Lapham's Quarterly

Quick with math, punctilious in mapping and documentation, and breathless for a change in status, George Washington crossed the Blue Ridge for the first time at the age of sixteen as a surveyor for the Fairfax family in its land investments in the Shenandoah Valley. Soon he was relied on by that most powerful family of the Northern Neck as a can-do dogsbody, a natural frontiersman always up for a job.

It is a maxim universally admitted in geometry, and indeed in every branch of knowledge, that in the progress of investigation, we should proceed from known facts to what is unknown. In early infancy, our ideas spring from our wants; the sensation of want excites the idea of the object by which it is to be gratified.

The Little Tennessee is not a big river. It flows a mere 135 miles from its source in northeastern Georgia—some 3,240 feet above sea level—to its point of discharge at Lenoir City, Tennessee, where it joins the Tennessee River. Still, each time I paddle along this river I remind myself of how this waterway has played an outsized role in North American history.

Detail from the powder horn of John Mahard, engraved by John Bush during the French and Indian War, 1756. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.

Vicksburg, March 18 I arrived at this place last night about sunset and was told that there was no hotel in the town except on the wharf boat, the only house used for that purpose having been closed a few days ago on account of a difference of opinion between its owner and his tenant. There are no wharves on the Mississippi, or any of the Southern rivers.

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“Today, George Forster’s name is often spelled ‘Georg,’ following German convention,” Andrea Wulf writes in the author’s note that prefaces The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris, from which this essay has been adapted.

Detail from an illustration of a black-fronted parakeet, by George Forster, 1774. Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin. Subscribe to This Podcast iTunes Spotify SoundCloud Google Podcasts RSS “He’s an intuitive ethnographer,” Andrea Wulf says of George Forster, the subject of her new book, on this week’s episode of The World in Time.

Do you want to live in a place where people take responsibility for their own actions, lives, and dealings with others? Where community is genuine and voluntary? Where your rights are fully respected, provided only that you equally respect the rights of others? So do we! Free Staters have chosen New Hampshire as our home—and for good reason. The Granite State consistently ranks among the best and freest states in the nation. In so many ways, it is the perfect launchpad for liberty.

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