A Morbid Calculation: Conquest Rate of the Americas and Cultural Assimilation Rates

The first European set foot on what would later become the United States in 1513. The last uncontacted indigenous person was captured in 1911. Many people are familiar with the story of Ishi; the picture above is of the monument commemorating the place in Oroville, California where he came under the power of European-descended people. (Image credit to Ray_Explores on Flickr.) This marker commemorates not just Ishi, but the date and place at which an entire nation's worth of indigenous people had finally been completely assimilated or exterminated - on August 29, 1911.

If taken in terms of territory, if it's just a linear expansion of a certain amount per unit time, then the annual expansion was 9,450 sq mi (24,729 km^2) per year; meaning a square of land about 98 miles (157 km) on a side. If we break it down to the day, then the U.S. was taking 26 sq mi per day (blocks 5.1 miles on a side.) Given the average American County size, that means every 46.5 days (about a month and a half) the U.S. was taking a county's worth of land in our march to manifest destiny. (I realize it didn't happen this smoothly but it gives us an idea.)

If we go by percent expansion (the more land you already got, the faster you get more), and we assume Ponce de Leon's camp when he landed was a square a hundredth of a mile on a side, then Europeans expanded at an average annual rate of 6.31%. Again, assuming this was a completely smooth process just for visualization purposes, that means the last year the US would have added territory equal to an area bigger than California but smaller than Texas. If going down to the day, the day Ishi was captured/gave himself up the US added half a county's worth of land.

But people are what we're most interested in here, and in human terms, the annualized assimilation rate for the United States of 4.1% over those 398 years. Obviously the size of the territory matters; to get a second data set to investigate territory size effects, I tried to find a similar event in the history of Canada but could not. With more than one country, we could get an idea of how the territory affects the rate.

Although it's not a conquest in the same way, it's been noted that the time for Germanic people to take over the Western Roman Empire was about six centuries, which corresponds to a 2.45% annualized rate of assimilation. In territory, in linear terms it's more than seven times slower, gaining 1,292 sq mi/year (an area 35.9 miles on a side.) In percentage terms, it's a 3.89% annual increase, using the same assumptions, i.e. same starting area, except this time it's a camp in the Black Forest instead of the Florida Coast. This is to be expected given that transportation was not as good and the technology gap between the Germanic tribes and the Romans was not nearly as great as between Europeans and North Americans; same people have likened colonization to being invaded by people from 4,000 years in the future.

Alternative History #7: German-Led Native Shock Troops in California

For the previous installment, see Alternative History #6: A Buddhist Colony in Ptolemy's Egypt.

For the next installment, see Alternative History #8: Ancient East Indian Settlement of Australia.

Imagine a more Habsburg-involved colonization of the New World (at least before the very late French-driven attempt that inspired the Cinco de Mayo holiday.) Charles V (Carlos Quinto) was, after all, both the king of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor - and you might imagine that the settlement of California especially would have gone very differently.

The Spanish, thinking more in practical imperial terms rather than as conquistadors eager to repeat the glories of the recent Reconquista of Iberia from the Moors, would gather and train troops from the native nations up and down the West Coast of the New World. Picture an army of Miwok, Nisenan, and Mission natives, complete with cavalry and infantry units, with German-speaking white officers - wearing Czarist uniforms from the nearby Russian colonies on the northern coast. They would be the elite men of the empire, the Holy Roman Empire's answer to Britain's Gurkhas, dispatched from a central location to defend the imperial governor in the event of a revolt.

Outlandish? There's this from Wikipedia, about New Helvetia, which would later become Sacramento:

The settlement was defended by an army of Miwok, Nisenan, and Mission Indians, all consisting of 150 infantry, 50 cavalry, and German-speaking white officers. This group, wearing Russian uniforms purchased from Fort Ross, marched to the Pueblo of Los Angeles area and briefly defended Governor Manuel Micheltorena from the revolt of the Californios.

The difference is that the German-speakers were Swiss and not Austrian, as John Sutter founded New Helvetia and named it after his ancestral homeland. Perhaps most unlikely of all, Sutter is today buried in Lititz, Pennsylvania, in good old Pennsylvania Dutch country. More on strange north European involvement in the Pacific - Russian Hawai'i here, and an almost-war in Samoa between American and Germany in the late 1800s.

Paintings of Unnoticed Places

Westside San Joaquin
I've run across Stephanie Taylor's work before, in the hospital where I work, and on every occasion they were paintings of non-iconic, obscure, but nonetheless unique and immediately identifiable aspects of California. These are places we aren't supposed to see, because they aren't how the place wants to think about itself, but we see them anyway. Consequently it's exciting to see them represented. I was moved to write about them and post some here after a trip to the Crocker Museum in Sacramento. I've always had kind of a strange fascination with boiling a place down to its authentic essence - taking the semantic mean, I guess you could say - and while usually I feed this addiction by poring over maps and narratives, here she's accomplishing the same thing visually. (Of note, as I looked through her work I noticed that she draws the occasional map.) Through these non-places, she lets California speak for itself, in the same way that Terrence Malick's New World let the real Tidewater Virginia speak for itself. Some of these places, specifically, are the Salton Sea, the rivers in the Central Valley, the golf courses in SoCal - oddly, places that many Californians would not recognize - but that if you're observant and you've been up and down the state, you immediately know. I guess my enthusiasm can be excused as resulting from the kinship I feel, after having often been in and around these places that we're not supposed to notice, and so has she, and more importantly I wonder if she found them all the same way.

A second observation is in order about her portraits, rather than the landscapes (although I've included only landscapes here). Paintings of people are, I think, necessarily more honest about the intrusion onto the subject the act of capturing them represents. Non-candid photography of casual subjects often seems a bit disingenuous to me. Clearly the subject knows s/he is being photographed, yet the speed of the shutter leaves us thinking that somehow we're seeing them in the moment as they actually are, not how they are for the camera. When someone is being painted, we know they sat for it, that they posed, that they moved during the process.

You can see more at this Bee article, as well as at her studio.





Above: two Salton Sea images. Next two below: Southern California.






Two below: scenes from the Central Valley.






Two below: a foothill-looking forest,
and one getting into higher in the Sierra.

Resilience To Stress Differs Between Individuals

"I can handle a hundred thousand men in battle, and take the City of the Sun, but am afraid to manage a lot in the swamp of San Francisco." -William Tecumseh Sherman

Orange County Editorial: Make the CA GOP More Libertarian

It's encouraging to see serious pieces like this finally seeing the light of day in the mainstream.