136 years ago: the Upper Midwest from the back of a horse

During the 1800s, even ancestors who would end up staying home often tried going West to see how it suited them. My great-grandfather spent a few years in Kansas hoping to alleviate his wife's asthma, but they returned to southern Illinois.

And in the spring of 1879, my wife's great-grandfather left his young family behind for several weeks and took a 430-mile horseback ride west across part of Wisconsin and most of Minnesota. He sent back postcards and letters, which I transcribed and annotated, and which have now been published in the Minnesota Genealogical Quarterly. It's all there -- the rain, the cold, the boredom, the jokes, the universal presumption that if your traveling companion fell sick you could find him a bed in a farmhouse along the way, and forge on.


"Across Wisconsin and Minnesota on Horseback, 1879," Minnesota Genealogical Quarterly vol. 45, no. 4 (2014): 7-9.

Getting Places in the Old Midwest

Somewhere Bill Bryson writes that Midwesterners are never happier than when they're arguing over how to get from point A to point B. But it's easy to forget how recent is our ability even to do that!

Juliette Kinzie's Wau-Bun: The "Early Day" in the North-west recounts more than one trip between central Wisconsin and Chicago in the early 1830s where their party spent significant time being completely lost, no cabins in sight, and low on food.

My son's new compilation of Selected Readings on the Life and Work of Frances Ann Wood Shimer includes her tales of travel to Mount Carroll (Carroll County), Illinois in the early 1850s, when the train west of Milwaukee stopped at Janesville, and nobody in Freeport seemed to know even where Mount Carroll was!

Travelers' accounts are valuable supplements to history, among other things because they mention facts that we want to know but the residents just took for granted.



Harold Henderson, "Getting Places in the Old Midwest," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 28 January 2013 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

New at Midwest Roots and LibraryThing: Baptists, travel, and the worst of the 20th century

Last week I picked up an interesting resource for 20th-century research at Samford University library's perpetual used-book sale: the 1949 and 1950 student directories for the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. Free lookups in these or my other 15 miscellaneous mostly Midwestern sources here.

Also new on my booklist at LibraryThing: Travel Accounts of Indiana, 1679-1961. So far my favorite quote comes from a Dunker Baptist head of household between La Porte and Michigan City. In 1836 he found a carriageful of travelers at his door, stranded by a flood and washed-out bridge, and greeted them cheerfully, saying: "You know you would not have staid with me, if you could have helped it; and I would not have had you, if I could have helped it; so no more words about it; but let us make ourselves comfortable." (p. 161) You just don't hear that frank talk from motels these days.

The most recent book on that booklist that I actually read straight through was Timothy Snyder's Bloodlands -- almost unendurable, but very important to tell because most published sources on World War II had access only to the Soviet or Nazi archives, not both. The total tale of the multiple deliberate mass murders in that stretch of country between Russia and Germany (including the Holocaust itself) is one of the worst stories in human history, and of course many Americans have ancestors and relatives who died there or who narrowly escaped by timely emigration earlier in the 20th century.




Directory 1949 and Directory 1950 (Louisville KY: Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2825 Lexington Road).

Harriet Martineau, [June 19, 1836], in Shirley S. McCord, comp., Travel Accounts of Indiana, 1679-1961: A Collection of Observations by Wayfaring Foreigners, Itinerants, and Peripatetic Hoosiers (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Bureau, 1970), Indiana Historical Collections, Vol. 47. "Her comments are in Michigan History Magazine, 7 (1923):61-72, from the original Society in America (3 vols., London, 1837)."

Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010).


Harold Henderson, "New at Midwest Roots and LibraryThing: Baptists, travel, and the worst of the 20th century," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 24 June 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Getting around in Rome, Wild West nuns, and more history items of potential interest

* Orbis at Stanford is the coolest thing I've seen in a while: a model of travel in the Roman Empire. "By simulating movement along the principal routes of the Roman road network, the main navigable rivers, and hundreds of sea routes in the Mediterranean, Black Sea and coastal Atlantic, this interactive model reconstructs the duration and financial cost of travel in antiquity." . . . Help me out, here, techies: how hard would this be to implement for, say, Connecticut in 1670, or Indiana in 1830? (Hat tip to Planetizen Newswire.)

* Farther west than this blog usually goes, the New York Times foretaste of Anne M. Butler's Across God’s Frontiers: Catholic Sisters in the American West, 1850-1920 looks spicy. (Hat tip to Legal History Blog.)

* In which historians discover that there is always more of it, at The Historical Society -- and then they discuss family history too.

* You've heard of house histories -- how about a history of the multistory luxury co-op at 1540 North Lake Shore Drive on Chicago's Gold Coast, complete with the full history of the underlying land, vignettes of Chicago life in the course of its existence, and profiles of movers and shakers who lived there? Grace Dumelle's Heartland Historical Research Service has published the 113-page book. (Full disclosure: I did some work on it as a subcontractor.)



The History of 1540 North Lake Shore Drive, Chicago, Illinois (Chicago: Heartland Historical Research Service, 2012).


Harold Henderson, "Getting around in Rome, Wild West nuns, and more history items of potential interest," Midwestern Microhistory: A Genealogy Blog, posted 30 May 2012 (http://midwesternmicrohistory.blogspot.com : accessed [access date]). [Please feel free to link to the specific post if you prefer.]

Did your forebear make this trip in 1847?

Check out page 300 in the previously blogged Appletons' Railroad and Steamboat Companion, a summary of the five-day, 1500-mile trip from New York City to Chicago in the summer of 1847:

by boat from NYC to Albany...

by train from Albany to Buffalo (riding all night if you're in a hurry)...

and the rest of the way by "one of the large and elegant Upper Lake boats" ("ladies and gentlemen...with guns, fishing-tackle, harps, flutes, violins, and other music")...

stopping at Cleveland, Detroit, "Mackinaw," where you can try your luck at fishing "in water so clear that you can see a trout twenty feet from the surface"...

and then south down Lake Michigan to Chicago, population 16,000.

Total fare: $21.

Getting There in 1848 and 1870

"Did Railroads Induce or Follow Economic Growth? Urbanization and Population Growth in the American Midwest 1850-1860" (PDF, National Bureau of Economic Research) Four economists have researched the effect of railroad development on Midwestern settlement between 1850 and 1860. If you're like me, you'll read the introduction and the historical information about how fast the new transportation mode developed (and how Ohio tried to quash it to protect the state's investment in canals!), skip most of the technical part, and check out the conclusions. It turns out that (if I have got it right) railroads didn't speed up settlement, but they did speed up urbanization. Not surprising given that they can't stop everywhere and therefore are a centralizing technology.

And then you'll discover that they footnote some very interesting old railroad and ship travel guides. (In order to measure the effect of railroads, they had to know exactly where they were when.) The links didn't all work for me. These are the ones I found, either directly or after a little fooling around, and I'm pretty sure there are more. These are extremely cool resources if you have folks migrating to or through the Old Northwest in this era:

Appletons' Railroad and Steamboat Companion, 1848 (Google Book Search)

1870 railroad map, not sourced

Travelers' Official Guide of the Railways and Steam Navigation Lines of the United States & Canada, June 1870. Note the prematurely psychedelic cover typography and the long list of local times.

Grain Dealers' and Shippers' Gazetteer, evidently 1891 (as digitized by Pam Rietsch), accessible one railroad line at a time. The maps are awesome; the gazetteer part contains names as well.

For further searching, check out the University of Texas's justly famous Perry-Castaneda Map Collection (no tilde available on blogger?).

Neill on saving $

Illinois-based researcher and writer Michael John Neill has some ideas at 24-7 Family History Circle on reducing your travel budget without reducing your research -- and his commenters add some more. No one so far has mentioned carpooling. Are we too individualistic in our schedules for that?