Home : Opening Of The West :

Ohio River Valley

For more than two centuries, American national identity has been tied inextricably to the idea of the West. The western dream of individual freedom and limitless expansion has shaped American cultural values and political ideologies. Literature, theater, and film have retraced the legends of the West and reinterpreted its heroes for modern audiences.

Encountering the West has become a mode of examining America itself, a way of understanding the possibility and loss embodied in the national experience. The lure of the West began with the earliest European voyages across the Atlantic, but it was not until the late eighteenth century that a distinctively American West emerged. In the great expanse of territory stretching from the Appalachians to the Mississippi, circumstance and opportunity created an arena of complex struggles that prefigured other western eras that followed.

The promise of this first American West drew soldiers, adventurers, speculators, and common folk into the rich lands of the Ohio River Valley and the Bluegrass region of Kentucky. Its potential also provoked international rivalries, struggles for political power, and the appropriation of Native American lands.

The river is formed by the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. From Pittsburgh, it flows northwest before making an abrupt turn to the south-southwest. The river then follows a roughly southwest and then west-northwest course before bending to a west-southwest course for most of its length. It joins the Mississippi near the city of Cairo, Illinois.

Because the Ohio River flowed westwardly, it became the convenient means of westward movement by pioneers. After reaching the mouth of the Ohio, settlers would travel north on the Mississippi River to St. Louis, Missouri. There, some continued on up the Missouri River, some up the Mississippi, and some further west over land routes.

The first explorations of the trans-Appalachian West by European Americans came in the late seventeenth century. Virginia Colonel Abram Wood made the earliest recorded visit to what would become Kentucky in 1654. At that time and for more than a century that followed, France claimed the entire region to the west of the Appalachians.

French outposts were established on the Wabash, Illinois, Mississippi and other western rivers. In 1729, French traders and groups of Delaware, Shawnee, and Mingo established Lower Shawneetown in Ohio. French hegemony remained in place until 1763, when France's defeat in the French and Indian War brought the whole vast western territory into British hands. Early descriptions of the trans-Appalachian West conveyed the astonishing richness of the natural landscape and the life it supported.

The years from 1790 until the coming of the Civil War were booming, bustling years at the Falls of the Ohio and in the Bluegrass Region of Kentucky. In this "First West”, settlers from the east and new immigrants to America came looking for a place where they could own their own land and raise families.

Everyone knows the name of Daniel Boone, an early explorer from North Carolina who came to Kentucky first as a hunter, looking for furs to trade. He returned many times to blaze trails and to survey the land, so that settlers could follow and claim lands to farm. He encountered the natives, who were not friendly towards strangers coming to hunt and settle on the land they also used. Some of the encounters were violent. Yet despite this, the Bluegrass region was attractive to settlers from the east who saw the fertile farmlands, rich with wildlife.

The Ohio River is the lifeblood of the central Kentucky region. It was the broad highway from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, from the eastern settlements of the coast to the Mississippi Valley. First French fur traders and trappers followed the path to the interior, then the flatboat and keelboats of the first settlers, and finally great steamboats went up and down the river.

The Falls of the Ohio, a series of rocky rapids, were an obstacle to boats trying to go up or down the river. Boats going downriver had to unload at Louisville, carry their cargo and passengers overland, and reload at Shippingport or Portland for the rest of the journey west. It was expensive and inconvenient for travelers, but provided work for many people in the Falls towns.

The Louisiana Purchase, included all of the land north of New Orleans, west of the Missisippi, into the Rocky Mountains on the west, and north to Canada. It doubled the size of the United States. The important port of New Orleans at the mouth of the Mississippi was now in American control. Jefferson set his friends and associates Merriwether Lewis and William Clark, brother of Louisville’s founder George Rogers Clark, to explore and map the new territory. Several men from Kentucky went on the expedition.

Kentucky grew so fast that by 1820 it was the 6th largest state in America. Settlers wanted land, and banks were set up to loan them money to start farms and businesses. But the banks were not careful in their loans, and in 1819 and again in 1837 the banks failed – went out of business – and the people who had money in them lost everything. Those were periods of great suffering, when there was very little work in the region. But people pulled out of it in time.

Louisville was named for King Louis XVI of France, who helped America in the Revolution. It was founded by George Rogers Clark in 1778. Clark brought a party of militia men and settlers to defend the Ohio Valley, the frontier during the Revolution, from the British army and their Indian allies. They set up a fort on Corn Island in the Ohio River. He lived in Indiana, but after being injured in an accident he moved to his sister’s home near Louisville. Lucy Clark Croghan and her husband William gave the old Indian fighter a home at Locust Grove plantation until his death in 1818.

Twenty years later, Louisville was one of six small cities at the Falls of the Ohio – the others were Portland and Shippingport in Kentucky, and New Albany, Jeffersonville, and Clarksville in Indiana. But Louisville grew faster than the rest, and soon became the premier city in the region. The city grew so fast in the early years of the century that in some years the population doubled. Houses could not be built fast enough. Louisville was the gateway to the Western Waters, where thousands of people headed each year to settle the new territories. They stopped in Louisville to buy provisions – food, seeds, clothing, tools, and other supplies.

Daniel Boone

When Daniel Boone, toward the end of his 86th year, died peacefully in bed in his son Nathan's elegant stone Missouri farmhouse on September 26, 1820, the surge of emigrants along the Oregon Trail was still a generation away. But Boone already exemplified the pioneer at his best. He was neither the physical giant (five feet nine) nor the innocent child of nature that legend has made of him. He was an intelligent, soft-spoken family man who cherished the same wife for 57 years. Though he never learned to spell—he had left school early after putting an emetic in a hated teacher's hidden whiskey bottle — he could read Gulliver's Travels aloud to hunting partners by the light of campfires. He befriended Indians, preferred company to solitude and when he told his wife it was time to move because a newcomer had settled some 70 miles away, he was joking. He loved the forest but it was also his place of business: in it, he was out for a buck — literally—because of a buckskin's worth.

Pennsylvania-born, Boone was one of 11 children in a family of Quakers who migrated to North Carolina. There Boone was recruited at age 40 to undertake a scheme designed to open up Kentucky to settlers and establish it as a 14th colony. He arranged a deal by which the Cherokees sold 20 million acres for £ 10,000 worth of goods to Boone's employers, the Transylvania Company. It was all fair and square — the Indians had an attorney, an interpreter and the sound advice of their squaws. The deal completed, Boone led a party from Tennessee through the Cumberland Gap, hacked out the Wilderness Road and set up a town — Boonesboro — and a government. Elected a legislator, he introduced on the first session's first day a bill to protect game against wanton slaughter and a second bill to "improve the breed of horses." He got 2,000 acres for his work, but after the Revolution—in which Boone won considerable fame as a militia commander — the scheme of the Transylvania Company was declared illegal and Boone lost his land.

Undaunted, he staked out more claims—and lost them because he impatiently neglected to register his deeds. Ever hopeful, he accepted an invitation from Spanish-held Missouri to come and settle there and bring others with him. The Spanish gave him 8,500 acres and made him a judge. But the Louisiana Purchase, which embraced Missouri, again left him — but not his children — landless. Old and broke, Boone cheerfully continued hunting and trapping long after his hands shook. Shortly before he died, he was talking knowledgeably with young men about the joys to be experienced in settling California.

top of page

back a page