Afloat on the Ohio

Looking for an audiobook to fill the hours at work, I turned to an app which republishes free books in the public domain. I was very pleased to find Afloat on the Ohio ; an historical pilgrimage of a thousand miles in a skiff, from Redstone to Cairo by Reuben Gold Thwaites, first published in 1897. After all, the river is right in our backyard, and I've spent plenty of time walking and biking along it, boating and swimming in it, and staring at it daydreaming when I should have been studying or working.

In the first pages, Wheeling and Steubenville are mentioned as being important shipping ports in the steamboat days. Later, half a chapter is devoted to Wheeling. Of Wheeling, Thwaites writes "The town has 50,000 inhabitants, is substantially built, of a distinctly southern aspect. Well stretched out along the river, but narrow, with gaunt, treeless, gully-washed hills of clay rising abruptly behind, giving the place a most forbidding appearance from the water. There are several fine bridges spanning the Ohio, and Wheeling Creek, which empties on the lower edge of town, is crossed by a maze of steel spans and stone arches. The well-paved wharf, sloping upward from the Ohio is nearly as broad an imposing of that of Pittsburgh." The chapter also has a terribly racist description of the "negroes" the author encounters for the first time in Wheeling, as well as a portrayal of Wheeling Island as a place of pleasant cottages.

The author continues with an account of the Zanes and the founding of Wheeling. Think you know your local history? Thwaite writes "Everyone who knows his Western history at all has read of the three famous seiges of Wheeling in 1777, 1781, and 1782, and the daring deeds of its men and women which help illumin the pages of border annals."

Thwaite doesn't have much nice to say about the "begrimmed villages" below Wheeling, and describes Moundsville as an "old, faded, countrified town" of 5,000. He goes on to give detailed descriptions of the Moundsville penitentiary and Grave Creek Mound before sailing on to points south.