Talk:Ohio River

Lead

One significant portion of the Ohio River is man-made, the McAlpine Locks and Dam (formerly the Louisville and Portland Canal) bypassing the Falls of the Ohio (which we don't mention in the lead, either). Sbalfour (talk) 00:03, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Fixed. However, even more significant is that the Ohio is no longer a free flowing natural river - it is divided into essentially 51 pools or reservoirs by 51 locks and dams for navigability. That's pretty significant, and it's not even mentioned in the article. Sbalfour (talk) 15:03, 15 March 2019 (UTC)

History

3 of 5 paragraphs and 64% of the text in the lead is history, and this is supposed to be a natural resource article. The largest paragraph is on prehistoric history, which probably doesn't need to be in the lead. We have 6 or 7 level 2 sections to summarize, and that ostensibly gives us our paragraphing. There's nothing on ecology or geology in the lead, for example. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sbalfour (talk • contribs) 23:34, 2 March 2019 (UTC)

I've deleted a paragraph of prehistoric history copy-pasted from the text; the lead is supposed to be a *SUMMARY*. The history portion is now 2 out of 5 paragraphs and 45% of the text, still too much by a factor of more than 2. And there's nothing about geology or ecology in the lead. I also think it's worth mentioning the Allegheny and Monongahela headwaters, as well as the major tributaries including the Cumberland in Kentucky and iconic Wabash in Indiana. The statement that the river was the boundary of the northwest territory doesn't appear in the text; the lead isn't supposed to be new information. Sbalfour (talk) 16:14, 3 March 2019 (UTC)

Geography

The lead is worded suspiciously like a website I found. Normaly the lead sentence takes the form, “a foo is a bar, baz, quux”. I don’t know where Cairo, Il is. Geographically, I have to look up Pittsburgh to see exactly where it is. A foreign reader might not know either city. Not an auspicious start. That it is a tributary of the Mississipi is important but secondary to knowing where it is. How about this:

The Ohio River is a 981-mile long river in the midwestern United States that flows southwesterly from western Pennsylvania south of Lake Erie to its mouth on the Mississippi River at the southern tip Illinois. It is the second largest river by discharge volume in the United States and a principal east (left) tributary of the north-south flowing Mississippi River that divides the eastern from western United States.

I recognize that the Mississippi River is not the same as the continental divide of the Appalachians or Rockies. Yet in lore as well as in practice, the ‘Ole Miss’ separates the east from the west on account of the impediment to passage.Sbalfour (talk) 04:25, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Drainage basin

The second paragraph says "...and its drainage basin includes parts of 15 states", and it's uncited (the end citation supports the drinking water clause only). I'm a scholar, so I get to nitpick. That's the largest number I encounter in web searches, which vary from 11 to 14 states, usually. And usually, those counts exclude the drainage basin of the Tennessee River which is rather confounding. I count 10 states rather obviously, excluding the Tennessee's basin: (north of the river) Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York; (south of the River) Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina. Then we come to Maryland: I was dubious, because Maryland is mostly east of the Appalachians. So I checked. The Youghiogheny River, a tributary of the Monongahela River, one of the headwaters forming the Forks of the Ohio, drains the western wedge of Maryland nestled in the bosom of West Virginia windward of Appalachia. So that makes the 11th state. In a separate enumeration, the drainage basin of the Tennessee River adds the following states: Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia. Of those 3 states, the only state the Tennessee River does not actually flow through or form part of the border, is Georgia. However, the Hiwassee River, a tributary of the Tennessee River, as well as a few of its tributaries in the southeastern corner of Tennessee, flows out of Georgia into Tennessee. So clearly, parts of Georgia are in the Tennessee River drainage basin. I say the drainage basin of the Ohio River is therefore 14 states, s'il vous plaît. Sbalfour (talk) 16:02, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Hmmm... the Eastern Continental Divide (ECD) passes through Jones Gap State Park on the northwest segment of the border of South Carolina. There is a sign there, the one and only sign in the state, demarcating the ECD. The French Broad River, which at the junction with the Holston River forms the Tennessee River, has headwaters located near the town Rosman, North Carolina 12 miles to the west but still only a few miles from the ECD. There, south of town, the East Fork and Middle Fork join other tributaries to form the river. The hydrography of those two creeks is local. But the East fork rises a few miles to the southeast, flows west a few miles then north. But its headwaters still don't appear to cross the SC border. Another tributary of the French Broad, the Little River, is further east and flows north from headwaters near the Blue Ridge escarpment. Jones Gap is located where U.S. 276 crosses the NC/SC border. In that vicinity are Clear Creek and Walker Creek and an unnamed tributary thereof, both tributaries of the Little River. Around there must be where that square mile in SC is drained by the Little River. The drainage basin might just be a slough, or a bunch of mountain streams. On the east side of the ECD at Jones Gap, the Middle Saluda River rises, flows through the park then south, ultimately draining into the Atlantic Ocean. One or the other of the former French Broad tributaries may drain the park west of the ECD, in which case the 15th state in the drainage basin of the Ohio River is established. But considering the slender chain of evidence here, it needs a citation by USGS, the SCDNR, or a professionally published hydrologic survey. Stay tuned. Sbalfour (talk) 17:54, 8 February 2019 (UTC)

Amidst staying tuned someone made an edit https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ohio_River&diff=933397700&oldid=931322015 which removed South Carolina from the list in the Drainage basin section. This leaves it inconsistent with the preceding text ("The Ohio drains parts of 15 states in four regions") and the number in the lead section. I don't have any idea what to do in this case (revert the edit? edit the numbers to match?) so I'll just leave it here.  — ⟨✆​∣µzdzisław∣⚒​⟩ 08:50, 16 June 2020 (UTC)

"Ohio Valley"

I came to this page looking for a definition of the "Ohio Valley" as mentioned in several other pages (ex: 1974 Super Outbreak#Meteorological synopsis). The closest definition I could find was this. 71.222.229.94 (talk) 21:48, 24 March 2019 (UTC)

Discovery, redux

The subsection “European discovery” passively stipulates 5 expeditions to the Ohio. It beggars the question, what of them? Some of the claims are credible, others are incredulous. Scholarship would demand that we make some distinction between them. It’s not because we don’t know - in most cases the later historians have resolved the ambiguity and conflicts for us. We should cite them, and the evidence they present.

The judgment of history is the following: the claims of La Salle and Woods are incredulous; those of Arthur and Viele are indisputable. There is ambiguity about the extent of the post-Kanawha Falls leg of the Batts and Fallom expedition - they may have proceeded northward, up the Kanawha possibly to its mouth on the Ohio, or westward, crossing the Guyandotte River and possibly reaching the Big Sandy basin adjacent to KY. So it may be said the attributed Ohio claim is specious, and historians have not elucidated the matter.

For the sake of completeness, Marquette and Jolliet record passing the mouth of the Ohio on the Mississippi in July of 1673, but the record of their landings does not place them on its shore; a la, sighting is not equated with discovery.

The lone paragraph constituting the section is worth more than one blanket sentence per putative claim. Maybe several paragraphs summarizing the authorities for each, so that some judgment about the answer to “Who discovered the Ohio River?” can be formed, while still maintaining the encyclopedia’s NPOV dictum.

We been thru a round of this - see the Discovery discussion above. It appears we’ve elided all controversy by eliding all exposition. Some part of that discussion could reasonably be text in the article, esp. the Lasalle-Margry-Parkman thread. It’s ok to document controversy and ambiguity, as long we don’t opine. I’m more bluntly discriminating here than I/we would be in the article. Sbalfour (talk) 16:59, 10 May 2023 (UTC)

"Major" tributaries

The section Major tributaries of the river, in order from the head to the mouth of the Ohio, include: lists 35 bullet items, including 3 streams we don't even have wiki articles for, and numerous creeks. It appears that we attempted to list anything bigger than a ditch. The other tributary sections above limit themselves to 10 bullet items, which seems more discrete. I'd propose cutting anything we don't have an article for, and anything that's a "creek". Maybe, we should only list things that appear in one of the tributaries-by-category lists above. We could also shorten the section title to something like Major tributaries, in order, from the forks. This might be the place to identify whether an item is a left or right tributary. Sbalfour (talk) 18:21, 10 May 2023 (UTC)