On 10/24/2021 9:48 AM, The Horny Goat wrote:
> On Sun, 24 Oct 2021 01:23:04 -0600, Chrysi Cat <Chrysicat@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On 10/23/2021 10:02 PM, Louis Epstein wrote:
>>> The Horny Goat <lcraver@home.ca> wrote:
>>>> On Thu, 21 Oct 2021 02:53:38 -0000 (UTC), Louis Epstein
>>>> <le@top.put.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> The Horny Goat <lcraver@home.ca> wrote:
>>>>>> On Wed, 20 Oct 2021 00:50:26 -0000 (UTC), Louis Epstein
>>>>>> <le@top.put.com> wrote:
>>>>>>
>>>>>>> The Horny Goat <lcraver@home.ca> wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Mon, 18 Oct 2021 20:13:38 -0000 (UTC), Louis Epstein
>>>>>>>> <le@top.put.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> The Horny Goat <lcraver@home.ca> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> On Mon, 18 Oct 2021 00:15:53 -0000 (UTC), Louis Epstein
>>>>>>>>>> <le@top.put.com> wrote:
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> There is no POD before 1812 so the Lousiana Purchase and Lewis & Clark
>>>>>>> expedition happen as in OTL.Orleans Territory has become the state
>>>>>>> of Louisiana before it becomes a crown colony.The rest of the Purchase
>>>>>>> is Missouri Territory.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for the clarification on the Louisiana Purchase territories - I
>>>> knew Louisiana had become a state by 1812 but was unclear whether the
>>>> remainder was still a single territory or had been chopped up further.
>>>> I was not at all in doubt who owned those lands in 1812 :)
>>>>
>>>> (Obviously in OTL it DID get chopped up between 1812 and 1860 but I
>>>> would have to refer to my books to get the details - I don't have
>>>> state dates of joining the Union committed to memory except for AZ, AK
>>>> and HI - the latter two being during my childhood and AZ as the answer
>>>> to who were the most recent presidential candidates not to be born in
>>>> a US state. The answers to that are Goldwater - born two years before
>>>> AZ statehood - and McCain - born on an overseas US naval base (which
>>>> ought not to be that big a surprise as his father was a serving
>>>> Admiral))
>>>>
>>>>>> In the context of 1812 I cannot imagine the Louisiana Purchase
>>>>>> territory all being ruled from New Orleans particularly once railway
>>>>>> construction began.
>>>>>
>>>>> OTL Missouri Territory as of 1812 included the Louisiana Purchase
>>>>> EXCEPT for the already-formed State of Louisiana,and was based in
>>>>> St. Louis...that's what would be inherited by the Empire.
>>>>> Between then and 1834 it might or might not be redivided or
>>>>> reorganized.
>>>>
>>>> I completely agree - I'm just saying once railway construction starts
>>>> that pretty much mandates either statehood or separate territory
>>>> status for quite a few places.
>>>
>>> Railroad construction is pretty limited by 1834.
>>> I suppose after the slavers are suppressed there might
>>> be plans for a transcontinental route that would not enter
>>> Mexico.
>>>
>>
>> This, however, is also a case of "being in the Empire might speed up the
>> timetable anyway"; UK rail technology ran ahead of US into the 1880s at
>> least IOTL. Think about what the UK had by the time of the driving of
>> the Silver Spike on the Kansas Pacific at Strasburg, in particular, but
>> most of that had already been completed before the Golden Spike a year
>> before.
>>
>> Well, assuming that Horny's wrong, and someone in London decides to try
>> to keep all of Louisiana. If they instead just let Spain, as an
>
> Well actually I never envisioned Britain giving up ANY of the
> Louisiana purchase territory - I was more discussing how that vast
> territory would be eventually subdivided into smaller territories and
> states (if that term in still used in TTL) Because in our timeline the
> ONLY North American territory remotely the size of the Louisiana
> territory has been the now subdivided (for reasons that have
> everything to do with creating aboriginal homelands and nothing to do
> with administration) Northwest Territories. And no question the lands
> of the Louisiana purchase are considerably more productive than the
> NWT.
>
>> erstwhile ally. have the Kaw, Platte and Yellowstone watersheds, then
>> there's really no great need for a railroad west from St. Louis to much
>> of anywhere. I suppose Council Bluffs is still a good place for a town,
>> and to run a railroad to, but I'm not sure anything *resembling* a great
>> route from there up the Missouri's left bank and then out to the Oregon
>> Country exists (and out to Vancouver or points north is WORSE). North of
>> South Pass, the Rockies are a BEAR to cross.
>
> In 1834 the area that is now British Columbia had been explored in the
> Georgia Straight area but not substantially north of Vancouver Island
> and overland down the headwaters of the Fraser as far as Hope. (Fraser
> turned back before getting to the mouth of the Fraser - not sure when
> the section from Hope to the sea was first explored) There was no
> exploration further north than where the Fraser first turns south then
> west to the sea. (The Barkerville gold rush which is about 300 km
> north of there) wasn't until about 20 years after that at which time
> the upper Fraser was extensively explored.
>
>> There is a REASON the Great Northern and Canada Pacific railways were
>> completed around the start of the C.XX, and it's not *just* that the
>> demand for them didn't exist until then. Even the tunnel-free routes
>> needed tech that 1860 wouldn't have IOTL, let alone the 30s.
>
> The CPR was completed in 1885. The Great Northern wasn't completed
> 1893.
>
>> If you don't have access to the Great Divide Basin (or South Pass, but
>> the rationale for letting Spain->->Mexico have the Great Divide Basin
>> and NOT South Pass is pretty limited) or to the path OTL's Southern
>> Pacific--ATSF combined line (which in Horny's version of this timeline
>> is VERY safely within Mexico except at its head, where you can see BNA
>> across the river from OTL-Atchison) traces, you really don't have a
>> great reason to want to railroad across the continent sooner than that.
>> You may WELL have a very good reason to want to increase the speed of
>> WATER transportation and in particular to build either the Nicaragua or
>> Panama canal, but of course those canals *also* require tech that can't
>> exist much before 1890. Though an overland ship-transportation railway
>> may be available sooner and even transshipping everything and having
>> shipping routes timed to intersect at ends of a "normal" railway might
>> be a thought.
>
> I'm afraid my specific knowledge of southern US routes comes from Rail
> Baron :) (Though I did have a great-great-grandfather who worked on
> the Northern Pacific for 40+ years)
>
>> And THEORETICALLY, there's a bottom limit for time on water--EVEN ONCE
>> YOU HAVE STEAM AND POSSIBLY EVEN IF THE TURBINE COMES EARLY-- that isn't
>> less than 2 1/2 weeks between New York (Washington almost CERTAINLY
>> having been reduced to a near ghost-town) and Vancouver [WITH some sort
>> of crossing at Central America, rather than rounding the Horn!] and may
>> well be greater, though still much better than you'll get without rails
>> if you cross the land instead.
>
> You're clearly suggesting the capital of British North America would
> have been NYC?
>

In hindsight, you're right; London (1) wanted it at London (2), and
that's where Epstein put it.

The problem, of course, is that *that* London is so far inland from the
oceans that it adds another week-plus of travel, even if you want to
give the Erie Canal credit for working for once. Once it's trying to run
a continent-wide set of colonies, that's not going to work.

I get that London (1) really doesn't want to feel like encouraging the
American independence movement, and NYC may have some identification
with being their capital (even if it was for a BRIEF time when everyone
knew it couldn't be permanent; remember, even the Continental Congress
never met there but Philly), but since the only part of North America
that's ready to railroad in a reasonable amount of time is well away and
it still makes sense to settle the PNW, that extra travel time is going
to be a big deal. But I also doubt that people along the Willamette and
the Salish Sea are going to want to be directly ruled from Westminster,
nor numerous enough for London to WANT them to have their own assembly
independent of the main one in eastern North America. Besides, after the
Second Revolution, NYC will have proved itself faithfully Loyalist.

It wouldn't make sense to put anything of importance in RICHMOND or
likely EITHER Charleston for decades at that point, but rewarding NYC by
making it the capital DOES, if for no other reason than you get back to
a situation where it's about equal travel time to the Willamette Valley
or to where we put the Twin Cities OTL (this all goes away if someone
successfully builds a transcontinental railroad first, because then
London is several FEWER days' travel from--let's give the other guy the
coin flip and call it "Boston, Oregon". But if the railroad still takes
until even ALMOST 1860, moving the capital still seems a good idea to
me. I DON'T, however, think that "only having to travel 3 extra days on
the Erie RAILROAD" is enough to keep the capital at London, though it's
quite possible that happens as it supplants any canal that might have
been built).

>
> While not related to your scenario, one interesting factoid is that
> the last Russian governor of Alaska DIDN'T take up his post via
> Siberia (no TransSiberian RR yet) but rather St Petersberg to London,
> London to one of the east coast American ports, by train to San
> Francisco and by steamer to Sitka (which was the Russian colonial
> capital - bear in mind that there were never more than 10000 people in
> colonial Alaska of which no more than 3000 were Russian, the rest
> mostly Aleuts many of whom were employed by the Russians)
>
>> Basically, British North America with Louisiana and Oregon but without
>> the right-bank-of-the-Missouri basins is likely a backwater west of the
>> Minnesota River-Mississippi River confluence and east of Celilo Falls,
>> indefinitely. OTL-Missouri might be the exception.
>
> In our TL Britain and America didn't settle the Oregon territory
> dispute till the 1840s so in TTL anything goes.
>
>> It also has very few extra mineral-resource locations over what the
>> Empire had access to IOTL. There's a reasonable part of OTL-Montana and
>> the Iron Ranges of OTL-Minnesota, but otherwise, the
>> Kansas-Oklahoma-Arkansas-Missouri lead belt is in Mexico by this time
>> after having become Spanish after the reincorporation of the States, and
>> the Cascades and Oregon Coast Range are much more heavily hit for timber
>> than for ore.
>
> Well certainly by the 1830s and the evidence seems fairly clear (the
> later Cecil Rhodes notwithstanding) that they were far less tolerant
> of filibusters than was OTL's United States.
>
> (As a British Columbian I find it HIGHLY ironic that the Law Society
> of BC has in these "cancel culture" days removed the statue of first
> chief justice Sir Matthew Begbie from their entrance since Begbie's
> efforts in maintaining law and order in the 1860s during the
> Barkerville gold rush when the majority of the colonial population
> were American miners was pretty much the main reason British Columbia
> didn't become US territory as it was HIGHLY vulnerable to a filibuster
> at that point. While initial settlement was by the Hudsons Bay Company
> that never really went beyond Vancouver Island)
>
>> The problem is, the British have no way of KNOWING that without the
>> entirety of what Washington claimed to be Louisiana, they're basically
>> buying a white elephant that will bleed lives--and not all of them clad
>> in red-- if settled and money if the First Nations are allowed to
>> continue to remain entirely nomadic. (Of course, if they DO claim the
>> entirety, we get back to how NIGHTMARISH the Adams-Onis southwestern
>> border was, and how no one will know it for decades because even the
>> first New Mexican settlers in OTL-Colorado were already US citizens as
>> the border had crossed THEM.)
>
> Too true. Though in this scenario I would be highly surprised if the
> Plains Indians were allowed to keep the entire prairies though one
> never knows how the Royal Proclamation of 1763 would be interpreted or
> whether it would have been overtaken by a new proclamation.
>
>> Americans having an annoying knack for filibuster of the non-Senate
>> sort, they *may* sneak into Mexico and find out how much more
>> mineral-rich that country is. They obviously can't force a
>> Mexican-American war before the Second American Revolution, but perhaps
>> after it, if Westminster or the Palace think that they need the "Pike's
>> Peak" or California gold to recover?
>
> All it would take would be someone like Rhodes to bring it off. I'm
> not suggesting the Cherokee and Sioux were anything at all like the
> Zulu but if gold were found HM Government would be on it with both
> feet and highly supportive of anyone successfully finding gold.
>
> (Incidentally most of the horses that the Plains tribes owned were
> descended from Spanish stock that had gone feral - most of this was
> well before your POD so I'm assuming there were about the same number
> of horses waiting to be rounded up as in OTL. Without horses the
> history of the Plains tribes is of course quite different)
>
> All this was of course long before the discovery of oil in Texas (OTL
> 1880s) and to a far lesser extent in California
>

--
Chrysi Cat
1/2 anthrocat, nearly 1/2 anthrofox, all magical
Transgoddess, quick to anger
Call me Chrysi or call me Kat, I'll respond to either!