The Ohio River; a course of empire

Front matter

LI b RARY

OF THE

U N I VERSITY

Contents

CHAPTER

II.- III.-

VI.-

Chapter I Introductory: The River, its Place and Power

FROM whatever standpoint one views the Ohio River it has a most interesting history; but of them all none is more attractive or important than that from w^hich it appears as a strategic avenue of national expansion. "Westward the course of empire takes its way"; this definition of the Ohio River very nearly meets the case. It was a course of empire; the Great Lakes did not become an emigration route until the steamboat had established its reputation in the third decade of the nineteenth centur>\ By that time the entire eastern half of the Mississippi Basin had received a great bulk of its population, and the occupation of its western half was merely a matter of time. From the eastern seaboard there were many river routes into the interior; the St. John, Penobscot, Connecticut, Hudson, Delaware, Potomac, and James were avenues of approach for the race that fell heir to this continent. But once across the Appalachian range there was but one river and on the Ohio and its tributaries that race spread its marvellous conquest. The occupation of the Ohio Basin was of strategic importance because, of necessity, the occupation of the remainder of the continent must follow. The vital question was not whether the Rocky Mountains could be crossed and the Pacific Coast secured but, rather, could the Appalachian Mountains be crossed and the eastern half of the Mississippi Basin be occupied. The Ohio River was one strategic course of empire to the heart of the continent, and there is no phase of its history that is not of imperishable significance.

The first brave English adventurers who looked with eager eyes upon the great river of the Middle West learned that its Indian name was represented by the letters Oyo, and it has since been known as the Ohio River. The French, who came in advance of the English, translated the Indian name, we are told, and called the Ohio La Belle Riviere, "the beautiful river."

We have, however, other testimony concerning the name that cannot well be overlooked. It is that of the two experienced and well-educated Moravian missionaries, Heckewelder and Zeisberger, who came into the trans-Allegheny country long before the end of the eighteenth century. Upon such a subject as the meaning of Ohio, one might easily hold these men to be final authorities. John Heckewelder affirms that Oyo never could have been correctly translated "beautiful"; Zeisberger adds that in the Onondaga dialect of the Iroquois tongue there was a word oyoneri which meant "beautiful" but only in the adverbial sense — something that was done "beautifully," or, as we say, done "well." Mr. Heckewelder, knowing that it was commonly understood that the French had translated Oyo when they gave the name La Belle Riviere to the Ohio, took occasion to study the matter carefully. He found that in the Miami language O'hui or Ohi, as prefixes, meant "very"; for instance, Ohiopeek meant "very white''; Ohiopeekhanne meant "the white foaming river."

The Ohio River [he writes], being In many places wide and deep and so gentle that for many miles, in some places, no current is perceivable, the least wind blowing up the river covers the surface with what the people of that country call "white caps"; and I have myself witnessed that for days together, this has been the case, caused by southwesterly winds (which, by the way, are the prevailing winds in that country), so that we, navigating the canoes, durst not venture to proceed, as these white caps would have filled and sunk our canoes in an instant. Now, in such cases, when the river could not be navigated with canoes, nor even crossed with this kind of craft — when the whole surface of the water presented white foaming swells, the Indians would, as the case was at the time, say, " juh Ohiopiechen, Ohiopeek, Ohiopeekhanne " ; and when they supposed the water very deep they would say " Kitschi, Ohiopeekhanne," which means, "verily this is a deep white river. "

For one, I like the interpretation of "Ohio" as given by those old missionaries — ^the ' ' River of Many White Caps." True, there is a splendid, sweeping beauty in the Ohio, but throughout a large portion of its course the land lies low on either bank, and those who have feasted their eyes on the picturesque Hudson, or on the dashing beauty of the Saguenay, have been heard to call in question the judgment of the French who named the Ohio La Belle Riviere. But it must be remembered that the French first saw the upper waters of the Ohio, which we now know as the glittering Allegheny. La Belle Riviere included the Ohio and the Allegheny; it was not until the English had reached the Ohio, about the middle of the eighteenth century, that it came to be said that the Allegheny and Monongahela formed the Ohio at Pittsburg. To one acquainted with the roaring Allegheny, dancing down through the New York and Pennsylvania hills, and who can see how clear the waters ran in the dense green of the ancient forests — to such a one it is not difficult to see why the French called it La Belle Riviere.

As I write there sounds over and above the noises of a busy little city the long deep booming of an Ohio River steamboat ploughing its way through from Cincinnati to Pittsburg. By day or by night, the hoarse baying of these inland greyhounds is singularly charming; the echoes roll away upon the Virginia hlls and then come thundering back upon the heights on the " Indian side, " as the Ohio shore was called for so many critical years. And as the mellow notes fade away far inland it occurs to me that if judged by the criterion, "handsome is as handsome does," there is hardly a stream of water in America to compare with the Ohio River. Few streams ever played so vital a part in the development of the United States. Providence meant this should be so. With a lavish hand these waters were thrown where they would count magnificently toward the building of a new republic. Three important conditions were answered: first, a generous quantity of water falls every year within the two hundred thousand square miles drained by the Ohio River and its tributaries; second, a liberal proportion of the water that falls flows away; third, the water passing from this area flows in the right direction — ^westward.

It will surprise most people to be told that very nearly one fourth of all the water that reaches the Gulf of Mexico through the mouths of the Mississippi comes from the Ohio River. While the drainage area of the Missouri is much greater than that of the Ohio, and the rainfall in that area is proportionally larger, yet the land is more thirsty there, and the result is that a smaller proportion of the water that falls flows away. Practically, therefore, the Ohio is a much greater river than the Missouri; and, for the same reason, a greater river than the Mississippi I above the mouth of the Missouri.

This splendid supply of water falling in the Ohio Basin flows westward — a fact of momentous importance in the destiny of America. Edward Everett said in Faneuil Hall in 1835, when advocating in a public address the building of the Boston and Albany Railway,

The destinies of the country, if I may use a language which sounds rather mystical, but which every one, I beheve, understands,— the destinies of the country run east and west. Intercourse between the mighty interior west and the seacoast is the great principle of our commercial prosperity and political strength.

In the pages that follow it will be seen how the Ohio reached far out into the foothills of the Alleghenies and Cumberland Mountains beckoning to the colonists on the Atlantic seacoast; with outstretched arms, spread as wude apart as are the sources of the Allegheny on the north and those of the Tennessee on the south, the Ohio River called through the dark forests to the conquerers of the West to come to their own for their own would receive them gladly.

No sooner was the call obeyed than the Ohio became a busy river, which is better, after all, than a beautiful river. Long before the booming note of a steamer's whistle echoed through these western hills was heard the cry of the pilot's voice in the prow of the long, heavy canoes; back and forth on the main trunk of the Ohio and into its more important tributaries, the Allegheny, Monongahela, Muskingum, Wabash, Kanawha, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Cumberland, sped these light craft carrying the earliest loads of freight — great packs of furs and casks of salt and provisions.

The history of the Ohio River might very well be divided into four ages and the first would be the Canoe Age when the steersman's voice rang clearly over the waters which flowed swiftly through their winding aisles in the forests. Then the rush of emigration into the West relegated the canoe to the smaller streams when the keelboats and flatboats and brigs came — ^when the boatman's magic horn drowned out the steersman's voice and heralded the Flatboat Age.

There is no believing the stories told of the busy scenes on this river and its tributaries while it was for a few mad years hurrying a whole vast Nation into the Middle West. Sixty and seventy flatboats have been seen to pass a given point (Bellville, West Virginia, for instance) in a single day. The European statesman who prophesied a dismemberment of America, soon after independence was secured, never saw this fleet of homeseekers hurrying along the Ohio to find new lands — ^whose memories of the homes they had left in the East were as precious and tender as their courage was noble and unfailing. In Europe mountains had almost become imperative boundaries of empire ; and therefore it was believed that the Alleghenies would eventually divide two empires in America. The reverse of this was true, for it seems that the very hardships these early emigrants endured on those bleak mountains, the tears the pioneer women shed, the suffering the men and boys endured, made them all love the old homes behind them better; made it impossible for them to harbor a thought of political alienation. And then, at the foot of the mountains lay the head-streams of the Ohio; the horns of boatmen just gone before them could be heard echoing along the hills — a, siren voice calling them down the broad stream. In almost a moment's time the population of the Ohio Basin sprang from 783,635 to 3,620,314 souls. The average increase of percentage of permanent population in the States of the Old Northwest in the Ohio Valley during the first five decades of the nineteenth century was over 182 per decade. Indiana's population between 18 10 and 1820 increased over 500 per cent. — a record equalled only three times in all the phenomenal "rushes" of recent years into the Western States. Those who prophesied political separation of this great people, many of whom had fought in the armies of independence, never heard a boatman's horn or read aright its simple and powerfully patriotic message.

But the boatman's horn died away, as had the echoes of the rough steersman's cry, and the booming note of the steamboat's whistle heralded the Steamboat Age. As both the voice and the mellow note of the horn had been typical of their Ages, so the shrill cry of the steam whistle is typical of the third period of Ohio River history. The Ohio itself had changed little in all these years. In a decade the United States spent almost as much in building the Old National Road from the Potomac to the Ohio as it has spent on Ohio River improvement in three quarters of a century. In the Canoe Age and Flatboat Age the river was practically useless half the year; in the winter it was ice-bound; in summer it ran dry. Pioneers unacquainted with the Ohio thought their hardships were over when the Alleghenies had been scaled. Imagine the surprise of Ephraim Cutler, for instance, who emigrated from Killingly, Connecticut, to Marietta, Ohio; he came four hundred miles from his home to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, on the Monongahela River, with cart and oxen in fifty-nine days; it took him thirty-one days more to float two hundred miles down-stream to Marietta. As late as 1866 it was estimated that there were two hundred and eighty-five dangerous obstructions in the Ohio such as snags, logs, and wrecked boats. Reefs and bars were not counted.

Along the shores a vast change had come over the face of the wilderness during the Flatboat Age, and the steamboats marked not only the rise of the great industries but also the swift advance of the cities, Pittsburg , Cincinnati, and Louisville. While statistics on the subject are almost inaccessible yet it is beyond question that until the Steamboat Age the majority of the population in what may be called the Ohio Valley was not along the Ohio River. In pioneer days the immediate banks of the river were not suitable for habitation. This was true in prehistoric and

Indian days. Take a map of the works built by the Moundbuilding Indians and it is clear that the smaller tributaries of the Ohio River were the favorite locations of those earliest tribes. It is on the Miami, Scioto, and Licking rivers in Ohio that we find the chief monuments of that prehistoric race. A great mound at Moundsville, West Virginia, and the impressive works at Marietta and Portsmouth are the only really significant monuments on the banks of the Ohio, while on the lesser interior tributaries we find vast quantities of these remains.

The same thing seems to be true of the Indian nations which white men found in this same drainage area. The chief seats of the Delaware, Shawanese, and Miami nations were not on the Ohio River, but rather on the Miami, Scioto, and upper Muskingum rivers. Save the Shawanese town at the mouth of the Scioto there was hardly an Indian town of any prominence on the Ohio River until such early commercial villages as Logstown near Pittsburg and Shawneetown near Portsmouth, Ohio, were established ; and the Scioto town was ruined by a flood and entirely abandoned for a safer location near the present Chillicothe, Ohio. A pioneer in Ohio, writing of the location of the Ohio Indians, says: "Their habitations were at the heads of the principal streams. " The rule was quite invariable in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. There were practically no Indian settlements in Kentucky or western Virginia; the meadow-land — Kcn-ta-ke — was a favorite hunting-ground, and the Indians never resided in their hunting-grounds.

Many of the reasons which inclined the earlier inhabitants of the Ohio Valley influenced the first io The Ohio River

white people who came thither. The bottom-lands on the immediate river shore were rich but they were comparatively few in number, and the flood-tides of the Ohio throughout the centuries made the river locations unhealthy; the bottom-land farms were often widely separated by projecting bluffs, while in the equally rich interior the newly cleared farms were closely joined and the community of interests thus secured by the proximity of numerous pioneer farmers gave rise to villages and towns. The Ohio's being the boundary line of counties did not make it a central site for county-seats. Only six of the county-seats of the fourteen Ohio River counties are on that river. The few important towns that sprang up on the banks of the Ohio in the Canoe and Flatboat Ages were the ports of embarkation and debarkation; of the former class Brownsville and Pittsburg in Pennsylvania and Wheeling in western Virginia were the most prominent ; while of the latter class Cincinnati in Ohio, Maysville and Louisville in Kentucky, Madison and Evansville in Indiana, and Shawneetown in Illinois were the most important.

The most spectacular change that came with the dawning of the Steamboat Age was the swift advance of certain of these entrepots in point of population — the crowning the beautiful valley with three imperial cities — and the commercial awakening upon and under the earth. In a moment's time the hail of the steamer's whistle was answered on land by ten thousand cries of triumph from as many brazen throats — and the note of the boatman's horn was as far lost amid the blue hills, measured by hopes and dreams, as the forgotten patroon's cry from the prow of the heavy canoe.

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Between the cities, towns and villages sprang up in the Steamboat Age to live and thrive until the steamboat reached and passed the crest of its popularity. The steamboat reigned as king of the inland waters from 1820 to about the beginning of the Civil War in i860, as the flatboat had reigned through the forty years preceding 1820. At the middle of the nineteenth century palatial steamers left Pittsburg, Cincinnati, and Louisville every day in the week, and an unnumbered list of smaller lines plied between the cities and lesser towns. With the building of what are now the Pennsylvania, Ohio River, Chesapeake and Ohio, Louisville and Nashville, and Baltimore and Ohio railways the steamboat trade, which had grown to enormous proportions, quickly sank to a comparatively trifling figure. The heavy passenger trade vanished entirely; the freight traffic was greatly diminished. You cannot go by a regular steamboat to-day from Pittsburg to St. Louis, or from Pittsburg to Louisville, or from Cincinnati to St. Louis. In a trip from Pittsburg to St. Louis you must change boats at Cincinnati, Louisville, and Cairo. Many thriving towns which were points of national importance half a century ago in the Steamboat Age have been ignored by the railways and lie sleeping in the sun and in the snow dreaming only of the old days and their merry scenes. Other towns, like Maysville, Kentucky, have retained something of their old-time position in the whirl of modern life.

But there is another and more telling form in which to review this marvellous river's history than by the varying form of craft which plied its waters; and this is by picturing typical representatives of the several classes of people in whose lives this stream played a part. Indeed the following pages, after those necessarily given to the period of conquest, will be found to be studies of men. The Ohio River is remarkable in this respect, the tremendous human interest which attaches to its history. No river of its size in America gave a livelihood to more people in a century's time; many which approximate or equal the Ohio in historic importance, as the Potomac, bear no comparison with it on the score of the personal element.

There was, first, the explorer, the brave La Salle, who first of Europeans saw the Ohio Valley; after him comes a long line of equally brave, picturesque men down to George Washington, the first to leave us an approximately accurate description of it. In this army of explorers we find the names of America's boldest adventurers. Gist, Croghan, Boone, Washington, George Rogers Clark, Kenton, Lewis, and William Clark. England gave America no great explorers, no successors to La Salle, Champlain, Marquette, Brule, and Joliet. The above named list of fearless adventurers were bom on this continent and bred to lives that made them the patriots and heroes they

were.

And after the explorers of the Ohio came that swarthy, rough army of borderers who wrestled with the Indian for the mastery. In this list we must repeat almost every name previously given and add many more, as the Poes, Wetzells, Girtys, Crawford, Harmar, St. Clair, "Mad Anthony" Wayne, and William Henry Harrison.

When the fighting was done came the rush of the

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Sun-dial Used at Fort Duquesne.

pioneer hosts to the Ohio, Dutch, Irish, Scotch, and Quaker, pious, long-legged Yankee, roistering, chivalrous Virginian, rich man, poor man, beggar man, and thief. This era calls vainly for an historian to chronicle its real story of commingled generosity and avarice, rough hospitality and murder — the passionate lust of an unbridled multitude leaping into a wilderness. On this count no American river ever can approach the Ohio; on no other river in the world has such a remarkable social movement ever spent its force.

Upon analyzation this multitude naturally falls into many distinct classes bringing into bold relief a score of personal types that are interesting: there were the conscienceless land-jobbers selling that which they did not own — a large class scattered widely in the Ohio Valley; there were the hardy, honest surveyors who played a useful part in their day; there were the promoters of cities and towns arguing forcefully with the plat of town-lots in their hands; the varying types of rivermen, masters, sailors, oarsmen, packers, roustabouts, polers, flatboatmen, keelboatmen, rafters, and beachcombers, form as unique a human element as can be found in all western history. Mike Fink is as distinct a character as any Dickens ever drew, and all worthy of a Dickens's pen, as is true of Colonel Plug, Micajah Harpe, and Wilson's gang. Special mention must be made of the flatboatmen, a cursing mob of men who bore the brunt of the toil and weariness that must fall on some shoulders if a civilization was to be born in a day in a new land; slaving at the "sweep" or at the "gouger" through many exhausting hours, the very frolic of these men had to be a brutal frolic. As a consequence the

"bully" of the valley knew how to fight with hands, knees, elbows, shoulders, feet, head, and teeth; and, as we shall see, an amazed traveller, when asking how to tell a respectable tavern from the reverse was advised not to stop with a landlord who was minus a nose or ear.

In more recent days the host of captains and deckhands and the other hundred odd engages in the Steamboat Age form the last of these interesting groups of Ohio River heroes.

i

Chapter II Where France and England Met

WHO can describe the old Ohio as it lay beneath the sun and stars a century and a half ago? Who of us can, even in imagination, picture this great waterway bound in on either side by the Black Forest of America — a long, shining aisle through a fair, green world ? This is the bright side of the picture, the forest green, the silvery call of the rapids, the lower monotone of the sweeping current. The poets paint such scenes and crown their fair creation with an Indian maiden singing beside her work in a gilded canoe.

But such pictures are not inspired by a careful study of our pioneer literature, at least so far as the Ohio River might be concerned. The dark side of the picture must overshadow the light; the havoc of the floods and storms removed from the scene much of beauty, and the bitter conditions of life in those distant days eliminated almost everything of joy. We are speaking of actual conditions that existed upon the Ohio before it was possessed by a white race. It has already been made plain that the shores of the river were not popular as the sites of Indian villages, and it can easily be imagined how the old-time floods affected the river shores ; to-day, when much of the river bank is comparatively free of timber, the effects of the great floods are seen and felt for a long period after the waters have receded; what, then, was the case when the river banks and bottoms were one tangled mass of tree and vine into which the sun could never shine save in winter when the ground was frozen?

Moreover in our day the great piles of driftwood and the wild miscellaneous plunder of the floods is rapidly cleared away from river shore and bottom-land; fancy the day when the deposit of the floods along the Ohio shores had continued ceaselessly for centuries — gigantic mountains of flood-plunder from the upper rivers thrown up in the dark, wet forest labyrinth at the foot of the great curves of the Ohio. At some points these great reeking monuments to the fury of the waters were almost terrifying to look upon, and no one but a collector of reptiles would ever climb them. When these shaggy mountains of broken and twisted trees accumulated in the centre of a river they often formed a treacherous bridge and became of use to the early travellers who came that way.

When General Butler came to the lower Ohio to hold a treaty with the Indians he was advised by friendly natives to build his fort far back on the hills as the floods below the mouth of the Wabash often spread over bottom-lands five miles in width. In the winter seasons the ice jams were not less gigantic than those sometimes formed to-day; and, without modem means of handling these dangerous phenomena, they spent their titanic forces along the Ohio shores and sometimes for miles into the bottom-land interior. The forests, however, proved a buttress against this evil and held in check vast fields of ice m m

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I which piled up to a great height where the trees held them at bay.

The continual falling of forests along its banks tended to make either shore of the river an intricate network of water-soaked trunks and branches. The conditions tended to preserve for a very long while this steadily increasing tangle of root and branch and it is probable that the pilot of a frail canoe in the; old days had to continue to look with a keen eye for a place to land for many rods and, in some places, miles, before finding a suitable landing and camping place. The more prominent of these obstructions were called "planters" and "sawyers" by the pioneers. Planters were logs which were imbedded in the river bed and stuck out of the water either straight up or slanting and which were immovable. They were the most dangerous obstacles in pioneer river navigation. Sawyers w^ere trunks or limbs of trees protruding from the water which were kept in motion by the swinging tides of the river ; as the name implies, they kept "sawing." These usually pointed down-stream and boats could often be shoved over if they happened to run foul of them. Bars, snags, rocks, and sunken logs were other dangers, and an early Ohio River pilot in canoe or flatboat had to possess sharp ears as well as sharp eyes; for it was a legend among old rivermen that boats floated faster in the night than in the daytime (for the same reason, no doubt, that com grows faster at night than in the day!) and the sound of the water "riffling" around the rocks, "planters," and "sawyers" was the one and only warning that the steersman had of danger. Such must have been some aspects of the "River of Many White Caps" when the eyes of the first adventurous Europeans looked through the leafy forests upon it. Some of these early pilgrims left records of their experiences which have come down to us, and though in the main they are little more than records of the temperature of the water and the temper of the Indian, yet they are our earliest accounts and as such are precious memorials of the dawning of civilization in the eastern half of the Mississippi Basin.

There is no question but that the brave La Salle discovered La Belle Riviere of New France (the Allegheny and Ohio) about 1670. He left no record that confirms this but his later references to the region of the Ohio are almost conclusive evidence that he descended that river probably to " the Falls, " as the rapids of Louisville have been known since the dawn of history in the West. It was in the last year of the first half of the eighteenth century that the first European to leave record of it sailed the waters of the Ohio. This was Celoron de Bienville, a chevalier of the military order of St. Louis commanding a detachment sent to La Belle Riviere by Marquis de la Galissoniere, commander of all New France and the country of Louisiana. The story of the advance from Montreal of this picturesque company of men, comprising "a captain, eight subaltern officers, six cadets, an armorer, twenty men of the troops, one hundred and eighty Canadians, and nearly thirty savages — equal number of Iroquois and Abenakes, " is the very epitome of romance.

As is well known, both England and France claimed the Mississippi Basin, the former through the disco vereries of Cabot and the latter through the exploration

Where France and Eno^land Met 19 of La Salle. Cabot discovered the American coast line and claimed possession of all the land in the interior for his English King. La Salle in 1682 buried a leaden plate at the mouth of the Mississippi, which claimed for his Bourbon King all the land drained by the waters which there passed into the sea! The French, established on the St. Lawrence, had found their way westw^ard to the Great Lakes by the Ottawa River, the St. Lawrence being controlled by the Iroquois or Six Nations whose enmity was recklessly incurred at an early date. Reaching the Great Lakes the French voyageurs, traders, and daring missionaries pressed on to the Mississippi by way of the Illinois, Wabash, and Wisconsin rivers and formed a connection finally with the Louisiana colony and its capital, New Orleans. Thus the region watered by the Ottawa River, Lakes Huron, Michigan, and Superior, and all the tributaries of the upper Mississippi, including the Wabash and lower Ohio, came under the influence of the King of France and contributed of its vast wealth of fur to his coffers, filtering through the fingers of peculating agents and governors.