Nor am I confident of my ability even to pick out the more important
features of its history in our common national life. But I venture to
put the problem, to state some familiar facts from the special point of
view, with the hope of arousing interest in the theme among the many
students who are advancing the science of history in this section.

To the physiographer the section is made up of the province of the
Alleghany Plateaus and the southern portion of the Prairie Plains. In
it are found rich mineral deposits which are changing the life of the
section and of the nation. Although you reckon in your membership only
the states that touch the Ohio River, parts of those states are, from
the point of view of their social origins, more closely connected with
the Northwest on the Lake Plains, than with the Ohio Valley; and, on the
other hand, the Tennessee Valley, though it sweeps far toward the Lower
South, and only joins the Ohio at the end of its course, has been
through much of the history of the region an essential part of this
society. Together these rivers made up the "Western World" of the
pioneers of the Revolutionary era; the "Western Waters" of the
backwoodsmen.

But, after all, the unity of the section and its place in history were
determined by the "beautiful river," as the French explorers called
it--the Ohio, which pours its flood for over a thousand miles, a great
highway to the West; a historic artery of commerce, a wedge of advance
between powerful Indian confederacies, and rival European nations, to
the Mississippi Valley; a home for six mighty States, now in the heart
of the nation, rich in material wealth, richer in the history of
American democracy, a society that holds a place midway between the
industrial sections of the seaboard and the plains and prairies of the
agricultural West; between the society that formed later along the
levels about the Great Lakes, and the society that arose in the Lower
South on the plains of the Gulf of Mexico. The Alleghanies bound it on
the east, the Mississippi on the west. At the forks of the great river
lies Pittsburgh, the historic gateway to the West, the present symbol
and embodiment of the age of steel, the type of modern industrialism.
Near its western border is St. Louis, looking toward the Prairies, the
Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains, the land into which the tide of
modern colonization turns.

Between these old cities, for whose sites European nation