Monthly Archives: February 2016

Making (Gravitational) Waves Pt 2

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Before I kick off, I just want to announce that as semester is starting, I’ll be dropping back to fortnightly updates. They may even be a little more infrequent at times, during marking and such. So please consider using the field on the left of the page to subscribe and receive an update when I post.

In essence, this was Ptolemy's view of the solar system.
In essence, this was Ptolemy’s view of the solar system.
Ok, so last week we left the world using the spirograph model of the universe. We can scoff as much as we want at this, but do remember that Ptolemy’s model was accurate enough not just for Columbus to get to the Americas (even if he was aiming for somewhere else entirely), but for Spain and Portugal to firmly establish their empires.

The first thinker to really upset this model of the universe was Copernicus. He was one of the first (after some Ancient Greeks who had been ignored for about 2,000 years) to place the sun at the centre of the solar system. Interestingly, this was primarily a philosophical shift, rather than any great revelation from new information. Although an avid astronomer, but Copernicus made few truly new observations. Instead, his great contribution was to show that placing the sun at the centre of the solar system explained many of the mathematical complexities of the planets’ orbits. It didn’t get rid of all the irregularities, however; and Copernicus still needed epicycles, albeit far fewer.

The orbit of Mars in particular offered problems for observers, but a German named Kepler was able to go a long way in explaining its strange orbit. He made several important contributions to the movement of the planets, but I’m going to concentrate on two. Firstly, up until Kepler no one had linked gravity on the earth to the motions of the planets; according to most thinkers of the age, they were still just sliding around crystalline spheres.

Of course, planetariums would have been a lot more interesting...
Motions of the planets and predictions of the future…
Instead, Kepler posited that there must be a universal force attracting everything to everything else in the solar system Unfortunately, he missed out on the invention of the term “gravity”, instead ascribing the force of attraction to magnetism.

Nevertheless, from this, Kepler was able to hypothesise that this force decreased exponentially with distance. Whilst this may sound more academic than interesting, it lead to his second key discovery—the orbits of the planets were ellipses, not circles, and the planets sped up and slowed down as they moved closer to and further from the Sun. This managed to account for the strange orbit of Mars (it has the most elliptical orbit of all the inner planets) without having to resort to any invisible epicycles.

Curiously, one of the opponents of elliptical orbits actually made an enormous contribution to the fields of astronomy and gravity—Galileo. The Italian’s contribution to the field of astronomy was largely to provide a way by which the planets continued to revolve around the sun without coming to rest. Our old friend Aristotle, upon whom I wrote last week, had decreed that an object’s natural inertia would inevitably lead to its deceleration and eventual rest. Consequently, Kepler hypothesised that in order to continue orbiting, the planets needed some sort of force to keep them moving. Through a series of careful experiments, primarily by rolling weights down a ramp, Galileo was able to determine that an object which met no resistance would continue forever. This meant that if the orbits of the planets were circular—if the momentum of the planets perfectly balanced the attractive force of the sun—they never stop. As for the problem that the planets did not appear to be moving circles, Galileo apparently proved to be a late disciple of Aristotle and simply ignored the issue away.

Because even 500 years on, he might have gotten it wrong.

Nevertheless, by the middle of the 16th century, the problem largely seems to be that Aristotelian gravity was “all but dead” (p. 60), but no one seemed to know what to replace it with. Kepler’s elliptical orbits offered accurate predictions of where the planets would move next, but without the circular symmetry of Galileo, there was little understanding of how they could go round forever. The planets appeared to accelerate and decelerate as they went around the sun, but few could offer explanations for this apparently erratic behaviour.

Apparently there was a grain of truth to the story of Newton and his apple tree. One didn't hit him on his head, but it was contemplating their falling that inspired his ideas.
Apparently there was a grain of truth to the story of Newton and his apple tree. One didn’t hit him on his head, but it was contemplating their falling that inspired his ideas. (Also, I like that Britain has a “Tree Council”)

Newton’s Apple Tree plaque (Richard Croft) / CC BY-SA 2.0

It took the illustrious Newton to sort this all out and provide one unitary theory of gravitation. At the prompting of some of his friends,1 Newton set to piecing all these disparate discoveries together. Starting with the Copernican assumption that the Sun was at the centre of the solar system, Newton made careful calculations as to what orbits would look like if everything in the universe were to have gravity that fell away with distance according to the inverse square law.2

Although Newton never attempted to set out the causes of gravity3 he did demonstrate that if gravity were to follow the inverse square law, the orbits of the planets would be elliptical—they would accelerate as they were pulled in close to the sun, and slow down as they shot away. Assuming that there was no wind resistance, Gallileo’s discovery around the conservation of momentum meant this would go on forever, without needing some mysterious force to slow down and speed up the planets, in spite of the utter lack of circles.4

The depth of this breakthrough is difficult to communicate. For many it seemed as if the laws of heaven had been discovered—the planets in their unchanging orbits could be mapped out with almost exacting precision. The key word in that sentence is, of course, “almost”. The orbit of Mercury did not quite fit the predicted route of Newtonian physics and would require Einstein’s general relativity to fix it.

Of course, everyone at the time used the time honoured Ancient Greek philosophical technique: they ignored it.

No idea what you're talking about. By WillowW - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3416065
No idea what you’re talking about.
Credit: WillowW CC3.0

PS: Just a sly reminder—I’m going to be updating less regularly over the next few months, so you might consider subscribing to my blog (see right) to be notified of new posts.

Academic Sources

Ede, A & Cormack LB 2012, A History of Science in Society: From Philosophy to Utility, 2nd ed., University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

Holton, GJ 1988, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler to Einstein, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

Horvitz, LA 2002, Eureka!: Scientific Breakthroughs that Changed the World, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey.

Huff, TE 2003, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West, Cambridge University Press Cambridge.

  1. Considering how famously dickish Newton was, I’m always surprised to write that he had “friends”. ↩
  2. Loosely, gravity at twice the distance is four times as weak. ↩
  3. It would not be until Einstein that anyone would successfully do that, but that’s a story for another day. ↩
  4. Not strictly speaking historical, but I found myself Googling “Why aren’t the orbits of the planets circular?” because it bothered me. Basically, they could be, theoretically; but a circle is a special kind of perfectly balanced ellipse and so the odds of a planet falling into a circular orbit during its formation is “astronomically” low (see what I did there?). ↩

Making (Gravitational) Waves Pt 1

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I have seen these spirals so many times in the last week that they're etched into my brain.
When the universe wants to hypnotise you.
Credit: MoocSummers CC4.0
You might have read that gravity has been making waves recently. The discovery of gravitational waves has apparently added substantial weight to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, truly one of the the ground breaking theories on how our universe operates. Nevertheless, it is has been a long road to get to our current understanding of the universe, and there is no reason to think we’re anywhere near the end of it. In fact, the road is so long and winding that I’m going to split this history of the theory of gravity over two weeks.

Strangely enough, I can’t seem to find a reference on when people first started to notice that things held up in the air would drop to the ground if you let them go. Nevertheless, for a long time in the West at least, Aristotle was considered the foremost authority on gravity (keeping in mind the term “gravity” itself wouldn’t be coined for over one and a half thousand years by Newton). Aristotle held that everything in the world was composed of four elements: earth, water, air and fire. Each of these elements wanted to be in its proper place, with earth wanting to occupy the centre of the universe below and fire the heavens above. According to Aristotle, everything was made up of these elements in differing quantities, and it was their relative compositions that determined whether they wished to rise or fall.

Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle...
It’s almost ironic that we think of him as a man of great intellectual vigour.
Interestingly, the fact that a falling object accelerates as it “nears its proper place” (ie. falls), rather than slows down or remains constant, was well known to Aristotle, but he managed to avoid this critique of his theory by using one of the most traditional discursive strategies of the Ancient Greeks: he ignored it. It is also worth noting that in Ancient Greece, there was also a competing theory of gravitation from atomists—those who believed everything was composed of tiny particles—that posited that all atoms attracted each other on some level and therefore everything had some type of gravity. Therefore going from the Ancient Era to the Middle Ages we had two competing theories of gravity—one over a thousand years ahead of its time and one that almost could not have been more wrong—I’ll let you guess which one we chose.

One the most curiously logical and yet mind-bending paradoxes in the history of gravitational theory is that for the majority of human history it did not seem to occur to anyone that what made objects fall to the floor and what kept the planets sailing around the sun (or earth, as it was believed for a long time) was the same thing. Aristotle seems strangely reticent on why the planets wander around the sky, but he maintained that the universe consisted of perfect symmetry and therefore they must orbit in perfect circles, while the Earth sat still at the centre of the universe. A beautiful model of the universe it may have provided, but unfortunately it failed to describe the movements of the planets as they were actually observed. The issue was that the planets would move forward across the sky for many months of the year, conduct funny little reversals, and then proceed forward like nothing had happened. Aristotle took his usual approach to explaining such inconsistencies—he ignored it.

Aristotle: "I don't see it."
Aristotle: “I don’t see it.”
(Apparent retrograde movement of Mars)
Credit: NASA Public Domai

Basically, it's God's spirograph.
Basically, it’s God’s spirograph.

Fortunately, Ptolemy stepped in to the rescue. To solve this conundrum, he introduced epicycles and a deferent. In essence, to correct for this backwards movement, the planets didn’t simply rotate around the earth, they traced small circles around a point—an epicycle—and that point traced a large circle around the Earth, along the deferent. There were even other aspects, such as equant and eccentric, because the model clearly wasn’t complicated enough already.

Again, as seems to so often be the case, there were Ancient Greeks who pointed out that if the planets and the earth revolved around the Sun, it explained many of these inconsistencies. But on the authority of that great thinker Aristotle, the model was rejected.

Credit where credit’s due, Aristotle was not without reason. There were problems with a heliocentric model of the solar-system. If the Earth were spinning, for instance, why don’t we all just go flying off? Similarly, why don’t objects dropped from a great height fall westwards? Why didn’t the stars appear to move around the sky? And finally, it needs to be kept in mind that whilst assuming the planets all revolves around the sun explains many of the inconsistencies, the model still does not entirely line up with observations.

However, for those answers, we need to wait about one and a half thousand years. Or at least until next week.

The orbits of the planets in Ptolemy's universe. I wasn't joking about the spirograph thing.
The orbits of the planets in Ptolemy’s universe. I wasn’t joking about the spirograph thing.

Academic Sources

Applebaum, W 2005, The Scientific Revolution and the Foundations of Modern Science, Greenwood Press,Connecticut.

Ede, A & Cormack LB 2012, A History of Science in Society: From Philosophy to Utility, 2nd ed., University of Toronto Press, Toronto.

Grant, E 1996, The Foundations of Modern Science in the Middle Ages: Their Religious, Institutional and Intellectual Contexts, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Horvitz, LA 2002, Eureka!: Scientific Breakthroughs that Changed the World, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey.

Huff, TE 2003, The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West, Cambridge University Press Cambridge.

Krebbs, RE 1999, Scientific Development and Misconceptions Through the Ages: A Reference Guide, Greenwood Publishing Group, Connecticut.

Rise Above the Railway Tracks

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So it looks like Melbourne might be getting some more elevated rail. I’ll mostly keep out of the debate as to whether it’s a good idea or not,1 and instead will note that elevated rail is pretty clever. Getting trains out of the way of roads is safer and much more efficient, but mostly, I think I have to marvel a little at the structure that can carry tonnes of moving steel at high speeds (or moderate speeds, this is Melbourne, after all), even under the threat of constant vibration. As a bonus, the space underneath can even be utilised for parks or even small businesses like cafes and bars.

Technically it's 1837.
I can’t tell if it’s 2020 or 1820.
It should come as no surprise then that we’ve only had the engineering ability to build such a structure for a mere 180 years… Or that the world’s first passenger railway was actually on elevated track… And they rented out the spaces underneath the arches to businesses. Ok, maybe we need to explore this a little more.

Whilst the London-Greenwich Railway (LGR) was the first passenger railway, it was not the first railway to take passengers. There are a number of contenders for this particular honour, but what is remarkable about early railways was that they were almost universally designed for freight, with passenger cars as almost an after thought. This is a little odd, as almost universally the demand for passenger services on these lines far exceeded what was predicted. Apparently the idea that people would want to get somewhere in rather a hurry did not occur to rail’s early proponents. What marks the London-Greenwich Railway as unique, however, is that it was the first railway to be solely constructed for passengers.

The answer is ME. I would want to ride on something like that. Right now.
Yeah. I mean, who would ever want to ride on something like this?
Credit: Barry CC2.0

The main figures behind the scheme were Colonel George Landman and Geroge Walter. They floated a company in 1831 (floating companies seems to be the way everything was done at that time) and raised £400,000. The track was relatively short, running only 3¾ miles, but because of its elevation, involved almost 900 arches. Its construction used more than 60 million bricks, which was more than any other structure up till that time.

Whilst the majority of arches ran over fields—though these would disappear in a few decades—the original plan was to make a small amount of extra income by renting out the space under the arches at the London end of the line as houses. Somehow, in spite of the assurance of Penny Magazine that the sound and vibration (which could be felt, mind you) of the trains passing overhead “did not disturb [the] comfort” of the resident of one of the archways (p. 249), the scheme never really took off. Instead, the spaces were used primarily for storage.

Londoners appeared to be extremely excited by this development, and regularly lined the tracks just to see the work that was going on. One can only assume that for them, this was the future slowly coming to London. Never one to miss an opportunity for a few extra pounds, while the railway was under construction, George Walter opened the path that ran alongside the railway to the public, charging one penny’s admittance. At first, the walkway didn’t do the business that management had expected. It was set two to three feet below ground, which made the viaduct the train ran along look quite impressive, but meant people couldn’t see out over the boundary wall. In response, Colonel Landman paid 1 shilling for rubbish to be spread along the path to raise it up. To be honest, I’m impressed they were still able to charge a penny to walk on it after they had spread the rubbish.

As these projects do, it ran both over time and over budget. A particular issue arose when one of the test trains derailed. We take trains for granted these days, but the amount of fear around them during their earliest stages is quite palpable. A good friend of Lord Nelson and fellow officer, Sir Thomas Hardy,2 refused to ride, for fear of the boiler exploding. Keep in mind this is a man who fought through the Battle of Trafalgar. Fortunately, the boiler didn’t explode, and no one was seriously hurt, but it did result in a field day for the papers. In particular John Bull had always been against the railways and used this as an excuse to discuss their dangers, describing them as a matter of “Tom-foolery” (p. 250). The president of No Sky Rail would have felt right at home with her fear of freight train derailments. I’ve found no evidence if locals were concerned of paedophiles looking out over their fields.

Apologies for the quality of the photo, but this is the most wonderful letter of complaint. It really helps if you can imagine a rural English accent.
Apologies for the quality of the photo, but this is the most wonderful letter of complaint. It really helps if you can imagine a rural English accent.
London’s First Railway, p. 57

In spite of set backs and critics, the project was completed, with an opening ceremony on the 14th of December 1836, which sounds as if it were full of appropriate pomp and ceremony. A lot of toasting is also mentioned by contemporary reports, so I think we can assume a good time was had by all. Having said that, the first train departed and hour and three quarters late, setting the standard for all future passenger services. Five trains ran the line from London Bridge to Deptford on that day, and all the local parish churches arranged so that their bells rang out as the first trains went by. Though as their top speed was 20mph, this probably did not require the military precision that it appears. Nevertheless, 20mph was enough to astonish many of the passengers. They were probably even more astonished to find that, the press of people was so fierce that they couldn’t get off at the Spa Road stop and had to continue on to Deptford, where they were unable to reboard the trains. Subsequently, many people that day caught the train out to Deptford, but had to take a stage coach home. I’m sure any who have experienced Metro’s disruptions will be sympathetic.

A good time being had by all.
A good time being had by all.

And so the first authentically passenger line came into action. In doing so it predicted much of the future of building mass transit systems: delayed, over budget, and controversial. In fact, it ended up being the centre of a vary public smear campaign between two rival railway companies, but that’s a great story in its own right, and I think I’ll save it for another day.

Academic Sources

Aslet, C 1999, The Story of Greenwich, Fourth Estate, London.

Simmons, J & Biddle, G 1999, The Oxford Companion to British Railway History: From 1603 to the 1990s, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Thomas, RHG 1972, London’s first railway – the London & Greenwich, Batsford, London.

  1. Though my money’s on “good idea”, for the record. ↩
  2. Yes of “Kiss me, Hardy” fame. ↩

The most annoying noise to make and break history

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So I’m sure by now you will have heard of the Zika virus. An obscure virus discovered in the late 40s, it has sky-rocketed to everyone’s attention recently with its potential links to the birth-defect microcephaly and the neurological disorder Guillain-Barre syndrome. In response, a number of South American nations have asked women to not get pregnant, apparently taking a leaf from the the US’s famously successful absitence campaign.

Yes, I had to double-check that this was just a costume.
Yes, I had to double-check that this was just a costume.
Credit: Marie Carianna CC2.0

In response, some are predicting that the extremely conservative governments in the region will have to loosen their restrictions on abortion. If this were to occur, it would be a large change for the region. It would not, however, be the first time mosquitoes have played a significant role in the course of history.

One of the most deadly mosquito borne diseases is Yellow Fever. These days, 85% of those who contract it have no or mild symptoms. For the other 15%, there is no treatment and even with modern medicine, up to 50% will die. Horribly. Vomiting blood, which one scholar describes as looking “like coffee grounds” (p. 110). Charming.

Mmm... Enjoy that next cup.
Mmm… Enjoy that next cup.
Nevertheless, whilst unfortunate for sufferers, that symptom is great for historians as it is distinctive.1 This allows historians to track its effects across history, particularly in the Caribbean.

For our purposes, the most important thing about Yellow fever is that although it has a high mortality rate, if you manage to live through it, you will be immune to it for life. This, combined with the fact that children generally only get minor symptoms of the disease, means that any population that has grown up around it will largely be immune, whilst any population that enters a Yellow Fever area is going to have a bad time. This is broadly similar to malaria where, while you don’t get immunity for life, each time you get it, you become a little more resistant to the disease.

What does this mean for history? In the Early Modern Period,2 for a variety of reasons that I don’t have time to go into here, the British Empire was waxing in the Americas, whilst the Spanish Empire was waning. Nevertheless, gold and silver were still flooding out of Spain’s colonies.

One its key possessions was Cartagena in Colombia, a bustling port city. Knowing it was a prime target, the Spaniards had the city well defended. Fortifications were layered, with troops able to give ground in pieces during the course of the siege. This was crucial, for while the fortifications at Cartagena were strong, the British were arriving with 29,000 men against just over 4,000 Spaniards, of which just over half were professional soldiers.

This isn't even the city. This is just one of the forts protecting the city.
This isn’t even the city. This is just one of the forts protecting the city.
By Martin St-Amant (S23678) – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6384027

The attack began on the 13th of March 1741. At first the British out gunned the Spanish, blasting two minor forts into submission. Then they began to falter. The British forces launched a spectacularly inept assault against the key fort guarding the city. Many of the soldiers abandoned their ladders on the trek through the jungle. Those that did bring their ladders quickly found that they weren’t tall enough to scale the walls.

Even so, it was disease that took the real toll. By the time the fighting ceased, the British had lost over 8,000 men, and McNeill estimates that only 6% of casualties were due to fighting. And things only got worse. After retreating from Cartagena, “unaccountably undeterred” (p. 166) the British forces attempted to raid several other Spanish possessions in the Caribbean. Again, disease continued to scour the British ranks. By the time the British returned home, of the 29,000 in the force, 22,000 are thought to have perished. Only 1,000 of them are thought to have been direct casualties of war.

Remember, amidst that compassion, that the preferred treatment for Yellow Fever was still blood letting (Yes, this photo is from much later, but it's one of the few known photos of the procedure).
Remember, amidst that compassion, that the preferred treatment for Yellow Fever was still blood letting (Yes, this photo is from much later, but it’s one of the few known photos of the procedure).
The Burns Archive – Burns Archive via Newsweek, 2.4.2011., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14762725.
Possibly the most astounding aspect of the whole affair is, despite Erica Charters’s counter-claim, the utter lack of compassion shown for the rank and file. Admittedly, they did often build hospitals and, where possible, provided fresh fruit. Though as pointed out by Harrison, this was largely for reasons of economics more than anything else—as warfare became more specialised, training new troops became more expensive. Nevertheless, such mortality was generally seen as “the inevitable cost of war and commerce in a hot climate” (p. 16).

Whilst this has been a single example of the effects of mosquito borne viruses on history, it is far from the only one. Mosquitoes proved a valuable ally to the home side in almost every conflict in the Caribbean, from assaults on the French possessions of Martinique and Guadeloupe, to the American Revolution itself. Even when the British were victorious, such as with the invasion of Havana in 1762, after victory, the troops garrisoned there lost so many men to disease during the occupation, that Britain had to trade it back as a concession after the war had ended.

And to think, all of that didn’t even include the fact that mosquitoes make the single most annoying sound in the world. Nevertheless, they serve as an excellent reminder that for all we tend to focus on the movers and shakers of history, often the smallest things can have gigantic impacts.

EEEEeeeEeEEeEEEEEe
¡Por la patria!

Academic Sources

Charter, E 2014, Disease, war, and the imperial state : the welfare of the British armed forces during the Seven Years’ War, University of Chicago Press, London.

Harrison, M 2010, Medicine in an age of Commerce and Empire: Britain and its Tropical Colonies 1660-1830, Oxford University Press, Oxford.

McNeill, JR 2013, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914, Cambridge University Press, New York.

McNeill, JR 2013, “Mosquito Revolutions: Disease, War, and Independence in the U.S. South, Haiti, and Venezuela, 1776-1825”, Juniata, vol. 14, 2014, pp. 107-123.

  1. I’m going to fess up and say I owe a great debt to that article. It’s not quite what I’d consider academic standard, but it does an excellent job of whittling down the central arguments of his book into something more wieldy. It’s also a good read, if you’ve got a moment. ↩
  2. Strictly speaking, the late Early Modern period, but that sounds ridiculous. ↩

A Land Worth Dying For

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I have no idea what the term “militia” conjures up inside the minds of Americans. But outside of the US, it tends to make us think of crazy right-wing extremists, the kind of gun-loving red blooded American who genuinely believes that it is essential to own a gun as a last resort to protect the American people from the tyranny of their own government. This lets us easily dismiss the recent actions of the so called Citizens for Constitutional Freedom and their occupation of the wildlife refuge in Oregon as actions of some ring-wing nut jobs. At first we’re shocked. Then we scoff. Then we send them a box of dildos. And then we move on with our lives.

You thought I was being rhetorical about the dildos?

Nevertheless, whether these groups are crazy or not (and make no mistake they are crazy), there are always reasons that their apparent craziness takes that particular form. With one member of the militia shot dead by police, and another four still occupying the facility, it is worthwhile to ask how have we ended up in a situation where a wildlife refuge is worth dying for.

In essence, the conflict is about land—who owns it and how they can use it. Currently, the US government own almost 30% of the land in the United States. However, the vast majority of this is concentrated in the West with the government owning as much as 85% of some states.

Am I the only one who thinks this looks like a blood-splatter pattern out of CSI?
Am I the only one who thinks this looks like a blood-splatter pattern out of CSI?
As the federal government basically operates out of the East Coast of the US, this leads to more than a few conflicts over how the land should be used. Specifically, conflicts between the needs of ranchers and conservationists; but we’ll get to that later. The first thing we need to look at is how the federal government ended up with such a disproportionate ownership of the West.

The secret is that the federal government never set out to own so much land, it simply couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. The US was colonised from the east.1 It took colonists about 160 years to move inland from the Appalachian mountains, somewhere between 400-500km from the coast. In this time, settlers tended to run ahead of the government (still the crown, at this stage). First some settlers who were trying to escape the law would settle down somewhere beyond the reaches of the government, but then the law would inexorably catch up, like a colonial T-1000. So they would have to move again.

An accurate portrayal of colonisation.
In fact, the British had signed treaties with the Native American population guaranteeing them everything west of the Appalachians. Subsequently, they deployed the army in an attempt to stop settlers moving over the mountains. In spite of “burning cabins and herding inhabitants eastward” (p. 156), settlement continued in waves until settlers were piled up against the banks of the Mississippi river in the early 1800s.

This is a distance of some 600km in about 40-50 years, so you’ll notice this is getting faster; although at this stage it is the settlers who are still leading the (now) US government in a merry chase. The final push was effectively lead by the government, however. Firstly, the US government constantly renegotiated treaties with Native Americans, pushing them further and further West, or isolating them in pockets of unwanted land and building the basis for much of the United States’ agricultural wealth. Secondly, the US “bought” much of its lands off Mexico. These two prongs of expansion let Americans tell themselves “We take nothing by conquest… Thank God” (p. 169). Of course, the fact that the deal was signed as part of the conclusion of the US-Mexican War and Mexico ended up ceding half its territory was purely coincidental.

This is Daniel Freeman, the first Homesteader. Yes, he looked exactly like you'd picture him.
This is Daniel Freeman, the first Homesteader. Yes, he looked exactly like you’d picture him.
Therefore, by 1853, the mainland of the US had finally assumed its present boundaries. Considering the last 2,500+ km between the Mississippi and the West Coast were covered in the space of about 40 years, the government was now left with so much land it had no idea what to do with it. So like someone who’s just won the lottery, the US government did its best to give away the land as fast as possible. With the Homestead Act of 1863, Americans were able to claim 160 acres of cheap land, so long as they occupied it for five years. Whilst this did spark a massive wave of migration westwards, proper government divestment was thwarted by the sheer size of the US and the unsuitability of the western states for farming. What the government wanted, was an enormous number of small-holding individuals; however, the geography of the West simply didn’t allow for this style of land-intensive farming. Instead, you ended up with cattle, lots of cattle, being grazed over huge tracts of land.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
As the majority of farmers could afford to purchase sufficient land to graze cattle, they leased the rights of the federal government. A system that has by and large continued to this day.

The final piece of the conflict is conservation. Slowly, as the US finally filled out its borders, it slowly came to realise it was going to have to come to terms with “a closed space existence” (p. 755). You can see the first signs of this change with the creation of Yellowstone National Park in 1872, the first national park in the US and possibly the world. Of course, the further down the road of conservation the US government went, the more difficult the livelihoods of ranchers became. Even on the great swathes of land ranchers were allowed to lease, the restrictions were ever growing.

And so we arrive at the present day conflict. Just as the ranchers were once the first wave of a new philosophy of land management, displacing the Native American ways of life with treaty after treaty, now they find themselves as a holdout against yet another new philosophy, with their own ways of life being threatened by legal restriction after legal restriction.

One has to wonder whether they see the irony in it.

Although one can't help feeling any direct comparison to the signing of this treaty and grazing restrictions being enforced on ranchers in Oregon is probably a little exaggerated.
Although one can’t help feeling any direct comparison to the signing of this treaty and grazing restrictions being enforced on ranchers in Oregon is probably a little exaggerated.

Academic Sources

Anderson, TL & Hill, PJ 1975, “The Evolution of Property Rights: A Study of the American West”, The Journal of Law & Economics, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 163-179.

Billington, RA 1949, Westward Expansion: a history of the American frontier, The Macmillan Company, New York.

Zinn, H 2010, A people’s history of the United States, HarperCollins, New York.

  1. This is hardly surprising, as this is the side that’s closest to England. ↩