"I bring thee wisdom, Master." Is it he,
I marvelled then, in sooth?
"Thy palace-builder, beauty-seeker see!"
I saw the Ghost of Youth!
CINCINNATI.
The French possessors of the Western country used to call the Ohio the Beautiful River; and they might well think it beautiful who came into it from the flat-shored, mountainous Mississippi, and found themselves winding about among lofty, steep, and picturesque hills, covered with foliage, and fringed at the bottom with a strip of brilliant grass. But travellers from the Atlantic States, accustomed as they are to the clear, sparkling waters and to the brimming fulness of such rivers as the James, the Delaware, and the Hudson, do not at once perceive the fitness of the old French name, La Belle Rivière. The water of the Ohio is yellow, and there is usually a wide slope of yellow earth on each side of the stream, from which the water has receded, and over which it will flow again at the next "rise." It is always rising or falling. As at the South the item of most interest in the newspapers is the price of cotton, and in New York the price of gold, so in the West the special duty of the news-gatherer is to keep the public advised of the depth of the rivers. The Ohio, during the rainy seasons, is forty feet deeper than it is during the dry. Between the notch which marks the lowest point to which the river has ever fallen at Cincinnati and that which records the point of its highest rise, the distance is sixty-four feet. If our Eastern rivers were capable of such vacillation as this, our large cities would go under once or twice a year.
In truth, those great and famous Western rivers are ditches dug by Nature as part of the drainage system of the continent,—mere means of carrying off the surplus water when it rains. At the East, the water plays a part in the life, in the pleasures, in the imagination and memories of the people. We go down to Coney Island of a hot afternoon; we take a trip to Cape May; we sail in Boston Harbor; we go upon moonlight excursions, attended by a cotillon band; we spend a day at the fishing banks; we go up the Erie Railroad for a week's trout-fishing; we own a share in a small schooner; we have yacht clubs and boat races; we build villas which command a water view. There is little of this in the Western country; for the rivers are not very inviting, and the great lakes are dangerous. They tried yachting at Chicago a few years ago, but on the experimental trip a squall capsized the vessel, and the crew had the ignominy of spending several hours upon the keel, from which a passing craft rescued them. Then, as to excursions, there is upon the lakes the deadly peril of sea-sickness; upon the rivers there is no great relief from the heat; and upon neither are there convenient places to visit. All you can do is, to go a certain distance, turn round, and come back; which is a flat, uncheering, pointless sort of thing. Upon the whole, therefore, the Western waters contribute little to the relief and enjoyment of the people who live near them. We noticed at the large town of Erie, some years ago, that not one house had been placed so as to afford its inmates a view of the lake, though the shores offered most convenient sites; nor did the people ever come down to see the lake, apparently, as there was no path worn upon the grassy bluff overlooking it.
The Ohio River has another inconvenience. The bottom-land, as it is called, between the water's edge and the hills, is generally low and narrow. Nowhere is there room for a large city; nor can the hills be dug away except by paring down a great part of Ohio and Kentucky. When the traveller has climbed to the top of those winding mountains, he has only reached the average summit of the country; for it is not the banks of the river that are high, but the river itself which is low. It is an error to say that the Ohio is a river with lofty banks. Those continuous hills, around which this river winds and curls and bends and loops, are simply the hills of the country through which the river had to find its way. We were astonished, in getting to the top of Cincinnati, after a panting walk up a zigzag road, to discover that we had only mounted to the summit of one billow in an ocean of hills.
There is always a reason why a city is just where it is. Nothing is more controlled by law than the planting, the growth, and the decline of cities. Even the particular site is not a thing of chance, as we can see in the sites of Paris, London, Constantinople, and every other great city of the world. A town exists by supplying to the country about it the commodities which the country cannot procure for itself. In the infancy of the Ohio settlements, when it was still to be determined which of them would take the lead, the commodity most in request and hardest to be obtained was safety; and it was Cincinnati that was soonest able to supply this most universal object of desire. In December, 1788, fifteen or twenty men floated down the Ohio among the masses of moving ice, and, landing upon the site of Cincinnati, built cabins, and marked out a town. Matthias Denman of New Jersey had bought eight hundred acres of land there, at fifteen-pence an acre, and this party of adventurers planted themselves upon it with his assistance and in his interest. Jerseymen and Pennsylvanians were finding their way down the Ohio, and founding settlements here and there, whenever a sufficient number of pioneers could be gathered to defend themselves against the Indians. President Washington sent a few companies of troops for their protection, and the great question was where those troops should be posted. The major in command was at first disposed to establish them at North Bend; but while he was selecting a place there for his fort, he fell in with a pair of brilliant black eyes,—the property of one of the settler's wives. He paid such assiduous court to the lady, that her husband deemed it best to remove his family to another settlement, and pitched upon Cincinnati. The major then began to doubt whether, after all, North Bend was the proper place for a military work, and deemed it best to examine Cincinnati first. He was delighted with Cincinnati. He removed the troops thither, built a fort, and thus rendered the neighborhood the safest spot below Pittsburg. This event was decisive: Cincinnati took the lead of the Ohio towns, and kept it.
In all the history of Cincinnati, this is the only incident we have found that savors of the romantic.
Those black eyes lured Major Doughty to the only site on the Ohio upon which one hundred thousand people could conveniently live without climbing a very steep and high hill. It is also about midway between the source of the river and its mouth; the Ohio being nine hundred and fifty-nine miles long, and Cincinnati five hundred and one miles from the Mississippi. The city is nearly the centre of the great valley of the Ohio; it is, indeed, exactly where it should be, and exactly where the metropolis of the valley might have been even if Major Doughty had not been susceptible to the charms of lovely woman. It is superfluous to say that Cincinnati is situated on a "bend" of the Ohio, since the Ohio is nothing but bends, and anything that is situated upon it must be upon a bend. This river employs itself continually in writing the letter S upon the surface of the earth. At Cincinnati, the hills recede from the shore on each side of the river about a mile and a half, leaving space enough for a large town, but not for the great city of two hundred and fifty thousand inhabitants to which it has grown.
Cincinnati is an odd name for a town, whether we regard it as a genitive singular, or as a nominative plural. The story goes, that the first settlers appointed a committee of one to name the place. The gentleman selected for this duty had been a schoolmaster, and he brought to bear upon the task all the learning appertaining to his former vocation. He desired to express in the name of the future city the fact that it was situated opposite the mouth of the Licking River. He was aware that ville was French for "city," that os was Latin for "mouth"; that anti in composition could mean "opposite to"; and that the first letter of Licking was L. By combining these various fragments of knowledge, he produced at length the word Losantiville, which his comrades accepted as the name of their little cluster of log huts, and by this name it appears on some of the earliest maps of the Ohio. But the glory of the schoolmaster was short-lived. When the village had attained the respectable age of fifteen months, General St. Clair visited it on a tour of inspection, and laughed the name to scorn. Having laid out a county of which this village was the only inhabited spot, he named the county Hamilton, and insisted upon calling the village Cincinnati, after the society of which both himself and Colonel Hamilton were members. In that summer of 1790 Cincinnati consisted of forty log cabins, two small frame houses, and a fort garrisoned by a company or two of troops.