Nineteenth-century American travel literature provides fascinating glimpses into the lives of ordinary people and into the history of the nation's settlement. Reuben Gold Thwaites's Afloat on the Ohio is a fine example of the genre, rich in Ohio River personalities, legends, and history as seen through Thwaites's eyes. His six-week journey by skiff covered a thousand miles from Redstone, Pennsylvania, to Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi. Thwaites's voyage echoes those taken by early explorers, pioneers, and settlers who opened up the West through river travel from the East.

This edition is a reprinting of the original 1897 edition.

"[N]o words can adequately describe the wooded hill-slopes which day by day girt us in; the romantic ravines which corrugate the rim of the Ohio's basin; the beautiful islands which stud the glistening tide; the great affluents which, winding down for a thousand miles, from the Blue Ridge, the Cumberland, and the Great Smoky, pour their floods into the central stream; the giant trees—sycamores, pawpaws, cork elms, catalpas, walnuts, and what not—which everywhere are in view in this woodland world; the strange and lovely flowers we saw; the curious people we met, black and white, and the varieties of dialect which caught our ear; the details of our charming gypsy life, ashore and afloat, during which we were conscious of the red blood tingling through our veins, and, alert to the whisperings of Nature, were careless of the workaday world, so far away,—simply glad to be alive."—From the Preface