark Twain.

After the ice went out in the spring, every able-bodied man was ready to go on a boat, and he stayed until the fleet laid up in October or November (today, it may be only a government boat engaged in surveying, dredging, or marking the river). With their season’s earnings captains, pilots, deck hands, and stokers all settled down to a comfortable and idle winter. Of course, it can be truthfully said that many of these families who enjoyed beefsteak in the fall probably ate liver in the spring. But merchants were lenient in advancing credit, so why bother about bills? No river man of the old school found employment elsewhere when off the river, for he knew no other trade or business.

Saloons, gambling rooms, billiard parlors, dances, and other social activities provided entertainment and recreation during the long winter months. Show boats, which have recently found a place in American literature, visited these river towns regularly. Just as the circus band drew small boys to the tent, so did the calliope draw them to the river bank. The saloon flourished above all other places of business, drink being the greatest weakness of the river man. A town of about two thousand inhabitants at one time boasted of thirteen saloons! Tying up for the night at a town was the signal for a celebration, and probably more than one member of the crew needed assistance in returning to the boat. No wonder the notoriously tough river towns were the object of many revivals and prayer meetings!

The typical river man was a genial fellow, liberal with his money which went more easily than it came. He was not much worried about the future, for he assumed that the river would always provide a living. So it is that few river men died rich, and many in their old age depended solely upon the small pension granted by former employers.

How the heart of the merchant in river towns was gladdened in those old days when a steamboat whistled, and a boat was put out to shore, or when a landing was made! No wonder he slept above his store, for boats came and went by night as well as by day. Once, while looking through some papers in my father’s desk, I found an old order for supplies to be ready when the boat passed Le Claire. It contained thirty-six items, including canned goods, fresh fruits and vegetables, hams, toothpicks, soap, molasses, and brooms. A footnote attached, stating that only goods of the best quality would be accepted, was proof that the crews were well fed, and that the packets spread a bounteous table for the passengers.

River cooks were noted for their skill, and many favorite dishes among the housewives in river towns today were originally prepared on the steamers. With a great abundance of everything, the packet cooks found no difficulty in creating dishes that would tempt the traveler. Three or four kinds of meat, innumerable vegetables, both hot and cold breads, fruits, and pastries were included in each meal. Indeed, I have very pleasant childhood memories of stolen visits to a boat whose cook was a favorite of all children, and never did we leave empty-handed. Amusing stories are often related about these cooks; of he who carried salt in one vest pocket and pepper in the other pocket, and of the one who annually cast a pan of biscuits into the water in memory of all river cooks who were dead.

Since life was centered about the river, it is only natural that the arrival and departure of a boat was more or less of an event to the children. Many youngsters learned to read by spelling out the names of favorite boats, and such fascinating names they were⁠—⁠Phil Sheridan, Red Wing, Northwestern, LeClaire Belle,² Eclipse, Diamond Jo, North Star, Saturn⁠—⁠all symbolical of romance and adventure. Mothers constantly worried about their children playing on log rafts, or riding the waves in small skiffs, and scarcely a season passed when some child was not pulled out of the water more dead than alive. It was perfectly natural that the river children took to the water like ducks. Truant boys could usually be located along the river bank or on small islands playing Robinson Crusoe in a shack of logs and willows.

Just as the cowboy had words and phrases peculiar to his life and occupation, so the river man’s vocabulary abounded in provincialisms and characteristic terms. No little girl ever dreamed of calling a rope other than a line, and all unskilled work on a boat was referred to as decking. The cook’s helpers were called “slush-cooks”; roosters were the men employed on raft-boats, possibly so called because they slept anywhere, always ready to go out on the raft. To address an old river man by the title of captain was the height of flattery.

Of course, the river man was a teller of tales⁠—⁠many true, some the delightfully improbable yarns spun on the deck, in the engine room, or around a card table. Politics had no fascination for these men, and rarely did a discussion of that kind disturb the minds or excite the temper of the genial group. Stories of races between rival boats (that most famous of all races between the Natchez and the Robert E. Lee still excites comment), storms on Lake Pepin, tie-ups in Cattail Slough, broken rafts, black nights when the rain fell in sheets and only instinct guided the pilot’s hand, of the mate who ruled his crew by carrying the spoke of a wagon wheel about with him⁠—⁠all these and many more offer a rich field of romance and adventure for the professional story-teller.

Tragedy stalked along the Iowa shores in Civil War times when cholera raged along the river. When the Canada, a North Line packet operating between Saint Louis and Saint Paul, cleared Saint Louis, she was free from the dread disease. But case after case broke out, and just below Le Claire a landing was made, and the victims were quickly buried on a nearby bluff. The graves were marked by rude stones from which the lettering has long since been obliterated by wind and sand. And again from the lower Mississippi during the Civil War comes the story of the Sultana which was blown up near Memphis, Tennessee, and fourteen hundred Union soldiers lost their lives.

We children were much interested in one white-haired pilot who for years brought a packet up from Saint Louis. He had given his dog to some friends, and every time the packet whistled, “Maje” dashed to the boat landing, eagerly and affectionately greeting his old master. In his younger days, Maje had been trained to look through the boats and barges for stowaways and seeping water. No watchman was needed to bring out the former, and Maje’s wet feet were proof of the latter.

Since the steamboats all had distinguishing whistles, no one needed to scan the river to learn what boat was coming in. Only a few weeks ago, I heard one of the few remaining steamers whistling a greeting to the captain’s wife as the boat went up the river. But the long rafts, carefully guarded by the towboat and the bow-boat which used to float slowly past our house, have disappeared forever. Gone also are the packets white and trim, and the side-wheelers churning the water impatiently, with the captain on his bridge giving orders to the sweating, hurrying crew, while presiding over all the bustle and apparent confusion stood the pilot, serenely aloof and remote behind his wheel, confident of his knowledge of an ever-changing river.

Possibly not many people know that the Mississippi contains a series of rapids between the city of Davenport and the town of Le Claire. A government canal and locks have done away with the necessity of running the rapids, but before this canal was constructed, every boat was steered over the rapids by a special pilot. Raft boats never ventured over these rapids at night, and when the water was low, the raft was divided and taken over in sections.

Whoever has lived in an old river town who can not recall the ghostly play of the lights along the shore as the pilot sought a landing; the creak of the lowering gangplank; the shouts of the mate and the crew as they made fast the lines? But the old river life is gone. The last raft floated around the bend of the river fifteen years ago, and many of the old river aristocracy and lesser members have passed on. Only the quiet little river towns remain, sole relics of the romantic time when the Mississippi was the principal highway to Iowa, when steamboating was an art as well as a job, and when culture and gaiety reigned in the ports on the Father of Waters.

Marie E. Meyer, “River Towns,” The Palimpsest, vol. 7:12 (1926). ↩︎
From Le Claire, Iowa. Officially spelled LeClaire. ↩︎

Chicago Amtrak Directions

Thu, 09 Oct 2025 17:43:47 -0500

Chicago’s Union Station is the most connected rail station in the United States. It is a double stub-end terminal, meaining that trains can come from either the north or the south.¹ As it turns out, all Amtrak lines, except for the Empire Builder and its subsets (Hiawatha, North Star), come to the south stub-end.

States accessible to the north (red) and south (blue) from Chicago Union Station. Illinois has stations in both directions.

Most of this is due to Lake Michigan. Any direction to the east has to go around the south shore, including Michigan to the northeast. Thus, the north side has only two cardinal directions (north and northwest), whereas the south has the other six: everywhere from California to Massachusetts.²

Most states are accessible from Chicago. Two (South Dakota and Wyoming) have no stations whatsoever. Alabama and the New England states have only regional access. And the other two are obviously not reachable by rail.

There are a couple of under-utilized through-running platforms. Many rail users think that more through-running is a necessary improvement. ↩︎
You can find the detailed alignments from Andrew Lynch’s beatiful “Chicago Track Map,” last modified in 2025. ↩︎

Early Alaska Transportation

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The period of evolution from man-carried burdens to railroad transport, from raft and dugout to steamboat, is coextensive with the advance of man from savagery to civilization, a period to be measured by many thousands of years. In Alaska, however, the most primitive modes of transport are often found side by side with the most highly developed: the prospector leaving a railroad coach and shouldering his heavy pack becomes a beast of burden, as was the man of the stone age; the tourist may photograph from comfortable steamers the little bark canoe of the Yukon native; a modern ocean steamer anchored at Nome will be visited by the primitive skin boats of the Eskimo.

Less than two decades ago, no Alaskan valleys had echoed in the whistle of the locomotive, and a score of its navigable rivers had never felt the rhythmic chug of the steamer. Now¹ there are over seven hundred miles of railroad in the Territory, and some form of steamboat service is found on nearly all Alaskan rivers. Of the tens of thousands who essayed the heart-breaking task of dragging and carrying their supplies through the passages in the mountainous coastal barrier, there were probably few who could realize that within a few years it would be possible to reach the Yukon by rail in not-as-many days as they took months for the journey.

Dog team pulling a wheeled vehicle over the railroads tracks on the Seward Penisula, photo by J. B. Mertie.

Transport is the very essence of frontier life. Progress of industry and settlement are absolutely controlled by the means of transport. The pioneer whose mission is to obtain or to harvest rich deposits of placer gold can, by hard labor, carry out his projects through means of transport of his own development. If, however, other resources are to be utilized, such as the fertility of the soil, beds of coal, deposits of copper and gold veins, and if permanent settlements are to be made and homes to be built, steamboats, railroads, and wagon roads must be provided.

While much the larger part of Alaska is still almost as inaccessible as it was in its earliest history, yet the railroads, the automobile roads already built, and the well-established steamer service have revolutionized the transport system. This fact, and this alone, has made possible the beginnings of a systematic industrial development of the Northland. The relative efficiency and approximate cost of the most important means of transport in Alaska are shown in the following table:

Relative Efficiency of Alaskan Means of Transport

Type	Weight carried	Miles traveled in 24 hours	Approx. cost per ton mile	Notes
Backpacking	50 lbs. per man	12	$25.00	Wages $7.50 per day.
Pack horse	200 lbs. per horse	12	$12.00	Based on actual charges.
Dog sled	100 lbs. per dog	15	$2.50	Based on actual charges.
Wagon road	500 lbs. per horse	20	$0.60	Two-horse team at $20 per day.
Railroad²	700 tons per train	300	$0.08	Frontier railroad.
Canoe or poling boat	1000 lbs. per boat	20	$1.50	Two men, wages at $7.50 per day.
River steamers	500 tons	250	$0.05	Average of river steamer freight.

Though the cost figures given in this table are only an approximation, yet they give a measure of the difficulties with which the pioneer who provides his own transport has to contend and show why large industrial advancement is only possible when modern means of transport are available. Historical evidence of this truth is also found in the evolution of Alaskan settlement and industry. Until the Klondike gold was discovered in the 1890s, the only settlements in Alaska of any importance were at tidewater. The great interior contained only a few roving prospectors, and a dozen trading posts on the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers were the only permanent settlements. The extraordinarily rich gold deposits of the Klondike and later those of Fairbanks, Nome, and other camps, made possible certain industrial advancements, but these constituted no permanent prosperity. It is only the construction of railroads and wagon roads which has led to the development of the resources of inland regions other than the rich placers.

Commercial shipping

When we took over Alaska from Russia, commerce, as has been previously pointed out, was confined to that of the fur trader along the coast and the lower courses of the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers. The coastal settlements were served by a few smaller steamers, and extraneous commerce was by sailing vessels chiefly operating between Sitka and Petropavlovsk on the east shore of Kamchatka. Once a year, a ship arrived direct from Kronstadt on the Baltic. The few overland journeys of the Russians were by dog teams, and traffic on the rivers was by skin boats or scows.

The steamers carrying the Commission and the troops to Alaska in 1867 were among the first ocean steamers to be seen in these waters.³ At this time, the steamer John L. Stephens also made her first voyage from San Francisco to Sitka. This inaugurated a monthly service which was the only communication with Alaska for twenty years, when a semi-monthly service was begun.⁴ These vessels ran from San Francisco to Sitka and Wrangell, with occasional stops at other settlements in Southeastern Alaska. After 1871, when the Cassiar gold discovery of British Columbia was made, a field which was reached by the Stikine River route, the Wrangell call be came the most important, for this city was then the industrial center of Alaska. It could also be reached by a small vessel operated by the Hudson Bay Company which gave an intermittent service between Victoria and Wrangell.

For over twenty years, the traveler who wished to go beyond Sitka had to rely on the occasional vessels of the Revenue Cutter Service or the fur companies, or on the small craft of the fisherman and the small trader, for there was no regular communication with other Alaskan ports. There was no mail service outside of Southeastern Alaska until 1891, when a contract was made to carry mail to Unalaska during the summer months.⁵ It fell to Alaska Commercial Company, which took over the fur trade of the Russian American Company and obtained the first lease on the Seal Islands, to establish communication with Alaskan ports other than those of Southeastern Alaska. The company posts on Cook Inlet, Kodiak, Unalaska, and Saint Michael were reached by vessels running to San Francisco. At first, small steam schooners were used, later vessels of a thousand tons or more, Early in the ’70s, a more or less regular communication was established with the principal ports, later developing into a regular carrier service. By 1879, the steamer St. Paul was making a seasonal call at Saint Michael, ant the famous little steamer Dora was supplying the ports on the Aleutian and Pribilof islands. Later, the steamers running to Kodiak and Saint Michael became public carriers, and the same was true of the river steamers on the Yukon.

The “Dora,” photo by D. F. Higgins

The Dora is perhaps the most famous of Alaska’s vessels, and has a record of forty years of service. At different times, she has served as a poacher of seal on the high seas, as a transport for furs and supplies, as a passenger boat, and finally as a fish boat. Originally built as a brig, she was later given steam power and for years plowed the dangerous waters of the Bering Sea. From 1891 to 1900, the Dora plied between Sitka and the ports to the westward as far as Unalaska. In 1900, she carried the local traffic from Saint Michael to Nome and other settlements along the southern coast of the Bering Sea. Later, for many years, she was the mail boat between Seward and Alaska Peninsula ports. The Dora, in spite of her great age, was always a staunch sea craft and weathered many a fierce gale that carried her hither and yon, for she had little steam power. She has perhaps the record for carrying more passengers with more discomfort than any vessel which ever reached Alaskan waters.

Though the reaching of Alaskan ports in the early history of the Territory presented many vexations, delays, and difficulties, these were the least of the transportation obstacles met with by the pioneer. Once landed with his outfit, he had to make further progress entirely on his own efforts. It was then a question of packing his supplies on his back, building his own boat—or, where conditions favored, making use of dog teams.

Sleds

Countless generations of Alaskan natives have used the dog for transport, and he is to Alaska what the yak is to India, or the llama to Peru. The climatic and topographic features of the Pacific seaboard are not favorable to sledding: the winter snows do not last long enough; and the heavy timbers and steep slopes also make the use of dog teams impractical. But the gently rolling upland region of the interior with its broad flat valleys and lack of thick timber furnished admirable sleigh routes, especially over the smooth surfaces of the many watercourses. The long cold winters also favored sled transportation, the season extending from November to May. The snowfall seldom exceeds three feet, but it remains continuous all winter, a fact which also favored the use of sleds.

Hand sleds have been used as well as dog sleds, and many a gold seeker dragged his heavy sled for hundreds of miles. From 150 to 200 pounds is all a man can pull over an average trail. But in sledding over river or lake ice, he can take advantage of fair winds by employing improvised sails of the type used on the upper Yukon during the Klondike rush. The dog sled is, however, the typical mode of transport in inland Alaska as well as for the tundra region of the Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean. Originally there were two rather sharply differentiated types of sled dogs in Alaska: the malamute or Eskimo dog, and the “husky” or dog introduced from the Mackenzie valley, probably by the Hudson Bay traders.

Dogs

The malamute, originally the sled dog of the Bering Sea and Arctic coastal region, is now widely distributed in the Interior. The same family of dogs is found along the entire Arctic coast of Canada and in Greenland, and has provided the power for most of the sleds of the Arctic explorers. Their short, stocky build, their strong shoulders, their pointed ears and noses, and their gracefully arched tails are familiar to all through the illustrations in narratives of polar adventure. A good-sized malamute will weigh 75 or 80 pounds. The malamute varies in color from almost snow white to black, gray, and mottled.

The husky has longer legs and body than the malamute, is loosely built, and has a dense though shorter coat of fur. His resemblance to a timber wolf is very strong, and he appears to be a much more powerful animal than the malamute. He is more vicious too, but he is nevertheless perhaps the favorite sled dog, especially in the heavy freighting of the interior.

The Yukon Indians also had a dog on the first coming of the white man. It resembled the malamute but was smaller and not so powerful. These dogs, generally called siwash, are probably the degenerate offspring of the coastal malamute; and generations of underfeeding and abuse have produced an inferior breed. It is probable that the Athabaskans, the true Indians of the interior, got their first knowledge of sled dogs from the Eskimo.

The pure breeds of both malamute and husky are rapidly disappearing along the well-traveled routes by the inbreeding of native with imported stock. Many drivers prefer these cross-breed dogs, the offspring of native dogs and collies, setters, pointers, spaniels, Newfoundlands, and Saint Bernards. The pure-bred imported dogs, while more intelligent and tractable than the native animals, have not their endurance and resistance. One of the great faults is the tenderness of their feet on a rough trail. Some of the half-breeds, however, combine the endurance of their native blood with the intelligence and gentleness of their imported ancestors, and these make the most valuable draft animals. A common practice is to use an outside dog as the intelligent leader of a team of more hardy native dogs. The leader controlled by the commands of the driver, guides the dogs that follow.

Dried salmon is the standard dog food throughout Alaska. It is surprising how much work a dog can perform on a pound and a half of salmon a day. Large dogs engaged in continuous travel should, however, receive from two and a half to three pounds of food a day. They show the greatest endurance when fed a diet of fish and a cereal, such as rice or oatmeal, and bacon or lard at a ratio of 1:1½; and the best practice is to cook all the food, which, of course, is necessary for the cereal. Dogs are fed only at night, no morning or noon meal being provided. Most of the Indian dogs, and indeed many of those owned by whites, in summer are much undernourished. This makes them most arrant thieves, and every cache of provisions must by carefully barricaded against dogs. Even well-fed sled dogs are not to be trusted and will devour or destroy footwear and even their own harness. The native dogs require no housing in the coldest winter weather and, after being fed, will curl up and sleep in the snow, even though a blizzard be howling. Their shaggy skins are proof against the mosquito, ever present in the summer, but these insects sometimes torture them by stings about the eyes and nose.

Backpacking man and dogs (photographer unknown)

There is no standard size for an Alaskan dog team. A prospector may drag a sled loaded with his 200 or 300 pounds of supplies with the aid of a single dog, or a driver may have a team of nine dogs or more. A driving team, however, usually includes not less than five or not more than nine dogs. Much larger teams are sometimes used for heavy freight. There is a known instance of dogs being used for hauling the heavy steel shaft of a gold dredge from Knik, at the head of Cook Inlet, to the Idiatarod district, a distance of nearly five hundred miles; the route led over a mountain pass in the heart of the Alaska Range and, though the journey was performed under great difficulties, the trip was completed successfully.

Sled dogs are hitched both tandem and in pairs, with an extra leader. For tandem driving, traces are used, and the rig is not unlike that for horses. In pair driving, the traces of each dog are merely hitched to a single tow line. If the dogs are staggered along the tow line, the team can adjust itself to any width of trail. The fan-shaped rig of Greenland, by which each dog is attached to the sled by a separate tow line and the team spreads out radially, is not adapted to narrow trails and is unknown in Alaska. Each dog is fitted with a padded leather collar from which his traces reach back and are attached to the tow line.

Distance of a day’s trail for a dog team and weight pulled vary so much, depending on condition of trail, on gradient of course, and on weight and endurance of dogs, that it is difficult to generalize. Where a new trail is being broken and where there are steep gradients, 50 pounds to the dog is an ample load. Indeed, in some cross-country journeys, this load may have to be reduced to 30 or 40 pounds. On the other hand, over a smooth, hard, level trail, strong dogs have been known to drag as much as 300 pounds. It is probably safe to say that a good dog on hard, level trails should haul 100 pounds—that is, about 25 percent more than his own weight. this load he will not take over 15 or 20 miles a day. Reduce this weight to 50 pounds, and the dog should make 25 miles a day. The famous dog races at Nome have shown that a dog team hauling only the empty sled can average nearly 90 miles a day for five days.⁶ The winter mail contracts call, on the average, for a speed of 22 miles a day; but the carriers frequently exceed this, runs of over 40 miles a day having been recorded. The mail carriers haul from 50 to 75 pounds of weight per dog.

The Alaskan dog team. Dogs are used for hauling sleds over the snow on cross country trips, photo by J. B. Mertie.

Many long journeys have been made over well-beaten trails by good “dog mushers” where a day’s average travel was 25 miles. This, however, is hard work for the driver as well as the dogs. The driver seldom rides on the sled, except on down grades, but runs behind, guiding and steadying it by the handle bars. Where a new trail has to be broken through new snow, a man on snowshoes goes in advance of the team.

The dog sleds are 8⁠–⁠12 feet long and about 20⁠–⁠24 inches wide. They are strong, built of hickory or oak, and made not too rigid. A certain looseness and pliability allow the runners to follow the tracks. Small sleds weigh about 75 pounds, large ones nearly 200. For freighting, flat sleds are used, sometimes with a “gee pole” for guiding at the front where the driver helps haul the load, sometimes with the gee pole at the rear. Travel sleds are made with a basked superstructure and two handles at the rear. These are used by the driver to guide the sled, and when opportunity offers he steps on the rear of the sled for short rides.

Dogs are also used in summer to a limited extent as pack animals by both Eskimo and Indian, and occasionally a lone prospector will be found to make a similar use of them. A dog will pack 20 or 30, even 40 pounds. Unless thoroughly broken, these dogs are difficult to control, and one of their favorite tricks is to lie down in water, pack and all.

Men on portage from one stream to another. Photo by J. B. Mertie

Backpacking is the most primitive and laborious mode of transport and is resorted to only when all other means fail. As an actual means of forwarding supplies, it is used only between navigable waters, namely on portages. A portage is chosen, so far as circumstances permit, so as to afford firm footing and easy grades. The Chilkoot Pass is the most famous portage in the world, for thousands of tons of supplies have been carried across it. It lies some twenty miles from, and 3,100 feet above, tidewater; and, as has been indicated earlier, the approach to it, though easy enough at first, becomes steep and difficult. To the place called the Scales, sledding was feasible; but from here on, a steep climb to the summit has to be made, and transport was on the backs of men. This portage provided the test that winnowed out the strong from the weak, the stout-hearted from the failures. The average man found, at least at the start, that 50 pounds was a heavy load up the steep ascent; many learned later to carry 100 pounds, though such a burden was a serious strain on the heart, and some whose determination was greater than their strength succumbed under it. Over an ordinary portage with hard trail and no grade, most physically strong men will carry 100 pounds; and experienced packers will take 150 or even 200 pounds on a cross-country trip, through the hills and mountains. But relatively few will carry more than 50 pounds, and that amount not over fifteen miles a day.

Horses

In the Pacific seaboard region of Alaska, the best grasslands are along the shores of Cook Inlet, on the Alaska Peninsula, and on Kodiak Island. But these areas are by no means all the grazing lands, and grass is sufficiently abundant elsewhere to make the use of horses feasible for summer journeys. There is much good pasturage in the Susitna valley, especially on its western margin in the Yentna River basin. The Copper River has less grazing land in its basin, but it suffices for the traveler. Summer pastures sufficient for pack train are widely distributed in the great inland region beyond the Pacific ranges and northward as far as the Arctic Mountains which divide the Yukon waters from those flowing northward into the Arctic Ocean. Some splendid grasslands are found in this region, for example along the Tanana and its tributaries. In other places again, such as north of the Yukon, the grass is scant, but patches sufficient for a pack train can usually be found at distances not exceeding a day’s march. Horses have been used by the Geological Survey as far north as the Arctic divide, and the International Boundary Commission took a pack train all the way to the Arctic Ocean along the 141st meridian, north of the Porcupine River. As the Bering Sea is approached, nutritious grass becomes scanter and is confined chiefly to the highlands, the extensive lowlands being chiefly covered with moss and marsh grass. In this region, only careful planning and search for pasture will permit the use of pack horses. Much the same is true of Seward Peninsula, though the Geological Survey expeditions have traversed its entire area with pack trains. There is some grassland even in the Arctic Slope region of Alaska, but not in sufficient abundance to make long pack train trips feasible. It is probably safe to estimate that there are in Alaska some 300,000 square miles in which the grass is sufficiently abundant to permit the use of a pack train.

Horses were brought to the Yukon as early as 1885, but they were relatively little used until the Klondike rush. The first long pack train trip in Alaska was that made in 1891 by E. J. Glave and Jack Dalton when they went from the coast into the Lake Kluane region, previously discussed in Chapter 16.⁷ The Army exploration of 1898 were made in part with pack horses, and in 1899 the Geological Survey first used horses. That summer, W. J. Peters and I made the journey from Haines in Southeastern Alaska to Eagle on the Yukon, a distance of nearly six hundred miles, that has already been referred to in Chapter 16. In 1902, I made what is perhaps the longest pack horse journey ever accomplished in Alaska: from Cook Inlet, round the base of Mount McKinley, and on to the Yukon at Rampart. In 105 days, the pack train traveled some 800 miles with the personnel going entirely on foot. At the start, the horses were each loaded with 250 pound sacks; but, as provisions were consumed at the rate of about 21 pounds a day, the packs gradually became lighter. On the other hand, some of the least strong of the horses were so weakened by the arduous trail and by the insect pest that they had to be shot before the journey was half over; at the end of the trip only nine of the original 20 animals remained.

During such journeys the animals find their food in the native grasses which are very nourishing. There is in Alaska, however, no natural curing of grasses such as takes place in the arid states of the West. When frost comes, about the middle of September, the horse feed is practically ruined. Therefore, the use of pack horses in Alaska is pretty much limited to the season from June 1 to the middle of September. By feeding grain one can considerably extend the season, but as a horse will eat up his own load in ten or fifteen days, such use is impractical for long journeys.

Pack train of horses swimming a stream. Photo by A. H. Brooks

Horse sleds, like pack animals, only came into general use after the Klondike discovery. Their efficient use is limited to roads which must be at least passable after the winter snow comes. In the early days there was much horse sledding over the ice of the Yukon and other rivers. But even this implies the breaking of a trail, and the use of horse sleds is now limited to established winter roads. Before good sled roads were available, many so-called “double enders” were in use. These are small sleds, not unlike the freight sleds pulled by dogs, that are drawn by a single horse or by two driven tandem.

Before trails passable for sleds were established, a mode of transport called raw hiding was sometimes resorted to. In this, freight was securely lashed into bales which were encased in raw hides, to which the traces of horses were attached. Such bales could be dragged over any trail, and even over bare ground, on which the horse could find footing, for it was of no importance which side of the load was on top. It was, of course, on account of the friction, a very inefficient use of horse power and little, if any, improvement over the back load. Now, where roads have been built or other good sledding conditions are found, winter horse freighting is by the familiar double- or bobsled, known in all the northern states.

Reindeer

During the early years of the introduction of reindeer into Alaska much was said about their use for transport. It was pointed out that the advantages of the reindeer over the dog were that he found his own food, and could be used as pack animal in the summer and sled puller in the winter. The enormous use of reindeer transport in Siberia appeared fully to justify these contentions; yet after thirty years of reindeer breeding in Alaska, their use in transport is almost negligible. In Siberia, a sled load of 270⁠–⁠300 pounds is easily hauled for long distances by the reindeer. But these are the large Tungus animals which average at least a third larger than the Alaskan reindeer, are used as saddle animals, and will carry a rider even through deep, soft snow; as pack animals they will carry from 100 to 200 pounds. It is difficult to understand why a similar use in Alaska has met with such indifferent success. In the earlier days of the reindeer experiments Laplanders were chiefly used for training both the reindeer themselves and the Eskimos in their use. This was undoubtedly, as can now be seen, a mistake. The Laplander had both the ignorance and the lack of adaptability to a new environment inherent to his semi-civilized state. He was dealing with a Siberian animal much wilder than the more highly domesticated one of his own land. The small pulka, or Lapland sled, fashioned out of half a log and rounded at the bottom, while making a good passenger vehicle, was not adapted to hauling freight; and the freight sled with runners was new to him. Moreover, in Lapland, the reindeer was chiefly used to carry men and light loads, and there was no use of the animal to transport heavy freight for long distances, such as had been done in Siberia for many generations. As a means of domesticating the Alaskan reindeer and of training the natives in their use, the Laplander was almost a complete failure.

Reindeer transport had, however, a more thorough test by some of the mail contractors. These men with a keen idea to business fully realized that if the reindeer could be substituted for dogs there would be a material profit in the change. The reindeer subsists on food of his own finding, and it costs $75 to $100 a year to feed a dog. After a period of careful test by men who had the initiative of the frontiersman, the experiment of substituting reindeer for dogs as mail carriers was on all but a very few routes entirely abandoned.

There are some evident reasons why the reindeer could not be substituted for the dog. Most of the established dog team routes are along the large waterways, and in the great inland regions of Alaska the lichen or reindeer moss grows only on the highlands above the timber line. Obviously the sled reindeer could not be driven to the highlands to obtain its pasture. Local climatic conditions were also an obstacle. A thaw followed by a freeze might cover the pastures with ice and make the lichens unavailable to the reindeer. In contrast to this, the general use of dog teams made the furnishing of dried salmon for dog feed a well-established industry along the watercourses. The reindeer will eat little except its regular food of lichens, but the dog is omnivorous in its appetite. It should be added, however, that the great tundra areas of the Bering Sea and of northern Alaska are the natural home of the reindeer. The barren ground region has as yet but little population save for the native whose mode of life has long been adapted to the use of dogs. Hence the substitution of the reindeer can only be brought about very gradually; the change of a people from a nomadic to a pastoral life must be a work of generation.

The following description by Jarvis illustrates the use of reindeer as sled animals:

All hands must be ready at the same time when starting a deer train, for, just as soon as the animals of the head team start, they are all off with a jump, and for a short time keep up a very high rate of speed. If one is not quick in jumping and holding on to his sled, he is likely either to lose his team or be dragged along in the snow. They soon come down to a moderate gait, however, and finally drop into a walk when tired. They are harnessed with a well-fitting collar of two flat pieces of wood, from which a trace goes back on each side to the ends of a breast or single tree that fits under the body. From the center of this a single trace runs back to the sled either between or to one side of the hind legs. In the wake of the legs this trace is protected with soft fur, or the skin will soon be worn through with the constant chafing. Generally, there is a single line made fast to the left side of a halter and with this the animal is to be guided and held in check; but this line must be kept slack and on only when the deer is to be guided or stopped. By pulling hard on this line, the weight of the sled comes on the head and the animal is soon brought to a standstill, though often this is only accomplished after he has gone in a circle several times and you and the sleds are in a general mix-up. No whip is used and none should be, for the deer are very timid and easily frightened and once gotten in that state are hard to quiet and control. A little tugging on the lines will generally start them off even when they balk. The sleds in use are very low and wide with very broad runners.⁸

During the past decade much advance has been made in the training of sled deer by the Eskimo, mainly because of the supervision and encouragement of W. T. Lopp and his assistants of the Alaska Reindeer Service. The use of sled deer is gradually becoming a part of the industrial life of the Eskimo, and the more intelligent herders are shoring an increasing facility in handling them. The superintendents of the Alaska Native School and the Reindeer Service are making much use of reindeer in their winter journeys of inspection. The journeys of one winter using reindeer aggregated 1,300 miles, and the average normal day’s travel was 28 miles. It is also worthy of note that native reindeer races have established a record of ten miles in 27 minutes, 20 seconds and that the pulling capacity of a single deer is 1,600 pounds for a distance of 250 yards. A sled reindeer should make 25 miles a day for a journey of 100 miles or so, hauling the driver and 50 or 75 pounds, perhaps 300 pounds in all. The reindeer tire easily in soft snow and must then be frequently rested.

The argument for the use of reindeer is presented by Carl O. Lind of the Alaska Reindeer Service:

Our trip, which demanded 45 days for its accomplishment, was successfully done before Christmas. In all we traveled about 1,000 miles under adverse conditions, and four out of seven deer made the return trip without us, hauling 100 to 200 pounds. If dogs had been used they could not have hauled their own provisions being picked up by themselves whenever we stopped. No shelter was needed. When the most furious wind sweeps its path, the deer simple faces it with an open mouth and with an expression of satisfaction and joy… It goes uphill and downhill alike. Trail or no trail, it will haul its 200 pounds or more day after day; yes, week after week.⁹

The argument against the use of reindeer has been presented by the late Archdeacon Stuck:

There is not a dog less in Alaska because of the reindeer… Speaking broadly, the reindeer is a stupid, unwieldy, intractable brute, not comparing a moment with the dog in intelligence or adaptability… The rein with which he is driven is a rope tied around one of his horns. He has no cognizance of “gee” and “haw,” nor of any other vocal direction, but must be yanked hither and thither with the rope by main force; while to stop him in his mad career once he is started it is often necessary to throw him with the rope.¹⁰

Some use of the Alaskan reindeer as pack animals has been made, but this mode of employment is not yet well developed. The large Siberian reindeer will carry 100⁠–⁠150 pounds, but the smaller animal of Alaska will on the average probably not carry over 50 pounds. The burden is carried in cloth hampers hung over the animals and made secure by a lashing going over the back and around the animal’s belly. Unless thoroughly broken, the pack-bearing animal must be led. There appears to be no question that the pack reindeer will find a use in the tundra regions where there is not enough grass to support horses. Its employment on long journeys has not been tested. Difficulties of herding when the deer are in pasture present themselves, and as yet but few reindeer have been broken to the pack.

The evidence in hand shows that the Eskimo reindeer has clearly demonstrated the fact of the utility of the sled reindeer to his mode of life. For his purpose the deer is no doubt more suitable than the dog, for his life is spent in the tundra region, where reindeer pastures are usually abundant. On the other hand, experience up to the present has shown that the needs of winter transport for the whites can better be served by the dog and the horse than by the reindeer. As has already be suggested, the value of the reindeer to both native and white as a source of meat and hides has been fully demonstrated.

It is roughly estimated that about 480,000 square miles of Alaska’s area are, by virtue of the physical condition, suited for winter dog transport. Of this area, about 220,000 square miles, or less than half, have the physical condition that makes the use of reindeer practical. This gives a rough measure of the relative value of the two draft animals; yet, as has been shown, there are other factors which must be given consideration in making this comparison.

Water transport

Water transportation has been the savior of the province. Without Alaska’s enormous coast line, aggregating over twenty thousand miles, and her extensive river systems that give access, though in part only with great difficulties, to the most remote parts of the Territory, industrial advancement would have been impossible. The Alaskan Yukon and Kuskokwim basins include upwards of five thousand miles of waters navigable for river steamers. It is these great arteries of commerce that have served chiefly in the past to open up the interior to settlement.

Hand-powered craft

Two men crossing a stream on raft. Photo by A. H. Brooks

Long before any steamers had navigated these rivers, these waters had been much used for transportation in various ways. The inland natives of Alaska were, it is true, a land folk who made relatively little use of the rivers. Their only boat was a small bark canoe, too frail and light to be used for transport. Downstream journeys were made by crude rafts and occasionally by a hastily improvised skin boat made by the stretching of the hide of a moose or caribou over an ill-constructed framework. They had, however, no means of transportation upstream, except the frail canoes which could be pushed against only a slight current. As has already been shown, the Russians were indifferent boatmen, and their clumsy river craft were but ill-adapted to upstream navigation. the first good river boats in Alaska were those introduced by the Hudson Bay voyageurs whose boats included both the double pointed bateaux, using both oars and poles as water power, and the bark canoes.

There were, as has been previously pointed out, no trees on the Yukon large enough for dugouts and, because of the small size of the white or canoe birch trees, no possibility for making practical large bark canoes. Therefore, the Yukon pioneers were forced to provide boats built of whipsawed lumber. This common type was a flat-bottomed boat, sharply pointed at the bow and with a rather narrow stern, of the general type of a dory, and some 18–24 feet long. Later the Yukon poling boat was devised. This was a long, narrow, tapering craft, admirably adapted to upstream journeys, against swift current and in shallow water. The poling boat was 20⁠–⁠30 feet long, and amidships, its bottom measured from 12 to 20 inches with tapering sides, giving it 2½⁠–⁠3 feet of beam at the gunwale. Though tapering rapidly at both ends, it is usually built with snub nose at both bow and stern. The Yukon poling boat was no doubt an adaptation of similar types of craft long used on the western rivers. Up to the time of the use of steamers, the Ohio River keelboats, said to have been first used in 1793, with their expert polers were the only crafts which would go upstream. These Ohio River boats were 50 feet long, but only 12⁠–⁠15 feet wide, and were propelled by ten polemen. Their form and mode of use were identical with the Mississippi craft.

It is surprising with what facility good polemen can push a loaded boat of this type up swift streams and with barely enough depth of water to float the craft. With fair conditions two good men could take a ton of supplies upstream at the rate of 10⁠–⁠20 miles a day, and with a lighter load. 30 miles a day were not uncommon. In the early days of Yukon mining it was not infrequent for a party of men to make the journey from Fortymile to Lake Lindeman, the head of boat navigation, a distance of nearly 600 miles, in a month, an average speed of nearly 20 miles a day. This included the time spent in making the difficult portage around White Horse Rapids and Miles Canyon, and also the easy navigation of Laberge and other lakes of the upper Lewes River.

An Eskimo "tracking," photo by A. H. Brooks

In these upstream journeys propulsion by poling was varied by tracking. This consisted in dragging the boat by lines of men walking on the shore. By attaching two lines to the boat, the men can readily steer it from the shore; and if good footing can be obtained, they can drag half a ton or more of supplies upstream at the rate of ten miles or more a day. Where the stream is shallow and the current swift, much wading is usually necessary to ease the boat over the bars. Where there are steep-cut banks and the water is too deep to pole, the boat must be pulled by the bushes and trees along the banks. This method of propulsion, formerly called “bushwhacking” on the Ohio River, is slow and tedious; and a whole day may be consumed to advance a few miles. It is not uncommon to use dogs as draft animals in taking boats up streams.

It was the Canadian explorers like William Ogilvie who first introduced the Peterborough canoes on the Yukon; and later, this craft was much used by the Northwest Mounted Police. Just as the poling boat has been the craft of the prospector, so the canoe has been the craft of the explorer. In general modeled after the Ojibwe bark canoe, the Peterborough is an admirable swift water boat, carries a large cargo, and is so light that it can be portaged a long distance. This model is built in sizes varying from 17 to 24 feet in length with a beam of 40⁠–⁠52 inches. The favorite canoe of the explorer is about 19 feet long and 46 inches wide. Such a boat built of cedar will, when dry, weigh about 120 pounds, and in an emergency can be packed by a single man across a portage. It will safely carry a cargo of half a ton besides a crew of two or three men. With a fair wind it makes a fairly good sailing craft. When it is equipped with six-foot paddles, ten-foot poles, and good tracking lines, there are no inland waters navigable to any other craft on which a Peterborough canoe can not be used. I have used a Peterborough provided with a small coaming and canvas air-tight compartments in fairly heavy weather on the Bering Sea. In river navigation, punctures by snags or rocks of thin cedar planking are not uncommon, but these are quickly and permanently repaired by strips carried for the purpose. The Geological Survey in the course of its explorations and investigations in Alaska has used these canoes on about fifteen thousand miles of the watercourses of Alaska. During the Klondike rush, when every type of craft was used, folding canoes and boats were not uncommon. Though easier to portage than Peterboroughs, they are useless for upstream work, being too flimsy to buck a current. They have found use in explorations, because they can be packed on a horse and transported overland and they are a necessity for cruising rivers too deep to ford, the banks of which are untimbered.

Engine-powered craft

The introduction of the light portable gas engine has greatly modified Alaskan water travel. Many prospectors avoid the labor of poling and tracking by its use. In shallow rivers air propellors have been successfully used. Nearly every Yukon Indian now has some sort of gas boat to visit his fish wheels and to travel from place to place.

Coastal navigation has also been completely revolutionized during the past two decades by the gas engines. Previous to 1900, the prospector and the fisherman traveled chiefly in crafts propelled by sail and oars, but now the use of power boats is almost universal. The favorite craft is the Columbia River fishing boat, 20⁠–⁠30 feet long, of the lifeboat type, and admirable for heavy weather. These, formerly propelled solely by sail and oars, are now equipped with economical heavyweight gas engines.

The Western Union Telegraph exploring expeditions had for part of their project the steam navigation of the Yukon River. Two flat-bottomed boats about 60 feet long, the Wilder and the Lizzie Horner, were shipped to Saint Michael in 1866, but neither succeeded in entering the mouth of the Yukon. Navigation of the Yukon continued by small boat until the newly organized Alaska Commercial Company brought in its first small steamer, the Yukon. This boat was 50 feet long with 12-foot beams, was equipped with two engines, and drew when loaded 18 inches of water; it was built by John W. Gates of San Francisco. On July 4, 1869, with Captain Benjamin Hall as master and John R. Forbes as engineer, the Yukon left Saint Michael and 27 days later arrived at Fort Yukon, having completed the first steam navigation of the lower thousand miles of the Yukon River. Within the next ten years, three other small steamers were brought to the Yukon and navigated the river up as far as Fort Selkirk,¹¹ 1,700 miles from the Bering Sea. These boats were chiefly used in the fur trade, but they also supplied the few prospectors then in the region.

"S.S. Scotia" taking on wood on Taku Arm, photo by Sidney Page

With the influx of miners after the discovery of gold in the Fortymile district, a larger vessel was demanded. In 1889, the Alaska Commercial Company built the Arctic,¹² 140 feet in length with a 28-foot beam. By this time the annual freight taken up the Yukon was largely the trading goods and provisions to supply the Alaska Commercial Company posts. Freight charges to the upper river were $50 a ton, passenger rates $150. The freight rates were very reasonable, and the passenger rates affected but few of the miners, who arrived mostly by the Chilkoot Pass route. In 1892, the North American Trading and Transportation Company entered the Yukon as a rival in fur trade and transportation. Their first boat, the Portner B. Ware, of about the same size as the Arctic, ascended the Yukon for some 200 miles in September, but was frozen in before it reached the mining camps. The organization of this company was due to the energy of J. J. Healy, a pioneer Alaska fur trader. He long maintained a trading post at Dyea, the gateway of Chilkoot Pass, and from information obtained from the miners became convinced of the industrial importance of the Yukon. As the managing head of a great commercial company, he was a commanding figure on the Yukon during the Klondike days, but he died a pauper in 1910.

With the Klondike rush came an enormous expansion of Yukon River traffic. In 1898 and 1899, between 75 and 100 steam-driven vessels were plowing the muddy waters of the great river and its tributaries. In 1900, five transportation companies were operating 33 river boats on the Alaskan Yukon, and a dozen steamboats were navigating the Canadian waters above. There is no record of the traffic during the height of the Klondike travel; but in 1901, when it had greatly subsided, 35 boats carried 25,000 tons of freight up the Yukon, and the passenger traffic upstream and downstream aggregated 2,500 persons. This was at a time when the building of the White Pass & Yukon Railroad had, by establishing, a through freight and passenger service from Skagway, greatly reduced the traffic on the lower river. The tariffs were, in 1901, $85 a ton for freight and $125 a passenger, from Saint Michael to Dawson.

During this period, large packets were built for the Yukon service,¹³ comparable to those used on the Mississippi. Their masters and pilots were recruited from the Mississippi and Columbia rivermen, the former having the prestige of having operated large boats, the latter being more experienced in handling steamers in swift water. The large steamers had lengths of 222 feet, beams of 42 feet, depths of 6 feet, and horsepower of 1,000. For many years they were all wood burners, for the several attempts to use the local lignitic coal were unsuccessful.¹⁴ In 1906, many of the boats were changed to oil burners, the petroleum being brought from California. These large packets proved to be uneconomical, and there has been a gradual change to smaller boats of from 400 to 600 tons which could be efficiently used on the small tributaries of the Yukon. With the decrease of gold mining, steamer traffic has already decreased. In 1919, only nine steamers were operated in the Alaskan Yukon, carrying a total of less than 10,000 tons of freight.

In general, the Yukon is open to navigation from June until October. The ice-free season, however, varies in different parts of the basin. Above Dawson, the river is usually clear of ice soon after the middle of May, and steamers can be operated well into October. Navigation on the lower Yukon is possible from the last week in May until the end of September. The ice, however, often does not go out of the Yukon delta until July, and the river there may be frozen again by the middle of September. One reason for the high freight rate on the Yukon is that the expensive equipment and, to a certain extent, the personnel too are idle for eight to nine months in the year. All the profits must be made during the short season of navigation.

Roads

Nothing emphasizes the slow growth of means of transportation in Alaska more than the history of its road construction. The Russians during nearly a century of occupation built less than five miles of wagon road in the American possessions. During the next thirty years, up to the time of the Klondike gold discovery, we added barely another five miles to the total length of wagon road. At the fiftieth anniversary of the annexation of Alaska, there were only 980 miles of wagon road in the Territory,¹⁵ an area of nearly six hundred thousand square miles and a population then of nearly seventy thousand. At this time, the Government had spent a total of $3,970,000 on road and trail construction in local taxes. Alaska had in turn produced minerals, fish and fur up to a total value of $800,000,000. It is questionable whether any other one country in the world has shown such a notable industrial advancement with such a scant outlay of public funds for transportation facilities.¹⁶

Private construction

Early roads, I. These roads were frequently crude affairs as is shown by the wagon road (left) up Gold Creek and that to the Jualin Mine in the Berners Bay district (right).
Photos by C. W. Wright.

A little construction and some improvements of roads at Sitka were done by the military authorities between 1867 and 1877, but beyond this bit, there was no building of roads until after the discovery of the Juneau gold. In 1882, a horse trail was built by the miners for two miles up Gold Creek, and later this was changed to a wagon road which, by 1888, had been extended into the Silver Bow basin. The building of this road in part through a steep-walled valley was an expensive undertaking and all of it was paid for by local mining industry. In 1898, a law was passed, authorizing the construction and maintenance of toll roads and bridges in Alaska,¹⁷ a privilege of which, however, few availed themselves. The Chilkat Indians had long regarded the Chilkoot Pass trail as a toll road owned by them, a monopoly which the pioneer miners soon disregarded and claimed the right of carrying their own burdens over it without charge. When the Klondike rush started, a wagon road was constructed from tidewater at Dyea for eight miles to the entrance of the canyon, and during the height of the travel it carried on a brisk business.

In the spring of 1898, George A. Bracket completed fifteen miles of wagon road from Skagway to the base of the final steep thousand-foot climb leading to the summit of the White Pass. This road traversed the heavily timbered flat of Skagway River for some five miles, and beyond led along the precipitous slopes of a rocky defile. At that time, the Bracket road was the longest and most difficult piece of highway construction that had been attempted in Alaska. Remnants of this pioneer road are still visible from the White Pass & Yukon Railroad where they can be seen clinging to the sides of precipitous cliffs. Bracket’s troubles, however, did not end with the building of the road, for he found it difficult to collect the toll of $20 a ton to which he was legally entitled. Many Klodikers could see no reason for paying toll on a route through which they had had a sled trail before the building of the road. Some of the toll collectors were roughly handled. But the controversy over toll was short-lived, for by May of 1898 the railroad surveyors had arrived and the railroad company bought the wagon road,¹⁸ both for the prevention of competition in the haulage of freight and for hauling use in construction.

Jack Dalton, in 1898, built a horse trail from Pyramid Harbor on Lynn Canal to the top of the pass at the head of Klehini River. This opened up a route into the interior well suited for horses and cattle which Dalton had explored. No trail work was necessary beyond the pass where the country was open. Dalton himself drove in several herd of beef cattle and horses, reaching the Yukon either at Five Finger Rapids or at Fort Selkirk at the mouth of the Pelly. The Dalton trail was the best pack horse route into the interior, but it was not much used even before the completion of the railroad and the venture was not a financial success.

In addition to the above, a few toll bridges have been built at various places in Alaska. On the whole, however, the toll road and bridge act of 1898 was entirely ineffective in opening up Alaska.

Public construction

In 1904, Congress made a second attempt to provide roads for Alaska without appropriating any funds. This effort compelled the United States commissioners to appoint a road overseer in each district, who was to receive the magnificent wage of $4 a day, the average wage at that time being $6 to $10 a day. Recognizing that the poor overseers would be at a financial loss for every day of employment, the law specified that they were to be paid for only ten days in the year. In this time these philanthropists were not only to construct roads but also to notify every man in their district that they must give two days’ work to road building each year, or in lieu thereof, to pay a head tax of $8. This law was evidently framed on the ancient statutes of many of the Eastern states, by which road building was made the duty of every citizen, and a knowledge of road engineering was recognized to be inborn in every American. For generations, this ancient fallacy hampered the development of good roads, and it was done away with only after the inauguration of modern highway construction.

No fault can be found with the principle of the Alaska Road Act of 1904, of throwing the burden of road construction on the Territory. But this should have been done by a proper system of local taxes, and the funds collected spent by qualified engineers. In Canadian territory, this was recognized from the start, and the royalty collected on the Klondike paid for the excellent system of highways in the Yukon Territory. The Alaskan law was almost futile in providing means of communication, though a few local sled roads and trails were improved, most of which were badly located and poorly constructed.

The extensive federal exploration of Alaska inaugurated in 1898, chiefly by the Geological Survey and, for the first few years, by the Army, included many long journeys. Many of these exploring expeditions used horses and, incidental to their advance, many miles of rough trail were established. These were subsequently followed by others and, in lieu of better trails, became established as routes of travel. A few are still in use, and we still hear of the Gem Trail, and the Survey and Army trails. Far more important than these trails to betterment of means of communication were the maps and reports which resulted from the work of these expeditions. All had as part of their mission the location of possible routes for wagon roads and railroads. The actual areal mapping fell chiefly to the Geological Survey which, before the epoch of road and railroad construction that began some five years later was inaugurated, had made contoured reconnaissance maps of nearly all the routes which were subsequently chosen or considered for wagon roads or railroads. This work admirably furnishes conclusive proof of the value of topographic maps. The cost of the areal topographic surveys of Alaska has been far less than it would have been had it been necessary to carry out explorations for every road and railroad project. These maps gave information on the best general route, and it was only necessary for the engineer to make his location survey.

Many of the reports of this exploring expedition made more or less definite recommendations for road and trail construction. For example, in 1903, incidental to the discussion of the future of placer mining,¹⁹ I recommended that a million dollars be spent in building wagon roads to the inland placer camps. The recommendation included a road from Valdez to Eagle or Fairbanks as a main highway and many other local roads. The opinion was then expressed that several of the Yukon gold camps had probably already spent more money in the transport of supplies than the cost of wagon roads. This was probably an exaggeration, but that such a generous project for wagon roads was sound is proved by the fact that most of those it included have, during the twenty years that have since elapsed, been completed or are under construction.²⁰

The backpackers will probably cross an old-fashioned bridge (photo by F. H. Moffit)

Though the trails established by these early exploring expeditions were of use to the prospector, they were little more than cuts through the timber, with here and there some small bridges. The only actual trail construction by such an expedition was that built under the direction of Major W. R. Abercrombie, from Valdez inland. Abercrombie, commanding the Copper River expedition of the U.S. Army, landed at Valdez in the spring of 1898. His parties, as already noted in Chapter 16,⁷ subsequently made their way inland over the difficult an dangerous Valdez Glacier route and also explored other passes through the coastal mountain barrier. Abercrombie recommended that a military trail be built inland from Valdez by a route which would avoid the glacier. This was authorized in 1899, and during the summer, Abercrombie constructed a horse trail to the summit of Thompson Pass, thus surmounting the most serious obstacle to inland travel. During the following five years a crude pack trail was built through to Eagle on the Yukon, under appropriations granted by the War Department. Good service was rendered the pioneers by this trail, but its construction is chiefly significant in being a forerunner of splendid work done by the Army in road construction in Alaska.

Since the law of 1904 was found futile in opening up Alaska, a new statute was enacted in 1906. This provided for an Alaska Road Commission of three Army officers, one to be detailed from the Corps of Engineers. This board was authorized to construct and maintain military and post roads, bridges, and trails from funds collected by the existing license taxes outside of incorporated towns. Thirty percent of these taxes was reserved for maintenance of schools for whites, and 25 percent for care of the insane; the remainder was to be used for road construction and to this was added a direct appropriation of $150,000. This law marked the real beginning of road construction in Alaska, and its beneficial effects have been felt throughout the Territory ever since its enactment.

The original act left but little to to be desired. Its immediate and continued success, however, was almost entirely due to the fact that Brigadier General (then Major) Wilds P. Richardson, a man of exceptional executive ability, was chosen to be president of the board and continued in this office until 1917 when he recalled for military duty. At the time of his detail, General Richardson had had eight years of almost continuous service in the Territory, during which time he had pioneered on the Yukon, built trails, and established Army posts. These duties had given him a broad knowledge of Alaska and her people, and his duties in road location and construction soon made him the leading authority on the subject of Alaskan transportation. His duties and responsibilities were arduous; for not only had he to carry on road building under very adverse physical conditions, but also he had to meet constant criticisms from local residents who could not realize that an annual grant of only a few hundred thousand dollars could not begin to meet the needs for wagon roads.

Richardson was quick to grasp that the crux of the transportation problem was to establish a trunk line of communication between open waters on the Pacific and the inland region. He, therefore, almost at once established a sled road between Valdez on the coast and Fairbanks, the largest settlement in the interior, a distance of 370 miles. Year by year, this route was improved, and it passed by successive stages, from dog trail, to sled road, to wagon road, and finally to a fair automobile road. For years, this was a main artery of mail routes and passenger trail into the interior, and it has only recently been superseded by the completion of the government railroad. Richardson’s vision extended even further, for he conceived the bold project of an extension of this road through to Nome, thus giving an overland route to this remote community. This larger project he unfortunately could not carry out because of lack of funds. In addition to the main highway, now known appropriately as the Richardson Road, many local roads and trails were also built.

Richardson’s many years of service devoted to the interests of Alaska are one of the outstanding features of federal administration of Territorial affairs. After his return to military duty, his work was most efficiently continued by the officers of the Engineer Corps to whom the task was assigned. By 1920, the Commission had built 4,890 miles of road and trail, of which 1,031 miles were wagon road. There had been expended in construction and maintenance a total of $5,498,000, of which $3,370,000 were from direct appropriations and the rest from local taxes. Meanwhile, some roads and trail had been built by the Forest Service and by the Territorial Road Commission.²¹ Thus great progress has been made, but the industrial needs of the Territory demand at least an equal mileage of roads and trails to that already constructed.

One of the most important acts of Congress for the benefit of Alaska was the authorizing in 1900 of military cable connection with Alaskan ports, the establishment of land telegraph lines, and wireless stations. The original act was passed, largely through the personal efforts of Major General A. W. Greely, then chief signal officer. Thanks to Greely’s efforts, cable communication with Juneau and other Alaskan ports was established by 1903, and by that time land lines had been extended over much of the inland region.²² Later, all important Alaskan towns were given some from of electrical communication cable: telegraph, telephone, or wireless.

The first aids to navigation in Alaskan waters were fourteen buoys placed in Peril Strait in 1906.²³ The hundreds of vessels which traversed Alaskan waters during the Klondike excitement, carrying thousands of passengers and millions of dollars worth of freight, were transported through these dangerous waters with hardly a single aid to navigation. The losses of ships in Alaskan waters have been appalling. These were in part, of course, due to the natural physical conditions; but they are chargeable also to the lack of sufficient aids to navigation and the lack of adequate charts, a problem which the Coast Survey, with its very limited facilities,²⁴ has tried hard to meet. Alaska’s vast shore line still has only one life-saving station, which was established at Nome in 1905. The Revenue Cutter Service, now the Coast Guard, has, however, from the beginning of its cruises in northern waters rendered much aid to wrecked vessels and has been the means of saving many lives.

ed.: This essay was seemingly written some time between 1920 and Brook’s death in 1924. ↩︎
Cf. “Railroad Routes in Alaska.” Report of Alaska Railroad Commission, and Congress, 3rd session, H. R. Doc. 1346, 1913, pp. 114⁠–⁠130. ↩︎
The Russians had only small coastal vessels driven by steam, their trans-Pacific traffic being all by sailing vessels. ↩︎
C. L. Andrews, “Marine Disasters of the Alaska Route,” Washington Historical Quarterly, 7, no. 1 (1916): 24⁠–⁠37. ↩︎
In 1878, the entire expenditure for the Alaskan mail service was $18,000, which provided monthly service to Sitka and Wrangell. By 1898, only seven post offices had been established in the Territory. In 1920, there was a total of 159 post offices of all classes. ↩︎
A speed of nine miles an hour for four hours has been recorded in some of the dog races. ↩︎
See Alfred H. Brooks, Blazing Alaska’s Trails (University of Alaska Press, 1953). ↩︎ ↩︎
D. H. Jarvis, Report of the Cruise of the U.S. Revenue Cutter Bear and the Overland Relief Expedition. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1899. p. 47. ↩︎
Sheldon Jackson, Fourteenth Annual Report on the Introduction Domestic Reindeer into Alaska (Washington, D.C., 1906), pp. 104–105. ↩︎
Hudson Stuck, Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled (New York, 1914), p. 402, 407. ↩︎
The first trip above Fort Yukon, made in 1875, ascended the Yukon as far as the site of Fort Reliance, about six miles below Dawson. ↩︎
The Arctic brought the first cargo of provisions to the then newly-discovered Klondike in the fall of 1896, but soon was caught in the ice and wrecked. ↩︎
Gross tonnage, 800 to 1,211. ↩︎
During the Klondike days, wood for steamers was sold at $15 and $25 a cord, but the normal price is $4 to $8. ↩︎
In addition, there were 620 miles of winter sled road and 250 miles of improved trail. ↩︎
Government railroad construction at this time was beginning to rectify matters. ↩︎
The law provided that the toll rates must be approved by the Secretary of the Interior. ↩︎
The price paid for the wagon road was $40,000. ↩︎
Alfred H. Brooks, “Placer Mining in Alaska,” United States Geological Survey Bulletin, no. 225, Washington, D.C., 1904, pp. 56⁠–⁠57. ↩︎
It is worthy of note that C. W. Purington, then of the Geological Survey, was the first to present definite estimates of the cost of road construction in Alaska and to substantiate by actual figures their need to the placer mining industry. See his “Roads and Road Building in Alaska,” Ibid., no. 263 (1905). pp. 217⁠–⁠228. ↩︎
It is estimated that the cost of wagon road construction in Alaska at the prices of 1920 will be from $5,000 to $6,000 a mile. ↩︎
It should be remembered that the Western Union Telegraph Company built and operated some fifteen miles of telegraph line in Seward Peninsula as early as 1867. The construction of long distance private telephone lines was begun at Nome in 1900, but telephones had by then been in use for a number of years at Juneau. Nearly all Alaskan towns of over 400 population have a telephone system. ↩︎
The Russians had one lighthouse in Alaska. This was a light placed in the cupola of the Baranof Castle at Sitka. It was maintained by the Army for a few years after the annexation and then abandoned because of lack of funds. ↩︎
In 1920, about ten percent of Alaskan waters had been charted in the detail needed for navigation. ↩︎

Letters of Vesuvius

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 19:54:22 -0500

These texts are modified from the Loeb 1915 version of Pliny’s Epistulae¹, letters 16 and 20 from Book 6.²

First letter to Tacitus

Your request that I would send you an account of my uncle’s end, so that you may transmit a more exact relation of it to posterity, deserves my acknowledgements; for if his death shall be celebrated by your pen, the glory of it, I am aware, will be rendered for ever deathless. For notwithstanding he perished, as did whole peoples and cities, in the destruction of a most beautiful region, and by a misfortune memorable enough to promise him a kind of immortality: notwithstanding he has, himself, composed many and lasting work⁠—I am persuaded that the mentioning of him in your immortal writings will greatly contribute to eternize his name. Happy I esteem those, whom Providence has gifted with the ability, either to do things worthy of being written, or to write in a manner worthy of being read; but most happy they, who are blessed with both talents, in which latter class, my uncle will be placed both by his own writings and by yours. The more willingly do I undertake⁠—nay, solicit⁠—the task you set me.

He was, at that time, with the fleet under his command at Misenum. On the ninth day before the Kalends of September,³ about one in the afternoon, my mother desired him to observe a cloud of very unusual size and appearance. He had sunned himself, then taken a cold bath, and after a leisurely luncheon, was engaged in study. He immediately called for his shoes and went up an eminence, from whence he might best view this very uncommon appearance. It was not at that distance discernible from what mountain this cloud issued, but it was found afterwards to be Vesuvius. I cannot give you a more exact description of its figure, than by resembling it to that of a pine tree, for it shot up a great height in the form of a trunk, which extended itself at the top into several branches; because I imagine, a momentary gust of air blew it aloft, and then failing, forsook it; thus causing the cloud to expand laterally as it dissolved, or possibly the downward pressure of its own weight produced this effect. It was at one moment white, at another dark and spotted, as if it had carried up earth or cinders.

My uncle, true savant that he was, deemed the phenomenon important and worth a nearer view. He ordered a light vessel to be got ready, and gave me the liberty, if I thought proper, to attend him. I replied that I would rather study; and, as it happened, he himself had given me a theme for composition. As he was coming out of the house he received a note from Rectina, the wife of Bassus, who was in the utmost alarm at the imminent danger (his villa stood just below us, and there was no way to escape but by sea); she earnestly entreated him to save her from such deadly peril. He changed his first design and what he began with a philosophical, he pursued with an heroical, turn of mind. He ordered large galleys to be launched, and went himself on board one, with the intention of assisting not only Rectina, but many others; for the villas stand extremely thick upon that beautiful coast. Hastening to the place from whence others were flying, he steered his direct course to the point of danger, and with such freedom from fear, as to be able to make and dictate his observations upon the successive motions and figures of that terrific object.

And now cinders, which grew thicker and hotter the nearer he approached, fell into the ships, then pumice-stones too, with stones blackened, scorched, and cracked by fire, then the sea ebbed suddenly from under them, while the shore was blocked up by landslips from the mountains. After considering for a moment whether he should retreat, he said to the captain who was urging that course, “Fortune favors the bold; carry me to Pomponianus.” Pomponianus was then at Stabiae, distant by half the width of the bay (for, as you know, the shore, insensibly curving in its sweep, forms here a vessel for the sea). He had already embarked his baggage; for though at Stabiae the danger was not yet near, it was fully in view, and certain to be extremely near, as soon as it spread; and he resolved to fly as soon as the contrary wind should cease. It was fully favorable, however, for carrying my uncle to Pomponianus. He embraces, comforts, and encourages his alarmed friend, and in order to soothe the other’s fears by his own unconcern, desires to be conducted to a bathroom; and, after having bathed, he sat down to supper with great cheerfulness, or at least (what is equally heroic) with all the appearance of it.

In the meanwhile, Mount Vesuvius was blazing in several places, with spreading and towering flames, whose radiant brightness the darkness of the night set in high relief. But, my uncle, in order to soothe apprehensions, kept saying that some fires had been left alight by the terrified country people, and what they saw were only deserted villas on fire in the abandoned district. After, this he retired to rest, and it is most certain that his rest was a most genuine slumber; for his breathing, which, as he was pretty fat, was somewhat heavy and sonorous, was heard by those who attended his chamber-door. But the court which led to his apartment now lay so deep under a mixture of pumice-stones and ashes, that if he had continued longer in his bedroom, exiting would have been impossible. After being awakened, he came out, and returned to Pomponianus and the others, who had sat up all night. They consulted together as to whether they should hold out in the house, or to wander about in the open. For the house now tottered under repeated and violent concussions, and seemed to rock to and fro as if torn from its foundations. In the open air, on the other hand, they dreaded the falling pumice-stones, light and porous though they were; yet this, by comparison, seemed the lesser danger of the two; a conclusion which my uncle arrived at by balancing reasons, and the others by balancing fears. They tied pillows upon their heads with napkins; and this was their whole defense against the showers that fell round them.

It was now day everywhere else, but there, a deeper darkness prevailed than in the most obscure night; relieved, however, by many torches and different lights. They thought it proper to go down to the shore to observe from close at-hand, if they could possibly put out to sea, but they found the waves still running extremely high and contrary. There, my uncle, having thrown himself down upon a disused sail, repeatedly called for, and drank, an amount of cold water; soon after, flames, and a strong smell of sulphur⁠—which was the forerunner of them⁠—dispersed the rest of the company in flight; and only roused him. He raised himself up with the assistance of two of his slaves, but instantly fell; some unusually-gross vapor, as I conjecture, having obstructed his breathing and blocked his windpipe, which was not only naturally weak and constricted, but chronically inflamed. When day dawned again (the third day from the last he had seen) his body was found entire and uninjured, and still fully-clothed as in life; its posture was that of a sleeping, rather than a dead man.

Meanwhile, my mother and I were at Misenum. But this has no connection with history, and your inquiry went no farther than concerning my uncle’s death. I will, therefore, put an end to my letter. Suffer me only to add, that I have faithfully related to you what I was either an eye-witness of myself, or heard at the time, when report speaks most true. You will select what is most suitable to your purpose; for there is a great difference between a letter, and a history; between writing to a friend, and writing for the public. Farewell.

Second letter to Tacitus

The letter which, in compliance with your request, I wrote to you concerning the death of my uncle, has raised your curiosity, you say, to know not only what terrors, but what calamities I endured when left behind at Misenum (for there I broke off my narrative)?

“Though my mind shudders to remember,⁠… I will begin.”⁴

My uncle having set out, I gave the rest of the day to study⁠—the object which had kept me at home. After which, I bathed, dined, and retired to short and broken slumbers. There had been, for several days before, some shocks of earthquake, which alarmed us less, as they are frequent in Campania; but that night, they became so violent that one might think that the world was not being merely shaken, but turned topsy-turvy. My mother flew to my chamber; I was just rising, meaning on my part to awaken her if she was asleep. We sat down in the forecourt of the house, which separated it by a short space from the sea. I do not know whether I should call it courage or inexperience⁠—I was not quite eighteen⁠—but I called for a volume of Livy, and began to read, and even went on with the extracts I was making from it, as if nothing were the matter. Lo and behold, a friend of my uncle’s, who had just come to him from Spain, appears on the scene; observing my mother and me seated, and the fact that I have a book in my hand, he sharply censures her patience and my indifference; nevertheless, I still went on intently with my author.

It was now six o’clock in the morning, the light still ambiguous and faint. The buildings around us already tottered, and though we stood upon open ground, as the place was narrow and confined, there was certain and formidable danger of them collapsing. It was not till then we resolved to quit the town. The common people follow us in the utmost consternation, preferring the judgement of others to their own (wherein the extreme of fear resembles prudence), and force us onwards by pressing a crowd in on our rears. Having arrived outside the houses, we halt in the midst of a most strange and dreadful scene. The coaches which we had ordered out, though stood upon the most level ground, were sliding to and fro, and could not be kept steady even when stones were put against the wheels. Then we beheld the sea sucked back, and as it were repulsed by the convulsive motion of the earth; it is at least certain than the shore was considerably enlarged, and now held many sea animals captive on the dry sand. On the other side, a black and dreadful cloud, bursting out in gusts of igneous, serpentine vapor, now and again yawned open to reveal long, fantastic flames, resembling flashes of lightning, but much larger.

Our Spanish friend already mentioned now spoke with more warmth and instancy: “If your brother⁠— if your uncle,” said he, “is still alive, he wishes you both to be safe; if he has perished, it was his desire that you would survive him. Why therefore do you delay your escape?” We could never think of our own safety, we said, while we are uncertain of his. Without further ado, our friend hurried off, and took himself out of danger at the top of his speed.

Soon afterwards, the cloud I have described began to descend upon the earth, and cover the sea. It had already encircled the hidden Capreae, and blotted from sight the promontory of Misenum. My mother now began to beseech, exhort, and command me to escape as best I might; a young man could do it; she, burdened with age and corpulency, would die easy if only she had not caused my death. I replied, I would not be saved without her, and taking her by the hand, I hurried her on. She complies reluctantly and not without reproaching herself for delaying me.

Ashes now fall upon us, though as yet in no great quantity. I looked behind me; great darkness pressed on our rears, and came rolling over the land after us like a torrent. I proposed while we still could see, to turn aside, lest we should be knocked down into the road by the crowd that followed us, and trampled to death in the dark. We had scarce sat down, when darkness spread over us⁠—not like that of a moonless or cloudy night, but of a room when it is shut up, and the lamp put out. You could hear the shrieks of women, the crying of children, and the shouts of men; some were seeking their children, others their parents, others their wives, or husbands, and only distinguishing them by their voices; one lamenting his own fate, another that of his family; some praying to die, from the very fear of dying; many lifting their hands to the gods; but the greater part, imagining that there were no gods left anywhere, and that the last and eternal night had come upon the world.

There were even some who augmented the real perils by imaginary terrors. Newcomers reported that such-and-such a building at Misenum had collapsed or taken fire⁠—falsely, but they were credited. By degrees it grew lighter; which we imagined to be rather the warning of approaching fire (as in truth it was) than the return of day: however, the fire stayed at a distance from us: then again came darkness, and a heavy shower of ashes; we were obliged every now and then to rise and shake them off, otherwise we should have been buried and even crushed under their weight. I might have boasted, that amidst dangers so appalling, not a sigh or expression of fear escaped from me, had not my support been founded in that miserable though strong consolation, that all mankind were involved in the same calamity, and that I was perishing with the world itself.

At last, this dreadful darkness was attenuated by degrees to a kind of cloud or smoke, and passed away; presently the real day returned, and even the sun appeared, though pale as when an eclipse is in progress. Every object that presented itself to our yet-affrighted gaze was changed, covered over with a drift of ashes, as with snow. We returned to Misenum, where we refreshed ourselves as well as we could, and passed an anxious night between hope and fear⁠—though indeed with a much larger share of the latter, for the earthquake still continued, and several enthusiastic people were giving a grotesque turn from their own and their neighbors’ calamities by terrible predictions. Even then, however, my mother and I, notwithstanding the danger that passed and which still threatened us, had no thoughts of leaving the place till we should receive some tidings of my uncle.

And now, you will read this narrative, so far beneath the dignity of a history, without any view of transferring it to your own; and indeed you must attribute it to your own request, if it appears scarcely worthy of a letter. Farewell.

Pliny, the Younger, Letters, trans. W. Melmoth, ed. W. M. L. Hutchinson, Loeb Classical Library (Macmillan, 1915). ↩︎
Plin. Ep. 6.16 and 6.20. (G. Crane, Ed.) Perseus Digital Library. ↩︎
August 24th. Believed to be a mistake in the manuscript. “Despite the date of August 24th is widely accepted in the literature… the most probable date must necessarily fall between October 24th and November 1st.” Doronzom M, et al. “The 79 CE eruption of Vesuvius.” Earth-Science Reviews, 2022:104072. ↩︎
A quotation from Virgil, Aeneid 2.12. ↩︎

Diglossic, parallel CSS

Sat, 22 Mar 2025 08:28:28 -0500

diglossic-text.css (link to the stylesheet) is a stylesheet to help create diglossic texts with proper text flow, and progressive, correct, HTML. Its features include:

aligning like elements in rows,
selectable, single-source texts,
unobstructed by excessive HTML-isms like div or table,
being completely readable without CSS rendering.

I have a demo set up on this website. Here is what it looks like:

First text

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet…

Second text

Pain itself desires pain…¹

Why make this, you may ask? The Loeb Classical Library is a beautiful series of Latin and Greek texts, published with English translations by Harvard University Press. The series features source texts on the left page, with the English on the right page. All other implementations of parallel web text fall short on at least one of the goals above.

Add it to your stupid webpage

It is supported by all modern desktop web browsers (Chrome, Firefox, … ). To use the stylesheet, add the following line to your document head:

<link href="/diglossic-text.css" rel="stylesheet">

Then, format your text (assuming a Markdown syntax) like this:


This paragraph will not be rendered in two columns.

<div class="diglossic-text">

<!-- --><span class="diglossic-l"></span>

### First text

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...

<!-- --><span class="diglossic-r"></span>

### Second text

Pain itself desires pain...

</div>

This text is outside of the diglossic text.

Keep in mind that only the block-level elements of h1--h6, p, blockquote, and pre are rendered in parallel. Everything else is ignored. Also, parallel texts must have the same number of elements to line up properly.

The horizontal lines are just for illustration. ↩︎

Camino Real

Fri, 14 Mar 2025 17:30:33 -0500

I scramble gleefully up a concrete incline six feet above the cobblestone road, but Hal Jackson saunters. We stand in the ruins of what was once a large house, twenty minutes outside Zacatecas, Mexico. The air is cool. Scrubby mountains pocked with old silver mines sweep across the landscape. Jackson is uneasy. I collect several pebbles, fallen pieces of wall. Jackson shakes his head, wanders the brush. “This is disappointing,” he says, eyes scanning, GPS in one hand, notepad in the other, camera slung round his neck. Why? “It just seems…” he trails off, gingerly steps over a sharp rock embedded in the earth. He was once a marathoner, and though it’s been thirteen years since his last, he maintains a runner’s lean grace. At seventy he looks perhaps fifty-five. “I thought it’d be bigger,” he mutters. “This doesn’t seem right.”

We are in Pánuco, the birthplace of Juan de Oñate, the last of the Spanish conquistadors, whose hand likely had more influence on the American Southwest and northern Mexico than that of any other single explorer. In 1598, Oñate blazed the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, a trail that became the most used and most significant route of commerce and culture for three hundred years. At its peak the Camino Real ran 1,800 miles from Mexico City north to Santa Fe. Spaniards used the trail to settle towns and villages all along the way, Franciscans used it to spread their gospel, troops from the United States and Mexico used it for waging battles and building forts, Indians used it to fight the swelling tide of foreigners, and traders used it for commerce. All morning, Jackson and I have searched for the remains of the Oñate family hacienda, and now, with the Jeep Cherokee parked conspicuously on the narrow road, clouds in full bloom beyond the mountains, and my pocket full of pebbles, Jackson’s doubt continues to deepen.

A man in stained white jeans and a thinning white undershirt wanders down the road below us in sandals. He greets the two gringos standing atop a ruined wall in a pool of packed dirt bursting with purple wildflowers. Jackson tells him we want Oñate’s villa; the man looks bemused, then beckons us down from our perch.

A quarter mile up and three minutes later we find the hacienda for real: an enormous hillock of pink cobblestones with a wall running around the circumference, a turret in the middle, the remnants of an ancient pool, a burrowed garden. The place is grand and empty. Silent with a cool breeze. It bears not a single marker indicating what it once was or who lived here. We three wander about it. Now Jackson is gleeful, running to take pictures, climbing up on the walls to peer at the vistas, his dusty white baseball hat nearly flying off behind him. “Now this⁠—” he grins, index finger poised in the air, “this is what I pictured. This…is…it!”

Throughout New Mexico and Texas, Oñate’s trail is clearly marked, but in Mexico many parts of it remained unknown to modern explorers, and Jackson and I set out on a mission to find them. We carried minutely detailed topographical maps and aerial maps from the early twentieth century, which often showed a trail obvious from a bird’s-eye view but elusive on the ground. We also carried copies of travelers’ journals that contained specific descriptions of the natural landscape, of mountains and valleys that wouldn’t have changed much, and of rest areas for caravans that still bore names Oñate had given them. Thus we had a decent idea of where things should have been if they hadn’t been paved or farmed over. “Trail finding,” Jackson assured me, “can be an exact science.”

Certain facts held true about the trail regardless of any particular location. For example, it always ran above the flood-plain. Also, water was a constant concern, so the caravans went for a route where it was accessible and where attacks by hostile Apache or Comanche Indians came infrequently. Acequias⁠—irrigation ditches⁠—often paralleled the trail, and they do even today in pueblos and small towns where they are still used. Oñate’s hacienda marked the final discovery of our journey, and the apex above all the others. Without Oñate, the trail might never have existed. Without Oñate, geographical boundaries, language, culture, battles, history, food, family, ethnic and racial intersection, economics, trade, and travel would have been vastly different. Without Oñate, Jackson and I⁠—a generation and 1,500 miles apart from each other⁠—would have never met four hundred years later.

Our fortuitous guide explained what each walled section might have represented in Oñate’s day. He showed us how to climb over trees, and through holes in the walls where vegetation had overgrown the pathways; he pointed out where the aqueduct ran in from the mountains. Hal took measurements, notes, and pictures; he clicked his GPS. We climbed halfway up a mountain for an eagle’s-eye view. Were this hacienda in the United States, historical preservation societies would have tagged, ticketed, and renovated it; it would not be inhabited by local fauna and ignored by humans. This was the home of a man who changed the course of history. For Jackson and me, it marked the end of a long journey, but for Juan de Oñate and his Camino Real, this place was just the beginning.

Built originally by the Spanish Empire to connect capital cities to one another, camino reals, or royal roads, snaked throughout what is now the Western United States and Mexico. But there is only one Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, the one Jackson and I drove; in addition to its incredible length, it predates the other camino reals by more than two hundred years, according to George Torok, president of the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro (CARTA) association.

Beyond simply offering a way to get around, the Camino Real became a palimpsest of cultural, religious, economic, and ethnic crossovers. Skirmishes, business deals, wars, and treaties were wrought along its path. Like the old Route 66 of the United States, it was as much a cultural symbol as a practical method of travel. Unlike America’s modern day expressways, which mostly skirt cities and often divide ethnicities and races from one neighborhood to the next, Oñate’s Camino Real, our country’s first superhighway, brought states, countries, and people together.

Because of it, Indians went from “hunting grubs to being warriors of the Plains in a single generation after the introduction of the horse,” Jackson says; he calls the animal a “technological revolution.” Mission churches replaced kivas as community centers, and villages began to gather around central squares. Catholicism flourished. Crops like corn, beans, and squash were introduced. The English and Spanish tongues mingled and eventually overwhelmed pueblo languages. Even food preparation changed, as the Spaniards taught Mexican Indians the concept of frying. Chickens, pigs, sheep, and goats arrived, along with new forms of architecture, new diseases, and new kinds of enslavement by the Spaniards. “There is constant traffic where the trail went up from Mexico,” Torok told me. “It’s still happening today: the migration, the immigration, the influence. It wasn’t a finite time period.” The Camino Real grew into a cultural system inscribed on the land itself. As we move forward in the present, it seems to say, we are bound to the past.

Its history can be loosely divided into six periods: 1598⁠–⁠1680, when Oñate and his successors connected the paths that led from village to village into what we recognize as the Camino Real today; 1680⁠–⁠93, when the Pueblo Indians revolted against the invasion of their culture and expelled the Spaniards from northern territories for thirteen years; 1693⁠–⁠1821, with the Spaniards back again and the Camino Real once more a thoroughfare for commerce, culture, and war; 1821⁠–⁠80, when Mexico gained its independence and Americans were allowed to trade; followed by the Mexican War of 1846⁠–⁠48, which made the northern stretch of the Camino Real American; and finally, the 1880s when the rails replaced the road. A few paved parts of the Camino Real are still used unchanged today in pueblos and small towns, but for a purist like Jackson, the trail’s great days are gone.

Jackson and I began our tour in early July, just about the worst time to do a lot of driving through the desert. Having retired as a professor from Humboldt State University, Jackson now spends his days on the trail. He serves as president of the Santa Fe Trail Association, and he wrote the revised version of Marc Simmons’s Following the Santa Fe Trail: A Guide for Modern Travelers.¹ Last May, he helped form the Camino Real Trail Association, and he’s now writing a guidebook about that trail, to be published this June by the University of New Mexico Press. He has been a political geographer, and he wrote his dissertation on a squatters’ village outside Mexico City, so his idea of place is inextricably linked to people and policy. He’s a diehard liberal, but his biggest complaint about archeologists, anthropologists, and sociologists⁠—all of whose subjects overlap with cultural geography⁠—is that they just don’t make good maps.

To say that Jackson is a map man is like saying that astronauts enjoy air travel. He doesn’t just like maps; he lives by them. He keeps topographical and aerial maps organized by route in a box in the back seat of his car, next to atlases, road maps, Lonely Planet maps, and historical maps. In his home office, he has maps framed on the walls, maps in filing cabinets, and maps laid out over his desk. Each morning after breakfast, maps cover his dining room table. He has computer programs to make maps. At various points during our journey, he offered to make me maps including or excluding such features as power lines, bodies of water, villages, and mountains. He doesn’t like to be lost. He told me once that he figured he looked at maps a hundred times a day. “I’m the where guy,” he says. He respects maps, and they in turn have given him the assurance of one who always knows his place in the world.

Our route began north of Santa Fe in the San Juan Pueblo, which Oñate occupied in July of 1598. Large excavations have been done in this area, so the location of the original mission church and central square are denoted by a marker, in the midst of a field of chamise and juniper beside a graveyard. “In northern New Mexico, there’s still a lot of resentment today toward Oñate, whose soldiers were said to be savage,” Jackson said. He illustrated this with a story about the Acoma Pueblo just outside Albuquerque. The tale claims that the Indians were living peacefully when Oñate’s men descended on them, and chopped off the right foot of every man over sixteen. As the Spanish tell it, the Acomas attacked the Spaniards first, and the latter were merely retaliating. Several years ago, on the eve of the opening of a new Oñate museum, north of the San Juan Pueblo along the road to Taos, someone chopped off the right foot of Oñate’s statue.

With close to five hundred people following him, Oñate, whose soldiers often marched in full body armor through the desert heat, averaged fifteen miles a day. Jackson and I covered fifteen times that. Remarkably, Oñate managed to establish the first American thoroughfare, predating the colony of Jamestown, yet has never received much historical credit. The author Marc Simmons, who wrote of Oñate’s perilous journey in The Last Conquistador, said that along with everything else the conquistador did to establish the shape and character of North America, he also “made a notable contribution, through his wide-ranging explorations, toward an understanding of the true geography of western America.”²

Just ten miles outside Santa Fe, Jackson showed me my first swale, a carved-out bowl of earth, where deep cuts from wagon wheels could still be detected. “I get excited about swales,” he told me, “but not everyone does. Standing where something happened is very powerful to me.” In the distance La Majada Mesa loomed black and foreboding. In Oñate’s time, the mesa was a near-insurmountable challenge to cross. Wagons had to be emptied, and their goods carried steeply uphill on horseback while the carts were routed through the shallow river that cleaved the mesa. Loaded with their cargoes, the carts would have been mired in the riverbed. In Commerce of the Prairies, perhaps the best traveler’s account of the Camino Real, Josiah Gregg, a mid-nineteenth-century trader, wrote of the treacherous crossings: “In some places, if a wagon is permitted to stop in the river but for a moment, it sinks to the very body [sic]. Instances have occurred when it became necessary, not only to drag out the mules by the ears and to carry out the loading package by package, but to haul out the wagon piece by piece⁠—wheel by wheel.”³

We drove to the base of La Majada Mesa, parked in the dust, and got out to walk along the old trail. “Look at this.” Jackson shook his head, pointed to where the trail had created an obvious swale, then disappeared from view ’round the bend of the mountain. Jackson believed few people even noticed the mountain. “Ten miles outside Santa Fe and not a single footprint,” he said.

As we drove, the terracotta countryside gave way to rich, red clay hills and low cliffs, and I began to learn how to read a landscape. Jackson pointed out that curved roads in a grid city, for example, were very likely just old trails paved over. The entire city of Boston is the most famous example of this. Parts of the Camino Real that are paved prove the fact. “The caravans took the best route, not necessarily north, east, south, and west,” Jackson told me, as we drove trail areas near his home in Placitas, New Mexico, just outside Albuquerque. “A crooked street in a city laid out by gringos? You can be sure it predates the grid.”

In a flat plain, carved-out swales often collected rainwater and runoff, so a long row of green bushes in a mostly barren landscape might mean the trail had run through there. Or a straight cut through a lush green area might signal the trail’s presence. Jackson was a landscape detective alert for clues. An oddly shaped mountain had been mined; a mound of dirt was a melted adobe house; a shallow gully, an ancient trail. In nature, context is everything. We scanned the land for the easiest route, the most level, and then we looked for angles. Where north⁠–⁠south paved roads ran, the Camino Real often bisected them today at 45-degree angles. We spent a lot of time in the Jeep slowing down, reversing, advancing, retracing our path. At one point, south of Socorro, Jackson remarked that the oxen from trail-day caravans ate beans off the mesquite tree, and the beans left behind in the cattle’s droppings eventually grew into trees, so there were areas where long, straight rows of mesquite trees amid otherwise random vegetation were obvious clues to the Camino Real.

Later we drove to San Pedro, a ghost town in New Mexico and once a stop along the trail, where a field of long-abandoned adobe houses has slowly dissolved during years of rain, sun, and neglect. One small ravine, once surely an acequia, was now host to tangles of weeds, paddle cactus, and thornbushes that crackled under my hiking boots. In the far distance Jackson and I heard voices coming from several trailers, followed by two distinctive pops of a shotgun. “Guess we’d better not linger,” he said, making his way slowly back toward the car. I was reluctant to leave. There are places on the trail today still populated, some large, some small, but none that I had seen like San Pedro, whose ravaged buildings so powerfully suggested the sad place between existing and forgotten.

From New Mexico, Jackson and I made our way south toward Mexico, via the infamous Jornada del Muerto⁠—in English, the Journey of the Dead Man. Christened after Oñate’s day, it maintains the name still. A ninety-mile swatch of desolation between Socorro and Las Cruces, this was one of three long jornadas through enormous chunks of desert. The flat, sandy plain was punctuated by paddle cactus and what Jackson called, in geographer’s parlance, “desert pavement”⁠—rocks blown by the wind off nearby mountains. Caravans often left after 4:00 p.m. and traveled through the night to avoid the jornada’s relentless sun. Water was a constant worry, and travelers’ journals again and again described the white bones of man and beast littering the landscape. Even I, a modern traveler with all the conveniences, did not escape the jornada, when I pulled out a blood-tipped mesquite thorn that had gone through the sole of my shoe and lodged in my foot. Gregg’s section of the Jornada del Muerto told of the luck his party had had in not losing a single person during the crossing. “One thing appears very certain,” he wrote, “that this dangerous pass has cost the life of many travelers in days of yore⁠… we felt truly grateful that the arid Jornada had not been productive of more serious consequences to our party.” ⁴

In El Paso we met up with CARTA’s president, George Torok, and Ben Brown, an archeologist employed by Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History (Instituto Nacionale de Antropologia e Historia), whose work has led him to study various areas around or on the Camino Real. Brown and Torok showed us around several border areas where the Spaniards took up residence after their expulsion in 1680 during the Pueblo revolt.

We drove first through pecan groves and cornfields, to Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican urban extension of El Paso and, after the Pueblo revolt, the northernmost boundary of the Spanish territory. Two Camino Real routes led south from Juárez. One, through sand dunes, has horrific accounts of carcasses in the sand like those in the jornada; the second was less direct but easier. Next to Juárez’s enormous cathedral in the central square stands the original whitewashed mission church built in 1659 and the oldest mission along the trail still functioning. In the square this day, preachers shouted Protestant theology into crackling loudspeakers, and pigeons commanded the immediate airspace. Just south of the mission a three-story covered market sat where the central market had stood during trail days, when it marked an important resupply spot famous for El Paso’s wines, brandy, and fruit. Then it was the only place between the Mexican city of Chihuahua and Santa Fe, New Mexico, where lush green vegetation flourished, a fact no longer true in modern-day Juárez, with its increasingly short water supply. “The Camino Real is really a communication trail,” Ben Brown told me. “Its social impact was with knowledge and items going north and south. It’s not just a trail in the physical sense; it’s really a concept of communication.”

We drove through various settlements where the Spanish retreated after the 1680 revolt. Ysleta del Sur, Senecú, San Elizario, San Lorenzo, and Socorro del Sur all were small communities and are laid out today as they were in trail days, with a mission-style church, a central square, and a small but growing sense of their place in history. At these settlements, Torok told me, the names had changed, the Camino Real path had changed, the river had changed, and the people and the culture had continually changed. The Rio Grande, which is the established border between the United States and Mexico, constantly shifts its location. The earth is not silent, not static, even if we wish our boundaries to be so. The river is far south of where it was in Oñate’s day and, as a result, makes for a rather odd choice for an international boundary line.

In a little town called Bracito, which was a resting stop along the trail in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a small but significant battle took place during the Mexican War of 1846⁠–⁠48, right in front of today’s Bracito School. Brown and Jackson stood at the mouth of an acequia, respectfully debating the trail’s location (Brown: underneath the acequia; Jackson: alongside it), and why the Americans who were outnumbered three-to-one by the Mexicans won the battle in twenty minutes (Brown: Mexicans were an ill-treated peasant army with low morale; Jackson: Americans were Missouri volunteers well used to their weaponry). As they talked, each with one leg resting atop the modern concrete wall of the old acequia, the sun began to set, lighting up the school. Lightning shot down from the clouds in the distance, and sheets of rain rolled in. Whether the Camino Real ran below or adjacent to the acequia, today a railroad track crosses where we all stood discussing what happened here once, watching as the storm and nightfall came on.

In Mexico, Jackson and I were alone again, searching for the first of many areas we hoped to find that had eluded modern day explorers, including Ojo de Lucero, a spring that nearly every journal mentioned that had watered a rest stop from Oñate’s day. In the Mexican state of Chihuahua, Jackson scanned the placid golden landscape, and I felt the Jeep slow. He pulled the car off the highway onto a two-track dust road in the middle of the desert. I hadn’t even seen the two-track, let alone whatever infinitesimal clue between this swatch of desert and the last had made him turn off for closer inspection. To Jackson, each new vista of desert offered a slightly altered landscape, a tiny promise of discovery. The Lucero spring would have once held enough water for a thousand people or more to drink, wash, and cook from for a few days in a trailside camp, but today it would be only an enormous indentation in the earth. If we found Lucero, we would be among just a handful of people in the world who knew where it was now, and who knew that it once meant, for many thousands of people, survival.

Jackson drove a mile off the highway on the two-track until we reached a private ranch in the midst of new construction. A man in a construction hat walked briskly to our car and peered in suspiciously. Jackson waved a greeting, rolling down his window. The man told us that what we wanted was across the highway. “No aqui,” he said several times in a voice meant to warn us away from our folly. Jackson gunned the engine, backed up, and retraced our route to the highway, at which point he grumbled, “He doesn’t know what the hell we’re looking for.”

Moments later he spotted a flash of aqua blue up ahead. “Aha,” he said enigmatically. Jackson read the landscape as an artist reads a blank canvas, wrought with possibility and inherently full of layers and details that the rest of us nonartists could not imagine. The blue dot became clearer as we drove, and I saw that it was an alberca, a public swimming pool. Jackson conversed with the alberca’s maintenance man, and he pointed in the direction we had come from. Afterward Jackson turned to me rather as a superhero might to his faithful but somewhat ineffectual sidekick and said, “Let’s get the maps!”

Ten minutes later, Jeep parked askew amid mesquite trees and choya cactus with pipe-cleaner arms, we stood at Ojo de Lucero. We’d driven along a two-track past scattered ranches, then turned into the desert until the trees got too thick to drive, and then we walked, carrying bundles of papers, maps, and Jackson’s digital GPS. Several hundred yards away was a tiny village, so Jackson knew there was a water source from somewhere. We noted nearby power lines, which showed up on the topo maps, and after a brief tromp through the desert, we stood at a shallow dry indentation in the earth, a small pipe pumping water through the desert.

The finding, though, was remarkably anticlimactic. Jackson marked the spot in his GPS device, then grinned for a moment until his mind jumped to what we had yet to find. In the world of Hal Jackson, if something hadn’t been found in four hundred-or-so years, it wasn’t so much a matter of its concealment as that no one had ever really bothered to look. Lucero was an auspicious sign of things to come.

We drove on through the Mexican desert. At Carrizal we stopped at what had once been a presidio. The walls had dwindled to a rectangular speed bump in the earth. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Spaniards bribed Apaches with food to ward off thievery in what was likely the first real attempt at social welfare. Later, in 1916, Americans⁠—mostly Buffalo Soldiers⁠—lost a small battle to Mexicans here. In the distance, dust devils flitted across faraway plains. You could watch your dog run away for days in land like this, I told Jackson, a phrase often said of the Midwest, where I happened to live. Jackson laughed, then, grew thoughtful. Every place you ever go will be compared with where you came from: the weather, the architecture, the context. “You never escape your own landscape,” he said. “It’s like gum on your shoe.”

Later we searched for another ojo: Caliente. Like Lucero, it was mentioned in every journal; unlike Lucero, Jackson didn’t know of many people who had ever managed to locate it. Using topo maps, we pulled off the highway onto a two-track and searched through the flat-planed dust for a road shown on the map. We drove up, looked, reversed, drove back up, looked again, and reversed, over and over. Between the irrigated alfalfa fields, the russet land managed only an occasional barrel cactus. Suddenly, a migrant worker appeared at the window of our Jeep. After the man gave us directions, Jackson and I easily spotted the tiny road that had eluded us. We lifted a metal-wire gate off its wooden hinge and drove in till we had to hoof it through the mesquite. Two things appeared in front of us: an enormous ocher-and-bronze-colored church⁠—too new to be Caliente⁠—and a lone brown cow.

We split up and searched through the trees, more animals appearing as we wandered: horses, cows, quail, a black-eared jackrabbit. Suddenly, in the distance, I heard Jackson hollering. He was buried deep in the trees, so I followed his voice and saw first the old church. It was just as Gregg’s journal and so many others had said: graveyard next to the church, padre’s home opposite. If this was really Ojo de Caliente, we could expect an enormous ojo and the Camino Real trail leading smack-dab into the church.

I found Jackson standing in the middle of the hole. It was dried up now, probably forty-by-twenty feet, but huge trees around its circumference suggested that water abounded deep down. Jackson was downright giddy. Around the ojo and church were mounds that had once been adobe houses. “It’s probable that no modern explorer has ever been here,” he said. “And certainly no settlement for ninety or so years.” He jog-walked from end to end in the ojo, measured the whole thing, and took a GPS position. Lizards darted across the ground. We felt as if we had been granted the memory of every traveler who ever walked that land. We ran atop and through the ojo, took pictures in the padre’s quarters, padded over the mounds where houses once stood. Then we wandered around to the back of the church, and there it was, clear as day: a single straight brown swale surrounded on both sides by overgrown mesquite trees. The Camino Real, with all but street signs pointing it out. Our elation was so great we simply stared, overwhelmed, silenced.

We found other things: the route of the trail in a charming, colorful village called Valle de Allende, where the air was cool, the trees were voluminous, and the town smelled of wet earth and roasted chilies. Oñate and his minions had crossed a stream there. We drove on past rolling green hills, out of the desert and into a land of eucalyptus and pine, to a town called Villa Hidalgo today and Cerro Gordo back in the trail days. We found the makings of an old presidio wall possibly from those trail days.

On a side road made of what appeared to be a scattering of stones embedded at random in the dirt, Jackson peered so close for so long that a pattern emerged. “Here,” he told me, “a straight line of rocks. You see that? That’s not accidental.” He got so excited he had to take a breath. “That was put there by someone. On purpose.” A moment later an old Indian couple walked out of a nearby doorway and greeted us. Jackson pointed to the rocks. “Camino Real, aqui?” he asked. The woman shrugged and invited us into her home, where her husband, in peasant hat and beat-up jeans, confirmed that indeed his home was on the trail. The rocks, he told us, were the old method of paving. We sat then and talked with them about what we were doing: a fusion of generations, cultures, and languages, exploring a history of generations, cultures, and languages.

That night a band of musicians walked through the streets of Zacatecas, Mexico, where Oñate’s family was once famous for its silver mines. There are still Oñates there today, and the pink-stoned buildings of Zacatecas are still surrounded by mines whose silver is coveted the world over. Tomorrow we would head to Oñate’s birthplace, Pánuco, and search for the spot where everything started, but tonight we would celebrate. As the band marched, people in the streets followed until the crowd was more than a block long. Car horns wailed as the entourage passed. Jackson and I were swept up with the throng, hurrying along the cobblestones behind the band. On the sidewalks, people danced, and the band stopped and played for several couples. A Mexican man in a white shirt pulled me by the hand and swung me around to the music. I laughed, and Jackson snapped a picture, and then the skies opened, and raindrops the size of pebbles crashed over our heads and all around us. But the band played on, and I kept dancing.

Marc Simmons, H. Jackson, Following the Santa Fe Trail: a Guide for Modern Travelers (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 2001). ↩︎
Simmons, The Last Conquistador: Juan de Oñate and the settling of the far Southwest (Univ. Oklahoma Press, 1991). ↩︎
Josiah Gregg, The Commerce of the Prairies (Lakeside Press, 1926), 242 ↩︎
Ibid., 240. ↩︎

Chicago’s Natural Divisions and Plant Communities

Wed, 27 Nov 2024 10:14:31 -0600

These texts are transcribed from Plants of the Chicago Region, by Floyd Swink and Geroud Wilhelm.¹ Wilhelm has since published a more up-to-date text for botanists, but the following chapters are out of print: the collection of primary texts from presettlement is especially notable. The citations have been checked and linked when available. ~

Natural Divisions of the Chicago Region

The authors are indebted to Kenneth Mierzwa of TAMS Consultants, Inc., Chicago, Ill., for having made available for this book a synopsis of the Natural Divisions of the Chicago Region, a distillation of a forthcoming paper.

Homoya et al.² describe a natural division as a “generalized unit of the landscape where a distinctive assemblage of natural features is present.” Natural divisions maps are a synthesis of geology, physiography, soils, hydrology, presettlement vegetation, and characteristic fauna. They soon will be available for all four of the states included within the Chicago region.²³⁴⁵⁶ The current effort combines maps of the four states and adds additional detail that reflects the regional scale. For example, the Morainal Section in Illinois³ and the Valparaiso Moraine Section in Indiana² are valid concepts when viewed within the context of each state, but when this section is extended along the Valparaiso and associated moraines from Wisconsin to Michigan, it must be split at some point. The beech-maple forests of our eastern section are too distinct from the oak savannas and prairies of our western section to be included in the same unit. Similarly, the lake plain is elevated to division status, and subdivided to reflect significant differences among the black-soil prairies once present on the site of modern-day Chicago, the sand savannas of much of the northwestern Indiana lake plain, and the more heavily wooded lake plain of Michigan and adjacent Indiana. These new boundaries address the east to west transition from forest to prairie.

Natural divisions of the Chicago Region

Morainal Natural Division

Young and rolling morainal topography close to Lake Michigan. The boundary follows the outer edge of the Valparaiso Moraine except in the northwest, where the line is based on geological features and presettlement vegetation.³

1A. Western Morainal Section

Mostly end moraines. Soils with a high clay content and often a perched water table. Primarily prairie and savanna, with isolated areas of mesic woodland and forest.

1B. Eastern Morainal Section

Eastern portion of the Valparaiso Morainal system. Geologically similar to 1A, but a break is made based on the predominant plant communities. Mostly timbered with savannas and forests.

1C. Kettle Moraine Section

Characterized by truncated end moraines, outwash features, kame and kettle topography, an unconsolidated aquifer, and glacial lakes. Savannas were once the principal plant community, interspersed with prairies, sedge meadows, fens, small spring-fed streams, and marshes.

1D. Racine Till Plain Section

Mostly end and ground moraines; timbered principally with mesic savanna or forest. Ravines along Lake Michigan include a number of boreal relict plants.

1E. Winnebago Drift Section

Altonian substage of the Wisconsinan glaciation, earlier than other sections of the Morainal Natural Division. Topography somewhat more level and wetlands less common; streams more entrenched and drainage patterns better developed. Savannas and dry prairies predominated.

1F. Fox River Bluff Section

Characterized by moderately high bluffs along the lower Fox River Valley, and associated outwash features and dolomite outcrops. Seepage areas and fens occur along the bluffs. Included within the Morainal Division because of the fens similar to those in 1C, and extensive woodlands associated with the bluffs.

Lake Plain Natural Division

Characterized by lacustrine deposits and aeolian dunes. Included within the Morainal Division by previous authors.

2A. Chicago Lake Plain Section

Once covered by glacial Lake Chicago; consists of nearly level lacustrine silt and clay deposits. Mesic and wet prairie and marsh originally extensive.

2B. Gary Lake Plain Section

Includes the Tolleston, Calumet, and Glenwood beach ridges and intervening often slightly acidic sand flats. Characterized by sand savannas with intervening wet sand prairies and marshes.

2C. Benton Harbor Lake Plain Section

Topographically similar to 2B, but originally mostly wooded with rich swamps and mesic forests.

2D. Illinois Dunes Section

Low beach ridges and swales at Illinois Beach State Park and Chiwaukee Prairie support an open community of sand prairie, sand savanna, and marsh. Two additional sand areas of irregular shape which once existed on the lake plain were probably similar; these are within the present limits of Evanston and Chicago.

2E. Ridge and Swale Section

Formed only within the past 6000 years, characterized by alternating parallel low ridges and swales. Ridges consist of relatively alkaline sandy soils and are covered by sand prairie and a sparse savanna of black oak and jack pines, wetlands characterized by pannes and open water.

2F. High Dune Section

Narrow band along Lake Michigan; includes a unique high dune complex of communities. Prevailing winds which build the dunes also bring higher than normal snowfall, moderate temperatures, and new sand. Regularly timbered with black oak and white pine savanna, becoming more regularly forested northward.

Grand Prairie Natural Division

The grand prairie once covered much of east-central Illinois. The northeastern portion of this natural region enters the Chicago region.

3A. Grand Prairie Section

Mostly end and ground moraines; level to gently rolling. Characterized by tallgrass prairie, with timbered communities limited to the margins of rivers and well-drained morainic ridges.

3B. Kankakee Sand Section

Aeolian and lacustrine sand deposits, mostly on the south side of the Kankakee River. Sand savannas are frequent on dunes, interspersed with wet to dry sand prairie, sand flatwoods, marsh, and shrub swamps.

3C. Kankakee Marsh Section

Vast wetlands which once bordered the Kankakee River in Indiana; marsh was probably the predominant community type, areas of true swamp and riparian savanna were present.

3D. Bedrock Valley Section

Dolomite exposed along the Des Plaines River by scouring from the outflow of glacial Lake Chicago. The Kankakee torrent cut down to underlying dolomite from Momence to the confluence with the Des Plaines. In the Illinois River Valley, shale and sandstone exposures are more prevalent. Unique communities include dolomite cliffs and prairie, typically interspersed with sedge meadow and marsh.

Glacial Lakes Natural Division

Only one section of the Northern Lakes Division enters the eastern part of our region.

4A. Glacial Lakes Section

Exhibits complex and uneven ice-contact terrain deposited by a stagnating glacier.⁴ Moraines, kames, and outwash plains are present, and kettle ponds, lakes, and swamps are numerous. Extensive forests, with savannas on steep slopes. Lakes, swamps, bogs, fens, and marshes are interspersed. This section is expanded to include a gravel outwash fan, formerly mapped as part of 3B.

Natural Plant Communities

The Chicago region, situated at the southern end of Lake Michigan, lies along the northeastern edge of the Tall Grass Prairie biome of the Midwest. The prevailing landscape at the time of settlement was open prairie. In some areas the prairie was flat, in others rolling.

Undoubtedly, the most remarkable feature of the state of Illinois is its extensive prairies, or non-wooded tracts. They begin on a comparatively small scale in the basin of lake Erie, and already form the bluff of the land about lake Michigan, the Upper Wabash, and the Illinois, … or rather, the whole of this tract may be described as prairie intersected by patches of woodland, chiefly confined to the river valleys. The characteristic peculiarity of the prairies is the absence of timber; in other respects, they present all the varieties of soil and surface that are found elsewhere; some are of inexhaustible fertility, others of hopeless sterility; some spread out in vast boundless plains, others are undulating or rolling, while others are broken by hills. In general, they are covered with a rich growth of grass, forming excellent natural meadows, from which circumstance they take their name. Prairie is a French word, signifying meadow, and is applied to any description of surface that is destitute of timber and brushwood, and clothed with grass. Wet, dry, level, and undulating, are terms of description merely, and apply to prairies in the same sense as they do to forest lands. The prairies of Illinois may be classed under three general divisions;–the healthy, or bushy; the alluvial, or wet; and the dry, or undulating. Those [that] have springs of water, … are covered with bushes of hazel and furze, small sassafras shrubs interspersed with grape-vine, and in the season of flowers become beautifully decorated by a rich profusion of gay herbaceous plants.⁷

The prairies were regularly interspersed with poorly drained flatland, and the hills were commonly characterized by hanging fens and seepage slopes where the water-filled high grounds discharged a constant flow of clear water into wet meadows and marshes.

Between the Plein and Theakaki, the country is flat, wet, and swampy, interspersed with prairies of an inferior quality of soil.⁸

Throughout the region were small to large tracts of savannas consisting of open-grown timbers, mostly of Bur and White Oak. Eastward, around the southern tip of Lake Michigan, the lake shore rose up in high wooded dunes covered mostly in White Pine.

The northern part of Illinois is beautifully diversified with groves of timber and rolling prairies. The shores of Michigan have a large supply of pine timber, and from this source the lumber for buildings at Chicago is obtained. … The stage road, from Michigan City to Chicago, is, most of the way, on the sandy beach. Chicago … is built on a level prairie, open in full view to the Lake, and the soil is enough mixed with sand, to prevent its being muddy.⁹

… there were along where Michigan Avenue now is walled with palatial mansions innumerable sand hills rising to a considerable height, overrun by the wild juniper loaded with its fragrant berries at the feet of which stretched away to the southeast the soft smooth beach of firm glistening sand … along the beach north of the river where also the drifting sand has been piled by the shifting winds into a thousand hills stretching farther back from the waters than on the south, but here the juniper bush was replaced by a stunted growth of scraggy pines often hilled up by the drifting sand. … Further back was a broad ramble among stately oaks sparsely scattered over the even plain among which a horseman could be seen at a great distance.¹⁰

Behind the dunes were vast wet prairies and marshes, which, eastward and northward, gave way to huge swamps of mixed hardwood forests. East of the windward shores, in the lee of the dunes and beyond, the timbers closed up in spots into tighter savannas and cool forests of Sugar Maple and Beech; but the timbers soon opened up again into scattered groves and prairies.

On the one hand stretched bur-oak plains, spread with a verdant carpet, variegated with dazzling wild flowers, without an obstacle to intercept the view for miles, save the sombre trunks of the low oaks, sparsely spreading their shadows across the lawn; on the other hand arose the undulations of the white oak openings, with picturesque outlines of swales and slopes gracefully sweeping and sharply defined in the distance. Then, there lay the majestic prairie, grand in expansive solitude, its fringe of timber, as seen in the distance, resembling a diligently trained and well-trimmed garden parterre.¹¹

Southward and westward, the landscape was broken by large streams, with flat prairie bottoms and scattered stretches of tree-lined bluffs and backwaters.

The roads in this country are in a state of nature, But the ground is so smooth, and so entirely free from stones, that when the earth is dry you do not find better roads at the north. … We took the Galena road, forded the river, a stream about four rods wide, and passed on, over a beautiful, open prairie country, here and there a log house, a small grove of timber, or small stream of water; the land high, dry and rich, and arrived at night at Naper’s settlement, on the Du Page River, thirty-seven miles from Chicago. … We now left the Galena road and took a course more northerly to the Big and Little Woods, on [the] Fox River. In travelling twelve miles we came to the settlement, at the lower end of “Little Woods.” … houses were built near the timber, and a beautiful rich prairie opened before them. … [The] Fox River is a clear stream of water, about twenty rods wide, having a hard limestone bottom, from two to three feet deep, a brisk current, and generally fordable. On its banks, and on some other streams, we occasionally found ledges of limestone; but other than that, we found no rocks in the State. We here forded the river, and travelled all day on its western bank. We found less timber on this side of the river. On the east side, it is generally lined with timber to the depth of a mile or more; but the west side is scarcely skirted with it. It is somewhat singular and unaccountable, but we found it universally to be the fact, that the east side of all the streams had much the largest portion of timber.⁹

All of the streams in the northern parts of the state, which empty into the Wabash and Illinois, have their branches interwoven with many of the rivers running into lake Erie and Michigan. … [T]hey not unfrequently issue from the same marsh, prairie, pond, or lake. The … portage between the Chicago and the Kickapoo [Des Plaines] branch of the Illinois, [is] rendered important by the inundations, which at certain seasons cover the intermediate prairie, from which the two opposite streams flow. By this means nature herself opened a navigable communication between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi; and it is a fact, however difficult it may be of belief to many, that boats not unfrequently pass from Lake Michigan into the Illinois, and in some instances without being subjected to the necessity of having their lading taken out.⁸

The country back of Chicago, for the distance of twelve miles, is a smooth, level prairie; producing an abundance of grass, but too low and wet for cultivation. The Chicago River is formed by two branches, which meet at the upper end of the village. The branches come from exactly opposite directions and after running some distance, parallel with the lake, and about a mile from it, here meet each other, and turning at right angles, flow in a regular straight channel, like a canal, into the lake. On each side of the town, between these branches and the lake shore, there is, for some distance, a good growth of wood and timber. On the lake shore, there are naked sand hills; and these are found all around the lake. … If Lake Michigan were ten feet higher than its present level, its waters would flow into the Illinois river. The Oplanes, a branch of the Illinois, approaches within twelve miles of the Lake; and the land between is low and level. When the water is high, boats now pass from the lake to the river. At a time of high water, a steamboat attempted to pass from the Illinois to the lake. After running a day from Ottawa up the river, the water began to subside, the captain became alarmed, lest his boat might run aground and returned.⁹

The alluvial, or wet prairies, are generally on the margins of the great water courses, though sometimes they are at a distance from them; their soil is deep, black, friable, and of exhaustless fertility. … From May to October, the prairies are covered with tall grass and flower-producing weeds. In June and July, they seem like an ocean of flowers of various hues, waving to the breezes which sweep over them. The numerous tall flowering shrubs and vegetables which grow luxuriantly over these plains, present a striking and delightful appearance.⁷

The landscape was replete with wet depressions, and, particularly northwestward in our region, surrounded by copses of larch, and then by shrubs and sedge meadows. Such landscapes were burned on a regular basis.

The dry or undulating prairies are almost destitute of springs and of all vegetation, with the exception of weeds, flowers, and grass. The undulations are so slight that, to the eye, the surface has almost the appearance of an uninterrupted level, though the ravines made by freshets show that there is a considerable degree of inclination. In the prairie region there are numerous ponds, formed some from the surface water, the effect of rain, and the melting of the snows in the spring and others near the rivers from their overflowing.⁷

The prairies are all burnt over once a year, either in spring or fall, but generally in the fall; and the fire is undoubtedly, the true cause of the origin and continuance of them. In passing through the State I saw many of them on fire; and in the night, it was the grandest exhibition I ever saw. A mountain of flame, 30 feet high, and of unknown length, moving onward, roaring like ‘many waters’–in a gently, stately movement, and unbroken front–then impelled by a gust of wind, suddenly breaks itself to pieces, here and there shooting ahead, whirling itself high in air–all becomes noise, and strife, and uproar, and disorder. Well might Black Hawk look with indifference on the puny exhibition of fireworks in New York, when he had so often seen fireworks displayed, on such a gigantic scale, on his own native prairies.⁹

For most writers today, our landscape no longer evokes such eloquence. To the extent that the natural landscape is described at all, it is done so very clinically, mostly yielding codifications of plant communities. Such taxonomies are facilitated by the fact that our natural communities are fragmented into disparate pieces, with many of the intervening, and possibly confounding, communities gone forever.

Attempting to discriminate plant communities from among the myriad of plant associations is, nonetheless, a pursuit of botanists seeking to assign each plant a “proper” and definable place in the landscape. Part of the challenge is to give each community a name which consists of two or three words from the English dictionary. Commonly used words include nouns such as forest, swamp, savanna, flatwoods, prairie, meadow, fen, and bog, and adjectives such as acidic, alkaline, wet, mesic, dry, sandy, mucky, and loamy. The difficulty begins when the default assumption is made that if the words do not exist, the community cannot exist. In the taxon entries we have avoided forcing the native species into formally circumscribed plant communities, choosing instead to use common English prose and a list of immediate associates to describe the habitat. While our native plants are prevailingly faithful to some natural context, a disciplined attempt to place even a small percentage of the 1,638 elements into one or more formally designated categories, however permutated, quickly informs the botanist of the folly of this exercise.

Another factor complicating plant community classification is the fact that soon after the Native American culture was replaced by the European culture changes in the human relationship with the landscape caused fundamental changes in plant community composition. Cessation of fire, straightening of rivers, ditching, tiling, heavy grazing, and urban and suburban infrastructure have so modified the original structure and depauperized the land that our ability to piece together an understanding of natural order is profoundly compromised. About 90 percent of our native flora is restricted to the stable habitats provided by our original plant communities,¹² so an understanding and stewardship of such areas is critical if we are to carry forward into the future a possibility of association with living things other than ourselves, a few weeds, and cultivars.

Given all the problems associated with trying to envision and describe the natural plant communities, we nevertheless will propose a paradigm of plant communities. While these communities are certainly more artifacts of binary thinking than representative of nature, a brief synopsis can communicate to a botanist information on the nature of our flora and landscape. An intellectual miscarriage occurs only when it is pretended that such community constructs are or could be “scientifically” abstracted.

Generally, one can visualize about nine principal kinds of communities: aquatic, marsh, fen, bog, swamp, forest, savanna, dune, and prairie. With the exception of certain dune, bedrock, or coastal-plain disjunct systems, most of these general community groups are variously expressed in the different natural divisions and sections (see page 38). In choosing representative species, we have generally chosen a few very conservative species to which the user can refer in the annotated checklist for further associates and nuances of habit, distribution, and more detailed interpretations of the plant community. These representative species are not intended to represent associations for specific kinds of plant communities; rather, each species tends to represent a facet or variant of the general community type. The word “characteristic,” when used in connection with species listed under the community descriptions, does not necessarily mean that the species are common or even locally extant in the community; rather, it is meant to imply that the species are typical of or restricted to the community, and that habitat discussions under those species in the annotated checklist amplify the character of the community. Another type of natural community in the Chicago region is the ruderal flora, principally those species with C values 0 or 1.¹

Aquatic

Aquatic plant communities were occasional throughout the region but most abundant in our eastern and northwestern sectors. They formed in the landscape in potholes and in lacustrine plains where there was no discharge. Since our region evaporates nearly or quite as much water as falls, aquatic communities are sustained by waters from a surrounding watershed in excess of that provided by rain over their surfaces. Generally, these excess waters filter down through vegetated ground into the underlying soil until they reach impervious material, and exit by way of springs, rills, or ground water. Along our major streams, aquatic plant communities developed in alluvial sloughs and ponds derived from surface melt or runoff waters.

The more minerotrophic or ground-water communities are characterized by plants such as Brasenia schreberi, Hippuris vulgaris, Megalodonta beckii, Myriophyllum verticillatum pectinatum, Potamogeton amplifolius, Potamogeton richardsonii, Potamogeton strictifolius, Utricularia vulgaris, and Zannichellia palustris. In softer waters one is more likely to encounter plants such as Nuphar advena, Nuphar variegatum, Nymphaea tuberosa, Utricularia geminiscapa, and Utricularia purpurea. Alluvial or surface water communities are characterized by members of the Lemnaceae, Ceratophyllum demersum, Potamogeton foliosus, Potamogeton pectinatus, Potamogeton illinoensis, and Potamogeton natans.

Marsh

Marsh plant communities generally occur along the transition between aquatic communities and drier communities, or in large flats which are regularly inundated by shallow surface waters for much of the growing season. Marshes are best developed with us in the Lake Plain, in the lacustrine flats of our northwestern and eastern sectors, and along the lower reaches of the Des Plaines and Kankakee river drainages. These communities are best characterized by emergent species such as Carex aquatilis, Carex lacustris, Hydrocotyle umbellata, Hypericum boreale, Peltandra virginica, Pontederia cordata, Sagittaria graminea, Sagittaria latifolia, Sagittaria rigida, Scirpus subterminalis, Scirpus validus creber, Sparganium americanum, Sparganium chlorocarpum, Sparganium eurycarpum, and Zizania aquatica. On the shores of ponds, lakes, and swales, often growing without heavy competition, conservative species include Cyperus diandrus, Eleocharis geniculata, Juncus pelocarpus, Peplis diandra, Rotala ramosior, Scirpus purshianus, Scirpus torreyi, Sparganium chlorocarpum, Utricularia gibba, Veronica comosa, and Veronica scutellata. A related community, with affinities to fens and wet prairies, is the sedge meadow. It develops in large, shallow, lacustrine flats, and is dominated by hummocks of sedges, particularly Carex stricta, and characterized by conservative species such as Aster puniceus, Carex buxbaumii, Carex atriculata, Dulichium arundinaceum, Lysimachia terrestris, Lysimachia thyrsiflora, Rumex orbiculatus, Sium suave, and Utricularia vulgaris.

Fen

Fens are wetland communities which occur in areas where the glacial formations are such that carbonate-rich ground water discharges at a constant rate along the slopes of kames, eskers, moraines, river bluffs, or even dunes, or in flats associated with these formations, provided the material through which the waters traveled is rich in calcium or magnesium carbonates. Depending upon the circumstances fens can occur where marl is at or near the surface or where peats are constantly bathed in minerotrophic ground water; such areas can be wooded or open.

Marly fens are commonly on open prairie slopes and are characterized by Carex sterilis, Eleocharis rostellata, Rhynchospora capillacea, Scirpus cespitosus callosus, Tofieldia glutinosa, and Triglochin palustris. In the constantly flowing rills discharging in these fens grow Agrostis alba palustris, Armoracia aquatica, Berula erecta, and Mimulus glabratus fremontii. Related to the hillside fens are the wooded seeps which occur sporadically on steep bluffs. Characteristic species include Aster prenanthoides, Cimicifuga racemosa, Fraxinus nigra, Polymnia canadensis, Rhamnus alnifolia, Rhamnus lanceolata, Thuja occidentalis, Ulmus thomasii, and Veronica americana. As fens become peatier characteristic species include Betula pumila, Campanula uliginosa, Conioselinum chinense, Eriophorum angustifolium, Filipendula rubra, Galium asprellum, Habenaria lacera, Phlox maculata, Pogonia ophioglossoides, Patentilla fruticosa, Salix candida, Saxifraga pensylvanica, Solidago uliginosa, and Valeriana uliginosa. The flat, black-soil prairie fens are characterized by Aster borealis, Carex interior, Carex prairea, Cirsium muticum, Cypripedium candidum, Habenaria hyperborea huronensis, Lobelia kalmii, Muhlenbergia glamerata, Parnassia glauca, Satureja arkansana, Scleria verticillata, Selaginella apoda, and Valeriana ciliata.

Bog

Bog, like most of the other terms used here to describe plant communities, is not a scientific word in the sense that its use always signifies a uniform, unique concept which is standardly perceived. Any place, for example, where there is a quagmire or wet, mucky, hummocky ground is likely to be termed a “bog;” hence, the expression “bogged down.” The contemporary ecologist tends to restrict the term “bog” to a hydric/edaphic vegetational scenario which is typified by acidic, usually organic substrates, and a characteristic floristic composition. Many of our peatlands are influenced significantly by waters rich in carbonates and can be called prairie fens. But as the cation exchange capacity damps off bog-like conditions can begin to develop. Many of the bogs in our northwestern sector can be called alkaline bogs for that reason.

Commonly the peatland floats on a minerotrophic head of water, with the deeper roots thus exposed to calcareous or circumneutral conditions, and the shallower roots are imbedded in the upper sphagnum mat, probably in a more acidic environment. Characteristic species in these minerotrophic or alkaline bogs include Carex brunnescens, Carex diandra, Carex lasiocarpa americana, Carex leptalea, Geum rivale, Hypericum virginicum fraseri, Larix laricina, Menyanthes trifoliata minor, Potentilla palustris, Rhus vernix, Rhynchospora alba, Ribes hirtellum, Salix pedicellaris hypoglauca, Salix serissima, Sarracenia purpurea, Utricularia intermedia, and Utricularia minor. In large basins or in areas where the influence of minerotrophic waters is insignificant, characteristically acid bogs can develop, inhabited by plants such as Andromeda glaucophylla, Arethusa bulbosa, Carex atlantica capillacea, Carex canescens, Carex chordorrhiza, Carex disperma, Carex echinata, Carex limosa, Carex oligosperma, Carex pauciflora, Carex tenuiflora, Carex trisperma, Chamaedaphne calyculata angustifolia, Cypripedium acaule, Drosera intermedia, Drosera rotundifolia, Eriophorum gracile, Eriophorum spissum, Eriophorum virginicum, Habenaria blephariglottis, Habenaria ciliaris, Hypericum virginicum, Salix sericea, Scheuchzeria palustris americana, Utricularia geminiscapa, Vaccinium macrocarpon, Vaccinium oxycoccos, Viola pallens, and Woodwardia virginica. Related to the acid bog, often in sand flats or basins, are floating sedge mats that rise and fall with the water table. Such mats are characterized by Eleocharis robbinsii, Eriocaulon septangulare, Fuirena pumila, Hypericum canadense, Rhexia virginica, and Scirpus smithii.

Swamp

Swamps are wetlands characterized by trees growing in large flats or basins that are poorly drained, with most of the water leaving through evapotranspiration. They can occur in the backwaters of large, slow moving rivers, such as the Kankakee, or in wet sandy flats in the Kankakee Sand Section south of the Valparaiso Moraine. They also occur on the moraine in wet depressions. North of the Valparaiso Moraine, in the Lake Plain, they are best developed in the large flats behind the high dunes.

Along the Kankakee River they occur in bottomlands, with characteristic species including Carex typhina, Cephalanthus occidentalis, Fraxinus pennsylvanica subintegerrima, Fraxinus tomentosa, Mikania scandens, Populus heterophylla, and Styrax americana. In sandy, poorly drained flats with a high water table, a fire-dependent savanna-like swamp dominated by Quercus palustris is characterized by Bartonia virginica, Betula nigra, Carex haydenii, Carex longii, Carex straminea, Eleocharis tenuis verrucosa, and Rubus hispidus. On the moraines, especially the Valparaiso and Lake Border moraines, there are shallow depressions characterized by Quercus bicolor; other characteristic species include Carex crus-corvi, Carex lupuliformis, Carex muskingumensis, Carex squarrosa, Carex tuckermanii, Carex vesicaria monile, Cephalanthus occidentalis, Fraxinus nigra, Onoclea sensibilis, and Lycopus rubellus. There is a phase of this swamp on the low terraces of the Kankakee River, characterized by Carex grayii, Carex lupulina, Carex muskingumensis, Leersia lenticularis, Lysimachia hybrida, and Quercus bicolor.

In the broad low flats behind the high dunesof Lake Michigan lies one of the richest and most complicated forested systems in our region. It is characterized by a complex hydrology and is interspersed by gentle rises, shallow depressions, and hummocks, and consists of an inseparable mixture of wooded fen, bog, and mesic forest. It supports a wide array of species, including trees such as Acer saccharum, Betula alleghaniensis, Betula papyrifera, Fagus grandifolia, Quercus bicolor, Quercus palustris, Quercus rubra, and Tilia americana; other characteristic species include Carex bromoides, Carex crinita, Carex debilis rudgei, Carex folliculata, Carex intumescens, Carex seorsa, Chrysosplenium americanum, Coptis trifolia, Cypripedium calceolus pubescens, Dryopteris cristata, Habenaria clavellata, Habenaria flava herbiola, Habenaria psycodes, Lycopodium lucidulum, Lycopodium obscurum, Medeola virginiana, Milium effusum, Nemopanthus mucronata, Poa paludigena, Rubus pubescens, Trientalis borealis, and Viola incognita. Such swamps, while they retain their essential characteristics, change in specific species composition as one travels northeastward from Dune Acres in Porter County to Benton Harbor in Berrien County.

Forest

Forests occur in our eastern sector on rises which are relatively well drained and physiographically located such that exposure to fire is rare. Such forests are dominated by Acer saccharum and Fagus grandifolia. The ground cover vegetation is not physiognomically capable of sustaining a line of fire. Characteristic species include Athyrium pycnocarpon, Athyrium thelypterioides, Carex amphibola, Carex careyana, Carex deweyana, Carex digitalis, Carex laxiflora, Carex leptonervia, Carex plantaginea, Carex prasina, Corallorhiza maculata, Cornus rugosa, Dentaria diphylla, Dicentra canadensis, Dirca palustris, Dryopteris hexagonoptera, Dryopteris marginalis, Dryopteris noveboracensis, Galium circaezans, Galium lanceolatum, Hieracium paniculatum, Hydrophyllum canadense, Lonicera canadensis, Maianthemum canadense, Mitella diphylla, Panax trifolius, Panicum commutatum ashei, Panicum dichotomum, Poa alsodes, Pyrola asarifolia purpurea, Sambucus pubens, Tipularia discolor, and Viola rostrata. Another type of forest is along the high dunes, northward in Berrien County, characterized by Betula alleghaniensis, Cornus rugosa, Dirca palustris, Fagus grandifolia, Taxus canadensis, and Tsuga canadensis.

A relative of our eastern forest occurs on the western bluff of Lake Michigan in the deep morainic dissections or ravines. Here also grow Acer saccharum and Fagus grandifolia, but the ground cover vegetation is such that sporadic ground fires could creep down the slopes from the savannas on the higher, more level ground, and nose slopes. Characteristic species include Betula papyrifera, Carex pedunculata, Dryopteris filix-mas, Matteuccia struthiopteris, Poa languida, Populus balsamifera, Prunus nigra, Pyrola elliptica, and Shepherdia canadensis. Pinus resinosa may also have grown here.

Savanna

Savannas, as interpreted here, include those portions of our wooded landscape in which structure was, to one degree or another, affected by fires set by Native Americans in the thousands of years before European settlement. Generally, these communities were intercalated among the prairies and developed a ground-cover vegetation which would carry at least occasional fires in the autumn, when their surrounding prairies were wont to burn. Such savannas ranged in character from completely closed and forest-like, to very open with only scattered trees.

Most related to the forest communities are mesic savannas. These are closed-canopy woodlands, dominated by Acer nigrum and Quercus rubra, and with a graminoid ground cover capable of sustaining small but occasional ground fires. Such savannas are best developed on north- and east-facing slopes in dissected or topographically complex portions of the moraines. Characteristic species include Actaea rubra, Adiantum pedatum, Agrimonia rostellata, Arabis canadensis, Aralia racemosa, Aristolochia serpentaria, Aster furcatus, Aureolaria virginica, Brachyelytrum erectum, Carex gracillima, Carex hitchcockiana, Carex laxiculmis, Carex shortiana, Carex woodii, Cercis canadensis, Collinsia verna, Conopholis americana, Diarrhena americana, Dryopteris goldiana, Habenaria viridis bracteata, Jeffersonia diphylla, Linum virginianum, Lonicera dioica, Morus rubra, Muhlenbergia sylvatica, Orchis spectabilis, Poa sylvestris, Sanicula trifoliata, Scutellaria ovata versicolor, and Trillium grandifiorum.

On the more undulating, well drained, but fertile morainic ridges and knolls are the dry-mesic savannas dominated by Quercus alba and Quercus macrocarpa. It is probable that portions of such woodlands burned fairly regularly, and carried low but steady lines of flame. Characteristic species include Agalinis gattingeri, Arenaria lateriflora, Aster schreberi, Bromus purgans, Camassia scilloides, Carex hirtifolia, Carex oligocarpa, Carex pensylvanica, Carya ovata, Corylus americana, Dodecatheon meadia, Erigeron pulchellus, Eupatorium sessilifolium brittonianum, Helianthemum bicknellii, Heuchera richardsonii, Hystrix patula, Krigia biflora, Lathyrus ochroleucus, Lechea intermedia, Monotropa uniflora, Orobanche uniflora, Silene virginica, Swertia caroliniensis, Taenidia integerrima, Trillium sessile, and Vici caroliniana.

On the nearly level or gently undulating moraines are the open savannas of heavier soil characterized by open-grown trees of Quercus macrocarpa. Such savannas have a well developed graminoid ground cover, and carry substantial fires on a regular basis. These savannas developed on low mounds within the mesic or wet prairies, or in transitional zones between the lower prairies and the dry prairies of kames and eskers. Little is known about the conservative flora of these savannas, but species which we associate with the Bur Oak include Andropogon gerardii, Carex pensylvanica, Carya ovata, Corylus americana, Galium concinnum, Helianthus hirsutus, Hypoxis hirsuta, Lilium michiganense, Rosa setigera, Solidago juncea, Thalictrum dasycarpum, Trillium recurvatum, and Veronicastrum virginicum.

In sandy soils, especially in our eastern sector, along well drained ridges and old dunes, the savannas are dominated by Quercus velutina. Such savannas are closely associated with sand prairies, and the two communities have many species in common. The sand savannas burn regularly and are characterized by species such as Aralia hispida, Aster linariifolius, Baptisia tinctoria crebra, Campanula rotundifolia, Carex siccata, Chimaphila umbellata cisatlantica, Corydalis sempervirens, Galium pilosum, Liatris aspera, Lysimachia quadrifolia, Monotropa hypopithys, Pteridium aquilinum latiusculum, Rubus enslenii, Spiranthes lacera, and Vaccinium angustifolium.

It would seem that there is a close association between the sand savannas and what once were pine savannas near the southern shore of Lake Michigan, where Pinus strobus was plentiful along the dunes. There remain a few isolated stands where one can only imagine what species once characterized these pine savannas. It was probably in these pine savannas wherein resided such now rare plants as Arctostaphylos uva-ursi coactilis, Epigaea repens, Habenaria hookeri, Lactuca hirsuta, Melampyrum lineare latifolium, Oryzopsis pungens, and Polygala paucifolia. Probably also included here are the associates of Carex eburnea, Celtis tenuifolia, Chimaphila maculata, Juniperus communis, Oryzopsis asperifolia, and Pyrola rotundifolia americana. Farther north, along the high dunes, the pine savannas give way to a wooded dune forest.

Dune

On the open sand of foredunes of Lake Michigan is a special habitat characterized by species which grow locally only in the dunes near the lake. These include Ammophila breviligulata, Cakile edentula, Cirsium pitcheri, Euphorbia polygonifolia, Lathyrus japonicus glaber, Salix syrticola, and Solidago racemosa gillmanii. Confined to the lower dunes along the western shore of Lake Michigan is Juniperus horizontalis. In the more active sands in the dunes of our eastern sector grow Hudsonia tomentosa, Polygonella articulata, and Selaginella rupestris.

In wet, interdunal flats (pannes), where sand has been blown out down to the water table, is a plant community generally characterized by species such as Carex aurea, Carex garberi, Gentiana crinita, Hypericum kalmianum, Sabatia angularis, Triglochin maritima, and Utricularia cornuta. The pannes near Ogden Dunes, Porter County, are characteristically surrounded by small forests of Pinus banksiana. Related to both the pannes and the prairie fens is a kind of wet alkaline prairie, characterized by plants such as Agalinis skinneriana, Carex conoidea, Carex crawei, Carex flava, Carex viridula, Castilleja coccinea, Cladium mariscoides, Cypripedium calceolus parviflorum, Eleocharis compressa, Panicum boreale, and Scleria triglomerata.

Prairie

The prairies comprise those plant communities that are dominated by a diversity of perennial forbs growing in a perennial graminoid matrix, which forms a dry flammable turf in autumn. A part of the habitat of our prairies was the regular autumnal fire, which, lacking a regular occurrence of dry lightning, was set annually by the Native Americans. Prairies developed on those substrates in which the aboveground perennial phytomass produced more fixed carbon annually than was likely to be grazed or decomposed. In our area prairie communities range from wet to dry and once dominated much of the landscape, intercalating or even blending with savannas and fens.

To a Midwesterner, perhaps the first image evoked with the term prairie is that of the tall grasses of Andropogon gerardii and Sorghastrum nutans in their full, late-summer development–“high as a man on a horse,” interspersed with the rosinweeds, sunflowers, and asters. Such are the mesic prairies; conservative species within them include Baptisia leucophaea, Cacalia plantaginea, Carex bicknellii, Eryngium yuccifolium, Gentiana andrewsii, Gentiana puberulenta, Habenaria leucophaea, Lilium philadelphicum andinum, Panicum leibergii, Sisyrinchium albidum, and Sporobolus heterolepis. A wetter variant of the mesic prairie is more likely to be dominated by Calamagrostis canadensis and Spartina pectinata, with Aster puniceus firmus, Beckmannia syzigachne, Chelone glabra, Eleocharis wolfii, Lysimachia quadriflora, Oenothera perennis, Oenothera pilosella, Pedicularis lanceolata, and Solidago ohioensis, and in its best development is fen-like.

In the drier prairies Andropogon scoparius and Stipa spartea are commonly the more obvious grasses, with conservative species including Agalinis aspera, Asclepias viridiflora, Aster ptarmicoides, Aster sericeus, Astragalus tennesseensis, Blephilia ciliata, Bromus kalmii, Carex meadii, Cirsium hillii, Convolvulus spithamaeus, Helianthus occidentalis, Panicum perlongum, Polytaenia nuttallii, Psoralea tenuifoa and Zizia aptera. Another kind of dry prairie occurs in the Kettle Moraine Section, or our northwestern sector and, growing among short warm-season grasses like Bouteloua curtipendula, characteristic species include Agoseris cuspidata, Allium stellatum, Anemone patens wolfgangiana, Artemisia serrata, Asclepias lanuginosa, Blephilia ciliata, Carex richardsonii, Geum triflorum, Houstonia longifolia, Oenothera serrulata, Panicum wilcoxianum, Potentilla pensylvanica bipinnatifida, Ranunculus rhomboideus, Sisyrinchium campestre, and Wulfenia bullii. Another variant of the dry prairie occurs on the dolomitic bedrock pavements exposed along our major rivers, particularly the lower Des Plaines; characteristic species are Actinea herbacea, Arenaria patula, Deschampsia caespitosa glauca, Muhlenbergia cuspidata, Petalostemum foliosum, and Scutellaria parvula.

A major variant of the dry prairie is the sand prairie, in which the principal fuel species is commonly Andropogon scoparius; in many respects it seems scarcely more than an exaggerated opening in the sand savanna. Characteristic species include Asclepias hirtella, Astragalus canadensis, Callirhoë triangulata, Carex muhlenbergii, Ceanothus herbaceus, Commelina erecta deamiana, Desmodium ciliare, Fimbristylis puberula, Orobanche fasciculata, and Sisyrinchium montanum. In moist to wet, acid sandy flats occurs an array of conservative species, many of them with affinities to the Coastal Plain. Such flats occur here and there throughout our southern and eastern sectors, off the moraines in the Lake Plain and in the Kankakee Sand Sections. Each such area has its own distinctive flora; characteristic conservative species in the aggregate include Aletris farinosa, Buchnera americana, Calopogon tuberosus, Carex alata, Carex atlantica, Cyperus dentatus, Eleocharis melanocarpa, Eleocharis microcarpa filiculmis, Hypericum adpressum, Hypericum canadense, Hypericum gymnanthum, Juncus biflorus, Juncus nodatus, Linum intercursum, Linum striatum, Ludwigia sphaerocarpa deamii, Lycopodium inundatum, Lycopus amplectens, Panicum polyanthes, Panicum verrucosum, Polygala cruciata aquilonia, Psilocarya scirpoides, Rhynchospora globularis recognita, Rhynchospora macrostachya, Rubus setosus, Salix lucida, Scirpus hallii, Scleria pauciflora caroliniana, Utricularia subulata, Viola primulifolia, Xyris difformis, and Xyris torta.

Ruderal Areas

It is presumed that many of our non-conservative native species developed their “weedy” tendencies in connection with the Native American peoples, particular those who were sedentary and agricultural. These plants are well adapted to soils regularly disturbed mechanically, subject to heavy trampling or compaction, or to very fertile soils free of conservative competition. In the drier soils such species include Acalypha rhomboidea, Agrostis hyemalis, Amaranthus hybridus, Ambrosia artemisiifolia elatior, Aristida aligantha, Asclepias syriaca, Asclepias verticillata, Aster pilosus, Bidens vulgata, Brassica kaber, Carex blanda, Cenchrus longispinus, Convolvulus sepium, Cuscuta campestris, Equisetum arvense, Eragrostis pectinacea, Erigeron annuus, Erigeron canadensis, Euphorbia maculata, Euphorbia supina, Galium aparine, Geum canadense, Juncus tenuis, Lepidium virginicum, Muhlenbergia schreberi, Oenothera biennis, Oxalis europaea, Oxalis stricta, Panicum capillare, Physalis subglabrata, Phytolacca americana, Plantago aristata, Plantago rugelii, Plantago virginica, Polygonum achoreum, Polygonum buxiforme, Polygonum scandens, Potentilla norvegica, Rhus glabra, Rhus typhina, Rudbeckia hirta, Silene antirrhina, Solanum americanum, Solidago altissima, Solidago canadensis, Sporobolus vaginiflorus, Verbena bracteata, and Veronica peregrina. Plants of moister or wetter ruderal ground include Acer negundo, Acer saccharmum Acnida altissima, Alopecurus carolinianus, Ambrosia trifida, Bidens frondosa, Cornus racemosa, Cyperus esculentus, Cyperus strigosus, Echinochloa crusgalli, Panicum dichotomiflorum, Polygonum lapathifolium, Polygonum pensylvanicum, Ranunculus abortivus, Rumex maritimus fueginus, Salix interior, Sambucus canadensis, Typha angustifolia, and Typha latifolia.

Boreal and Coastal Plain Relicts

An interesting aspect of the Chicago region is its position at the southern end of Lake Michigan with its Lake Plain flora, coupled with the large sand district associated with the Kankakee River. Together these singular areas have provided a remarkable context for habitats that support species otherwise more common northward or with their principal range in the Atlantic Coastal Plain. Many of these plants and their habitats, especially those which occur in the Indiana dune region, are discussed at length by Wilhelm.¹³

Those plants with an affinity for the Coastal Plain include Ammophila breviligulata, Aristida tuberculosa, Bartonia virginica, Bidens discoidea, Cakile edentula, Carex alata, Carex albolutescens, Carex debilis, Carex longii, Carex seorsa, Cirsium pitcheri, Cladium mariscoides, Decodon verticillatus, Drosera intermedia, Drosera rotundifolia, Eleocharis olivacea, Eleocharis equisetoides, Eleocharis geniculata, Eleocharis melanocarpa, Eleocharis microcarpa filiculmis, Eleocharis robbinsii, Eriocaulon septangulare, Euphorbia polygonifolia, Fimbristylis drummondii, Fuirena pumila, Gratiola aurea, Hudsonia tomentosa, Hydrocotyle umbellata, Hypericum virginicum, Juncus balticus littoralis, Juncus militaris, Juncus pelocarpus, Juncus scirpoides, Lathyrus japonicus glaber, Lechea pulchella, Linum striatum, Ludwigia sphaerocarpadeamii, Lycopodium inundatum, Panicum lucidum, Panicumoligosanthes, Panicum spretum, Panicum verrucosum, Peltandra virginica, Polygala cruciata aquilonia, Polygonella articulata, Polygonum careyi, Polygonum opelousanum adenocalyx, Potamogeton pulcher, Psilocarya nitens, Psilocarya scirpoides, Rhexia virginica, Rhynchospora alba, Rhynchospora globularis recognita, Rhynchospora macrostachya, Scirpus purshianus, Scleria reticularis, Sisyrinchium atlanticum, Solidago tenuifolia, Stachys hyssopifolia, Utricularia cornuta, Utricularia geminiscapa, Utricularia gibba, Utricularia inflata minor, Utricularia purpurea, Utricularia resupinata, Utricularia subulata, Viola primulifolia, Woodwardia virginica, Xyris difformis, and Xyris torta.

Plants believed to be relicts of a more boreal flora include Andromeda glaucophylla, Arctostaphylos uva-ursi coactilis, Betula alleghaniensis, Betula papyrifera, Betula populifolia, Betula pumila, Calla palustris, Campanula rotundifolia, Carex eburnea, Chamaedaphne calyculata angustifolia, Circaea alpina, Comptonia peregrina, Coptis groenlandica, Cornus rugosa, Cypripedium reginae, Diervilla lonicera, Epigaea repens, Glyceria borealis, Habenaria clavellata, Habenaria hyperborea huronensis, Juniperus communis, Linnaea borealis americana, Maianthemum canadense, Myosotis laxa, Panax trifolius, Pinus banksiana, Pinus strobus, Poa paludigena, Polygala paucifolia, Potentilla fruticosa, Pyrola elliptica, Pyrola rotundifolia americana, Rhamnus alnifolia, Salix candida, Salix syrticola, Spiranthes lucida, Thuja occidentalis, Trientalis borealis, Vaccinium macrocarpon, and Vaccinium oxycoccos.

Swink, F., Wilhelm, G. (1994). Plants of the Chicago region; a check list of the vascular flora of the Chicago region with notes on local distribution and ecology. Lisle, Ill.: Published by Morton Arboretum ↩︎ ↩︎
Homoya M.A., Abrell, D.B., Aldrich, J.R., Post, T.W. (1985). The Natural Regions of Indiana. Proc. Ind. Acad. Sci. 94, 245-268 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Schwegman, J.E. (1973). “Comprehensive plan for the Illinois nature preserve system. Part 2: the natural divisions of Illinois.” Rockford, Ill.: Published by the Illinois Nature Preserves Commission. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Albert, D.A., Denton, S.R., Barnes, B.V. (1986). Regional landscape ecosystems of Michigan. University of Michigan, School of Natural Resources ↩︎ ↩︎
Albert (in press) ↩︎
Hole & Germain (in press) ↩︎
Ellsworth, H.L. (1837). Illinois in 1837. Philadelphia: Published by S. Augustus Mitchell, and by Grigg and Elliot. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Brown, S.R. (1817). The western gazetteer; or emigrant’s directory, containing a geographical description of the western states and territories… Auburn, N.Y.: Published by H.C. Southwick. ↩︎ ↩︎
Parker, A.A. (1835). Trip to the West and Texas. Concord, Mass.: Published by White and Fisher. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Pratt, H.E. (1835). John Dean Caton’s reminiscences of Chicago in 1833 and 1834. J. Ill. State Hist. Soc. 28(1), 5-25 ↩︎
Coffinberry, S.C. (1880). Incidents connected with the first settlement of Nottawa-Sippi Prairie in St. Joseph County. Mich. Pioneer Hist. Coll. 2:489-501 ↩︎
Eleven percent of our native species have C values from 0-3, 89% from 4-10. ↩︎
Wilhelm, G.S. (1990). Special vegetation of the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore Research Program, Report 90-02. Published by the National Park Service. ↩︎