For readers who slept through their high school American
history classes, you probably missed a key detail we “citified” people raised
in the northern counties of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois conveniently like to
overlook: the undeniable fact that our three states were settled by immigrants from the bottom up, not from the top down.
Putting it in family terms, the Drakes and Coffeys (paternal
grandparents) did not fly into Chicago’s O’Hare airport and take the Amtrak
south to Logan County, Illinois; they likely floated down the Ohio, and up the
Wabash in the early 1820’s (beating a later upstart named Abraham Lincoln to
central Illinois by a full generation). On the maternal side, the Hendersons (grandmother)
were a clear boat ride down the Ohio River to its convergence with the Mississippi
River (a.k.a. the flood zone); while the Wards (grandfather) appear to have turned south down the Tennessee River before turning around and veering north again. This makes my family tree not
much different than that of countless other “native” Midwesterners,
particularly those with Scottish-Irish surnames.
If one is into history, and I am, this settlement of the
heartland saga is covered in detail in a travel log written long ago titled Afloat on the Ohio by Reuben GoldThwaites. In the 1800s, the Ohio River was the
superhighway of American expansion. Thwaites (1853 – 1913) was a
journalist and librarian who was the editor of the Wisconsin State Journal. His
more famous work as an editor was on the Journals of the Lewis and Clark
Expedition.
Afloat on the Ohio
is not technically a history book, it’s the log from a "vacation" trip Thwaite, his
wife, their ten year old son, and a friend dubbed “the Doctor” took in 1894. Like the pioneers before them, they launched
their journey at Redstone (now known as Brownsville, Pennsylvania) on the
Monongahela River, which winds its way north a little ways to Pittsburgh where it merges with the Allegheny to form the Ohio River. Six weeks later they disembarked from their
boat in Cairo, Illinois (pronounced Kay-row) where the Ohio River meets the
Mississippi River. Between were
cities/towns like: Wheeling, Ashland, Cincinnati, Covington, Louisville, New
Albany, Owensboro, Evansville, Elizabethtown, Paducah and Metropolis (Fort Massac). Get out the atlas, you will need it.
The significance of this waterway to American history cannot
be overstated, as one rapidly learns as the party pulls ashore each night to camp. There was not a single stop
that Thwaites was not able to relate to an event in American history. In the early decades of the new nation the
river was the divide between the acknowledged Indian country on the north side
of the river, and the storied Davey Crockett – Daniel Boone settlement era on
the south side of the river. The Ohio would
later mark the primary dividing line between the South and the North during the
Civil War.
While reflecting on American history in his journals,
Thwaites also proves to be a keen observer of the present (the “present” being 1894)
– a mere 29 years after the Civil War, with poor and displaced “crackers” and
“negroes” populating the river towns, left out of the post-war economy, an economy that was quickly passing them by completely as it crossed the Mississippi into
the plains. Thwaites, an educated man,
and also a northerner, often uses language then common that makes one cringe
today, not the least of which was the consistent slander of the period’s latest
wave of immigrants: eastern Europeans.
An interesting sub topic in the book is the varieties of river
boats. The Thwaites entourage traveled in a home-made cross between the
legendary flat boat, and what we would today call a houseboat; while the bulk
of river traffic was still carried on steam boats.
In the years just ahead of the trip, the Baltimore & Ohio RR
connected with river traffic at Parkersburg, WV. When it
“jumped” the Ohio River however, the B&O and other railroads, rapidly
came to dominate all shipping, and contributed to the decline of these river
towns, because freight and passenger traffic no longer had to follow the waterways.
One has to be a history buff to read this book today, and
even with that qualification the phrase “if you’ve seen one river town you’ve
seen them all” passed through my mind several times; this despite the fact that
Henry David Thoreau was clearly Thwaites’ literary role model. Afloat on the Ohio contains countless descriptions
of the river basin’s natural habitat that are detailed, yet poetic. His descriptions of the “river folk” while
not up to Mark Twain’s caliber, are astute none-the-less.
