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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Amazing Stories from the History of Ohio (Illustrated)," William Dean Howells artfully weaves a tapestry of Ohio's rich historical narrative, blending anecdotal storytelling with a meticulous attention to detail. His literary style, characterized by a conversational tone and vivid imagery, invites readers to traverse through the significant events and remarkable figures that shaped the Buckeye State. The book serves not only as an entertaining collection of tales but also as an important contribution to regional historical literature, reflecting the zeitgeist of late 19th-century America when local histories were gaining prominence and public interest in state pride was burgeoning. William Dean Howells, a prominent figure in American literature and a staunch advocate for realism, drew from his own experiences growing up in Ohio to craft this work. Howells's background as a journalist and editor, combined with his love for Midwestern culture, informed his deep understanding of local narratives, making him a fitting chronicler of Ohio's historical treasures. His lifelong commitment to representing everyday life and authenticity shines through as he highlights stories often overshadowed by larger historical accounts. Readers who appreciate a blend of history and storytelling will find "Amazing Stories from the History of Ohio (Illustrated)" to be an engaging and enlightening read. This book not only celebrates the essence of Ohio but also enriches the understanding of its socio-cultural fabric, making it a valuable addition to the libraries of history enthusiasts and casual readers alike. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
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Amazing Stories from the History of Ohio (Illustrated)
Table of Contents
Introduction
A river of memory runs through Ohio, carrying canoes, flatboats, locomotives, and ideas toward a shared future. In that current, Amazing Stories from the History of Ohio (Illustrated) gathers moments that show how a place becomes a people. William Dean Howells, a leading figure of American realism and a native of the state, brings a storyteller’s eye to the turning points that shaped the region and, by extension, the nation. He draws readers into scenes where landscape and character intermingle, inviting us to see familiar names, towns, and rivers anew—as living coordinates in a broader map of American experience.
This book presents a guided tour through Ohio’s past, not as a dry catalog of dates, but as a sequence of vividly rendered episodes. Howells prizes clarity, proportion, and the human scale, choosing stories that reveal how communities meet uncertainty, build institutions, and forge connections across cultures and eras. The illustrations amplify that narrative by anchoring moments of journey, labor, conflict, and celebration in concrete images. Together, text and image make history tangible. As the pages unfold, readers encounter both resilience and reinvention—the constant testing of ideals against circumstance that defines the state’s evolving identity.
Its classic status rests on the union of literary craftsmanship and historical insight. Howells’s approach exemplifies realism: precise observation, moral intelligence, and fidelity to everyday life. He honors complexities without melodrama and avoids romantic fog, trusting clear prose to carry weight. That balance helped shape how later writers treated local history, regional character, and the narrative essay. The book endures because it neither flatters the past nor dismisses it; it listens to it. For generations, readers have returned to these stories for their steadiness, their humane tone, and their capacity to make large events intimate and legible.
Amazing Stories from the History of Ohio (Illustrated) is authored by William Dean Howells, an Ohio-born novelist, critic, and editor whose career flourished in the late nineteenth century. Written during an era when the United States was consolidating its national story, the book seeks to present Ohio’s role in that broader narrative. Howells aims to educate without pedantry, to entertain without exaggeration. He selects episodes that illuminate cause and consequence and writes with a teacher’s patience and an artist’s restraint. The result is a volume that meets general readers where they are while inviting them to see further and think more clearly.
The content moves from the earliest inhabitants and exploratory ventures to the growth of settlements, the shaping of civic institutions, and the emergence of a dynamic economy. Along the way, it follows migrations, surveys the making of towns and roads, and watches as waterways and rail lines knit communities together. The book also attends to conflict and cooperation, showing how law, custom, and aspiration intersected in public life. Without giving away the specific turns of these tales, it is enough to say that movement—of people, goods, and ideas—serves as both a literal and symbolic thread binding the chapters.
Howells’s method privileges the revealing detail: a tool, a river bend, a domestic scene that hints at wide social change. He writes as an interpreter rather than a judge, situating events in their immediate context while tracing their wider implications. This balance confers credibility. His prose does not sentimentalize hardship nor sensationalize danger; instead, it demonstrates how ordinary choices accumulate into collective outcomes. The stories show that public life is strongest when informed citizens work patiently together. They also suggest that courage is often quiet and communal, growing out of shared obligations rather than solitary heroics.
As a work situated within American letters, the book influenced later portrayals of the Midwest by treating the region as a stage for national themes rather than as a provincial backdrop. Its emphasis on civic formation, infrastructure, and education foreshadows twentieth-century narratives that examine how local decisions shape national direction. The clarity of its language helped set a standard for accessible historical writing pitched to general audiences. In demonstrating that regional history can be artful without being ornate, the book expanded the toolkit available to historians, essayists, and novelists seeking to evoke place and period with economy and grace.
The illustrated format enriches the reading experience by grounding episodes in visual markers—landscapes, artifacts, and scenes of work and travel that convey texture and scale. Images do not merely decorate the text; they help the eye and mind coordinate, translating spatial relationships and material culture into memorable forms. For younger readers or those new to the subject, the illustrations provide helpful waypoints. For experienced readers, they underscore the book’s commitment to specificity. In both cases, the visual component supports Howells’s larger purpose: to make the past palpable, comprehensible, and available for thoughtful reflection.
Literarily, the book reveals Howells’s strengths: measured cadence, unshowy elegance, and a calm intelligence that invites trust. Narrative transitions are careful, placing episodes in sequence without forcing false drama. His diction is plain yet supple, allowing complex ideas to emerge naturally from scene and example. The voice is confident but not overbearing, attentive to the dignity of work and the consequences of policy. Occasional quiet humor lifts the tone without undercutting seriousness. These qualities help the book communicate across generations, as today’s readers can readily inhabit its sentences and share its vantage without needing specialized background knowledge.
The intended audience is broad: citizens curious about the roots of civic life, students beginning to study regional history, and general readers who value stories that connect place to principle. Because the book treats Ohio as a microcosm of national development, it welcomes readers from beyond the state’s borders. They will find in these pages a study of how communities negotiate competing claims, respond to new technologies, and manage the tension between inheritance and innovation. The narrative serves as both primer and companion—compact enough to invite entry, thoughtful enough to reward revisit, and hospitable to readers at many levels of expertise.
Contemporary relevance arises from the themes threaded throughout: migration and belonging, infrastructure and opportunity, conflict and reconciliation, education and civic trust. The book demonstrates how institutions grow from habits, how policies reflect values, and how local choices ripple outward. It reminds us that resilience is often infrastructural—built into roads, schools, newspapers, and networks—and that progress requires maintenance as much as ambition. In an era of rapid change, these lessons feel fresh. By illuminating the everyday mechanics of collective life, the stories model a realistic optimism that respects difficulties while affirming the possibility of shared improvement.
In sum, Amazing Stories from the History of Ohio (Illustrated) endures because it inhabits the juncture of art and instruction with unusual poise. It invites readers to encounter the past as a living field of human effort, tracing how a state’s character emerges from countless ordinary acts. The themes—community, enterprise, fairness, adaptation—remain as urgent as ever. Howells’s lucid prose and the edition’s images together create a pathway into understanding that is generous, memorable, and sustainable. To enter these pages is to join a conversation about what holds a people together and how memory can guide the work of tomorrow.
Synopsis (Selection)
Amazing Stories from the History of Ohio (Illustrated) presents a chronological series of episodes tracing the region’s development from prehistoric dwellers to a modern commonwealth. William Dean Howells arranges concise narratives that introduce peoples, places, conflicts, and civic milestones that shaped Ohio. Beginning with the earthworks left by ancient cultures, the book progresses through exploration, settlement, war, and state-building, pausing at incidents that illuminate broader trends. While attentive to notable individuals, it emphasizes collective efforts, laws, and institutions. The illustrations underscore scenes and artifacts mentioned in the text, guiding readers through a clear, accessible overview of Ohio’s past and its role within the United States.
The opening chapters survey the prehistoric mound-building cultures whose earthworks dot the Ohio landscape. Howells describes notable sites such as the Serpent Mound and the Newark works, considering their scale, purposes, and the clues they offer about early society and belief. He then introduces the later Native nations present when Europeans arrived, including the Shawnee, Delaware, Miami, and Wyandot, outlining their villages, trade, and alliances. The narrative sketches the forested environment, river routes, and patterns of intertribal relations that shaped life in the Ohio Country. These scenes establish the region’s deep history and the foundations on which later encounters would unfold.
European rivalry enters with French exploration and claims extending from Canada along the Ohio and Mississippi waterways. The book notes expeditions, forts, and alliances that anchored French influence, then turns to British colonial interests advancing from the Atlantic seaboard. The Ohio Company’s plans, Washington’s mission to the French on the upper Allegheny, and the outbreak of the French and Indian War illustrate how imperial competition engulfed the Ohio valley. Howells recounts shifting control as British victory reshaped the map, followed by Pontiac’s uprising and imperial limits on settlement. These developments foreshadow the tensions between frontier communities, Native peoples, and distant authorities.
During the American Revolution, the frontier remained contested. The narrative highlights raids, reprisals, and campaigns that linked Ohio to events east of the Appalachians while maintaining its own trajectory. Special attention is given to the Moravian missions among the Delaware, with towns like Schoenbrunn and Gnadenhütten illustrating efforts at Christianized, agrarian life amid war pressures. The tragic 1782 Gnadenhütten massacre, presented as an episode with lasting significance, shows how violence complicated diplomacy and faith. Meanwhile, military expeditions pushed into the region, and the peace treaty of 1783 transferred sovereignty of the Northwest to the United States, setting the stage for organized settlement.
With the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the book outlines the framework for governing the territory: guarantees of civil liberties, public education, and the exclusion of slavery. Governor Arthur St. Clair’s administration and land companies, notably the Ohio Company of Associates, begin formal settlement at Marietta in 1788, fortifying communities like Campus Martius. Persistent conflict followed as Native confederacies resisted encroachment. Howells traces the defeats of Harmar and St. Clair, the reorganization under General Anthony Wayne, and the campaign culminating at Fallen Timbers in 1794. The Treaty of Greenville in 1795 reorganized boundaries, opening much of southern and eastern Ohio to accelerated migration.
Population growth led to county organization, new towns, and debates over authority between territorial officials and settlers. The convention at Chillicothe drafted a state constitution in 1802, and Ohio entered the Union in 1803. The text summarizes provisions shaping early governance, courts, and schools, and notes the movement of the capital as communities vied for influence, culminating in the creation of Columbus as a planned seat of government. Agricultural expansion, surveying, and market connections bound settlers to regional trade, while local institutions—from churches to academies—established civic patterns that would define the young state’s political culture and daily life.
The War of 1812 brought renewed danger to the frontier. Howells recounts General Hull’s surrender of Detroit, the sieges of Fort Meigs and Fort Stephenson, and Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry’s victory on Lake Erie, events that secured the state’s northern approaches. In the war’s aftermath, Ohio invested in infrastructure linking farms to markets. The narrative follows roads like Zane’s Trace and the National Road and then the canal era, focusing on the Ohio and Erie and the Miami and Erie canals. Towns such as Cleveland, Cincinnati, and the new capital at Columbus grew as transportation spurred commerce, migration, and industry.
Midcentury chapters examine reform and politics. Ohio figures prominently in the antislavery movement and the Underground Railroad, with communities such as Ripley and institutions like Oberlin College providing examples of activism and education. The rise of new parties and debates over national policy set the context for the Civil War. The book notes Ohio’s mobilization, the prominence of officers with Ohio ties, and episodes on the home front, including dissent and cavalry incursions like Morgan’s Raid. These accounts show how the state contributed men and materiel while managing internal divisions, reinforcing its strategic and civic importance in the conflict.
In the postwar period, canals yielded to railroads, factories multiplied, and cities expanded along lake and river corridors. Howells surveys industrial growth in iron and coal regions, commercial leadership in Cincinnati and Cleveland, and the consolidation of schools, colleges, and cultural institutions. Political influence is marked by presidents and statesmen from Ohio, including Grant, Hayes, Garfield, and others, emblematic of the state’s national reach. The volume closes by linking these episodes into a portrait of progress from forest frontier to populous commonwealth. Throughout, the purpose is to acquaint readers with decisive events and the structures—legal, social, and material—that underpinned Ohio’s development.
Historical Context
The book is situated in the Ohio Country, a region stretching from the Ohio River to Lake Erie, whose valleys, forests, and waterways shaped human life long before statehood. Its temporal scope spans prehistoric mound-building cultures, the era of French and British contest, the American Revolution in the West, and the turbulent early republic, reaching into the nineteenth century of canals, abolition, and war. Composed by an Ohio-born author in the late nineteenth century, it reimagines the state’s past as a sequence of vivid episodes. Geography is central: the Muskingum, Scioto, and Miami valleys, and the lake and river corridors, serve as conduits for peoples, armies, and commerce.
Ohio’s setting as a frontier crossroads explains its recurring conflicts and rapid transformations. Indigenous nations such as the Shawnee, Miami, Delaware, and Wyandot interacted with, traded with, and resisted European powers and American settlers. The place witnessed imperial rivalry between France and Britain in the mid-eighteenth century, and later the legal framework of the Northwest Territory under the United States. Migration from New England, Pennsylvania, and Virginia produced a blend of republican ideals and pragmatic enterprise. The book addresses this layered society by narrating episodes that made Ohio a proving ground for American governance, expansion, moral reform, and industrial energy.
Long before written records, Adena and Hopewell peoples constructed earthworks whose scale and precision astound archaeologists. The Newark Earthworks complex, the Great Serpent Mound in Adams County, and Fort Ancient reflect ceremonial and social systems flourishing roughly 1000 BCE to 500 CE. Later Fort Ancient cultures persisted into the protohistoric era. These facts anchor Ohio’s deep past in measurable sites and dates. The book introduces readers to these monuments as tangible gateways to antiquity, using them to cultivate historical imagination and respect for earlier inhabitants whose ingenuity precedes European and American stories on the same ground.
French explorers and traders pushed into the Ohio Valley in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, establishing networks from Detroit and the Maumee to the Sandusky and down the Ohio River. In 1749, Captain Pierre Joseph Céloron de Blainville led an expedition, burying lead plates claiming the Ohio Valley for Louis XV. Meanwhile, British traders from Pennsylvania and Virginia forged their own alliances. These overlapping claims seeded conflict. The book situates Ohio at the hinge of empires, recounting French ceremonies, trading paths, and competing forts to show how diplomatic rituals and commerce set the stage for war.
The French and Indian War, 1754 to 1763, erupted from rival claims in the Ohio Country. George Washington’s 1754 skirmish and defeat at Fort Necessity, General Braddock’s disastrous 1755 expedition along the Monongahela, and the struggle for Fort Duquesne and the Forks of the Ohio shaped the region. By 1760, British victory displaced French authority. Native nations, however, remained decisive actors. The book presents this conflict as Ohio’s crucible, emphasizing how fragile forts, shifting alliances, and the perilous frontier created an arena where young America’s military leaders learned, failed, and adapted amid woods and rivers that governed the campaigns.
Pontiac’s War erupted in 1763 across Great Lakes and Ohio posts, contesting British policies after the French defeat. Raids struck frontier settlements and forts; supply lines from Fort Pitt were threatened. Colonel Henry Bouquet fought at Bushy Run in 1763 and led a 1764 expedition down the Muskingum River, compelling peace councils and the return of captives. These operations restored a precarious order. The book recounts Bouquet’s march and parley, depicting both the martial resolve and the cultural sorrow of families reclaiming children acculturated to Native homes, thereby exploring the human ambiguities within power politics and frontier vengeance.
The American Revolution’s western theater brought sieges and tragedies to Ohio. Fort Laurens, built in 1778 on the Tuscarawas, endured isolation and attacks. In March 1782, Pennsylvania militiamen massacred ninety-six Christian Lenape at Gnadenhutten, a moral nadir. The ill-fated Crawford Expedition followed that summer against Native forces near the Sandusky, ending in defeat and the death of Colonel William Crawford. These events reveal the brutal reciprocity of frontier war. The book narrates them frankly, using named dates and places to impress upon readers the costs of unrestrained violence and the difficulty of forging justice where civil authority was weak.
The legal architecture for Ohio’s American future was built by the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which established township survey grids, civil liberties, and a ban on slavery in the Northwest Territory. Organized settlement began at Marietta in April 1788 under the Ohio Company of Associates, led by Rufus Putnam and guided politically by Manasseh Cutler. The settlers fortified Campus Martius and courts began to sit under Governor Arthur St. Clair. Parallel ventures followed: the Symmes Purchase opened lands between the Great and Little Miami Rivers; Losantiville, later renamed Cincinnati by St. Clair in 1790, emerged as a strategic Ohio River town. In the northeast, the Connecticut Western Reserve brought New Englanders to survey and found towns such as Cleveland, platted in 1796 by Moses Cleaveland at the mouth of the Cuyahoga. The Virginia Military District and the Firelands reflected layered compensation schemes for Revolutionary veterans, embedding land policy inside the landscape. The book devotes sustained attention to this framework, describing the measured lines of survey, the civic aspirations of the Ordinance, and the birth of courts, schools, and municipalities. By detailing dates, names, and institutions, it teaches that Ohio’s growth rested not merely on pioneer grit but on statutes, plats, and a consciously republican design for free labor, public education, and orderly self-government.
War returned in the 1790s as confederated Native forces defended their homelands. General Josiah Harmar suffered defeat near the Maumee in 1790; General Arthur St. Clair’s 1791 catastrophe on the Wabash was among the worst U.S. losses to Native warriors. General Anthony Wayne rebuilt the army, constructed a chain of forts, and won at Fallen Timbers near present-day Maumee on 20 August 1794. The Treaty of Greenville in 1795 opened much of southern and eastern Ohio to American settlement. The book dramatizes this turning point, naming leaders like Little Turtle and Blue Jacket, while reflecting on victory’s complex moral legacy.
Ohio attained statehood on 1 March 1803, after the 1802 constitutional convention at Chillicothe. Early leaders included Edward Tiffin, the first governor, and Thomas Worthington, an advocate of statehood. The capital rotated between Chillicothe and Zanesville before moving permanently to Columbus in 1816. The 1802 Constitution granted broad white male suffrage but tolerated debtor imprisonment; a new Constitution in 1851 restructured courts and limited state debt after internal improvement crises. The book presents the evolution of public institutions as integral to the state’s identity, showing how legislative debates and constitutional reforms stabilized life beyond the precarious frontier.
The War of 1812 tested Ohio’s northern borderlands. General William Henry Harrison organized defenses; Fort Meigs on the Maumee endured sieges in May and July 1813. On 2 August 1813, Major George Croghan’s garrison of about 160 men repelled a British and Native assault at Fort Stephenson in Lower Sandusky. On Lake Erie, Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry secured victory on 10 September 1813 near Put-in-Bay, declaring, We have met the enemy and they are ours. The book links these actions to Ohioan resolve, drawing character portraits of soldiers and frontier families who bore the war’s strain and remade security.
Canal building transformed the state between 1825 and the 1840s. The Ohio and Erie Canal, begun in 1825 and substantially completed by 1832, connected Cleveland to the Ohio River via Akron and the Scioto valley. The Miami and Erie Canal eventually linked Cincinnati to Toledo by the mid-1840s. These corridors lowered freight costs, spurred towns, and made Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Columbus regional hubs. Steamboats on the Ohio River amplified trade. Economic cycles accompanied growth, including the Panic of 1837 and cholera epidemics in 1832 and 1849. The book treats canals as engines of civilization, illustrating how water and work reordered everyday life.
Antislavery activism defined Ohio’s moral landscape before the Civil War. The 1787 ban on slavery in the Northwest set a legal baseline, but enforcement clashed with southern proximity. Underground Railroad conductors such as the Reverend John Rankin in Ripley aided fugitives across the Ohio River. Oberlin College admitted African American students from 1835 and women from 1837, symbolizing reform energy. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 incited resistance, culminating in the Oberlin-Wellington Rescue of 1858. The tragic case of Margaret Garner in 1856 tested conscience and law in Cincinnati. The book frames these episodes as lessons in civic courage and justice.
Ohio’s Civil War contribution was immense, furnishing approximately 320,000 soldiers and leaders including Ulysses S. Grant, William T. Sherman, and James A. Garfield. The war reached the state during John Hunt Morgan’s cavalry raid in July 1863, culminating in battle at Buffington Island and Morgan’s capture near Salineville on 26 July. Political dissent also flourished; Congressman Clement Vallandigham of Dayton, a prominent Copperhead, was arrested and banished in 1863. The book balances battlefield exploits with home-front contention, highlighting names, dates, and places to show that loyalty, liberty, and dissent were contested in Ohio’s towns and fields.
Industrial growth after 1865 accelerated with railroads, iron and steel works, and energy discoveries. The Baltimore and Ohio reached the Ohio River at Wheeling in 1853; by the 1870s and 1880s, Cleveland and Youngstown expanded metallurgical capacity, and northwest Ohio’s natural gas boom, notably around Findlay after 1884, fueled factories and glass. Labor conflict accompanied change: the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 disrupted lines in Cleveland and Toledo, and the Hocking Valley coal strike of 1884 to 1885 exposed tensions among miners, operators, and state power. The book gestures toward these modern pressures, portraying progress as entangled with new forms of inequality.
The book functions as a civic critique by juxtaposing the rhetoric of progress with the moral costs borne by communities. Narratives of Gnadenhutten, the Crawford Expedition, and the treaty cycle confront the dispossession of Native peoples and the frailty of frontier justice, questioning whether victory fulfills republican ideals without legitimacy and fairness. Accounts of the Northwest Ordinance elevate law, education, and anti-slavery principles, implicitly rebuking later deviations and expediencies. Through named officers, dates, and settlements, the text examines how order must be earned ethically, not merely won by arms, and how public institutions should restrain vengeance and protect the vulnerable.
In social terms, the book’s treatment of the Underground Railroad, the Fugitive Slave Act, and abolitionist strongholds such as Oberlin critiques a national tolerance for human bondage and the collusion of law with injustice. Descriptions of canal labor, epidemic hardship, and labor strife reveal class divides that accompanied commerce and industry. Political episodes from state constitutional reforms to Copperhead agitation warn against demagoguery and the erosion of rights in crisis. By harnessing Ohio’s specific episodes, the text indicts cruelty, sectionalism, and opportunism, urging readers to measure prosperity against conscience and to align civic power with humane, inclusive governance.
Author Biography
William Dean Howells (1837–1920) was a central figure in American literary realism, often called the Dean of American Letters. Active from the Civil War era into the early twentieth century, he combined novel-writing, criticism, and influential editorial posts to shape national taste. His work moved American fiction away from melodrama toward attentive representation of ordinary life, social manners, and ethical choice. As both arbiter and practitioner, he helped legitimize the novel of contemporary experience and promoted new voices who would define modern American writing. His career bridges the world of antebellum journalism and the professionalized literary culture of magazines and publishing houses.
Raised in the Ohio River Valley with limited formal schooling, Howells learned his craft in print shops and newspaper offices, reading voraciously and practicing journalism from a young age. By the late 1850s he was writing literary sketches and political commentary, and his campaign life of Abraham Lincoln, published in 1860, brought him national notice. In the early 1860s he received a diplomatic appointment as U.S. consul in Venice, where he deepened his study of European languages and literature. The combination of practical newsroom training and self-directed education shaped his critical standards and gave him the cosmopolitan outlook that later informed both his fiction and criticism.
Howells's years abroad yielded the travel books Venetian Life and Italian Journeys, which introduced American readers to his calm, observant prose. Returning to the United States in the later 1860s, he joined the Atlantic Monthly, first in subordinate roles and, during the 1870s, as editor. From that vantage he championed a more realistic art and guided a generation of writers. His own early fiction, including Their Wedding Journey and A Foregone Conclusion, explored courtship, travel, and cultural encounter with a restrained humor. The editorial desk and the novelist's desk reinforced each other, as he tested in practice the aesthetic principles he advocated in print.
In the 1880s Howells reached the height of his reputation with novels that examined American business, marriage, class, and conscience. A Modern Instance probed the social and legal contours of divorce; The Rise of Silas Lapham presented a self-made industrialist confronting moral tests; Indian Summer offered a mature comedy of manners; and A Hazard of New Fortunes mapped the conflicts of an urban, commercial society. Reviewers often praised his tact, clarity, and humane irony, while some contemporaries found his realism too undramatic. The cumulative effect, however, was to make the everyday life of the United States a worthy subject for serious fiction.
After leaving the Atlantic, Howells wrote the Editor's Study for Harper's, a widely read venue where he elaborated the case for realism and assessed new books. Essays such as Criticism and Fiction and memoirs like My Literary Passions and Literary Friends and Acquaintance codified his views and recorded a lifetime of reading. He encouraged peers and proteges, notably Mark Twain and Henry James, and helped bring broader attention to regional writers and to African American authors, including Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles W. Chesnutt. European realists, particularly Ivan Turgenev and Leo Tolstoy, provided touchstones for his insistence on truthful representation and moral seriousness.
Howells's criticism linked aesthetics to ethics. He argued that literature should bear honest witness to social realities without resort to sensationalism, and his fiction often stages conflicts between personal desire and communal obligation. Sensitive to labor unrest, immigration, and widening inequalities in the Gilded Age, he used novels and essays to register competing perspectives rather than deliver programmatic answers. His public advocacy, sometimes controversial, grew from the same commitments that guided his editorial choices: a belief that American letters must include a wider range of experiences and voices, and that the novelist's task is to clarify the moral texture of ordinary life.
In his later years, Howells continued to publish novels, stories, and reflective prose, including autobiographical works such as A Boy's Town and My Year in a Log Cabin, which revisited formative scenes of American provincial life. He remained an active reviewer and essayist into the early twentieth century, and his death in 1920 closed a career that had spanned dramatic changes in the nation's culture. Today he is remembered for consolidating realism as a dominant mode, for opening magazine doors to diverse talents, and for modeling a criticism grounded in humane judgment. His books are studied for their subtle humor, social insight, and ethical poise.
Amazing Stories from the History of Ohio (Illustrated)
Preface
In the following stories, drawn from the annals of Ohio, I have tried to possess the reader with a knowledge, in outline at least, of the history of the State from the earliest times. I cannot suppose that I have done this with unfailing accuracy in respect to fact, but with regard to the truth, I am quite sure of my purpose at all times to impart it[1q].
The books which have been of most use to me in writing this are the histories of Francis Parkman; the various publications of Messrs. Robert Clarke and Co. in the "Ohio Valley Series"; McClung's "Sketches of Western Adventure"; "Ohio" (in the American Commonwealths Series) by Ruf us King; "History and Civil Government of Ohio," by B. A. Hinsdale and Mary Hinsdale; "Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley," by W. H. Venable; Theodore Roosevelt's "Winning of the West"; Whitelaw Reid's "Ohio in the War"; and above all others, the delightful and inexhaustible volumes of Henry Howe's "Historical Collections of Ohio."
W. D. H.
I. The Ice Folk and the Earth Folk
The first Ohio stories are part of the common story of the wonderful Ice Age, when a frozen deluge pushed down from the north, and covered a vast part of the earth's surface with slowly moving glaciers. The traces that this age left in Ohio are much the same as it left elsewhere, and the signs that there were people here ten thousand years ago, when the glaciers began to melt and the land became fit to live in again, are such as have been found in the glacier drift in many other countries. Even before the ice came creeping southwestwardly from the region of Niagara, and passed over two thirds of our state, from Lake Erie to the Ohio River there were people here of a race older than the hills, as the hills now are; for the glaciers ground away the hills as they once were, and made new ones, with new valleys between them, and new channels for the streams to run where there had never been water courses before. These earliest Ohioans must have been the same as the Ohioans of the Ice Age, and when they had fled southward before the glaciers, they must have followed the retreat of the melting ice back into Ohio again. No one knows how long they dwelt here along its edges in a climate like that of Greenland, where the glaciers are now to be seen as they once were in the region of Cincinnati. But it is believed that these Ice Folk, as we may call them, were of the race which still roams the Arctic snows. They seem to have lived as the Eskimos of our day live: they were hunters and fishers, and in the gravelly banks of the new rivers, which the glaciers upheaved, the Ice Folk dropped the axes of chipped stone which are now found there. They left nothing else behind them; but similar tools or weapons are found in the glacier-built river banks of Europe, and so it is thought that the race of the earliest Ohio men lived pretty much all over the world in the Ice Age.
One of the learned writers[*] who is surest of them and has told us most about them, holds that they were for their time and place as worthy ancestors as any people could have; and we could well believe this because the Ohio man has, in all ages, been one of the foremost men.
Our Ice Folk were sturdy, valiant, and cunning enough to cope with the fierce brute life [2q]and the terrible climate of their day, but all they have left to prove it is the same kind of stone axes that have been found in the drift of the glaciers, along the water courses in Northern France and Southern England.
Our Ice Folk must have dressed like their far-descended children, the Eskimos, in furs and skins, and like them they must have lived upon fish and the flesh of wild beasts. The least terrible of these beasts would have been the white bear; the mammoth and mastodon were among the animals the Ice Folk hunted for game, and slew without bows or arrows, for there was no wood to make these of. The only weapon the Ice Folk had was the stone ax which they may have struck into their huge prey when they came upon it sleeping or followed in the chase till it dropped with fatigue. Such an ax was dug up out of the glacial terrace, as the bank of this drift is called, in the valley of the Tuscarawas, in 1889, perhaps ten thousand years after it was left there. It was wrought from a piece of black flint, four inches long and two inches wide; at the larger end it was nearly as thick as it was wide, and it was chipped to a sharp edge all round. Within the present year another of the Ice Folk's axes has been found near New London, twenty-two feet under ground, in the same kind of glacial drift as the first. But it seems to have been made of a different kind of stone, and to have been so deeply rotted by the long ages it had been buried that when its outer substance was scratched away, hardly anything of the hard green rock was left.
After the glaciers were gone, the Ohio climate was still very cold, and vast lakes stretched over the state, freezing in the long winters, and thawing in the short summers. One of these spread upward from the neighborhood of Akron to the east and west of where Cleveland stands; but by far the largest flooded nearly all that part of Ohio which the glaciers failed to cover, from beyond where Pittsburg is to where Cincinnati is. At the last point a mighty ice dam formed every winter till as the climate grew warmer and the ice thawed more and more, the waters burst the dam, and poured their tide down the Ohio River to the Mississippi, while those of the northern lake rushed through the Cuyahoga to Lake Erie, and both lakes disappeared forever. For the next four or five thousand years the early Ohio men kept very quiet; but we need not suppose for that reason that there were none. Our Ice Folk, who dropped their stone axes in the river banks, may have passed away with the Ice Age, or they may have remained in Ohio, and begun slowly to take on some faint likeness of civilization. There is nothing to prove that they went, and there is nothing to prove that they staid; but Ohio must always have been a pleasant place to live in after the great thaw, and it seems reasonable to think that the Ice Folk lingered, in part at least, and changed with the changing climate, and became at last the people who left the signs of their presence in almost every part of the state.
Those were the Mound Builders, whose works are said to be two or three thousand years old, though we cannot be very sure of that. There are some who think that the mounds are only a few hundred years old, and that their builders were the race of red men whom the white men found here. One may think very much as one likes, and I like to think that the Mound Builders were a very ancient people, who vanished many ages before the Indians came here. They could not have been savages, for the region where they dwelt could not have fed savages enough to heap up the multitude of their mounds. Each wild man needs fifty thousand acres to live upon, as the wild man lives by hunting and fishing; in the whole Ohio country, the earliest white adventurers found only two or three thousand Indians at the most; and the people who built those forts and temples and tombs, and shaped from the earth the mighty images of their strange bird-gods and reptile-gods, could have lived only by tilling the soil. Their mounds are found everywhere in the west between the Alleghany Mountains and the Mississippi River, but they are found mostly in Ohio, where their farms and gardens once bordered the Muskingum, the Scioto, the two Miamis, and our other large streams, which they probably used as highways to the rivers of the southwest.
Their forts were earthworks, but they were skillfully planned, with a knowledge which no savage race has shown. They were real strongholds, and they are so large that some of them inclose hundreds of acres within walls of earth which still rise ten and twelve feet from the ground. They are on a far grander scale than the supposed temples or religious works; and there are more of them than of all the other ruins, except the small detached mounds, which are almost numberless.
These, from the charred bones found among the ashes in them, are known to be tombs, and they were probably the sepulchers of the common people, whose bodies were burned. The large mounds are heaped above walled chambers, and in these were platforms, supposed to have been altars, and whole skeletons, supposed to be the skeletons of priests buried there. The priests are supposed to have been the chiefs of the people, and to have ruled them through their superstitions; but there is nothing to prove this, for their laws were never put in written words or any other sign of speech. In some of the mounds little figures of burnt clay have been found, which may be idols, and pieces of ancient pottery, which may be fragments of sacred vessels, and small plates of copper, with marks or scratches on them, which may be letters. Some antiquarians have tried to read these letters, if they are letters, and to make sense out of them, but no seeker after true Ohio stories can trust their interpretations.
The Mound Builders used very little stone and showed no knowledge of masonry. But they built so massively out of the earth, that their works have lasted to this day in many places, just as they left them, except for the heavy growth of trees, which the first settlers found covering them, and which were sometimes seven or eight hundred years old. At Marietta, these works when the white people came were quite perfect and inclosed fifty acres on the bank of the Muskingum, overlooking the Ohio. They were in great variety of design. The largest mound was included in the grounds of the present cemetery, and so has been saved, but the plow of the New England emigrant soon passed over the foundations of the Mound Builders' temples. At Circleville the shape of their fortifications gave its name to the town, which has long since hid them from sight. One of them was almost perfectly round, and the other nearly square. The round fort was about seventy feet in diameter, and was formed of two walls twenty feet high, with a deep ditch between; the other fort was fifty-five rods square, and it had no ditch; seven gateways opened into it at the side and corners, and it was joined to the round fort by an eighth. It is forever to be regretted that these precious ancient works should have been destroyed to make place for the present town; but within a few years one of the most marvelous of the Mound Builders' works, the great Serpent Mound near Loudon, in Adams County, has been preserved to after time by the friends of science, and put in the keeping of the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.
