s contended,
stand the cities whose growth preeminently represents the Ohio valley;
Cincinnati, the historic queen of the river; Louisville, the warder of
the falls; the cities of the "Old National Road," Columbus,
Indianapolis; the cities of the Blue Grass lands, which made Kentucky
the goal of the pioneers; and the cities of that young commonwealth,
whom the Ohio river by force of its attraction tore away from an
uncongenial control by the Old Dominion, and joined to the social
section where it belonged.

The Ohio Valley is, therefore, not only a commercial highway, it is a
middle kingdom between the East and the West, between the northern area,
which was occupied by a greater New England and emigrants from northern
Europe, and the southern area of the "Cotton Kingdom." As Pennsylvania
and New York constituted the Middle Region in our earlier history,
between New England and the seaboard South, so the Ohio Valley became
the Middle Region of a later time. In its position as a highway and a
Middle Region are found the keys to its place in American history.

From the beginning the Ohio Valley seems to have been a highway for
migration, and the home of a culture of its own. The sciences of
American archeology and ethnology are too new to enable us to speak with
confidence upon the origins and earlier distribution of the aborigines,
but it is at least clear that the Ohio river played an important part in
the movements of the earlier men in America, and that the mounds of the
valley indicate a special type of development intermediate between that
of the northern hunter folk, and the pueblo building races of the south.
This dim and yet fascinating introduction to the history of the Ohio
will afford ample opportunity for later students of the relations
between geography and population to make contributions to our history.

The French explorers saw the river, but failed to grasp its significance
as a strategic line in the conquest of the West. Entangled in the water
labyrinth of the vast interior, and kindled with aspirations to reach
the "Sea of the West," their fur traders and explorers pushed their way
through the forests of the North and across the plains of the South,
from river to lake, from lake to river, until they met the mountains of
the West. But while they were reaching the upper course of the Missouri
and the Spanish outposts of Santa Fe, they missed the opportunity to
hold the Ohio Valley, and before France cou