Jefferson’s ‘most beautiful river’ is now among America’s most polluted
The Ohio River runs 981 miles (1,579 kilometres) from Pittsburgh to the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois, drawing a climatic and cultural line between Midwest and South. Seneca Ohi:yo’ means “good river”; Thomas Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia called it the most beautiful river on earth.
By discharge the Ohio is the third-largest river in the United States and the Mississippi's biggest tributary. It flows through or along six states, drains parts of 14, reaches into the Southeast through the Tennessee River, and supplies drinking water to five million people. A canal opened in 1830 let boats bypass the Falls near Louisville, and since canalization in 1929 the river has been a staircase of 21 pools, with 20 locks and dams serving barges and generating electricity.
The water runs along the boundary between humid continental and humid subtropical climates, hosting plants and animals of both. It regularly freezes at Pittsburgh, seldom near Cincinnati and Louisville, and never around Owensboro and Paducah.
For centuries before Europeans came, Mississippian chiefdoms raised earthwork mounds in the valley, such as Angel Mounds near Evansville, and the Osage, Omaha, Ponca and Kaw lived here before moving west of the Mississippi in the seventeenth century. Lenape and Haudenosaunee people treated the Ohio and the Allegheny as one stream, and a Miami-Illinois name, later Pelisipi, inspired Jefferson's proposed state of Pelisipia in 1784. In 1692 Arnout Viele led a trading party that became the first Europeans to explore the upper valley, and in 1729 French surveyor Chaussegros de Léry mapped the river; his men collected mastodon tusks 11 feet long that went to Paris.
After the Revolution the river became the southern edge of the Northwest Territory and was treated as a western extension of the Mason–Dixon line, dividing free states from slave states. Thousands of enslaved people crossed its narrows to freedom, many helped by the Underground Railroad.
Source: Ohio River
