No Great Lakes or Mississippi: St. Lawrence rises in the Rockies.

Suppose there were no Great Lakes or Mississippi River (which would have to go to make the new watercourse plausible) and the St. Lawrence has its source in the southern Rockies somewhere in New Mexico say. How would settlement and trade patterns in North America have evolved?
 
Why don't you draw a rough map, cause otherwise I'm confused.
Draw a line from Santa Fe to Montreal, and then connect it from there to the Atlantic, I'd guess.

Southern Rockies would be tricky to pull off, though, since there already are rivers that start there, and those just trickle down into the Gulf of California.
 
Southern Rockies would be tricky to pull off, though, since there already are rivers that start there, and those just trickle down into the Gulf of California.

Can't see why that would be a problem if the river flows northeast from the divide. Of course, the geography of the continent would be different
 
I forgot to mention; the OTL river be the same, and the alternate river would follow the basins of Lakes Ontario and Erie and the Niagara River and would continue southwest from near OTL Toledo, Ohio.
 
I forgot to mention; the OTL river be the same, and the alternate river would follow the basins of Lakes Ontario and Erie and the Niagara River and would continue southwest from near OTL Toledo, Ohio.

PIA03377_modest.jpg


Even assuming that the Great Lakes are flattened out, it makes more sense for a river that far south to empty out into the Gulf.

How much of this elongated St. Lawrence could be navigated, anyways? Even the Nile is disrupted at several key points, and its source was so difficult to reach that nobody managed to simply follow it upriver to the beginning.
 
I'm assuming that it would be nagivable at least as far as the approximate site of OTL St. Louis. There would be interuptions such the rapids upstream of Montreal and Niagara (St. Lawrence!) Falls, as well as ones further upstream

Such a river would be plausible if the Appalechian spine continued west to connect to the Rockies, directing water into the basin.
 
Had the mid-continental rift continued to develop into an inland sea, something like this may have resulted (and yes, I do know that other features of the continent might be different too):

PIA03377_modest.jpg
 
How many rivers in all of North America actually flow from South to North, other than the St. Lawrence? It seems almost all rivers that I can think of flow more or less from the North to the South or roughly East to West/West to East. I know that the Tennessee River does flow toward the North into the Ohio, but ultimately it flows into the Mississippi which empties in the Gulf.

Any geology experts out there have theories for why this is the case?
 
Here is a link to a website of what the geography looked like before the Ice age, and how different things would be if it was less severe. :eek:

http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/Research/What-If/WhatIf.HTM

Not only was the Mississippi's course moved south, but the Ohio, and the Saint Lawrence created (edit: wrong word, diverted from their original path, or created). This may be more helpful for you. Also shows the english channel.
 
However, if you eliminate the Mississippi, you also have to eliminate/completely alter the courses of the Missouri, Arkansas, Red, Ohio, Tennessee, and numerous other feeder rivers.

But if the river that flows roughly in the same pattern as OTL Ohio, but then flows into the ATL St Lawrence that takes everything back towards the Northeast, then a huge swath of North America (Mississippi River basin) will be much more isolated from the Northeast. I suppose you could create a St Lawrence river basin that includes much of OTL Mississippi basin, but I can't see how rivers in the Southern part of OTL US would be a part of the basin. All in all I think you end up with a continent that has more areas of isolation than OTL continent has.
 

Germaniac

Donor
That link is ridiculous. It actually poses the question whether or not Hitler could have invaded England without the channel... oh the butterfly's are churning
 
From the US Rockies, the continent drains east and south. To get a river flowing from the southern Rockies northeastwards would require a pretty major shift in continental geography that lifts the Midwest and southern Plains (Texas/New Mexico) and tilts it to drain northwards.

ASB
 
All I can say is, assuming World Island history goes largely unchanged, it's going to be awfully tempting when they arrive to build a canal or something from the Southwest into Sea of California... :rolleyes:
 
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