JOHN JAMES PIATT, REPRESENTATIVE FIGURE
OF A MOMENTOUS PERIOD
By CLARE DOWLER
Biographical and Critical Study.
The development of Ohio from 1830 to
I880 was spectacular.
It characterized, in a fashion, the
development of the whole nation.
In this typical region, it would be hard
to find a more representa-
tive man than John James Piatt. His life
span began as Ohio was
emerging out of the wilderness, as
"Johnny Appleseed's" trees
were bearing abundantly, and as the
completion of a system of
internal canals and waterways filliped
the growth of the State to
an accelerated speed. In his boyhood he
was excited by the new
marvels of steam--by Robert Fulton's
steamboat which, only
twenty-three years before Piatt's birth,
had startled the woods-
men and settlers along the Ohio as it
paddled its way from Pitts-
burgh to New Orleans; by the steam
locomotive which only five
years before Piatt's birth had drawn a
train of cars along twenty-
three miles of track on the Baltimore
and Ohio Railroad. Piatt's
images, his themes, his references
illustrate strikingly the imprint
of the new mode of life upon his
generation.
He had not the qualities of a Daniel
Boone. In the periodic
westward movements of frontiersmen,
Boone represented the first,
the trail-blazer-Indian-killer type.
Piatt represented the second,
the tiller of the soil, the man who
subjugated the ruthless forces
of nature, who began to grope for
expression and tried to make
articulate the life he represented. Nor
had he the background of
a James Russell Lowell. Piatt's
forebears should not be dis-
paraged, although they excelled in wars,
rebelling against tyranny,
rather than in literary accomplishment.
It was good that his ancestors were of
the crusading type,
that he himself was what he was, for in
general, the effete east-
erner could not write about the new West
like one actually bred in
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