Ohio History Journal

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Ohio Valley Hist

Ohio Valley Hist. Ass'n, Fifth Annual Meeting.           7

sylvania State College, excellently fulfilled its purpose of form-

ing a general introduction to the sessions of the three-days meet-

ing.

 

 

THE INFLUENCE OF THE OHIO RIVER IN WESTERN

EXPANSION.

 

BY EDWIN ERLE SPARKS,

President Pennsylvania State College.

 

Of the five great continents on the globe, three have been con-

quered, have been opened and have been civilized within the span of

recorded history. It is possible, therefore, to make a comprehensive

study of the point of attack and the progress of the march across the

continents of North and South America and of Africa. Points of re-

sistance and points of difference are found in making such comparison.

Naturally the point of attack is from the coast, and the line of march

is inland. But here the similarity ceases; natural and local charac-

teristics begin to show their force in variations. The general line of

progress in Africa has been from the North to the South, and a counter

movement from the South to the North, with a side line from the

west. The main direction in South America has been from the South-

east to the Northwest, and from the East to the West, with a slight

progress from the North toward the South; but in either of these

continents has there been a general, marked and definite line of ad-

vance.

North America, on the contrary, has ever maintained one line

of advance, one direction of progress-from  the East to the West.

"Hold Westward, Pilot" cried the persistent Columbus, and in that con-

fident command he gave the watchword for four hundred years of

North American advance. "Westward the course of empire takes its

way" said the equally persistent Bishop Berkeley in his missionary

vision of christianizing the heathen in the new world. "Westward lies

the domain of England" said the ambitious Governor Spottswood, of

Virginia, in attempting to establish the claim of his king to the Trans-

Alleghenian lands. "Go West, young man," said Horace Greeley, the

sage of the New York Tribune, in attempting to find a remedy for

crowded conditions and social unrest in the settled Eastern States.

"Our manifest destiny is from the Atlantic to the Pacific" said William

Henry Seward, in calling up the vision of the Western expansion, which

gave to our domain, eventually, both Oregon and Alaska.

Omitting as insignificant the detached settlements of the Spanish

and Russians on the Pacific Coast, the conquest of the North American