River-Horse: A Voyage Across America

by William Least Heat-Moon

  With Lock Three soon behind us, we came into Pittsburgh and the last lock. Nikawa made another rapid descent, the tender signaling us on out with his steam whistle that set Pilotis to singing, and we began passing under the many bridges of William Pitt’s town, he the Great Commoner who pleaded for cessation of hostilities with America but refused to recognize its independence. We passed Herr’s Island, once an eyesore with an abandoned slaughterhouse but now on the way toward becoming landscaped and not inexpensive housing. Beyond the old ketchup factory, we went under the Sixth Street Bridge which isn’t quite high enough to ensure a successful suicide, so the dedicatedly downhearted climb the big cables to the tops of the towers for the jump.

  Mayor Thomas Murphy, who grew up not far away, once told me his mother always said when he left the house, “Be home before dark, and stay away from the river.” Now he and rowing clubs and others were reawakening residents to its three rivers. The Allegheny was wide and empty, giving us an unobstructed view of the downtown catching shafts of light breaking through a dark sky blowing out of the west. It’s excellent to see Pittsburgh from the bluffs—to realize its remarkable topographic setting where the Allegheny and the Monongahela join at that regular triangle to form the Ohio—but perhaps even better is the view from the water where the buildings rise in a way unmatched by any other river city in America (New York is a harbor city).

  The Photographer had found a safe dockage for the night at the Pittsburgh River Rescue Station on the north side of the Allegheny, across from the Golden Triangle, the place those citizens of Vulcan began their town. With our man aboard and clicking his camera, the rescue crew motored up, gave welcome, then led us to a fuel stop and on to our mooring.

  To celebrate a safe descent of the Allegheny, we went off that night to an old factory—at last a reused building—this one converted into a brewery of lagers which we ale lovers nevertheless duly appreciated, as we did a plate of pickled herring, but the accordion man in Tyrolean hat and lederhosen was another matter. My manliness would never admit that I try to flee when I see a belly organ coming near, but I will say that should I never hear one again I’ll account myself well served. We endured an enfilade of schussbooming polkas and Teutonic schmierkäse. Then that one, “In München steht ein Hofbräuhaus,” with its infernal “Eins, zwei, g’suffa!”

  The accordionist saw our navy blue sweatshirts, NIKAWA writ boldly across them, and he took an interest and decided to give a special concert inches from our ears. Half deafened, half insane, I was able briefly to quiet him by describing our attempt for the Pacific, but the musician was soon ready for “Beer Barrel Polka” when the Photographer saved another moment by asking him what he thought “Nikawa” meant. The music man stood puzzled and silent, then said, “Jawohl! It translates, ‘White man must be crazy,’” and then out rolled those damn barrels of fun—zing, boom, tararel! And that’s how, blues on the run, we got ready to descend the thousand miles of the river Ohio.

  V

  THE OHIO RIVER

  NIKAWA AT PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA

  Iconogram V

  Below Eureka the Ohio winds in a series of broad sweeping curves, with the sharp rubble banks of the upper valley giving way to swampy, spongy shores on both sides. As fishing is good here, the stretch is a frequent port of call for shanty-boaters. These boats, generally flat bottomed, but often built to resemble an ark, cruise the thousand miles between Pittsburgh and Cairo, Illinois, each year. The shanty-boater lives in the small cabin on his craft; the river and its banks provide his food; driftwood for heating and cooking is to be had for the taking, while a little backdoor begging at farmhouses usually provides him with castoff clothing. More energetic shanty-boaters work a few days each week ashore; they are invariably jacks-of-all-trades, their footloose life developing in them both an amazing versatility in handicrafts and an earnest desire to practice these crafts as seldom as possible.

  Not all houseboat dwellers are shanty-boaters, this term being applied mainly to those whose wanderlust keeps them from settling in one spot for any great length of time. Cheerful, hospitable with what little he has, shiftless and slovenly, the typical shanty-boater leads a fairly carefree existence. His whims and moods are dictated by the vagaries of the river, which gives him sustenance and transportation. When left high and dry, he shores up his boat and waits for high water to put him afloat again—a few months of waiting mean nothing in his life of leisure. He is generally law-abiding, but his neighbors include a few elements who impart a bad reputation to all shanty-boaters by distilling and selling cheap whisky, and by hiding criminals until all trace of them is lost in the vague peregrinations and trackless wanderings of the boats. Yet his fellow boatmen include a number of Gospel preachers—elderly men, as a rule, who have grown weary of worldliness and dedicated themselves to the regeneration of the water gypsies. These preachers travel continuously, and their boats are welcome wherever shanty-boatmen congregate.

  West Virginia: A Guide to the Mountain State,

  American Guide Series, 1941

  Proving the White Man a Liar

  WHEN TORTURE is imminent, suicide beckons, although it’s rare a captive has the choice. In Pittsburgh, at the place the Allegheny becomes the Ohio, was once a sandbar called Smoky Island with a peculiar and dark history, and the darkest of its incidents started ten miles down on the sister tributary, the Monongahela, nearly at the mouth of the Youghiogheny River. In 1755, General Edward Braddock, a Briton of hauteur—a quality inimical to a frontier America requiring new ways and attitudes—came marching up with almost two thousand soldiers, nearly three quarters of them English, to try to capture the French Fort Duquesne at the Point on the forks of the Ohio. This impressive contingent was the best his young aide-de-camp, George Washington, had ever seen, but Braddock was the wrong leader, and his contempt for the new land and its people was a deadly flaw. When Washington warned him of possible ambush and recommended firing from cover as the Indians did, Braddock reportedly said, “What! A Virginia colonel teach a British general how to fight?”

  As the Redcoats and their supporting colonial soldiers marched through a narrow ravine, they found themselves trapped in volleys of invisible musket fire from the slopes. Braddock, insisting on standard European rank-and-file order, saw his regulars forced into shooting blindly toward the woods while the Americans tried to get to protected positions. Quickly, the much smaller contingent of French and Indians, mostly the latter, put the British into a panicked scramble; the general had five horses shot out from under him, the last just before he took a bullet in a lung. More than half his royal troops and all but one of his mounted officers fell. He himself was probably shot by Thomas Faucett, an American under his command. Faucett never denied the allegation, insisting, rather, he did it so the Redcoats and their brothers Jonathan could fight from behind trees and save their lives. Washington, the last mounted officer, though ill with fever and his coat perforated by four bullets, assumed command to direct the remaining troops back to safety where, three days later as the arrogant general lay dying—he who had smilingly told Benjamin Franklin, “These savages may, indeed, be a formidable enemy to your raw American militia, but upon the King’s regular and disciplined troops, sir, it is impossible they should make any impression”—said weakly to Washington, “We shall better know how to deal with them another time.” The Virginia colonel had Braddock buried in a road and then marched soldiers and drove wagons over the grave so the enemy wouldn’t find it. The British who could not join Washington’s retreat were less fortunate: Indians herded them naked back toward the Point and took them at nightfall to an Allegheny sandbar, tied them to stakes, piled embers on their feet, and thrust glowing iron rods into their nostrils and ears while children fired novice arrows into them.

  A story has come down about one soldier who sought to save himself agony. He loudly boasted he knew of a plant that would render him invulnerable, so his captors untied him and dared him to prove it. Picking the nearest leaves he s
aw and rubbing their juice around his neck, he spoke some mumbo-jumbo, laid his head on a log, and challenged anyone to test his immortality. A warrior took up an ax, swung it hard, and cleaved the soldier’s neck, thereby proving the white man a liar. Nine years later, Governor John Penn offered bounties on Indians: $150 for a male older than ten, $134 for scalp of same, $130 for a female or boy, $50 for the scalp of a woman.

  Fort Duquesne is gone, and close to where that horror happened, the Pirates and Steelers play ball at the river edge. The morning we passed by, Three Rivers Stadium stood dismal in mist, but the big fountains across the river, the ones nearly atop the site of the fort, spewed up their glory to a city triumphant. Pilotis took the binoculars to scan the ridge above the Duquesne Incline and managed to spot the Photographer and his signal flag waving goodbye before he pulled the trailer west to meet us—we trusted—in a few weeks and two thousand miles away in Sioux City, Iowa, below the first dam on the Missouri River.

  From Pittsburgh almost to Louisville, six hundred miles downstream, bottomland highways lie close to both banks of the Ohio and make it, for its length, one of the most visible and accessible big rivers in the country. Only two generations after the slaughter of imperious Braddock’s troops, another British fellow, Thomas Ashe, wrote in 1808:

  The Ohio . . . has been truly described as beyond competition the most beautiful river in the universe, whether it be considered for its meandering course through an immense region of forests; for its elegant banks, which afford innumerable delightful situations for cities, villages, and improved farms; or for those many other advantages which truly entitle it to the name originally given it by the French, of “La belle riviere.” This is the outline of a description given several years since, and it has generally been thought an exaggerated one. Now, the immense forests recede, cultivation smiles along its banks; numerous villages and towns decorate its shores; and it is not extravagant to suppose that the day is not far distant when its whole margin will form one continued series of villages and towns.

  Like so many of the earliest river travelers—those in canoes, bateaux, flatboats, keelboats, and the first paddlewheelers—we were about to descend the Ohio as the water rose, although timing was no longer necessary since virtually the entire river seventy years ago was dammed into pools for the benefit of navigation, a process called canalization. Unlike those of, say, the Missouri, the Ohio barriers do not control floods; during high water a towboat and its barges pass right over the low crests of the dams, while at other times traffic must use the system of twenty locks. So off we went, singing the old refrain:

  Hi-O, away we go,

  Floating down the river

  On the O-hi-O.

  The rising Monongahela sent rafts of woody drift into the Ohio, some that Nikawa could dodge or avoid by changing course, but others we simply had to plow through with nothing more than hope. Emsworth, the first lock, was full of floaters, many of them natural, the remainder human crud ranging from tires on rims to tampon applicators—la belle rivière—so, to keep the props clear, I did my best to coast to a tie-up on the wall. Although heavy barge traffic often forces a small boat into long waits, we entered alone and quickly descended, our teapot preposterously small in the massive chamber. That first dam cleared the drift for some windless miles to give us a slick-water run between low banks full of industry, power plants, and railyards, but on the bluffs were fine old homes at Coraopolis and Haysville and Sewickley. From the early days of coarse rivermen and aesthetically dim industrialists, Sewickley has tried for greater elegance, shedding its earlier labels of Dogtown, Contention, and Devil’s Race Track to take its current name, one that may look regally English but is in fact Indian, “sweet water.” Later, wishing to have domiciles rather than industries, the town banned factories and even trolleys.

  The Ohio, Pittsburgh to Huntington, 309 river miles

  I have not said that the design of Nikawa made her look like an illustration from a children’s reader, and her lines sometimes drew people who—more often than we cared for—used the word “cute.” At Dashields Lock, the tender came out to see the boat. Before he lowered her, I asked where we could find a good lunch along the river. We pursued his suggestion past once steely Aliquippa, on past Ambridge that has surrounded its predecessor village, Economy—perhaps a not unexpected result, given the celibacy practiced by its German Rappite founders.

  The village was the third and last home of communalists who settled there in 1824 after giving up on Harmony and New Harmony, and indeed they found they did better as Economists than Harmonists. Their celibacy derived from their certainty that the Christian Millennium was nigher than anyone could believe (their great church clock has only the hour hand, a reminder of their sense of time). Against the Second Coming they tried to be ready with bodies pure of recent sexual taint, not to mention—hidden in Father Rapp’s cellar—a stash of half a million dollars intended to get them to the City Celestial. That epochal Last Generation not yet in sight, they managed to hold on eighty-one years before their abstinence left them shorn of believers. Yet they did leave a grand architectural inheritance of more than a hundred beautiful buildings along the banks of the Ohio and nearly twenty thousand fascinating and scrupulously designed worldly possessions. Where the half million went, I don’t know.

  Upon leaving Pittsburgh, the Ohio heads north as if to empty into Lake Erie less than a hundred miles away, something it did until the glaciers thousands of years ago pushed it back to assume a southwesterly course—another piece of fortuitous topography that very much contributed to linking the eastern half of America to the beyond. Without the Ohio and the Missouri, all people west of the Mississippi might today speak Spanish or vote for members of a parliament, and how different the Civil War would have been without the broad Ohio effectively separating much of the nation. At Monaca, a glass and steel manufacturing town like others nearby, the Ohio makes its great glacially wrought turn, and across the water lies the mouth of the Beaver River at the northernmost point of the Ohio. There we went a mile upstream to Bridgewater and found a good dock near the café the lockman had told us about. The place was once an ice cream stand, and before that a filling station, and filling was what we wanted: we ate tureens of spicy pinto-bean soup and tostadas, all of it fresh from the stove, and the dreary day seemed to withdraw. A young mother came in, child at her side; as customers made much of the girl, a man asked whether she was talking yet; said the woman: “She babbles one word, ‘Mall,’ and that means me and the shopping center.”

  Below the Beaver, the hills of the Ohio become higher and edge right to the water, a combination that has prevented significant industrial encroachment for some miles, and at last la belle rivière looked just that. At Montgomery Lock a drizzle came on and seemed to wash us back into the uglier aspect of railyards, then we passed a nuclear power plant across from Industry, the name perhaps accurate beyond its founders’ dreams, and four miles farther we left Pennsylvania. Now on the south bank was the Northern Panhandle of West Virginia, and across the river lay East Liverpool, Ohio, a town I’d known before only from the road and thought it possessing a worn grime similar to that of its English counterpart. But from the river we saw old homes atop the high bank, slender steeples, and a graceful 1905 suspension bridge. It was for such changed views I had come. Wellsville, five miles below, with more historic houses along the bluff, was downright inviting, and there the Ohio began its 260-mile southwesterly drop before shifting to a more westward course at Huntington, West Virginia.

  A repair crew held Nikawa off for a while at New Cumberland Lock. When we entered, Pilotis took delight in tying to our first floating mooring bitt, a pin or small bollard that moves with the rise and fall of the water to make securing a boat much easier; those plaintive squeaking, stridulating rollers added a new voice to the chamber music of mechanically profundo valves and soprano gears, that one strikingly like the song of humpback whales.

  The afternoon finally began to dry but the clo
uds remained low, and, having done sixty miles, our longest run yet, we turned into a protected cove near a titanium processing plant. Pilotis began laughing, then said, “Get yourself ready,” and pointed. Tied to a pier was the Doctor Robert fresh from its overland transport to Pittsburgh. “Here you go again.” No we don’t, I said, not anymore—we’re now a convoy of one. We warped in behind to refuel. Down in the engine well of the character boat stood a mechanic and Cap, both splattered with oil. “Never mind,” Cap said. “Don’t ask.” But I did, and his lone crewman, Mr. V—, answered: “The diesel just quit above Montgomery Dam. We began drifting toward it. Dead in the water. Wasn’t a thing we could do except get on the radio. A towboat managed to reach us in time and put a line on us. One hell of a scare.”

  I thought of how Cap once referred to Nikawa as Tupperware, and I looked at Pilotis, who said softly, “That was nearly our boat.” I whispered that the Doctor would be a suitable vessel if only she could tow behind a dry dock; from then on, to us she was the Dry Docktor. That evening we borrowed a clunker of a station wagon from the marina and pursued a tip and drove a few miles south to one of the “mother towns of Ohio,” Steubenville, laid out by Bezaleel Wells; the first steamboat built there was named after him, although its frequent breakdowns earned it the moniker Beelzebub. We met Cap and Mr. V—at the High Hat Café for a round of martinis followed by plates of chicken sautéed with banana peppers and mushrooms, a recipe the owner’s mother had brought from Italy, all of it so good that Cap laughed and toasted and told jokes and for a while forgot about his Beelzebub.