front cover of George Washington in the Ohio Valley
George Washington in the Ohio Valley
Hugh Cleland
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1956
This book chronicles Washington's excursions to the Ohio Valley frontier, as a soldier and private citizen. Through newspaper accounts, letters, and the journals of Washington and his contemporaries, we learn much about the man's leadership qualities, military skills, his honor and integrity, and how his life was shaped by his journeys that spanned nearly half a century to what was then known as the Western Country.
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James Hall, Literary Pioneer of the Ohio Valley
John T. Flanagan
University of Minnesota Press, 1941

James Hall, Literary Pioneer of the Ohio Valley was first published in 1941. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

For generations the attention of students of American literature has been directed toward the Atlantic seaboard, but the rise of regional literature and the development of genuine artists in various parts of the United States has caused them to turn their scrutiny westward. High on the western horizon of the early 1800's stands James Hall, a literary pioneer in the Ohio Valley, one of the minor literary figures whose influence on the artistic consciousness of the frontier was widely felt.

Author, critic, journalist, editor, publisher, and historian—few men have had more to do with the early cultural development of the Middle West. Every historian of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys is indebted to Hall for facts and details of life in America in the early nineteenth century.

A circuit judge when there were only 55,000 people in all Illinois—he had an unparalleled opportunity to observe the life and customs of the times. A publisher of the first literary magazine west of the Ohio when there were more Indians and horse thieves in the state than there were literate readers—he had a virgin field for awakening the artistic, literary, even scientific, interest of the frontier.

He organized the first State Historical Society of Illinois, was state treasurer, published two newspapers, welcomed Lafayette on his triumphal tour, edited the first literary annual in the West, awarded a prize to Harriet Beecher (Stowe) for her "New England Sketch," published in his magazine. Moving to Cincinnati when it was at the peak of its sectional importance, an intellectual and cultural oasis on the frontier, Hall continued his sponsorship of education and culture.

James Hall's own published works were multitudinous in the fields of fiction, biography, poetry, criticism, history, and anthropology. His picture of the prairies in his day is still one of the best accounts ever written and his Indian Tribes of North America a monumental volume, but none of his works is of first-rate importance. Nevertheless, because of the tremendous variety of his activities and the breadth of his influence, he left his stamp upon the history and the literature of the region.

Hall's work is an honest, vigorous record of the path of the American pioneer in the days of the rapid growth and expansion of a new nation, and an understanding of his contribution is obligatory for every serious student of American literature.

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The Western Experiment
New England Transcendentalists in the Ohio Valley
Elizabeth R. McKinsey
Harvard University Press, 1973
This essay deals with the Western experience, in the 1830s, of three young Unitarian ministers who were Transcendentalists when the movement was just beginning and before it had a name. After touching upon the symbolism of the West, Elizabeth McKinsey tells the story of three protagonists—James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Pearse Cranch, and William Henry Channing—describing the idealism with which they embarked on their ministries in the Ohio Valley and the progressive disillusionment that led each of them to return East within a few years. The concluding section probes the implications, for the three men and for Transcendentalism as a whole, of the failure of their errand into the wilderness.
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