The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company: A Story of George Washington's Times (Repost)

The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company begins, appropriately, amidst a time of extraordinary popular delusions. The mania surrounding the Mississippi Company and the South Sea Bubble was just properly breaking around 1720, leaving countless speculators broken and penniless. But any lessons to be learned from these legendary schemes seem lost on the principals of Charles Royster's historical epic, including such august figures as George Washington and Virginia's William Byrd. They--apparently like all other men of means at the time--were driven to convert the vast tracts of America into cold, hard cash. Speculation on land, along with the various ventures intended to exploit it profitably, is the central theme to Royster's interconnected patchwork of stories that spans some hundred years and sprawls the better part of the globe. Nearly all these tales relate to, if sometimes obliquely, a particular company and the men (including a young George Washington) who founded it to "save" the impassable, frog-infested marsh on the Virginia-North Carolina border known as the Great Dismal Swamp. (Never mind that local folk thought of it as "a low sunken morass, not fit for any of the purposes of Agriculture.") Fortunately, Royster, an accomplished historian and author of the Francis Parkman Prize-winning A Revolutionary People at War, had more luck getting something valuable out of the Dismal Swamp than his Colonial predecessors. His richly detailed, circuitous saga makes for dense, satisfying reading.