The Black Swamp and the Narrow Passage

An interesting comment was received by a Reader regarding a narrow passage in the Heartland of North America that bears a response, since it is a growing area of interest among members and several have opted to accept what is said about this area without checking it out for themselves to see how fallacious are the arguments favoring the North American model as Lehi’s Isle of Promise.
    The comment received was: “Your belief that narrow neck of land or the narrow passage is in Central or South America is way off. You’ve never heard of the Great Black Swamp which extended eastward from Lake Erie? There was also another swamp that extended southward from Lake Michigan. These two swamps created a narrow passage between them. Google them. These swamps were impassable and were not drained until the 1880s. That’s how Bowling Green, OH got its name because it was founded on a high spot in the swamp. And the Great Lakes are the four seas mentioned in The Book of Mormon. No there are not five Great Lakes as Lake Michigan and Lake Huron are the same lake as they have same elevation” S.R.
    Response: First of all, as we have repeatedly written, the narrow neck we state is the narrow pass between the eastern shore of the Gulf of Guayaquil in Ecuador, South America, and the area of the sharply rising sheer Andean mountains about 25 miles further east. This creates a narrow passage even to this day, that runs along almost the entire length of that eastern shore, that in BC times was a great sea. This eastern sea is referred to by geologists as the Pebasian Sea, which extended eastward into the Amazon Sea that emptied into the Atlantic Ocean, and southward into the Paranense and Paranan seas and southeastward into the Atlantic. The Pebasian Sea also ran northward into what is now the Caribbean Sea, all of which created the island that Jacob claimed the Land of Promise was located upon (2 Nephi 10:20).

The Black Swamp or Great Black Swamp (Red Circle) was located in a southwesterly direction from the area of Toledo at the southwest border of Lake Erie and extended almost to Fort Wayne

As for the Black Swamp, it was a glacially fed wetland in northwest Ohio that extended from the eastern end of Lake Erie across Ohio to just short of Fort Wayne, Indiana. The swamp area existed from the end of the Wisconsin glaciation until the late 19th century, when farmers began to drain the swamp for planting. The area  once encompassed extensive swamps and marshes, with some higher, drier ground interspersed. It occupied what was formerly the southwestern part of proglacial Lake Maumee, a Holocene precursor to Lake Erie, covering what is now ten counties, for a distance of about 120 miles in length from the Sandusky River in the east to almost Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the west, and was 30 to 40 miles wide.
    This area was not deep, and ancient elm and ash trees grew with their roots in the standing waters, with massive oaks and hickories on the sandy beach ridges. Windfalls, mostly tumbled trees uprooted by occasional tornadoes, together with the deep, heavy mud, made the region almost impassable for common traffic. No one knows the origin of the name "Black Swamp,” but its ominous remoteness and dark countryside may well have been the cause of the name, though its soil is black and rich.
    This swamp itself was an oozing mass of water, mud, snakes, wolves, wildcats, biting flies, and clouds of gnats and mosquitoes. At 4,800 square miles, it was nearly big enough to cover the entire state of Connecticut. It was an oozing mass of water, mud, snakes, wolves, wildcats, biting flies, and clouds of gnats and mosquitoes. It stretched south of the Maumee River, 30 to 40 miles wide, for 120 miles from the Sandusky River in the east, nearly to Fort Wayne, Indiana, in the west. It crossed the area of ten counties, and was poorly drained by four rivers: the Maumee, the Auglaize, the Portage, and the Sandusky. Water stood in it during the wetter seasons, and moisture oozed underfoot in all but the driest periods. Beginning with the Indians, almost everyone avoided its knee-deep mud and ravenous mosquitoes.

Map showing the cities built up over the past century that surrounds the swamp, with few settlements within it—Bowling Green now sits in the center of the old swamp area

Indian villages ringed the swamp, and a look at any current map shows that later settlements followed their example. Lakeside, Fremont, Findlay, Cairo, Delphos, Van Wert, Fort Wayne, Napoleon, Maumee, and Toledo fall into a clockwise pattern around the old swampland's edges, with Bowling Green in its heart.
    In trying to ride across the swamp, water, often up to the belly of a horse, stood on the surface until it evaporated in the hot summer months. When it rained, or thawed in the winter, it was water and muck. Much of the swamp was covered with a thick forest of giant oak, sycamore, hickory, walnut, ash, elm, maple and cottonwood trees, except in a few prairie areas where limestone just under the surface would not support timber growth.
    However, the water’s depth was quite shallow, attested by the building of a corduroy road constructed through the swamp lands from Fremont, Ohio, to Perrysburgy, Ohio, in the early 1800s—a corduroy road, or timber trackway, is a long road made by placing logs, perpendicular to the direction of the road over a low or swampy area. While these logs shift and difficult for horse travel, the point is the swamp was a shallow area, and would not have restricted the military movement of warriors on the attack.

The Corduroy Road, created by a Scottish engineer and inventor named John MacAdams, soon after the Revolution. It was useful in swamps because it created a road for people and horses cross over and was much smoother riding on than the bumpy and uneven swamps

In addition, gravel and dirt could be placed over the timbers to make a more useful road, and according to the scriptural record of the extensive road networks built by the Nephites (3 Nephi 6:8), such a road would not have been considered impossible for them to have constructed, again, rendering this shallow swamp area no longer a restriction to travel. However, it still would have been restrictive to settlement because of the shifting ground and moisture oozing up through it, which kept it from settlement until the latter half of the 19^th century.
    As for the other swamp that extended south of Lake Michigan, it did not form a “narrow passage between them.” This ancient swamp accessed the short overland portage into the South Branch of the Chicago River, which provided the only total water route from the Great Lakes to the Mississippi during the Spring in a heavy rain year.
    In fact, in 1794, two years before his death, Anthony Wayne, an American Revolutionary General and later U.S. Representative best known for winning the Battle of Fallen Timbers which removed Native American claims to Ohio and the surrounding area, marveled at “the very extensive and highly cultivated fields” that lay at the present site of Defiance, where the Auglaize enters the Maumee. This area, though within the Black Swamp, was planted by local farmers and quite productive.
   Also, Robert Lucas, a Captain in the American Army of whom was said, “As a spy he was productive and brave—as a soldier he had no superior" (Thomas Verchères de Boucherville, War on the Detroit: The Chronicles of Thomas Verchères de Boucherville and the Capitulation by an Ohio Volunteer,” Edited by Milo M. Quaife, Lakeside Press, Chicago, 1940, p314). Lucas later was appointed a Brigadier General in 1810, and much later Governor of Ohio. He crossed the Black Swamp with his men during the War of 1812, spending several nights there, of which soe of his men complained “bitterly of mud that reached their horses’ saddle skirts and that oozed ankle-deep in their tents at night.” General William Hull’s entire army marched completely across the black Swamp from Urbana, Ohio, to Toledo, and then on to Detroit in 1812. The point is, military men, used to uncomfortable and unusual travel problems, crossed the Black Swamp without trouble. It is not conceivable that it would have prevented the Lamanites from crossing it if they had been confronted by it,

Area between the Black Swamp and the Chicago River’s South Branch—the so-called Portage area

There is no indication from the records that this swamp area was anywhere near the Black Swamp in Ohio, and in fact, would have been more than a hundred and 150 miles away—hardly a narrow passage (Brad Olsen, Sacred places, North America: 108 Destinations, CCC Publishing, San Francisco, 2008, p249).
    However, the most important thing here, is the narrow passage mentioned by Mormon, was between the East Sea and the West Sea. In the Heartland or Great Lakes model, the reference of a swamp is not a sea, and these two swamps were nothing more than wetlands interspersed with higher ground islands in a basic marshy terrain—hardly the East or West sea as Mormon describes them.

Meldrum’s map of his Land of Promise. Besides many other problems and misplacements of lands according to Mormon’s descriptions, he has all four seas mentioned in the scriptural record basically north of the entire Land Southward, completely contrary to Mormon and Helaman’s descriptions

As for the Great Lakes, they are listed as being five, because the two lobes of the lakes (Michigan and Huron) were considered then, as now by most people to be two lakes; however, hydrologically they are considered one lake, even though separated by the narrow Straits of Mackinac. However, if you name these “four lakes” the north, east, south and west seas, as is shown in the Heartland theorists’ model, they in no way match the scriptural record and Mormon’s descriptive use of the terms.