[Sidenote: THE OHIO RIVER BRIDGE AT CINCINNATI] River traffic along the Ohio, in the forties, was still a big factor in business but was contesting tooth and nail the advance of the railways, and fought bitterly against the right of the invaders to build bridges over the waterways. The steamboat men said bridge piers would be a peril to navigation, but the cities of Cincinnati and Covington, facing each other across the river, cried for the bridge. The rivermen were on top in 1846 when Roebling came along, fresh from the building of the wire bridge in Pennsylvania and with his head full of wire bridges, and offered to throw a wire span across the Ohio with a length of 1057 feet and a floor height above the water of 103 feet. [Illustration: LOGGING--HANDLING BIG FELLOWS WITH WIRE ROPE] For just ten years the steamboat faction staved it off. It was not begun till 1856, just after the Niagara Bridge was opened. The panic of 1857 and then the Civil War kept the project at a standstill until 1863. On Easter Day in 1867 the bridge was opened. Colonel Washington A. Roebling, son of the pioneer, was the first to cross on its cable. In the meantime John A. Roebling had completed not alone the Niagara Bridge, but the Alleghany Bridge over the Alleghany River at Pittsburg. The last named differed from the Niagara, Ohio and later East River bridges in that it had several piers in the streamway, after the manner of the old type structures, but in principle it conformed to the plan which had been in his mind from the beginning. His son, Washington, was his only assistant. [Sidenote: BRIDGING NIAGARA GORGE] In all the world, perhaps, no place could have been found where the building of a simon pure "Suspension Bridge" would have been a more spectacular accomplishment than over Niagara Gorge, with the Falls thundering a little way upstream, and the waters lashing and fuming underneath; no place where its slender beauty could have had such stern and impressive background. The idea of carrying railroad trains over that turmoil of waters on a web apparently so frail, evoked a storm of protest from well-nigh all the foremost engineers of the time. But Roebling was a practical man as well as a stubborn one. After all, he was dealing with rock and wire and he knew what they would do. He built the bridge, the first of its kind to carry railroad traffic. All the world of that day knew, but most of it now has forgotten, how he flew a kite across the gorge to get his first wire over, and from that built up his cables. On March 16, 1855, the first train passed over it. With one remodeling it continued to carry increasingly heavy loads until nearly half a century later it was replaced by a larger structure, better calculated to bear the burden of modern equipment. [Sidenote: THE "SUSPENSION BRIDGE" PROVES ITSELF]