The land of North America: its regions, rivers and climate

What this chapter is for

This chapter is about the stage on which all of American history is played. That stage is the land of the United States, with its mountains, rivers, plains and climate. When you finish it you will be able to draw a rough map of the country from memory, explain why the first English colonies clung to the Atlantic coast, why the Mississippi and New Orleans mattered so much, why the dry West was settled last and in a different way, and use all of this as evidence in an answer on any period.

It is a long chapter, so here is the map of it. First comes the size of the country and how its land was made. Then we cross it from east to west, by the coast, the Appalachian mountains, the Mississippi, the Great Lakes, the Great Plains, and the Rockies and the West. Then come the climate, the riches under and on the land, and the regions Americans name. Last we see how the land steered the story, what it gave the country, and how historians have argued about it.

No FPSC paper has yet asked about the land by itself. Questions on the colonies, on westward expansion, on the Civil War and on America’s rise as a power keep needing it, and the examiners have asked for the “geopolitical features” of the Northwest Passage and the Middle Passage (CE-2023), which is geography by another name.¹

Before you start

The words

• Continent. One of the earth’s great land masses. North America is the continent that holds Canada, the United States, Mexico and the lands of Central America.
• Coastal plain. Low, flat land along a sea coast, made of soft soil and sand that rivers and the sea laid down.
• Plateau. A wide area of high land that is fairly flat on top, like a table.
• Basin. A low area surrounded by higher land. A river basin is all the land whose rain drains into one river.
• Tributary. A river that flows into a bigger river rather than into the sea.
• Meridian. A line on the map running from the North Pole to the South Pole. Each one has a number, its longitude. The 100th meridian west is the line 100 degrees west of Greenwich in England.
• Arid. Dry, with too little rain for crops to grow without watering them by hand or by canal.
• Irrigation. Bringing water to fields by canals, pipes or wells, as Punjab’s farmers do from the canals of the Indus.
• fall line. The line where rivers flowing to the Atlantic tumble from hard rock onto soft ground, making rapids and waterfalls. Boats from the sea could go no further.
• Continental Divide. The line along the high Rockies that separates the rivers flowing to the Atlantic side from those flowing to the Pacific.
• drainage basin. All the land whose rain ends up in one river system. The Mississippi’s basin covers most of the middle of the country.
• Frontier. In American history, the edge of settled land, where farms gave way to land the settlers had not yet taken.
• Determinism. The idea that one force, such as the land or the climate, decides what people do. Historians use the word mostly to reject it.

The places

• The Atlantic coast. The eastern shore, where the English colonies began, from Maine in the north to Georgia and Florida in the south.
• The Appalachian Mountains. A long belt of old, worn mountains running from Canada down to Alabama, a few hundred kilometres inland from the Atlantic.
• The Cumberland Gap. A pass through the Appalachians where Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee meet.
• The Mississippi River. The great river of the middle of the country, flowing south from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico at New Orleans. Its big tributaries are the Missouri from the west and the Ohio from the east.
• New Orleans. The city near the mouth of the Mississippi.
• The Great Lakes. Five huge lakes on the border with Canada: Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario. They drain to the Atlantic through the St. Lawrence River.
• The Great Plains. The flat, dry grassland west of the Mississippi, running up to the foot of the Rockies.
• The Rocky Mountains. The great high mountains of the West, running from Canada down to New Mexico.
• The Great Basin. The dry land between the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada, whose rivers never reach the sea.
• The Sierra Nevada and the Cascades. The mountain ranges near the Pacific coast, in California, Oregon and Washington.
• Alaska and Hawaii. The two states that do not touch the other forty-eight. Alaska lies north-west of Canada, and Hawaii is a chain of islands in the middle of the Pacific.

The story in plain words

1. The United States is very big, about twelve times the size of Pakistan.
2. Its eastern side has low, old mountains and a wet climate. Its western side has high, young mountains and a dry climate.
3. Between them lies a huge flat middle drained by one river system, the Mississippi.
4. The English settled first on the Atlantic coast, because that was where the ships landed and the soil was good.
5. The mountains behind the coast held the settlers back for more than a century.
6. Once they crossed, the rivers carried their crops down to New Orleans, so whoever held New Orleans could choke the West.
7. The United States bought New Orleans, and much more, in 1803.
8. Canals, steamboats and then railroads tied the country together and pointed it towards the East’s cities.
9. The dry plains and the mountains beyond them were settled last, and needed new ways of farming and of sharing water.
10. Two oceans and weak neighbours kept the country safe while it grew, and its land gave it the food, coal, iron and oil that made it a great power.
11. Historians agree the land mattered. They argue about how much, and whether people shaped the land as much as it shaped them.

1. Why the story of America begins with the land

Imagine you are an English farmer who landed in Virginia in the 1610s. You can grow tobacco on the flat, wet land by the rivers. A ship can come up the river to your landing and carry your crop to London. Two hundred kilometres west of you there is a wall of forested mountains, and you have no idea what lies behind it. Everything you do, where you build, what you grow and who you trade with, is decided by what is around you. That is where a history of America has to start.

Every period in the syllabus has a geography inside it. The colonies of head II hugged the coast because of the coast’s rivers and harbours. The quarrels with Britain after 1763 were partly about whether settlers could cross the mountains. Head III’s fight over the Mississippi and New Orleans was a fight about a river mouth. Head IV, the growth from thirteen states to fifty, is the story of crossing a continent. The Civil War of head VI was won partly by controlling the Mississippi. The rise to world power in head VII rested on the coal, iron and oil the land held, and on the two oceans that kept enemies far away.

A student who knows the land can explain events instead of only listing them. “The settlers moved west” is a sentence anyone can write. “They crossed the Appalachians through the Cumberland Gap and floated their grain down the Ohio and the Mississippi to New Orleans” is a sentence that shows the examiner you know how it actually happened. The CE-2018 examiners complained that candidates “opted for general questions demanding discussion and comments merely without mention of historical facts and figures”.² Geography is one of the cheapest ways to put facts into an answer, because a place name, a river and a mountain range are facts.

The land does not decide everything, and section 15 shows how historians argue about that. But you cannot judge how much it mattered until you know what it is. So we will cross the country once, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, before the history begins in earnest.

2. A country the size of a continent

The United States covers 9,833,517 square kilometres, land and water together, by the count of its Census Bureau.³ Pakistan’s census of 2023 gives Pakistan’s area as 796,096 square kilometres.⁴ So the United States is about twelve times the size of Pakistan. Figure 1 shows what that means. Pakistan is drawn at the same scale on top of the United States, and it fits into the middle of the country with plenty of room on every side.

The country is in three pieces. The largest is the block of forty-eight states between Canada and Mexico, which Americans call the “lower 48” or the “contiguous” states, meaning the ones that touch each other. On its own it is about ten times the size of Pakistan. Alaska, bought from Russia in 1867 and taught in head IV, sits north-west of Canada and is about twice Pakistan’s size by itself.²⁶ Hawaii is a chain of volcanic islands in the middle of the Pacific, small in area but important for its harbour at Pearl Harbor, which head VIII will make famous.³

Most American history happened in the lower 48, so most of this chapter is about that block. It lies between about 25 and 49 degrees north, roughly the same band of the earth as the land from Karachi to the north of Central Asia, so most of it has hot summers and cold winters rather than the steady heat of the tropics.

Look at the shape of the whole continent and three things stand out. Two oceans guard it, the Atlantic to the east and the Pacific to the west. Its neighbours are Canada to the north and Mexico to the south, and for most of its history neither could threaten it seriously. Its land is arranged in long strips that run north to south. From east to west they are a coastal plain, the old Appalachian mountains, the great central plain, the high Rockies, the dry basins and plateaus, and the Pacific mountains. A traveller going west crosses these strips one after another, and so did the American people. The next ten sections take them in that order.

3. How the land was made

The strips of land are not an accident. They are the marks of how the continent was built over hundreds of millions of years, and a few plain facts about that make the map easy to remember.

Start in the east. The Appalachians are very old. Their rocks range in age from the Precambrian, the earliest part of the earth’s history, to the Paleozoic, the long era that followed it.⁵ They were pushed up when ancient continents collided. Since then wind, rain and frost have worn them down for so long that today they are rounded, forested ridges. Their highest point, Mount Mitchell in North Carolina, stands at 2,037 metres.⁶ Old, worn mountains are low enough to cross on foot, but they come in many parallel ridges with few gaps, which is why they were a barrier rather than a wall.

The Rockies, in the west, are much younger. According to the National Park Service, they took shape during a period of intense movement of the earth’s plates, around 170 to 40 million years ago, and the last great upheaval, which geologists call the Laramide orogeny, raised the Rockies we see today.⁷ Young mountains have had less time to wear down, so they are high and sharp. Mount Elbert in Colorado reaches 4,399 metres, and Mount Whitney in California’s Sierra Nevada, the highest point of the lower 48, reaches 4,418 metres.⁶ That is more than twice the height of Mount Mitchell, and for settlers with wagons these mountains were a serious obstacle.

Between the two mountain belts lies the great central plain, made of layers of rock laid down flat under ancient seas and later covered by soil. In the last ice age, huge sheets of ice spread south from Canada over the northern part of this plain. When they melted, they left behind flat land, rich soil in many places, and countless lakes. The biggest hollows the ice scraped out filled with water and became the Great Lakes. So the north of the central plain is the land the ice made, and it is some of the best farmland on earth.

You do not need geology for the exam. You need the picture it gives. The East is old, low and worn, the West is young, high and broken, and the middle is flat and rich. Figure 2 shows that picture. Hold it in your head and the rest of the chapter is a walk across it.

4. The Atlantic coast and the fall line

The first strip is the coastal plain, a band of low, flat land along the Atlantic. It is narrow in New England, where the hard rock comes almost to the sea, and widens as you go south, until in the Carolinas and Georgia it is a few hundred kilometres wide. It continues round the Gulf of Mexico to Texas. Its soil is soft and sandy, and many rivers wind slowly across it to the sea.

These slow rivers were the roads of the colonies. In Virginia and Maryland, the land around the great bay called the Chesapeake, the rivers are so wide and deep that an ocean ship could sail far inland and load a planter’s tobacco at his own landing. That is why the Chesapeake colonies had few towns for a long time. The river came to every planter’s door, so nobody needed a port town. In New England the coast was rocky and the soil thin, so the colonists turned to fishing, shipbuilding and trade, and gathered in towns around good harbours such as Boston. Head II’s chapters on Virginia and on New England build on exactly this difference.

The inner edge of the coastal plain is marked by the fall line. There the rivers leave the hard rock of the hilly land called the Piedmont and drop onto the soft rock of the plain. In Virginia they fall 15 to 30 metres through a zone of rapids and small waterfalls.⁹ A ship from the ocean can go no further, so the fall line was where sea travel ended. In May 1607, within days of the landing at Jamestown on 14 May, Captain Christopher Newport and John Smith spent six days exploring up the James River, until the falls at the place that is now Richmond stopped their boats.²⁹⁹

The fall line made towns. At each river, goods had to be taken off the boats and carried round the falls, and the falling water could turn mill wheels. So a line of cities grew up along it, among them Richmond on the James, Washington near the falls of the Potomac, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Trenton further north, and others to the south. If you draw a line through these cities on a map you have drawn the fall line, as figure 2 does with its thick black line.

Behind the fall line rises the Piedmont, rolling hill country with better soil than the sandy coast. Settlers spread into it through the 1700s, many of them poorer farmers who could not afford the rich river land of the coast. The Piedmont runs up to the foot of the Appalachians, and there the second strip begins.

5. The Appalachian barrier and the gaps through it

The Appalachians run from Canada down to central Alabama, a few hundred kilometres inland from the coast. As we saw, they are not very high. What made them a barrier was their shape. They come in long parallel ridges with narrow valleys between them, covered in thick forest, and for most of their length there was no easy way through. A family with a wagon, a few animals and all they owned could not simply climb over them.

For a century and a half after Jamestown, almost all the English settlers lived east of this belt. The mountains were not the only reason. The native nations beyond them were strong, and France claimed the land to the west. But the mountains made every step west slow and dangerous. When Britain won the land between the mountains and the Mississippi from France in 1763, it at once tried to stop settlement there. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 forbade colonial settlement beyond the line of the Appalachians, to keep peace with the native nations. Settlers ignored it, and the anger it caused became one of the grievances behind the Revolution, as head II will show.¹⁰

The ways through mattered enormously. The most famous was the Cumberland Gap, a pass where Kentucky, Virginia and Tennessee meet, marked on figure 2. The National Park Service calls it “the first great gateway to the west” and says 300,000 people crossed the Appalachians through it to settle America.¹¹ Bison and native hunters had used it long before the settlers. From the 1770s a trail through it, the Wilderness Road, led families into Kentucky and Tennessee. Further north, the valley of the Mohawk River in New York gave a rare low, level route right through the mountains to the Great Lakes, and section 7 shows what that route became.

Once across, settlers found themselves in a new world, the land Americans of 1800 called “the West”, meaning the land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi.¹² Its rivers flowed west and south, away from the Atlantic cities. A Kentucky farmer could not easily haul his corn back over the mountains to Philadelphia, but he could float it down the Ohio to the Mississippi and down the Mississippi to New Orleans. That simple fact of drainage shaped the politics of the young republic, and it is the subject of the next section.

6. The Mississippi and the rivers that feed it

The Mississippi is the spine of the country. It rises in Minnesota, near the Canadian border, and flows south for 3,766 kilometres to the Gulf of Mexico.¹³ Its great western tributary, the Missouri, is longer still, 4,088 kilometres, and rises in the Rockies of Montana.¹³ From the east comes the Ohio, which begins at Pittsburgh where two rivers join and flows south-west to meet the Mississippi. The Tennessee, the Arkansas, the Red and hundreds of smaller rivers join them. Together they drain the land from the Appalachians to the Rockies, the whole middle of the country, into one river and one mouth. Figure 3 shows this system in thick blue lines.

Look again at figure 3 and you will see why New Orleans mattered. Every farm in the Ohio valley, in Kentucky, in Tennessee and later on the plains, sent its produce down these rivers, and all of it had to pass the one city near the mouth. Whoever held New Orleans held the door through which the West traded with the world. In the 1790s that door was in Spanish hands. When news came that Spain had passed Louisiana to France, Thomas Jefferson, then President, wrote to his minister in Paris on 18 April 1802:

“There is on the globe one single spot, the possessor of which is our natural & habitual enemy. It is New Orleans, through which the produce of three eighths of our territory must pass to market.”¹⁴

Jefferson was not exaggerating for effect. He was describing the drainage map. A strong France at New Orleans could strangle the western states or lure them away from the Union. The answer came in 1803, when France sold not only New Orleans but the whole of Louisiana, some 828,000 square miles, about 2.1 million square kilometres, between the Mississippi and the Rockies, for $15 million.¹² That is land nearly three times the size of Pakistan. Head III teaches the purchase in full. Here the point is that it was a purchase made for a river.

The river was a highway as well as a door. In the early 1800s flatboats carried grain, pork and whisky downstream, and from the 1810s steamboats could push upstream as well, so the river became a two-way highway. Towns grew at the key points. St. Louis stood near where the Missouri meets the Mississippi and became the gateway to the far West. Cincinnati and Louisville grew on the Ohio. New Orleans became one of the great ports of the world, shipping the cotton of the South.

In the Civil War the river became a weapon. The Union’s plan was to seize the Mississippi and cut the Confederacy in two. Abraham Lincoln said of the fortress city of Vicksburg, high on a bluff over the river, “Vicksburg is the key! The war can never be brought to a close until that key is in our pocket.” After a 47-day siege, its Confederate garrison surrendered on 4 July 1863, and the Union held the whole river.¹⁵ Head VI teaches the campaign. The geography is why it mattered.

7. The Great Lakes and the northern road

North of the Mississippi’s basin lie the Great Lakes, from west to east Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario. They are, says the US Environmental Protection Agency, the largest system of fresh surface water on earth, holding about 84 per cent of North America’s surface fresh water and about 21 per cent of the world’s.⁸ Only the polar ice caps hold more fresh water. They drain east through the St. Lawrence River, past Montreal and Quebec, to the Atlantic.

The lakes and the St. Lawrence make a second great waterway into the heart of the continent, and for a long time it was France’s. The French settled the St. Lawrence from the early 1600s and pushed their fur traders and missionaries up the lakes and down to the Mississippi, which is how a French empire came to stretch in a great arc from Quebec to New Orleans. The English colonies sat between that arc and the sea. Much of the long contest between France and Britain in North America, taught in head II, was a contest for the waterways that joined the lakes to the Ohio and the Mississippi.

For the young United States the lakes posed a problem. Their trade naturally flowed out through the St. Lawrence, which was British Canada’s river. The answer was to cut a door of its own. New York State dug the Erie Canal from the Hudson River near Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo, along the low Mohawk valley, the level gap through the mountains. The canal system has been in continuous use since 1825. The National Park Service records that it opened the interior of the continent to settlement, that the population of the canal towns of Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo quadrupled between 1830 and 1850, and that it made New York the nation’s chief commercial and financial centre.¹⁶

The canal did something larger as well. Before it, the West’s trade went south down the Mississippi. After it, more and more of the grain of the new states around the lakes went east to New York. Then the railroads of the 1840s and 1850s ran east and west and strengthened the pull. By the Civil War the farms of the Northwest were tied by trade to the factories and ports of the North-East. That tie is one reason the states of the upper Mississippi valley stood with the Union in 1861, a point head VI makes. Chicago, at the south end of Lake Michigan where the lakes come nearest to the Mississippi’s rivers, grew from a small town into the great railroad and grain city of the middle of the country.

8. The Great Plains and the 100th meridian

West of the Mississippi the land rises very gradually, so gently that a traveller hardly notices, until it meets the Rockies at about 1,600 metres. Denver, at the foot of the mountains, lies between 1,564 and 1,667 metres above the sea.⁶ The eastern part of this slope, the Central Lowland, is wet enough for ordinary farming. The western part, the Great Plains, is not. It is a sea of grass with few trees and few rivers, where the wind blows hard and the rain is uncertain.

The change from wet to dry happens roughly at the 100th meridian, the line of longitude that runs through the middle of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas. John Wesley Powell, the explorer of the Colorado River, made this line famous in his Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States of 1878. East of it, says the National Park Service, more than 20 inches of rain fall in a year, about 500 millimetres, enough to grow crops without irrigation. West of it, with exceptions such as the Pacific Northwest, the rain falls below 20 inches, and in places such as Nevada’s Carson Desert it falls under 5 inches, about 130 millimetres.¹⁷ Figure 2 draws this line in dashed red.

For a Pakistani student the picture is familiar. Lahore and the plains of central Punjab get several hundred millimetres of rain a year, and a farmer in much of Sindh and Balochistan cannot rely on rain at all and lives by the canal or the karez. The Great Plains are like the land where the rain runs out and the canal has not yet arrived.

Settlers from the wet East reached this line in the middle of the 1800s, and their ways of farming broke down. The 160-acre farm, about 65 hectares, that the Homestead Act of 1862 offered to a settler who lived on it for five years was enough to support a family in Illinois, but often too small on the dry plains.¹⁸ There was little timber for houses or fences, so settlers built houses of turf and, later, fenced the land with barbed wire. The windmill pumped water from deep wells. Before the farms came, the plains belonged to the bison and to the nations who hunted them on horseback, such as the Lakota and the Comanche, and to the cattle drives that followed them. Head IV tells the story of how the plains were taken.

Powell argued that the West needed different laws, with farms laid out around the scarce water and the government helping to store and share it. For Western settlement to succeed, the government had to control the rivers and irrigate the dry land.¹⁷ Congress at first ignored him, but in 1888 it gave $100,000 to the Geological Survey to study possible irrigation works, and the Reclamation Act of 1902 set the federal government to building dams and canals across the West.¹⁷ Long after Powell, the plains reminded the country of its limits. In the 1930s drought and wind blew away the ploughed soil in the disaster known as the Dust Bowl, which head XVI’s chapter on the Depression takes up.

9. The Rockies, the dry basins and the Pacific coast

At the western edge of the plains the Rocky Mountains rise like a wall. They run from Canada down to New Mexico, and their peaks reach above 4,000 metres. Along their crest runs the Continental Divide. Rain that falls on its eastern side flows by the Missouri and the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico and so to the Atlantic. Rain that falls on its western side flows by the Colorado or the Columbia to the Pacific. The divide was the great line that the explorers sent west by Jefferson in 1804 to 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, had to cross to reach the Pacific.

West of the Rockies lies a vast dry country of plateaus and basins. In the south is the Colorado Plateau, cut by the Colorado River into the Grand Canyon. In the north is the Columbia Plateau, drained by the Columbia and the Snake. Between them is the Great Basin, a land of desert valleys and bare ranges whose few rivers never reach the sea and end instead in salt lakes, the largest of which is the Great Salt Lake of Utah. At its southern edge is Death Valley, which falls to 86 metres below sea level, the lowest point in the United States, and which the National Park Service calls the driest place on the continent, with less than 2 inches, about 50 millimetres, of rain a year.⁶¹⁹

Figure 4 shows how high and how varied the West is compared with the East. Each bar stands at its true longitude. The two tallest bars, Mount Whitney and Mount Elbert, and the dip below sea level at Death Valley all lie in the western third of the country. East of the 100th meridian nothing reaches much above 2,000 metres.

Near the Pacific rise the last mountains, the Sierra Nevada in California and the Cascades in Oregon and Washington. Between the Sierra and the coast ranges lies California’s Central Valley, a rich farming region once it is irrigated. North of it, Oregon and Washington have mild, wet coasts and great forests. The Pacific coast has fewer good harbours than the Atlantic, but it has two excellent ones, San Francisco Bay and Puget Sound, and in the 1840s Americans wanted both.

For most of the 1800s there were only three slow ways to reach this far West. One was by wagon across the plains and over the mountain passes, a journey of months. Another was by ship round the tip of South America. The third was by ship to Central America, across its narrow neck by land, and on by ship again. That is why the gold found in California in the late 1840s drew people from the whole world but was a long way from the rest of the United States. It is also why the joining of the first railroad across the continent, completed when its two lines met in Utah on 10 May 1869, was so important.²⁰ Head VII begins there.

10. Climate: why the East is wet and the West dry

The land’s shape explains its climate, and the climate explains a great deal of its history. Three facts are enough.

The first is the direction of the weather. Over most of the United States the winds and storms move from west to east. Storms from the Pacific drop their rain on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada and the Cascades as the air rises over them, and the air that comes down the eastern side is dry. That dry land in the lee of the mountains is called a rain shadow, and the Great Basin and Death Valley lie in it.¹⁹ The Rockies cast a second shadow over the Great Plains. That is why a few hundred kilometres can separate the wet, forested coast of Oregon or Washington from near-desert on the far side of the Cascades.

The second fact is the Gulf of Mexico. Warm, wet air from the Gulf flows north over the open middle of the country, with no mountain range to stop it, and brings rain to the Mississippi valley and the East. That is why the eastern half of the country is green and the line of dryness runs north to south down the middle, as Powell saw.¹⁷ The same open country lets cold air from the Arctic pour south in winter, so Chicago’s winters are bitter, and where warm and cold air meet over the plains in spring they breed the tornadoes for which the middle of the country is known.

The third fact is latitude. The South lies in the warm, wet band where the growing season is long, the summers hot and the winters mild. That climate suited tobacco in Virginia, rice and indigo on the coast of the Carolinas, sugar in Louisiana and above all cotton across the Deep South. The North has a short growing season and cold winters, which suited small family farms growing wheat and corn and raising animals, and pushed many New Englanders into trade and, later, factories.

Climate did not create slavery. People did, by choosing it and by making laws to keep it. But climate helps explain why slave plantations spread across the South and not the North. Crops such as cotton and sugar needed a long hot season and large gangs of workers, and the planters bought enslaved Africans to work them. When the cotton belt pushed west into Alabama, Mississippi and Texas in the early 1800s, slavery went with it. When the states argued about whether slavery could spread into the new western lands, they were arguing partly about climate and soil, and head VI teaches that argument.

11. The riches of the land

A country’s land is also what lies in and on it, and the United States was given a great deal.

Much of its soil is very rich. The prairies of the Central Lowland, from Ohio to Iowa and Illinois, have deep black soil laid down under grass for thousands of years, and the plains beyond grow wheat on a vast scale. With a good climate and plenty of land per person, American farmers fed a fast-growing population and still had grain and cotton to sell abroad. The South’s cotton went in great quantities to the mills of Britain before the Civil War, and grain from the North and West was shipped to Europe in the late 1800s.

Its forests were vast. When the English arrived, forest covered most of the East from the coast to the Mississippi. Timber built the ships of New England, the houses of every town and, later, the fuel and the railroad ties of the expanding country. Clearing it was the first labour of almost every settler family, and in the eyes of the native nations it was the destruction of a world they had shaped for their own hunting and farming, a point section 15 returns to.

Under the ground lay the materials of an industrial power. The Appalachians hold great beds of coal, from Pennsylvania down to Alabama. Iron ore lay near Lake Superior and was carried down the lakes by ship. Pittsburgh, where the coal of the hills met the river and the lake trade, became America’s great steel city. Oil was found in western Pennsylvania in the middle of the 1800s and later in Texas, Oklahoma and California. Gold and silver drew miners to California, Colorado and Nevada. Head VII’s chapters on industry and on the captains of industry, among them Andrew Carnegie in steel and John D. Rockefeller in oil, are built on these riches.

Water is the last resource, and in the West the scarcest. The East has plenty. The West has little, and the history of the West after 1900 is in large part a history of dams and canals that store the snowmelt of the mountains and carry it to farms and cities. The Hoover Dam on the Colorado, built in the 1930s, is a famous example. A Pakistani reader who knows the story of Tarbela and Mangla, and of how the Indus waters are shared between the provinces, will understand the American West’s quarrels over water very well.

12. The regions Americans speak of

Americans often talk about their country in regions rather than states, and the names come up in every period of history. It helps to know them precisely.

The official set is the one the US Census Bureau uses. It has four regions, the Northeast, the Midwest, the South and the West, divided into nine smaller divisions.²¹ Figure 5 shows them. The Northeast is New England, the six small states in the far north-east, and the Middle Atlantic states of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. The Midwest is the old Northwest around the Great Lakes and the farm states west of the Mississippi out across the plains. The South runs from Delaware and Maryland round to Texas. The West is the Mountain states and the Pacific states, including Alaska and Hawaii. Thirteen states touch Canada, counting the lines that run through the Great Lakes. They are Alaska, Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Four touch Mexico, namely California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, and Texas has the longest share of that border along the Rio Grande.

Historians also use older names that change with the period, and you must read each in its time. In 1800, “the West” meant Kentucky, Tennessee and the Ohio valley, the land just beyond the mountains.¹² By 1850 it meant the plains and the Pacific coast. The “Northwest” of the 1780s and 1830s was the land north of the Ohio River, today’s Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, which the Census now places in the Midwest. “The North” and “the South” in the Civil War meant the states that stayed in the Union and the eleven that left it, a line set by slavery, not by the Census.

A last useful pair is “the Sun Belt” and “the Rust Belt”, which you will meet in chapters on the late 1900s. The Rust Belt is the old industrial area around the Great Lakes and in Pennsylvania, whose factories declined from the 1970s. The Sun Belt is the warm South and South-West, from Florida to California, where people and industry moved in the same years. The move shifted seats in Congress and votes in presidential elections towards the South and West, a point heads XIX and XX take up.

13. How the land steered the story, from the first peoples to the railroad

Now that you have crossed the country, we can follow the history across it in order and see the land at work at each turn. This is the part of the chapter you will use most, because each paragraph gives you a geographical reason you can bring into an answer on that period.

The story starts with the first Americans, who came from Asia, as the next chapter explains. Once in the continent they spread into every kind of land and fitted their ways of life to it. In the wooded East they farmed corn, beans and squash in forest clearings and hunted deer. On the plains they hunted bison. In the dry South-West, peoples such as the Pueblo built towns of stone and adobe and farmed with careful irrigation. On the north-west coast, rich fishing let large villages live without farming at all. The chapter on the native nations in 1492 teaches these “culture areas”, and every one of them follows the land.

When the Europeans came, each empire took a different kind of land. Spain came first to the warm south, to the Caribbean, Mexico and Florida, where there was gold and silver, and from Mexico its explorers pushed north into the dry South-West. France took the St. Lawrence and the lakes, a land of furs reached by canoe. England, arriving later, took what was left, the middle of the Atlantic coast. It turned out to be the best land for farming families, with a climate much like England’s in the north and good for cash crops in the south, and with rivers that let ships reach the settlers. The English colonies grew by farming and by sheer numbers, while the French and Spanish lands stayed thinly settled.

Once settled, the English colonies stayed on the coast. For 150 years the Appalachians, the native nations and the French kept the English colonies to a coastal strip. That kept them close together and close to the sea, tied to Britain by trade, and able to meet and act together when they quarrelled with it. When Britain’s victory in 1763 opened the land beyond the mountains, its Proclamation tried to close it again, and the colonists’ anger fed the Revolution.¹⁰

After independence the settlers poured through the gaps into Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio, and the question became the Mississippi. Jefferson’s fear for New Orleans and the purchase of Louisiana in 1803 are a plain example of geography driving policy.¹⁴¹² The purchase gave the United States the whole western half of the Mississippi’s basin, so the river now lay entirely inside the country.

Owning the river did not solve the problem of the mountains. From the 1810s to the 1850s Americans broke the mountain barrier with transport. The Erie Canal of 1825 joined the lakes to New York, steamboats ran up and down the western rivers, and the railroads followed.¹⁶ Each one pulled the trade of the West more firmly towards the North-East. By 1861 the Northwest was bound to the North by trade, while the South still looked down the Mississippi and across the Atlantic to the cotton mills of Britain.

When the Civil War came, it was decided partly by this same geography. The North had more people, more factories and more railroads. The Union’s strategy aimed at the water. Its navy blockaded the South’s coast, and its armies set out to capture the Mississippi and split the Confederacy. The fall of Vicksburg on 4 July 1863 completed that second aim.¹⁵

After the war the railroad crossed the continent, meeting in Utah in 1869.²⁰ It carried settlers onto the plains under the Homestead Act of 1862 and carried their wheat and cattle back east.¹⁸ The bison were slaughtered, and the plains nations were confined to tracts of land the government set aside for them. In 1890 the Census reported that there was no longer a single line of settlement across the West, the “frontier” had closed, and Frederick Jackson Turner built his famous argument on that report, as section 15 explains.²²

14. What the land gave the United States

Put together, the land gave the United States four great advantages, and you can use them in any answer on why it became a world power.

The first was safety. Two wide oceans lay between the United States and the great powers of Europe and Asia, and its land neighbours were weak. Apart from Britain in the War of 1812 and the Japanese attack on Hawaii in 1941, no foreign power seriously attacked American soil in the country’s first two centuries. The young country could spend little on armies and much on growth, and in its early years it could stay out of Europe’s wars, as Washington advised in his Farewell Address, which head III teaches. Compare that with Pakistan, which was born with hostile and unsettled borders on both its eastern and western sides and has had to keep large armed forces from its first year. The difference in geography explains much of the difference in what each state has had to spend on defence.

The second was room. The country had a whole continent to fill, with rich land for every family that would farm it. For a century, cheap western land drew immigrants from Europe and gave the poor of the East somewhere to go. Many Americans came to see their country’s growth across the continent as natural and even as a fate decided by God, the idea called “Manifest Destiny” that FPSC has asked about twice.

The third was wealth. The soil, the forests, the coal, the iron and the oil gave the United States nearly everything an industrial economy needed inside its own borders. When its factories overtook those of the old powers of Europe, in the years head VII covers, they ran on materials dug from its own ground.

The fourth was a single great market. The river systems, and then the canals and railroads built to join them, made one huge market out of a continent. A factory in Pittsburgh could sell to a farmer in Kansas without paying a duty at any state line, because the Constitution gives Congress, not the states, the power to regulate trade among the states, as head V explains. A market of that size let American firms grow very large.

The land also set the country problems. Its size made it hard to govern from one capital before the railroad and the telegraph. Its North-South split in climate helped divide it into slave and free economies, which ended in civil war. Its dry West forced the federal government to take on large public works. Taking the land from the native nations who already lived on it is the darkest part of the story, and it is taught in heads I and IV.

15. How historians have weighed the land

Historians agree that the land mattered to American history. They disagree about how much, and about whether the land shaped the people or the people shaped the land.

The most famous argument is Frederick Jackson Turner’s. In July 1893, at a meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, the young historian from Wisconsin read a paper called “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”.²² He began from the Census report of 1890 that said there was no longer a frontier line, and argued:

“Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.”²²

Turner meant that the move west, again and again into new and open land, made Americans what they were. It made them practical, independent, democratic and impatient of rules from far away. Each new frontier, he said, forced settlers to start over, and in starting over they shed the habits of Europe. For half a century this “frontier thesis” was one of the most influential ideas in the writing of American history. FPSC’s question on the “American sense of destiny” (CE-2021) and its question on the slogan “Go west, young man” (CE-2025) both sit on ground Turner mapped.

Turner put the stress on the open land. A second line of writers went further and made the land itself the main cause. Ellen Churchill Semple, a geographer, published American History and Its Geographic Conditions in 1903, explaining the country’s growth from its coasts, rivers and mountains.²³ Writers of this school spoke of the environment “controlling” what people did. Their maps and examples are still useful, which is why this chapter uses many of them, but the idea that geography decides history on its own, called environmental determinism, has been rejected by most historians since the middle of the 1900s.

Critics of Turner, and of the geographers, pointed to what his story leaves out. The “free land” was not free. It belonged to native nations, who were driven off it by war and by treaties they were forced to sign. Turner’s frontier was a line between “settlement” and “wilderness”, but to the people living beyond it there was no wilderness, only their homes. Later historians of the American West also showed that the West was settled as much by railroad companies, mining corporations and federal money as by lone pioneers, and that women, Mexicans, Chinese workers and African Americans were all part of the story Turner told as one of white farming men.

Between these sides, William Cronon’s book Changes in the Land, published in 1983, offers a middle view.²⁴ Writing about colonial New England, he showed that the land did not stay still while people acted on it. The native peoples had shaped the forests by burning and farming them. The English colonists brought a different idea of property, fences, grazing animals and a market for timber and furs, and within two centuries they had changed the land itself, its forests, its animals and its soil. The land shaped the settlers’ choices, and the settlers’ choices reshaped the land.

In the hall, a sound position is close to Cronon’s. Say that the land set the possibilities and the costs. It decided where ships could go, where crops would grow, where the routes ran and where water was short. Then say that people made the choices within those limits, choices about slavery, about the native nations, about canals and railroads, about war. That answer uses the geography as evidence, gives Turner his due, names his critics, and avoids claiming that rivers and mountains caused events by themselves. Examiners reward exactly that kind of weighing.

16. What students mix up

• “The Appalachians are the high mountains.” They are the old, low ones in the East, at most about 2,000 metres. The high mountains are the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada in the West.
• “The West” always means California. In 1800 it meant Kentucky and Ohio. Read the word in the period the question asks about.
• The Missouri and the Mississippi. The Mississippi flows south through the middle of the country to New Orleans. The Missouri is its longer western tributary from the Rockies, and they meet near St. Louis.
• The Northwest and the Pacific Northwest. The Northwest of the 1780s was the land north of the Ohio River, around the Great Lakes. The Pacific Northwest is Oregon and Washington.
• The Northwest Passage and the Northwest Territory. The Northwest Passage was a sea route round the north of the continent that explorers sought from Europe to Asia, taught in the chapter on the northern explorers. The Northwest Territory was the land north of the Ohio River that the new United States organised by the Northwest Ordinance of 13 July 1787, taught in head III.²⁸
• The Louisiana Purchase and the state of Louisiana. The purchase of 1803 covered all or part of fifteen of today’s states between the Mississippi and the Rockies. The state of Louisiana is only one small part of it.¹²
• “Geography caused the Civil War.” Geography helps explain where slavery spread and how the war was fought. It did not cause the war. People’s choices about slavery did.
• The size of the United States. Learn it as about twelve times Pakistan, or ten times for the lower 48. A candidate who calls it “the largest country in the world” is wrong, since Russia alone is far larger, and the examiner will notice.

17. What FPSC has asked

No question in the papers from CE-2016 to CE-2026 asks about the land by itself. These questions need it, and they are answered in full in their own chapters:¹

• CE-2023, Q.2: “Discuss the role & significance of geopolitical features of Northwest Passage and Middle Passage in shaping the history of the US.” (The chapter on the search for the Northwest Passage and the chapter on slavery and the Middle Passage.)
• CE-2019, Q.5: “The westward expansion was a story of annexations, concessions and purchases, since the declaration of Independence. Discuss.” (Head IV.)
• CE-2025, Q.4: “‘Go west young man’ was popular phrase in USA during the last decade of the 19th century. What was its significance and how it had impacted the sentiments for expansion?” (Head IV.)
• CE-2021, Q.8(a), a short note: “American sense of destiny”. (Head IV.)
• CE-2025, Q.8(a), a short note: “Louisiana purchase”. (Head III.)
• CE-2021, Q.2: “How the Anglo American group came into existence in the seventeenth century and established its standards as paramount along Atlantic seaboard of North America?” (Head II.)

Part-I asks about places too. CE-2026 asked which of four states does not border Canada and which state is known as the “Sunshine State” (Florida), and CE-2024 asked about the Gadsden Purchase.¹ A clear map of the country in your head answers such questions in seconds.

18. Facts to carry into the hall

19. What loses marks on this topic

• Geography with no history. A paragraph that describes mountains and rivers without saying what they did to people earns little. Every geographical fact in an answer must be tied to an event: the Appalachians held the colonies on the coast, the Mississippi made New Orleans the key, the dry plains changed how land was farmed.
• Determinism stated as fact. “The Mississippi caused the Louisiana Purchase” is too strong. Write that control of the river and of New Orleans was the reason Jefferson sought the city, and that Napoleon’s own troubles explain why he sold the rest.
• Wrong scale. Vague words such as “huge” and “vast” are weaker than one figure. Use the comparison with Pakistan; the examiner is a Pakistani reader and will feel it.
• Muddled place names. Confusing the Missouri with the Mississippi, the Appalachians with the Rockies, or the old Northwest with the Pacific Northwest tells the examiner you are guessing. A rough sketch map in the margin of your plan prevents it.
• No sketch. In a question on expansion or on the Civil War, a small, neat sketch map with the Appalachians, the Mississippi, New Orleans and the 100th meridian shows command of the subject in a way prose cannot. It takes three minutes. Practise it until it does.

20. A worked answer plan

Here is how the land enters an answer on a question from another head. The question is CE-2019, Q.5, quoted in section 17.

The tasks. The statement says expansion came by three means: taking land, land other powers gave up by treaty, and buying land. “Discuss” asks you to weigh how far that is true and what it leaves out. A good answer agrees that it is largely true as a list of the legal means, and then argues that it leaves out two things: war and the land itself, which explains why each piece was wanted.

The plan, in the shape taught in the method chapter.

1. Introduction. In 1783 the United States ran from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. By 1853 it reached the Pacific. Most of the land came by treaty, purchase or annexation, but behind each lay a geographical need and, often, force. Thesis: the statement is right about the means but incomplete about the causes.
2. Purchases. Louisiana, 1803, $15 million, about 828,000 square miles, bought because New Orleans controlled the outlet of the Mississippi; quote Jefferson’s “one single spot”. Then Florida from Spain by the Adams-Onís Treaty, 1819, and Alaska from Russia, 1867.²⁵²⁶ Sketch map: the Mississippi basin with New Orleans marked.
3. Annexations. Texas, 1845, annexed after it broke from Mexico.²⁷
4. Land given up by treaty. The Oregon country, 1846, divided with Britain by treaty; the land from Mexico by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848, at the end of a war, which shows that land “given up” could mean land lost in a war.²⁷
5. What the statement leaves out. War with Mexico; the removal of the native nations from their lands; and the land itself, which made each acquisition valuable: the river mouth, the Pacific harbours of San Francisco and Puget Sound, the gold of California.
6. Historians’ views. Turner’s frontier as the making of American democracy; his critics on conquest; the idea of Manifest Destiny as the belief that justified it.
7. Judgment. Largely true as a list of how land was acquired, but a story of geography and power as much as of law.

In the body, every paragraph names a date and a place, and the sketch map does the work of a page of description.

What to remember from this chapter

• The United States is about twelve times the size of Pakistan; the lower 48 about ten times.
• The land runs in north-south strips: coastal plain, old Appalachians, great central plain, young Rockies, dry plateaus and basins, Pacific mountains.
• The fall line marked the end of sea travel and a line of cities. The Appalachians held the colonies to the coast for 150 years, and the 1763 Proclamation tried to keep them there.
• The Mississippi drains the middle of the country to one door, New Orleans. That is why Jefferson called it “one single spot” and why the country bought Louisiana in 1803.
• The Erie Canal of 1825 and the railroads pulled the West’s trade towards the North-East and helped bind the Northwest to the Union.
• West of the 100th meridian the rain falls below about 500 mm, so the plains needed new ways of farming and the West needed dams and canals.
• The West is wet on the Pacific side of its mountains and dry in their rain shadow. The South is warm with a long season, the North cold with a short one.
• Soil, forests, coal, iron, oil and water gave the United States the materials of an industrial power, and two oceans gave it safety.
• Turner (1893) said the frontier explained American development. His critics said the land was taken, not free. Cronon (1983) showed people and land changing each other. In an answer, let the land set the limits and the people make the choices.

Check yourself

Answer each from memory, in your own words, before you open the answer.

1. Why did Jefferson call New Orleans “one single spot”?

2. What is the fall line, and why did cities grow along it?

3. Where is the 100th meridian, and what does it divide?

4. Give two reasons why the Appalachians held the English colonies to the coast for so long.

5. Name the five Great Lakes from west to east, and say why the Erie Canal mattered.

6. Why is the Great Basin so dry?

7. In two or three sentences, state Turner’s frontier thesis and one criticism of it.

8. A question asks whether geography made the United States a great power. In one sentence, what is a balanced position?

9. From the method chapter: you have planned an answer and 36 minutes are allowed. Roughly how many go on the body, and where does a sketch map fit?