The Smoky Time: Ohio Frontier Valley
In the late eighteenth century, writes Ray Swick, Americans began to settle in huge aromatic forests across the Appalachians.
In the last half of the eighteenth century, when Americans began crossing the Appalachians to settle the interior of the continent, they were startled by the wilderness that met their eyes. By comparison, the long-settled East with its neat towns and well-tended farms seemed exhausted and worn out.
Beyond the mountains stretched a vast new world, one containing such natural riches that it seemed at first almost fabled and beyond belief. Bountiful as these gifts were, and despite the awe that initially was accorded them, they in the end went unappreciated. Within a half century the West provided a drama unique to the American scene: the wholesale destruction of an ecology which had existed unspoiled since time immemorial.
No single area of the trans-Appalachian West exemplified this tragic train of events better than did the Ohio River Valley. New Englanders were among the first to settle the region systematically; in 1788 they founded Marietta at the point where the Muskingum flows into the Ohio.
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