loves a good scenic description

Starting, like the canals, with horses, it soon switched to the newfangled steam engines.

New York had a special advantage for canal building – the Mohawk valley, a natural notch through the Appalachian chain. Elsewhere canals had to run through the mountains or climb over them, which was either impossible or ruinously expensive.

Just as they were getting established, the neighborhood was decimated by the "milk sickness," caused by local dairy cows grazing on white snakeroot, a plant highly toxic to humans, and thereby contaminating the community's milk supply.

The land that Thomas acquired in Indiana was virgin forest.

Traditional cast-iron ploughs, which worked well in the light soils of New England, were unsuited to breaking up the prairie sod; they also became clogged by the heavy clay soil underneath and had to be cleaned by hand every few yards.

The New Englanders settled farther north on the undulating prairies of Central Indiana and Illinois, and across the Mississippi in Iowa. This was more daunting terrain because of the lack of trees for building materials and also the tough surface soil whose thick grass, several feet high in summer, developed a matted, intertwined root system.

Farms, even whole towns, were simply abandoned and fields turned over to sheep.

Many of the early settlers came from the South, particularly Virginia, and they settled in the southern parts of Indiana and Illinois, where the forested River valleys offered abundant timber for houses, barns, and fencing.

"A small waggon (so light that you might almost carry it, yet strong enough to bear a good load of bedding, utensils and provisions, and a swarm of young citizens – and to sustain marvellous shocks in its passage over these rocky heights) with two small horses; sometimes a cow or two, comprises their all; excepting a little store of hard-earned cash for the land office of the district."

Private houses were spared, unless used by snipers; likewise the French mission (and the presidential parrot).

After she drove off, her steward carefully locked the doors and took the Madisons' pet parrot three blocks to the French mission – to secure for it diplomatic immunity.

The new Southwest from South Carolina and Georgia across the Mississippi to what became Louisiana was ideal climatically, with at least twenty-three inches of rain a year and 200 frost-free days.

Long-staple cotton could easily be separated from its seed by using a roller contraption rather like a clothes wringer, but this kind of cotton only grew along the coast of South Carolina and Georgia. Inland, short-staple varieties held sway and rollers did not work; the cotton could be separated from the sticky green seeds only by hand and very laboriously.

Even on flat land, this would have been demanding work but swamps and forests, rivers and mountains were hard to accommodate in tidy squares and the mapmakers resorted to discreet little zigzags every so often to make ends meet. Yet, in modified form, Jefferson's squares are what you can still see today if you fly over the Midwest and the Plains, etched out for mile upon mile in rectilinear fields and straight roads.

When President John Adams, George Washington's successor, was finally able to move down to the city at the end of that year, the presidential mansion stood in a weed-ridden field full of stones and rubble and the building itself reeked of wet paint and new plaster.

His backcountry estate at Monticello near Charlottesville faced toward the Appalachians and into the heartland of the continent.

Outside, as if to echo his words, thunder rolled and rain pelted the windows.