Notes on Virginia: the Great Miami in figures

Thomas Jefferson published 1785 496 characters easy

The Great Miami of the Ohio is 200 yards wide at the mouth. At the Piccawee towns, 75 miles above, it is reduced to 30 yards; it is, nevertheless, navigable for loaded canoes 50 miles above these towns. The portage from its Western branch into the Miami of Lake Erie is 5 miles; that from its Eastern branch into Sandusky river is 9 miles. Salt River is at all times navigable for loaded batteaux 70 or 80 miles. It is 80 yards wide at its mouth, and keeps that width to its fork, 25 miles above.

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About this text

Here Jefferson measures the Great Miami and the Salt River in yards and miles and gives the length of two portages. The figures follow each other closely, 200, 75, 30, 50, 70, 80 and 25, which is what makes the passage a drill. He compiled them from surveyors, traders and army reports, since he had not traveled there himself. The queries reached him in 1780 from a French diplomat posted in Philadelphia.

Where this text comes fromThis is the passage where the Notes stop being prose and become a table that forgot to be one. Jefferson assembled the figures from surveyors, traders and army reports rather than from his own travel, and he sets them down river by river without a single word of commentary on what they mean. The 1853 reprint linked below runs them together in continuous text, which is how they were read for a century before anyone thought to tabulate geography.

What you might not noticeThe Great Miami is given as 200 yards wide at the mouth and 30 yards at the Piccawee towns, 75 miles upstream, so the numbers record a river narrowing by more than four-fifths along that stretch. Source

What it trainsNineteen digits in 496 characters is heavy number row work, though not the heaviest here: an encyclopedia entry on this shelf packs twenty-two digits into 315 characters. The figures come in a run, 200, 75, 30, 50, 70, 80 and 25, close enough together that the hands never settle into either the letter rows or the digits and spend the whole passage moving between them. Sixteen capitals, eleven of them place names in the middle of sentences, add Shift on top. Five sentences and two semicolons give you somewhere to breathe, but not often, and six commas are the only other punctuation in the fragment.

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Read the full text at the publisher: Wikisource