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Along the Path

Updates as we learned about Lawson's journey and times -- and reports from the trail as we progressed along it. Plus tales of the process of publishing the result.

In Which Our Hero Dies Before We Even Get Started

9/18/2014

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Picture
have the terrible duty today, anniversaries being as they are, to share the story of the death of John Lawson, which occurred 303 years ago, right around today. It wasn't a super pleasant death.

Lawson's journey, which we will be retracing beginning October 12 in Charleston, was transformational for him, for North and South Carolina -- and for the original inhabitants of those states.
The native population had been much transformed in the decades before Lawson arrived, and that transformation included the death by disease of most of the Native Americans and the enslavement of many others. Lawson himself says that "The Small-Pox and Rum have made such a Destruction amongst them, that, on good grounds, I do believe, there is not the sixth Savage living within two hundred Miles of all our Settlements, as there were fifty Years ago. These poor Creatures have so many Enemies to destroy them, that it's a wonder one of them is lest alive near us," and he doesn't even bring up the nasty habit of the European settlers of selling the Indians into slavery -- by 1720, of a colonial population of about 17,000, some 1,500 (about one in 11 people) were Indian slaves. Though the Indians themselves practiced slavery, at some point a people is going to say "enough is enough," and Lawson not only helped bring about the event that pushed the Tuscaroras to the limit and started the Tuscarora War, he turned out, quite accidentally, to be the first target of their wrath. The description that follows is largely distilled from the excellent "Among the Tuscarora: The strange and mysterious death of John Lawson, gentleman, explorer, and writer," from the North Carolina Literary Review.

PictureIn his descriptions of Indians Lawson was one of the most thoughtful and understanding of European observers. In the end it didn't help.
Lawson's book, published in 1709 -- eight years after his journey -- was encouraging more and more settlers to come to Carolina, and Lawson himself was helping with Baron Christoph von Graffenried to establish the city of New Bern, which, with seven hundred or so new European settlers, could not have left any doubt among the Indians about their future. The Tuscarora, were an Iroquois tribe who had centuries before moved south to settle in eastern North Carolina. Considered fiercer and more warlike than most of the other local tribes, the Tuscarora still interacted comfortably with settlers. In his journal -- and in the more descriptive portions of his book -- Lawson describes the Indians in open and honest terms, admitting that most of the troubles between the two peoples come from the poor treatment of the Indians by the settlers:

They are really better to us, than we are to them; they always give us Victuals at their Quarters, and take care we are arm’d against Hunger and Thirst: We do not so by them (generally speaking) but let them walk by our Doors Hungry, and do not often relieve them. We look upon them with Scorn and Disdain, and think them little better than Beasts in Humane Shape, though if well examined, we shall find that, for all our Religion and Education, we possess more Moral Deformities, and Evils than these Savages do, or are acquainted withal.

Even so. More and more settlers came; those that came shared drink and disease and enslaved their children.

The Tuscarora saw where this was all leading and tried to move away: in 1710 they applied to the governor of Pennsylvania for amnesty in one of the most hearbreakingly plaintive letters of all time, saying they wanted to get away from the North Carolina settlers, requesting among other things that for their children "Room to sport & Play without danger of Slavery, might be allowed them" and, for the people in general, "to intreat a Cessation from murdering & taking them, that by the allowance thereof, they may not be affraid of a mouse, or any other thing that Ruffles the Leaves." The government of Pennsylvania, cautious, said they were welcome so long as they could provide a testimonial to their good behavior from the Carolina government.

No such recommendation came from North Carolina.

Unable to stay and with nowhere to go, in 1711 the Tuscarora determined to fight back, choosing September 22 as the day for their attack. A week or so beforehand, Lawson and von Graffenried and a small party sallied upstream on the Neuse River, hoping to find a good route to trade with the Colony of Virginia. One of their scouts stumbled into a party of the Tuscarora, who then surrounded Lawson's party.

Picture
A drawing of uncertain provenance showing Lawson and von Graffenried being ambushed by the Tuscarora in September, 1711.
They captured them and ran them overnight through the forest to the Tuscarora settlement, where, bound, the captives (von Graffenried, one of his slaves, and Lawson) watched a long discussion about their fates. The Indians at one time thought von Graffenried was the new Governor, and in any event he was able to persuade them that harming him would cause them more trouble than it was worth. The Indians freed his slave, unbound von Graffenried, and sequestered him in a hut.

Lawson, known to them certainly as one of the fairest of their partners, was also a man who brought more and more settlers, founding towns for them to live in, to disastrous effect. Von Graffenried describes Lawson arguing with the Indians, though about what he doesn't say. His account is staggeringly self-serving, blaming Lawson for everything from their capture by the Tuscarora to the decision to settle in Carolina in the first place.

The Tuscarora killed Lawson, either by slitting his throat or, perhaps, in a fashion Lawson had himself described: The Fire of Pitch-Pine being got ready, and a Feast appointed, which is solemnly kept at the time of their acting this Tragedy, the Sufferer has his Body stuck thick with Light-Wood-Splinters, which are lighted like so many Candles, the tortur'd Person dancing round a great Fire, till his Strength fails, and disables him from making them any farther Pastime.
Picture
Baron Christoph Von Graffenried’s drawing, The Death of John Lawson, depicts Von Graffenried, his servant, and John Lawson being held captive by Tuscarora Indians shortly before Lawson’s death. In the center of the drawing, the three prisoners sit, hands bound, near a fire. The Tuscarora dance and play drums in a semi-circle on the right, and one Indian stands in the center, holding what appear to be a hatchet and a knife, near two dead animals impaled on sticks. Four Tuscarora in a line on the left seem to be guarding over the prisoners. A few Indian buildings are scattered across the top and bottom of the drawing.
In any case, the man who in his journal only one page before this description of torture had described Carolina as "a delicious Country, (none that I ever saw exceeds it)," was dead.

Von Graffenried stayed captive for weeks, forced to, in the words of Marjorie Hudson, "watch helplessly as warriors headed out to massacre his Palatines, bringing back captives who told him the grisly details — women impaled on stakes, more than 80 infants slaughtered, more than 130 settlers killed. New Bern was almost wiped out."

Six weeks later von Graffenried -- appropriately traumatized, it must be said -- was set free, and he eventually wrote his account blaming everything on Lawson. Lawson was the first to die in the Tuscarora War, but in the end the settlers had numbers. The Tuscarora War lasted two years. At the end virtually no Tuscarora remained in Carolina.
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Finding the Old Road

9/11/2014

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One awesome thing about undertaking a project like retracing the route taken by someone like Lawson is that amazing people almost instantly begin flinging themselves at you out of the ether. Consider Dale Loberger. A geographic information system (GIS) specialist, Loberger works with Bradshaw Consulting in South Carolina, using GIS to improve people's lives and their understanding of their world -- through systems that connect information with maps (it's not just a fire hydrant; it's a fire hydrant last painted in 2007 and last maintained in 2012; it's not just an address, it's an address with a 17 percent likelihood of generating a 911 call within the next year). That U.S. map showing which NFL team each county prefers? That's a GIS map.
Picture
Dale Loberger in 19th-century surveyor garb, with a plane table. He has loads of cool stuff like that.
PictureThe Great Wagon Road drawn on a perfectly vague map from 1755
Anyhow, I've known Loberger on email for some time -- a mutual friend introduced us when he learned of our mutual interest in old maps and trails. And when I got interested in Lawson, Dale began telling me about his interest in uncovering the old roads in the Charlotte area where he lives: the Great Wagon Road, the Trading Path, and other ancient trails that lead through the area -- trails which Lawson almost surely trod. As someone skilled in GIS, he knew how to take the old maps he was familiar with and link them to modern maps, but he still wondered how he could find his way to the actual spots where the original roads lay.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Loberger said, something like the Great Wagon Road "was less a name than a description." The Road referred to various ways leading, in general, from Philadelphia in the northeast down into Georgia, generally following the eastern edge of the Appalachians -- and, not coincidentally, the Trading Path, which existed before the Wagon Road, and the animal paths that probably existed before that. Roads were moving-around things in those days before significant paving -- they moved to accommodate new towns, to avoid swamps or ditches, to solve the needs of new kinds of wagons.

More, he says, the maps were meant to be nothing like we think of maps now, and returning to old maps trying to get specific pathways from them is a game of "teasing information from maps never designed to give that information." Speaking in an 18th century museum house in Raleigh, Loberger used a highly 21st-century ArcGIS Explorer* presentation while wearing his 19th-century surveying garb (don't worry, he assured me -- he has plenty of eighteenth-century gear more appropriate to Lawson's time). To understand those maps Loberger learned to survey. Most educated men of the 18th century would have learned surveying -- less as a job skill than as a way to truly learn math and computation. (Seriously, every educated man. Surveyor joke: What does a surveyor say when looking at Mt. Rushmore? "Well, there's three surveyors, but who's that other guy?" Teddy Roosevelt was the non-surveying president.) And surely Lawson knew surveying -- in 1708 he ended up as the Surveyor-General of the Carolina colony. Surveying in those days, Loberger has learned, often focused to a level of detail no greater than a single link in a surveyor's chain (7.92 inches) or even a single surveyor's pole (16.5 feet). Once you realize that the original surveyors figured that three person-lengths ("Smoots," to MIT students) was close enough, you're going to feel a little foolish trying to apply your phone's calculation of your position in degrees to 14 decimal points.

But not so fast. Loberger didn't give up. "These are not documents of truth," he says of old maps. But "they're documents full of secrets." He reasoned that the roads drawn on early maps were closer to legend images, like picnic tables for parks or big question marks for information centers, than actual representations of specific paths: all they did was say, "Charlotte and Salisbury are connected by road," not "the road from Charolotte to Salisbury looks like this." Just the same, the paths had to exist -- and if they did, they'd do what roads always did. They'd go the easiest way possible from point of interest to point of interest -- village, watering hole, mountain pass -- following the most sensible path: choosing solid places where you can easily ford a creek, following dry ridges where you can avoid insects and moisture plus not constantly climb and descend, traversing open land where you didn't have to wrestle through underbrush.

So Loberger turned to modern maps. The Natural Resources Conservation Service, he saw, rates soils for various purposes -- including limitations on utility for paths and trails. He realized that hydric soils -- those formed under conditions of wetness -- would make for bad roads, given that the wet conditions may remain. Soils indicative of thick undergrowth during formation would give the same hint: why would people -- or animals -- wrestle
Picture
From a 1972 USDA soil conservation study
PictureLoberger's composite suitability model
through the brush if they could easily avoid it? Same with hilly terrain -- horses and wagons are just as dangerous on slopes as an 18-wheeler, so Loberger included slope, soil type, proximity to landmarks, and other elements as he began to develop a sort of diagnostic tool for terrain. It ranks places on a 0-10 scale for road suitability. And as he's begun to apply it to old maps and old descriptions -- he hasn't published his results yet -- he's found, at least anecdotally, that his method works. 

Hoping to come within a mile of somewhere a road's original travelers would have walked, he describes a road he looked for near Charlotte. He found a road that he thought was likely the exact spot and felt certain that, given the uncertainties of old surveying methods and the assumptions of his model, he was probably in the ballpark, within 15 or 16 miles of Charlotte. After he once explained what he had done, someone approached him with a question. "Would you like to see one of the markers?" And took Loberger to a granite stone, marked "XV To C." Loberger wasn't sure whether a Roman "I" followed the "V," but the guy assured him. "That's 15," he said. "I know where 16 is" -- it had been used in a fence.

If I had to begin looking for Lawson's trail to bring me finally to Loberger? It's already worth it. Loberger will join us on the trail, probably around Charlotte, and he'll not only help us know exactly where Lawson would have gone but teach us to use the surveying tools that Lawson would have used. This one is called a Gunter scale, named after surveyor Edmund Gunter, who invented it as a sort of pre-slide rule, using logarithmic scales to simplify calculations.Of course Gunter had to become professor of astronomy at Gresham College, where Lawson took classes, because once you start looking for connections that's how it always happens. He was there long before Lawson was, but still.

Loberger has tons more cool stuff and ideas, and he'll tell us all about them when he joins us on the trek, probably sometime in the winter or spring.

*Oops. I originally called this a PowerPoint. My bad.
Picture
Dale Loberger's Gunter's scale. I suppose it's possible that stuff gets cooler than turn-of-the-eighteenth-century surveying equipment, but seriously: how?
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