Ohio History Journal

THE OHIO RIVER.

 

 

 

ARCHER BUTLER HULBERT,

Professor of American History, Marietta College; President of the

Ohio Valley Historical Association; author of "Historic High-

ways of America," "The Ohio River," etc.

 

The mountain ranges of this Continent generally trend from

North to South. The greatest rivers trend in the same general

direction, particularly the St. Lawrence, Mississippi and Hudson,

all of which were to play an important role as avenues of ap-

proach for the races which fell heir to the Continent. But the

Europeans, landing on our Atlantic coast were compelled to ex-

plore and occupy the land along East and West lines, the social

movement in general cutting straight across the general trend of

the greater mountain ranges and river valleys.

An interesting result followed. So far as actually playing a

definite part in the western expansion of America is concerned,

the lesser streams were of greater importance than many of the

larger ones, and one cannot have a very clear understanding

of the development of our Nation without knowing something

of the place and power of the Juniata, Mohawk, Wood Creek,

Connemaugh, Watauga, Holston, Fox and Wisconsin rivers.

Said Edward Everett in 1835: "The destinies of the country, if

I may use a language which sounds rather mystical but which

every one, I believe, understands, - the destinies of the country

run east and west". At the moment, when the building of the

Boston and Albany Railroad was under discussion, the Housa-

tonic was of more importance to New England than the Con-

necticut; if Boston nails were to continue their battle success-

fully against Pittsburg nails in the West the Housatonic would

be responsible.

Perhaps this introductory word will bring out as plainly as

possible the one great important fact concerning the Ohio River -

its position on the Continent. It paralleled the "destinies of the

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The Ohio River.                  221

 

country", running from the Northeast to the Southwest; more

than all other rivers combined, probably, it directed and aided

the exploration, conquest and occupation of the land.

The second great fact to be noted is that enough water fell

in the two hundred thousand square miles of Ohio River drainage

to make a river useful for the high mission of empire-building.

Measured by its total output, the Ohio is a greater river than the

Missouri; it is greater than the Mississippi above the mouth of

the Missouri; one-fourth of all the water entering the Gulf of

Mexico comes from the Ohio.

Francis Parkman once expressed the hope of being able

to prove that that King of Adventurers, La Salle, discovered and

explored the great stream that became known as La Belle

Riviere, about 1670. The hope was never realized and it is

exceedingly doubtful if any one of the hundred-odd theories

to this effect will ever emerge to the stature of a Fact. Whether

discovered then or a decade or two later, the daring dreams of

French conquest of this last and fairest Continent took them

westward by the Wisconsin, Illinois and Wabash avenues to the

giant Mississippi, and La Belle Riviere was left unfortified and

unoccupied until, in the middle of the eighteenth century, it was

threatened by the English who were creeping up the Potomac

and James to a slow but sure conquest of the promised land be-

yond.

In 1747 a company of enterprising Virginians formed an

"Ohio Company" and got from their King a grant of land on

the upper Ohio. I speak in present-day terms; at that time the

Ohio was the Allegheny and Ohio of today; it was after the

middle of the century that the Allegheny became known as a

separate river. And it should be added, in this connection, that

the "Ohio country" of that period was all territory contiguous

to the Ohio River; reputable maps dated as late as 1776 bore

the name "Ohio" on the South as well as the North side of the

Ohio River. The Ohio Company at once sent out a mighty man

of valor, Christopher Gist, to count the giants and the grapes in

the land beyond the rough Alleghanies.

Suddenly the boasting French at Quebec were thrown into

a panic. While chanting the heroism of their marvelous ex-

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222      Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

plorations of the Mississippi had the rich piece of cheese which

they really had in their mouths fallen into the maw of the hungry

fox which had sneaked across that impenetrable mountain wall?

Post haste a body of men were forwarded to the endangered

Valley under the command of the cautious Celoron de Bienville

by way of Lakes Erie and Chautauqua with leaden plates which

were to be buried at the mouths of the principal tributaries of

the Ohio to reinforce the claim to the Valley made by La Salle's

plate buried at the mouth of the Mississippi three-quarters of a

century before. That plate claimed for France all lands drained

by the waters which there entered the Gulf of Mexico. Celoron

buried his plates at the mouth of the Conewango (Warren, Pa.)

at Indian God Rock (near Franklin, Pa.) at the mouths of

Wheeling Creek and the Muskingum, Great Kanawha and Great

Miami rivers. Why he ignored the Monongahela River--the

point of actual danger--is a mystery of interest and wonder.

Perhaps he thought it safest not to claim the valley in which the

English were already planning settlements, leaving it a neutral

passageway. This is a difficult theory to accept, but that he

did not see the river or forgot to mark it is more impossible

still.

From at least two sources the English heard of Celoron's

expedition. The rapid series of events which followed needs no

description here-Washington's tour to the forts the French

built along Celoron's route, the Fort Necessity Campaign, Brad-

dock's brave march and astonishing defeat and the conquest of

Fort Duquesne by the dying but victorious Scotchman, John

Forbes.

Until England came into control of the upper Ohio in 1758

the river had merely been a goal. The steps by which the river

now became a force in human affairs has rarely been outlined

by the formal historians and seems to be understood not at all

by the reading public. Between the close of the French War and

the beginning of the Revolution in 1775 the Allegheny trails from

Virginia and Pennsylvania were traversed by hundreds of

pioneers who settled in what was long known loosely as "the

Monongahela Country", the region South and East of infant

Pittsburg. This may be made to include the "Pan-handle" of

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The Ohio River.                  223

 

West Virginia. With Brownsville, Pa., as a center draw a circle

having a radius of fifty miles in length. That circle will embrace

a region of tremendous power in the making of America in

the past as well as in the present. But I do not think that it is

too much to say that that region would not have been of much

less potency if the Ohio River had not existed. The valleys

which focused there were a heritage in themselves; in the early

days this was true because of the nature of the soil; in later days

because of the wealth found under the soil. The Monongahela

Country received its vital population before the Ohio River

became of great importance in human affairs-before the close

of the Revolutionary War.

Now look to the Southwest. With Lexington, Ky., as a

center draw another circle with a circumference as great as that

in the Monongahela Country. Here in the decade following the

Revolution another great center of population was formed-

in the "barrens" (prairies) of Kentucky. I have said that the

Monongahela Country would have become important had there

been no Ohio River. What of this Kentucky region? Still less

did it owe its early development to the Ohio River. Of course

some early pioneers came to it on the river. But Colonel Richard

Henderson with Daniel Boone opened the door to this rich empire

by way of Cumberland Gap. Before the Ohio River became any-

thing more than a nominal highway to the Southwest Kentucky

had a population of thirty thousand souls. By 1790 its popula-

tion was over the seventy-five thousand mark, and immigration

down the Ohio River had only just begun.

The reader may say that I am writing an article on the

"Unimportance of the Ohio River". If I can only show how un-

important the Ohio was in creating the two great vitally im-

portant settlements upon its waters, I can succeed in my purpose

of showing how and when the Ohio River became a mighty power

in the story of our Nation-making. Do you remember Yancy in

the fine story "The Prodigal Judge"? He had to prove the

"eternal slowness" of his mule or his story "wasn't worth a hill

o' beans".

Such then was the situation at, let us say, the close of the

Revolution in 1784. Two great regions had been comparatively

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224      Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

thickly populated on the Ohio River, one, the Monongahela

Country on its upper waters, and Kentucky, four hundred miles

to the Southwest. In each case agriculture had been the piloting

influence. Now between these settlements there was very little

good land except the bottoms along the river, separated one

from the other by bluffs and rocky headlands. Scattered as

these were along the silver chain of water, the conditions of the

period forbade their occupation; the redskins North of the Ohio

were not awed into even seeming peace until 1795; and, indeed,

when these bottoms came to be occupied it was found that there

was little good land on the hills above the river. Look at the

Valley in our own day. Where will you find a river in all the

world flowing through such a central region of a rich Nation

which, for four hundred miles of its course, can count such a

small population, so few cities, as were to be found on the Ohio

between Pittsburg and Cincinnati at the beginning of the present

century? Until about 1895 there was not a town of ten thousand

inhabitants in all the four hundred miles between Wheeling and

Cincinnati. One hundred years before, in 1795, the rush of

immigration was on by way of the Ohio River; from November

1787 to the same month in 1788 eighteen thousand people went

by Fort Harmar at the mouth of the Muskingum; it took one

hundred years for a town containing that many souls to grow

up in all the hundreds of miles between Wheeling and Cincin-

nati - and there are not more than two or three today.

It must be clear, now, that the Ohio River has been one of

the greatest forwarding and distributing agencies ever known in

history. Most rivers have been important because they invited

to their shores a great and steadily increasing population creating

States, government and civilization. Not so with the Ohio. Its

historic role has been to forward quickly to distant empires the

home-seekers and home-builders, in the nick of time, to count

tremendously as a factor in Nation-building; and the fruits of

the Ohio's importance, historically, are to be looked for and

found in the meadow-lands of Kentucky and the prairie-lands of

Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas. Europe

laughed to scorn the pretensions of the young American Republic

in asserting sovereignty from the Alleghanies to the Mississippi;

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The Ohio River.                  225

 

France and England, rich monarchies, had found that Trans-

Allegheny empire too heavy a burden; how, then, could the

feeble Republic, "one nation today, thirteen tomorrow" carry it?

For just one reason. It could lay down a population almost in-

stantly in a strategically rich agricultural region that would com-

mand the Mississippi and its western tributaries. We vastly

over-estimate the importance of marching armies and rising

fortresses and proportionately overlooked the genuinely vital im-

portance of the timeliness of the seating of a self-supporting

population in a debated country. I do not know how many

"rides" Marcus Whitman took but I do know that his great ride

was at the head of a marching army of settlers whose fires built

on Oregon hearthstones were of infinite more moment, so far

as conquest was concerned, than all the camp-fires that were ever

known or planned in that noble country. Possession is nine and

one-half tenths of the law in such cases. It might be too much

to say that the Ohio saved to America the Mississippi Valley;

but I do venture the assertion that if the land between Pittsburgh

and Louisville for fifty miles on either side of the Ohio River

had been as rich as that in Washington or Fayette counties in

Pennsylvania or Ohio County in West Virginia American owner-

ship of the Mississippi and expansion into the Trans-Mississippi

country would have been most seriously opposed because it would

not have been as timely as it was. I believe that the swift for-

warding of a very Nation of pioneers through the Ohio Valley

from 1785 to 1805 settled the continental dimensions of our

Republic.

By what means did this great water-way accomplish its

mission in Nation-building? This query introduces us to the

romantic story of the three great eras of Ohio Valley history, the

era of the canoe and keel-boat, the era of the flat-boat and

barge and the steamboat era. These very largely overlap but in

a measure are somewhat distinct. On shore, these eras are

represented by the pack-horse, the freighter and the railway,

though it was at least three decades after the steamboat became

really a power before the railway at all supplanted the heavy

freight wagon.

Vol. XX -- 15.

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226      Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

The canoe and keel-boat reigned supreme until about the

close of the Revolution. Both had one notable distinction; they

plied up the rivers as well as down. Through all of what, merely

for purpose of emphasis, may be called the unimportant period

of Ohio River history, these crafts were common everywhere,

bringing explorers and surveyors and prospectors, plying between

infant towns and the first mills and the salt-licks. You would

expect me to say they bore thousands of pioneers to their future

homes; while some came by that means I think a careful study

of a number of specific instances will cause any one to come to

the conclusion that a vast majority of the pioneers settling along

the upper Ohio and in Kentucky--in the canoe and keel-boat

era-very much ignored the rivers so far as immigration was

concerned. I think the land routes, the Indian traces, deer paths

and buffalo routes were of vastly more consequence than the

waterways in this early era. Vehicles and cattle were prime

requisites; the canoe and keel were not fitted for such cargoes.

No rule will hold true in any case, but in general but I am of

the impression that a correct picture of the day of the beginnings

in this great valley will show a great transient population voyag-

ing about in these first craft, with the settlements being made

by those who came in them and along the land routes with

carts and wagons and cattle and implements of agriculture. In

the canoe era the Indians faithfully patrolled the Ohio; at the

same time the lesser streams were well-nigh impassable because

of fallen timber. You will recall that General Moses Cleaveland

was unable to ascend the Cuyahoga at all because of the obstruc-

tions. One has to know very little of the early story of Kentucky

to remember that the business of the infant settlements was con-

ducted very largely on landward routes, and that all the little

towns were located well back from the great river.

The keel-boat lost little of its importance with the dawning

of the flat-boat era when the Ohio suddenly became a strategic

"Course of Empire". The keel was much like a long round-

bottom row boat roofed over, with running boards on each side.

With long poles to their shoulders, the crew traversed these

boards, "setting" the poles on the bottom of the stream or on

any other support within reach and drove the craft forward

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The Ohio River.                  227

with infinite toil up-stream. The flat-boat was the all-important

craft which made the Ohio a power in the world. It cannot be

described, except by saying that anything that would float came

under the classification. Steered by an oar, either in front or in

the rear, propelled by pole, oar, sail or current, the flat-boat can

be divided roughly into two classes; those more strongly con-

structed were usually destined for a longer journey-to the

Mississippi or its tributaries-while those more loosely built were

for the lower Ohio. The trading boats, wherever they were to

ply, were, of course, strongly built. These were driven up-

stream by pole, oar, sail or rope attached to the shore and

"cordelled" upward at great expenditure of strength- and

stimulants!

The loosely-built flat or barge (which, in general, was a

covered flat-boat with bulwarks) appearing on the upper Ohio

heralded the days of the Grand Advance; many armies with

trumpets and banners had entered this western world but none

had ever come to compare with the brown, uncouth regiments of

eager homeseekers which knocked together thousands of these

flat-boats and set sail for the prairie-lands to which the Ohio

led. No trumpets announced the coming of this army, but the

mellow call of the boat-man's horn rang a truer tune, so far

as empire-making was concerned, than ever a sabre sang or

musket crooned. For these Ships of State were floating palaces

if you look at them carefully and see their true inwardness.

Sawed lumber was the rarest thing in the Promised Land to

which this strange army was headed. And so when the flat-boat

was put together at the mills of the upper waters it was, in many

cases, a house rearranged temporarily in the shape of a craft

which would float. Arriving at the destination, the boat was

knocked apart and a cabin, house, store or school-house arose

as though created by a magician's wand from an ugly-looking

scow or raft. Conquerers had come to the Mississippi by the

thousands since La Salle buried his leaden plate, boasting splen-

didly; but none had come thither floating in their own homes,

towing schools and stores in their wake until the American ap-

peared on his raft and flat-boat - the true conqueror because he

came to give as well as to get.

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228     Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

The flat-boat and barge reigned well along into the steam-

boat era which may be said to open about 1820. In March, 1811,

Fulton and Livingston's first steamboat on western waters was

launched at Pittsburgh, having been constructed by one of their

partners, Nicholas J. Roosevelt, brother of Theodore Roose-

velt's grandfather. Mr. Roosevelt had made a preliminary voy-

age down the Ohio and Mississippi to investigate the great valleys

from the standpoint of steamboat navigation. His conclusion

was that the rivers offered a great field for steam navigation.

Accordingly the steamer "New Orleans", of about 400 tons

burden, set sail on its maiden voyage from Pittsburgh October

20th, 1811. The necessity of stopping frequently for wood to

supply the engine made the journey comparatively a slow one,

though under the circumstances it was remarkably fast. Mari-

etta was reached on the 23rd, Cincinnati on the 27th and Louis-

ville the day following; the running time from Pittsburgh to

Louisville was only 64 hours. On January 9th, 1812, New

Orleans was reached in 259 hours, running time, from the start-

ing point. This meant an average speed of eight miles an hour.

While the feat was received with loud acclaim, it was not con-

sidered possible for a steam-driven craft to ascend these great

rivers without the aid of the same means of propulsion used by

the keel - and flatboat-men. In 1817 the good ship "Washing-

ton", built by Henry Shreve, partly from the timbers of old Fort

Henry at Wheeling, proved that the steamboat could master

these giant rivers - and the day of steam on western waters had

dawned. It was not until the second decade of the century that

people guessed the future greatness of the steamboat era; but

by 1842 the steamboat tonnage of the Mississippi Basin exceeded

that of all Great Britain of 1834 by forty thousand tons, and had

over half the entire tonnage of the United States. In that year

Pittsburgh had a registered tonnage greater than that of Phila-

delphia, Boston and Charleston combined. At the same time

Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, combined, had a registered tonnage

five thousand tons greater than all the Great Lake ports com-

bined.

The bright, fascinating picture of these valleys in the hey-

day of the steamboat has been drawn on hundreds of pages and

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The Ohio River.                  229

 

it is well-known. Famous palaces were such gay boats as the

"Yorktown", and famous record-breakers were the "J. M.

White" and the "R. A. Lee". The steamer's deck was the fashion-

plate of the day, steamer's pilots were Nation's heroes known far

and wide for their prowess at the wheel. Most important, how-

ever, was the steamer's contribution in Nation-building by making

great cities in these valleys; for the growth of Pittsburgh, Cin-

cinnati and Louisville dates back to this era, while Wheeling,

Steubenville, Marietta, Parkersburg, Huntington, Portsmouth,

Ironton, Evansville, Paducah and Cairo came into important

notice in the era of the steamboat. With the advent of the rail-

ways the steamboat era has given way, in a sense, to a momentous

sequel which may be described as the era of the Steel Barge.

Neither the story of the Ohio's place in empire-building nor

that of its developing eras of navigation are more interesting

than what we may term the "melting-pot" aspect of its social

history. First to its sweeping shores crept the daring, resource-

ful Irish, Scotch-Irish and German pioneer-traders, occupying a

large portion of its headwaters - the Monongahela Country.

Then came the valiant Virginians and Carolinians who made Ken-

tucky the key-stone State of the Middle West for at least four

famous decades. In their wake came the stream of Yankee im-

migration to build up around Marietta and Cincinnati the giant

walls of anti-slavery sentiment that should make the Ohio the

western extension of Mason and Dixon's Line, saving West

Virginia and Kentucky to the Union and giving Joseph E.

Johnson to the Southern armies and Grant and Sherman to the

Northern. The crossing of these virile stocks by the settlement

of over half a hundred doughty New England families in Ken-

tucky, by the occupation of the Scioto Valley in Ohio by cavalier

Virginians, and the swarming of thousands of Southerners along

the routes northward from Cincinnati has led to the commingling

of Northern and Southern blood to which Ohio orators "point

with pride" in crowning proof of the nobility of the cosmopolitan

Ohioan who, with the aid of the Creator, regulates the move-

ments of our Planet.

Or, if you please, consider the story of the great river

biographically. From La Salle to the steel, yeast, soap and

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230      Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

whiskey kings of our time, is, perhaps, a far cry, but the

destinies of this great valley have and today still lie in the hands

of mighty men of valor whose names are synonyms of nobility,

bravery, foresight, patriotism and integrity. Note the stalwart

proportions of the first two, Christopher Gist who opened the

front door of the Valley by way of the Potomac, and Daniel

Boone who opened the Cumberland Gap highway to the promised

land. Beside its sweeping shores Pontiac, Tecumseh and Little

Turtle laid their first cunning ambuscades, and the noble Logan

mourned the passing of all his kin with an oratorical brilliancy

that leads us to doubt that Yankees built the first distillery

in Kentucky.   Washington fought his boyhood battles on

the  Ohio   tributaries, and  explored  the  river  as  far

down as the mouth of the Great Kanawha in 1770 and

patented almost forty thousand acres of good land on and near

its waters. So anxious to get the land was he that he wrote

his agent, Col. Crawford, if it was not legal to take as large a

patent as he wanted under one name to take out the necessary

number of small ones. Returning from down the river in 1770

so anxious was he to examine carefully the land without arousing

the suspicion of his fellow-voyagers that, coming to an island on

which a bear was sighted, he asked to be landed that he might

pursue bruin, which he did until his curiosity was satisfied!

What a relief in our own day to see Presidents chasing bears

for the bear's own sweet sake! George Rogers Clark came to the

Ohio in the early seventies and spent a winter near Moundsville

W. Va. Some five years later he struggled to the deathless fame

of the Illinois Conquest, laying the beginnings of proud Louisville

as he went. Here in the wilderness of the Ohio were brewed a

small army of those rough gallant spirits of the borderland, the

Indian fighters, heroes like Girtys, Wetzells, Kentons, Harrods

known to the pages of our boyhood books, to be followed by a

second generation of equally picturesque characters, the rivermen

of the keel-and flat-boat days. Of these Mike Fink was the

perfect flower and fruit-who describes himself modestly in

these magnetic words: "I can out-run, out-hop, out-jump, throw

down, drag out and lick any man in the country. I'm a Salt

River roarer; I love the wimming and I'm chock full of fight".

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The Ohio River.                   231

 

These were the days when travellers were advised not to stop

at a tavern presided over by a landlord who was minus a nose,

and when the absence of eye, nose, chin or ear was a source of

the solemn pride that today is the ear-mark of the German

student's honor.

The Ohio's role of honor bears the names of the Revolution-

ary officers who made the Ohio Company's settlement at Marietta,

Putnam, Tupper, Parsons and the sons of Mannaseh Cutler and

Israel Putnam; royal Partners of Empire, these, who pledged

that if the young Republic would create a Territory West of the

Alleghanies they would move thither and make that Territory

a genuine part of the Nation. Beautiful Marietta was the ful-

fillment of this solemn pledge, and here in 1788 the brave Pennsyl-.

vanian, General Arthur St. Clair, was inaugurated Governor over

a mighty empire now embraced in the commonwealths Ohio,

Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. Here bold Commo-

dore Whipple, hero of the "Gaspee" incident in Narragansett

Bay, built the "St. Clair", the first ocean-rigged vessel that ever

went down the Ohio, and piloted her down the mazy channel

and out to sea. Here arose Muskingum Academy, with a pre-

ceptor from Yale, the first school of higher learning between the

Ohio, Mississippi and the Alleghanies, from which Marietta Col-

lege proudly traces her beginnings. In that same year, 1797,

an ardent young Virginian, Captain William Henry Harrison be-

came Secretary of the Territory, the first step in a career of

great renown. At about the same time the eccentric Irishman,

Herman Blennerhassett, built, on an island near Parkersburgh

which he called "Isle de Beau", a home forever famous in the

Valley. Blennerhassett's folly can only be compared to that

of the Ohio steamboat-maker who wanted a big whistle on his

boat. He secured such a large one that when he blew the

whistle he hadn't steam enough left to start the boat. Blenner-

hassett's house, which is said to have cost upwards of fifty

thousand dollars, had not been built five years before its master

found it too expensive a luxury and began to find a way to leave

it and resume the practice of law. He secured a lawyer's advice

on the subject-Aaron Burr's! With this renegade from the

outraged public sentiment of the East he formed a partnership

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232       Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

for the exploitation of a southern land scheme, or what-not. It

was another partnership of "magpie and eagle". Burr's arrival

was timed as though the drama had been previously rehearsed,

and the pitiful result is common knowledge. Whatever may be

the facts of the case (and we certainly do not known them as

yet) the romance of the episode has its lasting qualities, the part-

ing of a fool with his money, the breaking of a lovely woman's

heart, the spoliation of a handsome home-and a tribunal to

find whose hands and skirts were clean! The historic island

remains, but little changed by the river's whims. The "old well"

and a giant hollow tree in which Burr hid to escape from the

Indians (who would, of course, never have thought of looking in

such secluded retreat!) and the "foundation stones" of the origi-

nal homestead, remain to interest the tourist; on Sundays and

holidays the island is widely visited, and the exuberant report of

pop-bottles and the crack of the ball-bat is heard beneath the

giant sycamores.

The Ohio has had its share of seekers for Utopia. Beauti-

ful Gallipolis was the sad Mecca for some six hundred duped

French in 1790, lured thither by speculators whose prophecies

were never realized. Economy, Pennsylvania, hard by the famous

trading center of the Canoe Age. Loggstown, was an early set-

tlement of the Harmonists. The river was the route to the

Birkbeck-Flower establishment in Illinois. Beside the Ohio was

published the first broadside in favor of the Erie Canal; at Mt.

Pleasant, Ohio, the first anti-slavery sheet in America appeared;

in Cincinnati, with "her heart's blood", as she once confided in

a friend, Mrs. Stowe wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin"; at Marietta

lived and toiled the hero who penned that marvelously human

document, which begins:

"You would hardly expect one of my age

To speak in public on the stage."

 

The part played by the Ohio in the war between the North

and South cannot be over-estimated. The campaigns involving

its great tributaries, the Tennessee and Cumberland, were vital.

A Southerner once said to Horatio Seymour, "The North would

never have beaten us if it had not been for our rivers. They ran

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The Ohio River.                  233

 

from the North into the heart of our country and we could not

get away from you." Grant's Cumberland campaigns spelled

Appomattox.

The future of the Ohio daunts the boldest dreamer. A little

less than a century ago the United States Government began the

"improvement" of the river. This meant merely clearing out the

more serious obstructions such as half-sunken logs and wrecked

boats. At various points rip-rap wing dams were constructed.

About fifty years ago larger plans for the maintenance of a steady

flow of water throughout the year were developed. One of these

was the "canal plan"; longitudinal mounds and cross dams were

to be so fashioned as to make a canal on one shore of the river.

What was known as Livermore's Plan was a scheme to erect

combination dams and chutes, according to a patent taken out

by the author. A "reservoir plan" was the solution of Charles

Ellet about 1850. By this scheme great reservoirs were to be

created on the headwaters of the rivers; these were to be filled

in times of abundance and slowly drained in times of famine

but rapidly enough to provide, according to the author, eight

feet of water in the channel at Wheeling in the dryest seasons.

The first suggestion recommending locks and dams in the

usual sense was made in 1870 by W. Milner Roberts. Four years

later Major W. E. Merrill, Corps of Engineers, U. S. A., recom-

mended the improvement of the river from Wheeling to Pitts-

burgh by a system of 13 locks and movable dams. In 1875 one

hundred thousand dollars was carried in the River and Harbor

Act for the building of Lock and Dam No. 1 at the head of Davis

Island six miles below Pittsburgh. Locks and dams Nos. 2, 3,

4, 5, 6, and 18 were completed between 1904 and 1910. Nos.

8, 11, 13, and 37 are nearing completion; Nos. 19 and 26 are well

advanced and Nos. 7, 9, 10, 12, and 29 are started. The total

number of dams between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati will be 37,

and between Pittsburgh and Cairo, 54. In adopting the "Lock-

wood Board" recommendation in the River and Harbor Bill of

1910 Congress enunciated the most important policy ever adopt-

ed; it means that the entire river will be given a minimum depth

of navigation of 9 feet of water and that, more important still,

the appropriation made therein was made with "a view to the

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234        Ohio Arch. and Hist. Society Publications.

 

completion of such improvement within a period of 12 years".

The expenditures to June 30, 1909, have been, for open river

navigation $6,500,000; for lock and dam construction, $11,500,-

000, and for operating and care of Locks 1 to 6, $785,964.00.

When this great work of internal improvement is completed

what Andrew Carnegie has called "The Work-Shop of the

World" will see the dawning of the day when the great prophecies

made for it will be in the way of realization. The completion

of such other great works as the proposed Lake Erie and Ohio

River Ship Canal will hasten the day. The shipments of coal

will be regular and not dependent on the caprice of the river

freshets. A great free avenue of trade on which freight can

be carried by the cheapest known methods will certainly re-

dound to the rapid growth of the splendid empire drained by the

Ohio and its tributaries, for it should be observed that most of

the important Ohio tributaries are already improved with locks

and dams. The rate on a ton of coal today from         Pittsburgh

across Ohio to Ashtabula by rail is as high as the rate from

Pittsburgh to New Orleans by boat; and a single giant tow-boat

has safely convoyed down the river a fleet of coal barges which

would have filled a freight train eleven miles in length. One of

the great prophets of the new Era of the Steel Barge, Stanley

of Kentucky, lately said:

 

"There are men within the sound of my voice who can remember

the time when Chicago was a hunter's camp upon an untroubled stream

and a placid lake. And yet what are the cities of Chicago and St.

Louis? They are but the caps and breakers upon that great waves

of progress and of power that finds expression in those massive works.

Behind the city of Chicago and behind the city of St. Louis are mil-

lions of toiling Americans who made those cities great, simply because

it was at that point in Missouri and at that point in Illinois where

the products of the mines and of the fields could find most ready ex-

change for the product of the mill. Around you on every side are

fields more fertile than those that feed the city of St. Louis or the

city of Chicago. Within your hills along this valley is wealth un-

known to any citizen of the plain; and citizenship as energetic, as

willing, as earnest, and as patriotic. And I tell you that I am neither

a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but one of the results of this

great movement of river improvement will be that along the valley of

the Ohio, God's Eden restored, will spring up on this great canal

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The Ohio River.                   235   when it is completed the peer of any city in this or any other country on the reeling earth."   In that day will dawn the beginning of the real era of the Steel Barge. Then the eras of the canoe and keel, of flat-boat and barge and steamer, as once known, will seem but the memories of a bygone millennium.   May the ancient, though rough, love of country still survive, the old honesty, the old love for labor - as in the stirring days when the pioneers towed with them down the valley their homes and shops and school- houses.

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