Day 1 – 6/29 – North Bend to Miami Whitewater, OH – 15 miles

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I knew exactly what this post was going to be about. The idea had crystallized in my mind in the days leading up to my departure. In resuming my walk, I decided not to start back in the center of Cincinnati, since I would have been repeating some miles that I had already previously covered. (The American Discovery Trail splits into northern and southern branches just west, in Elizabethtown.) Instead, I caught a Lyft to North Bend, and specifically to William Henry Harrison’s memorial, as it seemed like an easy way to minimize overlap while also initiating the walk at a place of some historical relevance.

So that post was going to be about William Henry Harrison, and particularly about his legacy as the man who served the shortest presidency in the history of the US. Just 30 days! The story is that his inauguration occurred in a frigid downpour, but to play up his reputation as a rugged frontiersman, he refused to wear a jacket. To make matters worse, he proceeded to deliver the longest inaugural speech in the history of the presidency–a whole two hours! People quickly linked cause and effect, deducing that he had come down with pneumonia, which ultimately killed him. More recent study suggests that typhoid was the culprit, a victory for long-winded speakers everywhere.

All of that made me wonder, though: what’s it like to have at one time been important enough to win the presidency, only to be known historically for a singular failure, and a failure that wasn’t your fault in any way? At this point, most Americans don’t know who William Henry Harrison was. And that’s a bit of an insult. But most of those who do know he existed know him only as America’s 30-day fiancé. I’m not in a great position to throw stones, either; I certainly read about him at different points in my education, but I rarely taught US History or spent much time reading US History after graduation, so the details grew fuzzy over time.

So, over the last couple days, I’ve been listening to Gallop Toward the Sun: Tecumseh and William Henry Harrison’s Struggle for the Destiny of a Nation by Peter Stark. While Harrison was my priority, it was helpful to see how his and Tecumseh’s lives were intertwined, with the latter dying in a conflict that secured Harrison’s preeminence on the frontier.

What stood out the most, though, was just how important Harrison was to American history. At a time when the future of the American west was an open question, Harrison manifested his destiny from Ohio to Canada, long before he ever reestablished residency back east. He found an ally in Jefferson, spearheading an aggressive policy that sought to push back Native Americans across Appalachia. When Madison’s policy priorities shifted, Harrison capitalized on his distance from the capitol, continuing to push and prod the indigenous peoples across Kentucky and Ohio, crossing one treaty line after another. For all of Tecumseh’s efforts, along with other native leaders, to find a way to coexist in peace, it was Harrison’s persistence that eventually brought matters to a tragic end. I’m hesitant to offer that, without Harrison, the USA would look very different today; it was just so damn tempting to keep pushing onward to the Pacific, that I suspect other opportunists would have eventually conjured up sufficient justification. Andrew Jackson still existed, after all. But I still wonder what might have happened if Madison’s more accommodating preferences would have been given a chance.

Equally interesting to me is how divergent Harrison’s priorities were, particularly when thinking about his attitudes towards different marginalized or disempowered populations. He was adamantly pro-slavery and repeatedly tried to establish loopholes through which he could bring his own slaves into Ohio. His relentless drive to push the indigenous populations out of Ohio and elsewhere was tied to his priority to make land available for poor white settlers. Despite coming from one of the most privileged families in the US and the son of a founding father, it was of top importance for him to–in his view–bolster democracy by sharing the wealth of land widely. This occurred, admittedly, by effectively stealing the land from many others! But that’s the other piece–before he kicked into high gear, he wrote a letter to Jefferson warning him that an aggressive expansion policy risked setting in motion a tragedy that would be a stain on the United States forever after. Harrison was against it before he was for it. Before he was really, really, really for it.

It’s hard to know exactly what he believed. By all accounts, Harrison was a brazen opportunist, often surrounded by sycophants. But it’s clear what he did–he fundamentally reshaped the American West, and Ohio in particular. His fingerprints are all over the land I’m passing through. A short presidency takes nothing away from that. For better and a great deal worse, he left a hell of a legacy.

What was there to see at Harrison’s memorial? The monument is tower-like, standing high over the hillside. His tomb sits just inside the large tower. Only a few other family members are entombed there with him–plenty of vaults still available! Otherwise, a handful of pillars line the walkway, offering quotes from his life. Like this one, from his (long) inaugural address: “as long as the love of power is a dominant passion of the human bosom, and as long as the understandings of men can be warped and their affections changed by operations upon their passions and prejudices, so long will the liberties of a people depend on their own constant attention to its preservation.”

There’s not much to say for the walk from the memorial onward. By design, it was a shorter day–around 15 miles–and it included a fair amount of miles on well-traveled roads. I rode out a thunderstorm at Monk’s Kitchen, just outside of Harrison, and another blast in a wildlife shelter just outside of Miami Whitewater. The skies cleared out after that, just in time for a night’s worth of firecrackers popping off. Not my best night’s sleep ever.