Queen of the River (July/August 1993 | Volume: 44, Issue: 4)

Queen of the River

AH article image

Authors: The Editors

Historic Era: Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to the present)

Historic Theme:

Subject:

July/August 1993 | Volume 44, Issue 4

The steam calliope’s sprightly rendition of “Waiting for the Robert E. Lee” bounces off immense lock walls at the Kentucky Dam. As the steamboat Delta Queen descends 46 feet, onlookers are soon no more than barely visible heads, rising to disappear into the mild twilight. We haven’t seen much river traffic so far on this journey from Nashville, but here, at the lock, strings of coal and grain tows line up to transit the Tennessee River. The barges often have to wait at least a day, says the Delta Queen’s captain, John Davitt, adding, “We were real lucky”; our vessel was ushered right through.

It’s not the only time that passengers on the Delta Queen will feel favored. We are here, after all, on a snug, solid survivor of an era that effectively ended even before this steamboat was built, in 1926. We share a sense of being attendant at a sort of miracle, as we travel waterways that are almost as unknown to today’s car-bound or airlifted traveler as they were to the first European explorers.

On a May journey of five days starting in Nashville, we cover 157 miles on the Cumberland River, slip onto the Tennessee for 25 more miles, then steam north and east on the Ohio, which we follow 465 miles upriver to Louisville.

Although no one is certain which European adventurer first spied the Ohio River or how it got its name, René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, is often credited for the discovery. Still, it remains a matter historians like to disagree about. “Someone Finds the Ohio—and France and England Claim It,” the chapter title in R. E. Banta’s authoritative volume on the river, summarizes it well enough. The name Ohio supposedly refers to an Iroquois word for “beautiful,” but that too belongs to lore.

Never mind. We agree that it is a beautiful river, revealing pleasing harmonies, all of a piece, with few signs of civilization. A passenger stationed at the bow deck will discover a broad and curving stream, screened at the shores by a thick mesh of cottonwood and willow, flecked with small islands that hold ospreys and heron. Eager to see what the next bend will reveal and the turning after that, the passenger can easily imagine himself or herself as a painted dab of a figure in a work by George Caleb Bingham or any of the countless mid-nineteenth-century artists who found in the Ohio a message about the journey West, toward the promise of America.

 

As the only major American river that flowed in a westerly direction, the Ohio was the route of choice for settlers. “We are pilgrims, wild and winding river! Both wandering onward to the boundless West,” exclaimed the young Frederick W. Thomas in his epic poem “The Emigrant,” written in 1833.

Starting in 1811, the first steamboats enabled traders and manufacturers to send goods