1. Niagara Falls
All we think of Niagara Falls right now is as a fun tourist
destination, as well as the main town in a comedy sketch made famous by The
Three Stooges and Abbott and Costello (for your viewing pleasure, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYP1OBZfFK0). The most news it gets is when some Darwin Award-worthy
idiot climbs into a barrel and goes over the Falls. Its biggest impact,
however, is what it does to the northern North American freshwater system.
You’ll notice that it comes on the Niagara River, between Lake Erie and Lake
Ontario. That’s important.
Canadian settlement occurred up the St. Lawrence River, to
and including Lake Ontario. From there, though, there are fairly few ports and
settlements on the Great Lakes in Canada. The biggest Canadian standalone port
on the Great Lakes west of Niagara Falls is Thunder Bay. Seriously. The western
part of the Great Lakes was largely settled by later, 1800’s-era expansion from
both the United States and Canada. Canadians didn’t go there earlier because
they would have had to portage (transport goods overland around) Niagara Falls,
which is expensive as hell, and it was so cold that the land wasn’t good enough
to make overland transport reasonable. The western Great Lakes area, and really
almost all of the Midwest, was cut off from shipping by major obstacles to the
eastern seaboard. These were the Appalachian Mountains and Niagara Falls. As
such, the cheapest way to transport goods from this entire area was to ship it
on various rivers all the way to New Orleans, out through the Gulf of Mexico
and from there up to whatever port it was going to. This situation eventually got
fixed by the Erie Canal, making it profitable to ship through Appalachia and
connecting the Midwest to the eastern seaboard.
Consider what would happen if there were no Niagara Falls,
though. Expansion from Ontario would have continued south and west, and odds
are the people there would have been less than enthusiastic to join the United
States at the time of the Revolution. Today people in Chicago would be
complaining about the crowdedness of the local Tim Hortons and be enthusiastic
about the Blackhawks year-round rather than just at playoff time if Niagara
Falls were simply a flat stretch of the Niagara River. With all that shipping
going through Toronto and Montreal rather than New York (not to mention the
entire Midwest being part of Canada), the argument can be made that Canada
would have become the major power in North America, if it just hadn’t been for
Niagara Falls. (Now, we’re neglecting discussion of Canada’s near-century-long
delay in entering world markets camped to the US, and their cold climate, but
still.)
2. 1700’s-era religious conflicts in Europe
We all hear that the Puritans left England because they were
persecuted due to their religion (this was true) and that they founded their
colonies on the basis of freedom of religion (partially true; it was more
freedom to be Puritan, and they weren’t much more liberal with their Puritanism
than the English were with their Anglicanism). Nonetheless, by the time of the
American Revolution, religion was not much of an issue, and the outrage at England
was largely directed at economic meddling, better known as taxation without
representation (we ought to note that the British were awfully hardheaded about
this; the small representation in Parliament that the Americans would have been
afforded would have been able to do nothing about the tax, and would have
removed the major American argument for independence).
It’s also generally known that we picked up big help from
France and Spain during the Revolution. They were quite happy to see Great
Britain humiliated, due to historical British opposition. This was largely due
to British self-interest. Britain is always strongest on the European stage
when the Continent is decentralized, and France was the country most likely to
centralize the rest of Europe under its rule (see: Bonaparte, Napoléon). Spain
was always France’s most secure ally in Europe and naturally followed France in
its rivalry with Britain. However, another major issue was, simply, religion.
In Western Europe, the great Protestant country was Great Britain, and the
great Catholic countries were France and Spain. Great Britain especially had
major issues with religion in the past, and its strong Protestantism under its
Dutch- and German-derived monarchs made it naturally antagonistic to France and
Spain, particularly as their colonial claims tended to conflict. As such, the
French and Spanish eagerness to embarrass their Protestant rivals resulted in
their aid to a United States that, then as now, was majority Protestant!
3. A swarm of gnats in Philadelphia
We generally accept the Declaration of Independence as an
outstanding piece of prose, composed largely by Thomas Jefferson over the course
of seventeen days in June 1776 when most of his time was taken by other things.
It is possible that he may have spent as much time writing it as a
procrastinating college student like me spends writing his term paper at the
last minute. After the Continental Congress resolved to declare independence on
July 2nd, 1776, they turned to the actual text of the declaration
the Committee of Five (Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman,
and Robert Livingston) had submitted to them. They ended up cutting out about a
quarter of it, some of which got nasty and personal in criticism against George
III (the point was to attack the system in general and not just the present
head of it), and some of which condemned the slave trade, which was generally
supported by the southern half of the new U.S. The Congress at large also made
a few typographical changes and such, but generally left alone what is possibly
the greatest state paper in the history of the world.
Once they had got it to this stage, however, there was an
impetus by some Congress delegates to substantially rewrite the thing, which
would likely have changed it into some ridiculous form of legalese
gobbledygook, and deprived the nascent American republic of its major statement
of principles (the Preamble of the Constitution came 11 years later and, to be
honest, doesn’t come close to the Declaration). However, the weather on July 4th
came to the rescue. Much of the American eastern seaboard at the time was
largely built on swamps (the eventual site of Washington D.C. was a
particularly malaria-infested little hellhole, which did not really become developed
until the 1860’s or so), and Philadelphia was no exception. It was also
unbearably hot in July. Even worse, the Congress was working in a hall without
such modern conveniences as air conditioning or electric fans, which meant the
only possible escape was open windows – but the Congress, desiring secrecy, had
ordered the windows shut during debate. This led to a warm, stuffy, hall, which
meant a lot of the delegates just slept through the proceedings, and many
others were angry and fractious. Worse still, on the 4th of July a
swarm of gnats descended on Philadelphia. As such, many of the delegates were
eager to get to the relative safety of their boarding houses and the alcohol
they contained. One delegate then rose and said he was plenty happy with the
Declaration as it was, which unleashed a sort of domino effect and secured the
approval of the resolution as-is. It was then sent, on July 4th, to
the printer, and independence was proclaimed that day using our familiar “When
in the course of human events” language. Even though the actual vote to declare
independence occurred on July 2nd (the best guess of the time for
that vote is 6:46 pm local time), we celebrate our national holiday on July 4th
instead. (Incidentally, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both died on July 4th,
1826, the fiftieth anniversary of our Declaration of Independence. The two had
been estranged political rivals but in their old age reconciled. Jefferson’s
supposed last words were “This is the Fourth?”, although he probably did mumble
a few words to doctors or servants after that before he died. Adams’s,
meanwhile, were “Jefferson still lives!”, untrue as Jefferson had died a few
hours earlier. James Monroe also died on Independence Day, five years later. I
believe they are the only Founding Fathers at all, let alone just the
presidents, to die on July 4th. They have been the only presidents
to die on July 4th; only Calvin Coolidge was born on that day.)
4. A folded-up copy of a speech
The 1912 Presidential election was one of the most bizarre
in our history, plagued by the split of the Republican vote. This came when the
progressive Republican ex-president Theodore Roosevelt attempted to wrest the
GOP nomination from incumbent William Howard Taft, seen as more conservative
(Taft’s administration was actually far more aggressive in breaking up the
trusts than Roosevelt’s had been, but he had always personally been a friend of
some of the leading Republican bankers and his rhetoric was less fiery than
Roosevelt’s). When Roosevelt couldn’t get it, he went and formed his own
Progressive Party, which quickly became known as the Bull Moose Party after the
nickname Roosevelt gave himself.
Roosevelt ended up doing significantly better than Taft and
gained 88 electoral votes, while Taft got only 8, allowing the Democrat Woodrow
Wilson to get 435 electoral votes and the presidency on only 41% of the popular
vote. This all might have been very different, though. In October, some nut
shot Roosevelt in the chest while he was at a speech. Rather stunned, the
rugged Roosevelt, who knew a lot about anatomy, figured out that he was not
coughing up blood and therefore the bullet had not gone into his lung. It
lodged in his chest, just missing killing him. The bullet had passed through
his eyeglass case and a 50-page, single-folded copy of his speech that he had
kept in his pocket, almost certainly slowing the bullet enough to save his
life. Roosevelt’s first words after that, addressed to his adoring crowd, were
“Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know if you are aware that I have just been
shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.” His hordes ate it up,
and he proceeded to give his full speech, lasting an hour and a half. He passed
out the bloodstained pages of the speech to admirers as he was hauled off
afterward to a hospital, where it was determined that it was safest to leave
the bullet in Roosevelt’s chest. It made him unable to do his usual exercises
and contributed to him growing obese later in life, eventually ending in a
heart attack that denied him the 1920 GOP nomination that would almost
certainly have been his (although his breakfasts, which routinely consisted of
a dozen eggs and a gallon of coffee, might’ve had something to do with it as
well).
Had Roosevelt died, the fortunes of the Progressive Party
would have probably died with him, as the enthusiasm that it engendered was
more about his charisma than his policies. The Progressives would have probably
shifted back to their natural home in the Republican Party, and Taft would
probably have shifted his rhetoric a bit to get their votes. Had all the
Progressive votes gone to the Republicans (not a guaranteed proposition,
certainly, but let’s go with it), Wilson would have been reduced to about 150
electoral votes or so, almost all in the South, and Taft would have won in
something near a landslide. Instead we got eight years of Wilson, arguably the
most transformative president between Lincoln and FDR.
5. A slight lack of Viking resolve
There is no dispute – none – that there was transatlantic
contact between North America and Europe before Christopher Columbus persuaded
everyone that the earth was round (actually, he was trying to sell people on a
different, and wildly incorrect, measurement for earth’s circumference; no
serious scholar thought that the earth was flat at the time and the myth that
they did is really pernicious). There
are persistent legends of various explorers going before Columbus, and it is
thought that English fishermen were getting their fish off the coast of
Newfoundland in the 1480’s.
Uncontroverted evidence, however, was discovered in the
1960’s at L’Anse aux Meadows, a cape on the northern end of the island of
Newfoundland. There was found there the remnants of a Norse village, positively
identified based on structures and artifacts that were incredibly similar to
those found in Greenland and Iceland from the 10th and 11th
centuries. The site is identified as the winter camp of Leif Erikson, who came
to “Vinland” in 1000 AD, as well as the reused camp of other explorers in years
that followed. “Vinland” almost certainly means “wine-land,” and as such was
thought to be in an area no farther north than Massachusetts, which is as far
north as grapes grow. However, L’Anse au Meadows is in an area where berries
grow, and there is evidence of Norse people making berry wine. This moved the
hypotheses of where Vinland was, or at least where it started. The L’Anse aux
Meadows site also shows interesting signs of culture. For one, there exist
remains of an iron smithy, a carpentry shop, and a boat repair place. Also,
there have been found a knitting needle and remains of a spindle, suggesting
that women were at this site as well as men. Even more interesting is the
presence of butternuts. The natural range of this species does not go farther
north than New Brunswick, suggest trade networks from L’Anse aux Meadows south
at least into the St. Lawrence River or into the Bay of Fundy, and probably
farther south than that.
The thought is that the Norse eventually abandoned the
settlement due to the harsh winters; Greenland and especially Iceland were more
attractive places, closer to established trade networks and resources and with
better resources themselves. Still, one’s gotta wonder what would’ve happened
if the Vikings had stayed – would any other Europeans have bothered to send
expeditions over at all if a Norse empire had formed itself in America?
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