Governor Spotswood’s Tramontane Expedition

A writer in the Alpine Journal, in a reference which now eludes us, once suggested that we had in America a predecessor of the Alpine Club in the Tramontane Club of Virginia, founded in 1716 with the purpose of annual pilgrimage to the summit of Mt. George and drinking a health to the King. This seemed so useful for propaganda purposes that we referred to it in a presidential address before the American Alpine Club. Thereafter our luck ran out, for, curiosity getting the better of us, we learned from the Historical Society of Virginia that there never was a Tramontane “Club.”

We were, however, referred to W. W. Scott’s A History of Orange County, Virginia (1906), where the story of Governor Spotswood’s Tramontane Expedition of 1716 is set forth in a chapter entitled “The Knights of the Golden Horseshoe,” which includes the Journal of John Fontaine, a former ensign in the British Army, who took part in the expedition.

Governor Spotswood and a party of about fifty, taking with them an abundant supply of provisions and an extraordinary variety of liquors, started from the Germanna settlement on August 29th, 1716, to visit the country west of the Appalachians. But for the frequent manifestations of loyalty in drinking the healths of the royal family and themselves, a better idea could be obtained of the route followed, but it appears to have been entirely within Spotsylvania, afterward Orange County.

Fontaine states that they came to the very head of James River “where it runs no bigger than a man’s arm from under a big stone. . . . We drank King George’s health, and all the Royal Family’s at the very top of the Appalachian Mountains. . . . We had a good dinner, and after it we got the men together, and loaded all their arms, and we drank the King’s health in champagne, and fired a volley, and all the rest of the Royal Family in claret, and a volley. We drank the Governor’s health and fired another volley. We had several sorts of liquors, viz.: Virginia red wine and white wine, Irish usquebaugh, brandy shrub, two sort of rum, champagne, cherry punch, water, cider, etc. . . .We called the highest mountain Mount George, and the one we crossed over Mount Spotswood.”

There is every reason to believe that this crossing of the Blue Ridge in 1716 was the first ever made by any body of white men. The place is now known as Swift Run Gap. Governor Spotswood presented miniature jeweled horseshoes, small enough to be worn on a watch chain, to the gentlemen adventurers, giving rise to the fiction of the Knights of the Horseshoe. Hugh Jones, writing in 1724, states that on one side of the horseshoe was engraved Sic juvat transcendere montes, and on the other the tramontane order.

It will no doubt relieve the minds of our British colleagues to to know that their organization was not anticipated, but on both sides of the Atlantic we can approve the “good spirits” in which the expedition was carried out.

J. M. T.