![]() During spring 2019, I worked with two undergraduate research assistants to transcribe the ledger’s handwritten entries and cross-check the resulting data. officials about local and global maritime voyages, can help to answer these questions. This ledger, as a collection of information registered by U.S. 5 What did the “scaffolding of American conquest” look like in a coastal border region? How did Puget Sound become a trans-local place? And what role did steam propulsion play in these changes? 3 These changes often relied on what Anne Hyde terms the “scaffolding of American conquest-–railroads, armies, surveyors, reservations, censuses, and law.” 4 Similar changes were roiling the wider Pacific Ocean, which Matt Matsuda argues was increasingly populated by “trans-local” places, specific local sites that came to host global connections. territorial governance to constrain possibilities for indigenous autonomy. 2 In the Pacific Northwest, growing numbers of American settlers and other non-natives combined with increasingly formalized U.S. Even as the 1848 California gold rush sparked new transpacific migration and trade patterns, it also marked a moment when the United States began consolidating its territorial holdings to make the Pacific Coast more fully a part of the U.S. colonization of the Pacific Coast and Pacific Northwest. Until April 1861, Moses and his successors used this ledger to record a wealth of information about vessels entering and leaving the Puget Sound Customs District. In a neat bureaucratic trick, Moses authorized his own arrival: The George Emery carried him from San Francisco to his posting of Olympia, a small American settlement at the head of Puget Sound. Collector of Customs for the Puget Sound Customs District, which Congress had organized earlier that year. He entered Puget Sound as the inaugural U.S. These notes comprised the first of what would, over the next decade, amount to more than 4,500 entries in the ledger Moses carried. Moses announced the arrival of American authority in Puget Sound, the inland sea at the heart of the Pacific Northwest, by opening a large leather-bound book and writing a series of notes across the top of its first two pages. Ultimately, this project demonstrates the potential of digitally analyzing raw data from similar records to better understand the maritime dimensions of U.S. ![]() While the 1858 Fraser River gold rush significantly altered regional travel patterns, its lasting impact on Puget Sound’s merchant marine was a new flotilla of small, simple sailing vessels that operated largely within the Pacific Northwest’s sheltered waters. Although steam power captured settlers’ imaginations, steam-powered vessels made up a relatively small portion of Puget Sound vessel traffic and served fewer ports over a smaller area than did sailing vessels. Mapping and visualizing this data shows that settlers relied far more on sailing vessels than on steam-powered ones. By tracking individual vessels into and out of Puget Sound, these data make it possible to examine historical vessel traffic at a much finer resolution than is available in published sources. colonization of the Pacific Northwest? This article uses data from an archival handwritten ledger covering the Puget Sound Customs District’s first decade (1851–1861) to investigate the use of steam-powered maritime mobility by non-natives during initial American settlement.
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