Life With The Twigtwees

Ever heard of the Twigtwee Nation? Me neither.
Reaching for my books I discover no trace of them in Angie Debo's "A History Of The Indians Of The United States," nor indeed in Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee."
Turning to the interweb I find this, but it doesn't help much.

Anyhoo … They were there in 1763, just west of Robyn's house, in what's now Amish country.
And now they're gone.
Here's the map I was talking about yesterday. It's from the 1763 continuation volume of my 1756 Smollett, in the section regarding the Colonies.
I was delighted to discover the Twigtwees (they're in Ohio if you can't spot them), mostly because it's such a splendidly silly name, but also because I had never heard of them before and it's always nice to find something new to puzzle over.
The map is chock full of bizarre places that have since sunk without trace into the quagmire of history or mutated into something even stranger (hello, modern America).
Explore with me …

This is the original before I scanned it in.

You may be able to read a little about the Colonies (and that part of the Seven Years' War that became known locally as The French And Indian War) if you click on the photo.

And here's the whole thing scanned.

I had to scan it in sections, being careful not to damage the binding, and then assemble the pieces using Photoshop's spiffalicious "Auto-align layers" and "Auto-blend layers" tools (see my old Photoshop posts for more boring stuff on that).

To make things readable I've saved the map at a larger scale in several pieces.

They're pretty memory-hungry but find the piece where you live and see who was there in 1763.

Fun, huh?

We start, somewhat predictably, in the top left hand corner, where we find New South Wales.

Yup … Not only did we use North America as a penal colony before you guys got uppity and we had to dump our trash on Australia instead, but we also stored all our Australian names there, too.

Hey, recycling's good! Shit, New England's made up almost entirely of recycled town and village names from East Anglia. I'd be totally freaked trying to follow road signs there.

Next up comes more stuff that will only be of interest to Canadians.

I do like Lake Begon, though; I wonder if it influenced Garrison Keillor?
It's not that far from where he located Lake Wobegon.

More bits of the frozen north.

Hey, if you want you can download all of these and stick your own big map together.
Better still, get your kids to do it for you.

Cool, huh?

Okay, maybe not.

Now we're getting to the real stuff!

This is out Maria's way. Cornhusker Country.

I wonder if she knows about the appropriately named Lake Tinton?

I can't seem to find it on any modern map.

Nor can I find any trace of the River Moningona (even then labelled "little known").

Moving east we find ourselves in Prudence's neck of the woods.

Some pretty uppity folk out here in 1763.

Look out, England, Revolution's stirring in those woods!

Hokay, so this one's not much use unless you want the whole map.

Or maybe if you have an unnatural attraction to cod.

Back out west to the mighty Mississipi (spelled with only one 'p' back then).

If you know anyone from St.Louis, it didn't exist back in 1763.
I like the "French Fort. Ruined" note at the mouth of the Ohio.

And I must say I prefer the old spelling of Kansez.
It's also nice to see the Ohio River was once known as the Fair River.
And there on the right are the enigmatic Twigtwees.
What a weird place it must have been then … er … plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, as we say in Europe.

Here's where we find Neetzy and Katherine, long before the battlefields of the Civil War and before even the fœtid village in a swamp that became your nation's capital was founded.

Out to the left hand side of the map we find Robyn's ancestors, recently arrived from England and scratching a living between the Confederate Indians (the good guys who fought on our side against Les Frogs) and the Miamis and the enigmatic Twigtwees.

And here's a big old compass, way out in the Atlantic.

I think it must have sunk as it's not in the Times Atlas these days.

Say hi to Shan ("Hi, Shan!"), up near the top of this map, somewhere near a place called Mentos (as close as I can guess it) that no longer turns up on Google Maps.
That Earl Granville must have been a greedy bastard. He's got a hundred mile wide band of land stretching the whole width of the map, labelled "Earl Granville's Property."
Well, it's somebody else's now, buddy!

And of course, Savannah, now home to our own lovely Savannah, then still in all its antebellum finery (indeed its pre-Revolutionary finery).

It must have been quite a place back then.

It's quite a place now!

Last up is … er … The Bermudas, in case anyone's interested.

Apologies to Ms.M, who lives somewhere so far beyond the known world that it fell off the edge of this map (indeed you'll note from yesterday's later map that the Rocky Mountains around her home were then so young they were called the Stony Mountains), and also to Petrea, Vanda, Katie and the California Girls, whose homes were then occupied by various Nations and a few wandering Spaniards building Mission Houses and therefore of no interest whatsoever to English map makers.

Hey ho … What little we knew.

As I said in the last post, I'd love to hear any tales you might have of the history of where you live now.

Toodle pip from Ancient Albion!

Crap In The Attic

Those of you who have, for some inexplicable reasons of your own hung around here for many a long year might remember tales from my attic. Some may even recall the creature that lives up there, lurking in the dark corners, always just on the edge of sight, making occasional scurrying and crunching noises as it catches and eats its prey.
Yup, I was up there again last weekend and "The Thing That Eats Spiders" is still there.
Considering how many spiders I have in the rest of my house the fact that I have never seen a single one in the attic led me some years back to the inevitable conclusion that something up there eats them.

I like spiders as a rule. They're clean, they don't require any looking after and they eat those filthy flies and bugs that shit all over your food. A cobweb at the kitchen window makes for a great flyscreen, and a pretty entertaining one at times.
But we also have the 'giant house spider' here (Tegenaria duellica), a monstrous bastard, tales and photographs of which I have posted in the past but no way am I going to go and look at them again now. And those, together with the lanky scuttling things that come in here off the fields at harvest time and startle the crap out of me, make me glad that The Thing That Eats Spiders lives up in my attic. It's nice to know that I can rummage around up there in the semi-darkness and not find a bunch of six inch wide, fifteen mile-an-hour hairy bastards running up my arms.

Anyhoo …
Apart from the lack of spiders, there are many and varied wonders in my attic. Fifty-two years worth of accumulated crap to be precise. Together with some useful stuff I have no room for down here in the land where spiders live.
Every once in a while I find I need something that's stored somewhere in a box in the attic, so I head on up there and come down a couple of days later with boxes full of crap I never knew I had, having completely forgotten what it was I went up there for in the first place.

Last weekend I happened upon a box full of old prints and maps going right back to the 1700s; stuff I had picked up over the decades either because it seemed like a good idea at the time or because it came in a job lot with an item I actually wanted.
The box was labelled "Unframed stuff" and in it I found something that might interest those of you living in our Lost Colonies.

This is a Lowry map of your neck of the woods from back in 1802.
A couple of you I know live in places that are actually marked on here, but most of you now live in what was then wild and uncharted wildernesses of guesswork, peopled with the occasionally mis-spelled names of the folk who lived there before the blessings of civilisation rained down upon their heads.

 Here's an enlargement of the middle part of the map. Click on either of these pictures; I've saved them so they blow up pretty big, so they may take a couple of seconds to load.
I must confess to sitting here for ages, wasting my time in a pleasant yet futile manner, figuring out where you all live and what has happened in those places since this map was drawn.

From over here in the Ancient World, folk in the US of A seem somewhat obsessed with history, probably because their own has as yet been so brief. It would be nice to learn a little bit of the history of those parts where you now live, like when your settlements were founded, what happened to the people who lived there originally, what your town or city has become known for and any other little snippets of history that might startle or entertain us.
Write 'em here in the comments or do a post of your own about them (Robyn and Petrea get a pass on this one for all the excellent work they already do detailing local history online).
I'd love to know.

Ooh, ooh! A quick addendum:
I just remembered there are big, fold-out maps in my lovely eleven volume 1756 edition of Smollett's "History of England" (the brown ones in the eighth photo down in my "Pimp My Dante" post) and I'm pretty sure the Colonies are in there somewhere.
I shall have a rummage and scan in what I find for the next post.
Hooray for old crap!