Can the Ohio river be navigated to the great lakes?

Answer 1

The Ohio is not connected to the Great Lakes directly. Going from the Ohio to the Lakes could be done via man-made canals. The Ohio is formed at Pittsburg, in southwestern Pennsylvania, by the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, and flows southwestwardly until it eventually empties into the Mississippi. The Ohio and Mississippi watersheds are separate from that of the Great Lakes, divided from the Lakes by high ground. The Lakes are drained by the Saint Lawrence River/Seaway system. In the old days the Indians, and later white pioneers whom the Indians let in on the secret, used to cross from the Great Lakes system over to the Ohio and Mississippi systems via portages. This involved canoeing up tributary streams of the Lakes as far as the canoe could be floated by the ever-shallower water, then dragging the canoe out of the water and carrying it over the hill to the creek on the other side, and floating downstream on it, until ever larger streams were reached, and eventually the great rivers. These "portage places" or "carrying places" were obviously very important, and the Indians had figured out where all the good ones were, where the two systems were separated by only a few miles of canoe-carrying. Today canals have been built that allow large vessels to pass from one system to another by water.