The Ohio (The Rivers of America Series)

592 pp. 8vo. Illustrated by Edward Shenton, two two-panel maps precedes text. "The is the story of the Ohio, once the 'beautiful' river of Indians and French voyageurs, today the mightiest river of America's industrial heartland. The Ohio is a huge, a rich, even a fabulous river. It flows swiftly. It begins in dark mystery with mastodons and mound builders, glints through the sombre moonlight of savage forests and the bloody colonial frontier. It flashes into the full daylight of dynamic middle America of the nineteenth century, and it rolls on today past the infernal glow of steel furnaces, thundering manufacturing cities, and seething populations - into a future with immense implications. Like the river, Mr. Banta's narrative flows on through geology, geography, human history, and time. The author has caught nicely in both symbol and fact the great paradox of the Ohio as being at once a gateway and highway between the East and West and a physical and spiritual boundary and barrier between the North and South. There is the early period of Indian habitation. There is the great struggle over the Ohio between England and France in which France lost a world. There is the stirring and bloody story of the moving frontier. Here on the Ohio were seen George Washington, Daniel Boone, George Rogers Clark. The Ohio tells the wonderful story of transportation. The age of the Indian canoe, flatboat and keelboat, the luxurious steamboat, and the era of canals and railroads, and the present-day diesel tows unroll before us. The fantastic eighteen-thirties and forties with the various utopias are given full treatment as are the troubles before, during, and after the Civil War, and the years of gigantic industrial development."