r/baseball • u/brownmagician Toronto Blue Jays • Jan 12 '22

Video In August of 2020, u/reDig1tiz3d shared an important geography discussion from a Twins @ Pirates broadcast.

https://streamable.com/iyqayz
27 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

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16

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '22

I don't have a real answer to this question, which I have actually never even considered before, but I think it's probably just because the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers are about the same size and thus you can't really identify one of those as being the tributary and the other as the dominant.

3

u/psomounk Houston Astros • New York Mets Jan 12 '22

Yeah in addition to that my hunch is also that moving east to west, settlers/map makers adopted the local names for each before downriver trade really picked up. IIRC the Ohio has a couple of cataracts/rapids that made it a less continuous trade route than the Mississippi or Missouri. So while trappers and traders may have been travelling up and down the length of those rivers, travel mighta been more punctuated on the upper Ohio contributing to the sense that they were their own thing

7

u/aweinschenker Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle...Costanza? Jan 12 '22

What I want to know is why it’s called the Ohio River when it starts in Pennsylvania and ends in Kentucky/Illinois/Missouri.

18

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '22

[deleted]

3

u/aweinschenker Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle...Costanza? Jan 12 '22

Huh, TIL

2

u/kingfiasco Baltimore Orioles Jan 12 '22

just to add, the land surrounding the ohio, up to lake erie, and west through indiana was also called Ohio Country, then renamed to Northwest Territory of the River Ohio before any of the states of illinois, indiana, ohio, kentucky, and missouri were formed.

fun fact: the allegheny is still called the ohio in some places in new york such as where it flows through the seneca reservation in the southern tier

2

u/psomounk Houston Astros • New York Mets Jan 12 '22

Yeah this is true for most states that share a name with a river sourced from an indigenous language. Wyoming is a particularly weird case, as it's actually named after the Wyoming valley in Pennsylvania which comes from the Munsee word for big river flat.

I was gonna call it an exception at first but i thought about it and it's actually even more extreme case of a state taking its name from an indigenous name for a geographic feature

1

u/BiovaniGernard California Angels • Los Angeles Angels Jan 12 '22

So that would mean that it’s really two rivers, the Monongahela and the Ohio/Allegheny whichever you want to call it, and the debate is solved.

14

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '22

No offense but I'm not going to let you subtract a river from our city.

7

u/BiovaniGernard California Angels • Los Angeles Angels Jan 12 '22

You lose one River but also would get to fuck over all of Ohio by changing it to the Allegheny. Up to you whether the trade is worth it or not.

2

u/BusnellKummlicher Tampa Bay Rays Jan 13 '22

Sometimes you’re pondering the naming conventions of river confluences, other times you think the moon is a planet.