Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America by Mary P. Ryan

Abstract

Reviewed by: Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America by Mary P. Ryan Steven L. Driever Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America. Mary P. Ryan. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2019. Pp. 438, photographs, maps, footnotes, index. $40.00, hardcover, ISBN 978-1-4773-1783-9. $40.00, eBook, ISBN 978-1-4773-1785-3. Mary P. Ryan expounds on the history of Baltimore and San Francisco through a chronological comparison beginning with the first human occupancy of their sites and surrounding areas and continuing through the 1860s. Ryan has succeeded in breaking new ground in the history of North America by focusing on local sovereignty as the key actor in local, regional, and national affairs. For many centuries before European colonization, fertile ecological zones in and around the Chesapeake and San Francisco Bays supported dense settlements of Native Americans. Ryan thus begins by describing [End Page 129] the natural forces that formed the estuaries and how the Ohlone people east of San Francisco Bay and the Algonquian-speaking tribes beside the Chesapeake exploited their bountiful environments. The Ohlone sustained hundreds of small, autonomous tribelets through hunting and gathering. The Algonquian tribes practiced horticulture and created a complex society, having a hierarchy of settlements that experienced intertribal conflict over territory. Neither people, however, built cities like the great Amerindian cities of Peru or Mexico or intensely exploited the sites of modern Baltimore and San Francisco. The taking of Native lands begins with the English arriving on the East Coast. Ryan makes clear that it was not official colonial policy but rather the arrival of Englishmen intent on enclosing land into farms and plantations that initially disrupted Indian territory. Soon, however, the taking was officially sanctioned on the grounds that the indigenous peoples were not "Christian People" and had not established permanent settlements and farms. Ryan attributes the seed for colonial Baltimore to Presbyterian Pennsylvania merchants who wanted to construct a port at the mouth of the Patapsco River to facilitate trade with the Caribbean and across the Atlantic. A town would be necessary to house the port's workforce, and, starting in 1745, Baltimore would grow along streets with adjacent land being divided into tidy lots that could be bought and sold repeatedly. Large landowners prospered while small leaseholders lived in small row houses, and most residents were propertyless. Receiving little help from Maryland's state legislature, Baltimore formed its own institutions to meet its most pressing needs. According to Ryan, the Spaniards, noted for their urban planning, merely cleared the land of Ohlone settlements and established a mission and presidio on the San Francisco Peninsula. The mission failed due to measles epidemics, venereal disease, and brutal punishments of recalcitrant Indians. The presidio was abandoned on Mexico's independence in 1821. The environment was permanently altered by invading plant and animal species introduced as the Mexican settlers began to convert the land to support the production of hides and tallow for export from ranchos. The second part of Ryan's book zooms down to the scale of streets and houses. We learn that Baltimore Town officially became the City of Baltimore in 1796 and witnessed local elites gradually transforming "mob town" into "monumental city," a civic-spirited community that [End Page 130] attracted enough immigrants to make Baltimore the third largest US city by the 1830s. Ryan argues that it was the process of street making that taught the Baltimoreans how to collaborate, leading to other city improvements such as building elaborate monuments, providing street lighting, extending wharves into the bay, and so on. Ryan avers that the benefits of active citizenship, unfortunately, were not extended to African Americans despite almost all of them in Baltimore being free. In Alta California local authority overrode Mexico's central authority. The secularization of the mission lands benefited leading Californios, while the displaced Indians became a servile labor force on their ranchos. The site of present-day San Francisco began development in the 1830s as an "anchorage" in the small Port of Yerba Buena on the northeastern corner of the peninsula and as the pueblo of Dolores to the south...