Ohio River Valley

The first american west was the Ohio River Valley (1750-1820), from the beginning of European American settlement to the end of the frontier period, those who came to the West encountered its possibilities and challenges.

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 opening of the trans-Appalachian West launched one of the greatest land rushes in American history. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the population of Kentucky had swelled to more than 200,000. Many came over the Wilderness Road, the route first laid out by Daniel Boone for the Transylvania Company. But a majority of settlers avoided overland the passage and made their way to Kentucky by traveling down the Ohio River.

Land speculation was a big business in Kentucky in the eighteenth century, and the potential for making a quick fortune was unprecedented in American history. The rush of land claims and settler migrations came so quickly that they overwhelmed the limited skills of many poorly-trained frontier surveyors, including Daniel Boone, and the unscrupulous practices of buyers and sellers soon left Kentucky landholding in a legal jumble.

In March 1775, at Sycamore Shoals on the Watauga River in Tennessee, Richard Henderson and other members of the association secured a deed from members of the Cherokee tribe for all of the territory embraced by the Ohio, Kentucky, and Cumberland Rivers, a tract of more than twenty million acres. Although the land grant was voided, Virginia and North Carolina each awarded Henderson and his associates 200,000 acres in compensation.

One consequence of the Transylvania venture was the spur it offered to immediate settlement of Kentucky. In 1774, James Harrod led the first group of permanent settlers into the heart of the Bluegrass and founded Harrodsburg. In 1775, Daniel Boone and a work party representing the Transylvania Company cut the path of the Wilderness Road across Cumberland Gap and laid out the frontier settlement of Boonesborough on the Kentucky River.

Boats used by settlers descending the Ohio varied in size and construction. The earliest settlers fashioned pirogues from hollowed out logs or loaded their possessions into wooden skiffs maneuvered with oars. Larger families and groups favored keelboats that could be ridden downcurrent and dragged or poled upstream. Flatboats, sometimes called "Kentucky boats" or "family boats," held the most passengers and cargo and could be 40 to 100 feet in length.

The best time to descend the Ohio was in the spring, when seasonal rains raised the river's water level and made it easier to avoid snags on buried tree limbs and sandbars. Many settlers carried Zadok Cramer's Navigator, a frequently updated guidebook that described each stretch of the Ohio and suggested the safest course of passage down the river.

While European travelers described their western journeys in detail, relatively few migrant settlers kept diaries or wrote about their experiences. Many were illiterate, and those who could read and write were preoccupied with the daily dangers and physical demands of the journey. Once in Kentucky, settlers' attention had to turn to the immediate needs of securing a claim, building shelter, clearing land, and planting the first crop to carry a family through the winter.

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.

top of page

back a page