Six months in America, vol. 2 (of 2) by Godfrey Thomas Vigne
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"Six months in America, vol. 2 (of 2)" by Godfrey Thomas Vigne is a travel narrative written in the early 19th century. It records a British visitor’s rapid tour through the eastern and midwestern United States, balancing landscape and natural curiosities with sharp observations on infrastructure, politics, language, and manners. The focus ranges from canals, rail-roads, and steam-boats to frontier settlements, communal experiments, slavery in the South, Native nations, and great sights
such as Mammoth Cave and the Great Lakes. The opening of this travel narrative follows the author from Washington toward Harper’s Ferry, contrasting American admiration for canals and cleared land with his own taste for the picturesque, then pushing through the Shenandoah and Alleghanies to Pittsburgh. He samples technology and industry (an arsenal and rapid‑loading rifles), witnesses Fourth of July oratory, visits the communal Rappite settlement at Economy, and descends the Ohio by steam‑boat past Wheeling to Maysville and inland to Lexington, where he dissects land‑title tangles, ruinous banking, and the realities of slavery and free‑Black restriction, before giving a vivid, extended tour of Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave. He continues to Louisville and Cincinnati, mixing city portraits, trade flows, and language notes with frontier hunting frustrations, then cuts across Ohio toward Lake Erie, joining a comfortable steamer that carries him via Detroit up Lake Huron to the Sault Ste. Marie, where he rides birch‑bark canoes, shoots the rapids, and engages with Chippewa families. The section closes with lively scenes at Michilimackinac (fort history, missionaries, night spearing of fish), a flat interlude at Green Bay, and a return to the island capped by a Catholic priest’s public controversy. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Vigne, Godfrey Thomas, 1801-1863 |
|---|---|
| Title | Six months in America, vol. 2 (of 2) |
| Original Publication | London: Whittaker, Treacher, & Co., 1832. |
| Credits | Chris Miceli and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | E151: History: America: United States |
| LoC Class | F1001: North America local history: Canada |
| Subject | United States -- Description and travel |
| Subject | Canada -- Description and travel |
| Category | Text |
| eBook-No. | 78758 |
| Release Date | May 26, 2026 |
| Copyright | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 443 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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