In its virgin splendor, the Ohio River awed the French explorer, La Salle, and all who came after him. The French called it La Belle Riviere, meaning, as Poet Carl Sandburg explained, "a woman easy to look at." Raft-riding settlers from the colonies called it "Ohio," after the Iroquois word for "thing of beauty." For a century and a half, while nursing the frontier's commerce and industry, the Ohio continued to be a 981-mile-long showcase of nature's charms. Rising at the confluence of the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers at Fort Pitt...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
