For, taken through the years, the human element in the historical phases of these valleys has remained practically unchanged. Greed of the great round dollar has been the commanding passion, and nowhere has it burned more fiercely. All the crimes, treacheries, deceptions, and frauds practiced under the sun have been repeated on the Ohio between Pittsburg and Cairo. Some, perhaps unknown elsewhere, have here been committed. But here, too, that old-time clear love of living for life's sake only, the thing which makes sailors sing the world over, was deeply felt. In its lower extremities the river reaches practically southern climes while its northern arms reach out into New York and Pennsylvania. On its northwestern shore settled many colonies from New England; on the south-eastern coast flocked the Virginians. Thus, from the standpoint of temperament, the Ohio offers a most remarkable field of study of human types. As said, it was the western projection of Mason and Dixon's Line; but instead of being a mere geographical technicality, it was a teeming highway where passion, hate, love, and fraternity were every day displayed until the great crisis was finally passed. For, be it remembered, there was civil war on the Ohio long before Fort Sumter belched its defiance to secessionism. True, western Virginia and Kentucky were not unbalanced by the fervor that swept the South, but this river highway between them and Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois (as loyal as Vermont or Massachusetts) was the meeting-place of hundreds who could not meet without striking fire. Brought up in this zone where issues were plain and where it was not derogatory to carry a broken nose or a blackened eye any time between 1840 and 1860, fired to fast thinking and faster action by the passionate current in which they lived, were many of the bravest leaders of the Civil War, such as Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman. Our study here has nothing to do with the history of the Civil War, but disclosures made at that time bring out most plainly the position of the Ohio Valley in the Union, and the political consequences. It has been in place elsewhere to define the various stocks of people who entered the Ohio Valley a century ago and who have been its controlling spirits since their entrance. Of these the rivermen were a part, moved by one and the same force politically. Some were of the North and some came up from the South, and they wrangled for years over the problems solved by the Civil War.