"This book explores the role the Ohio River played in the lives of three generations of settlers from its headwaters at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to the falls at Louisville, Kentucky. In the first part of the book, Kim M. Gruenwald examines the strategies of colonists who coveted lands "across the mountains" as space to be conquered.

In part two, she traces the emergence of a new region in a valley transformed by commerce as the Ohio River became the artery of movement in "the Western Country." Part three reveals how relations between neighbors across the river cooled as residents of "the Buckeye State" came to regard the river as the boundary between North and South.".

"From 1790 to 1830 the Ohio River nurtured a regional identity as Americans strove to create an empire based upon the ties of commerce in frontier Ohio and Kentucky, and the backcountry of Pennsylvania and Virginia. Gruenwald traces the local, regional, and national connections created by merchants by detailing the business world of the Woodbridge family of Marietta, Ohio.

Only as regional commercial concerns gave way to statewide industrial concerns, and as artificial transportation networks such as canals and railroads supplanted the river, did those living to the north define the Ohio as a boundary."--BOOK JACKET.