Allegheny River

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Allegheny River
Allegany River
Allegheny River at East Brady, Pennsylvania

Allegheny River at East Brady , Pennsylvania

Data
Water code US :  1209386
location Pennsylvania , New York (USA)
River system Mississippi River
Drain over Ohio  → Mississippi  → Gulf of Mexico
source at Cobb Hill, Allegany Township, Pennsylvania
41 ° 52 ′ 21 "  N , 77 ° 52 ′ 34"  W
Source height 759  m
Union with the Monongahela River to the Ohio River Coordinates: 40 ° 26 ′ 33 "  N , 80 ° 0 ′ 57"  W 40 ° 26 ′ 33 "  N , 80 ° 0 ′ 57"  W
Mouth height 216  m
Height difference 543 m
Bottom slope 1 ‰
length 523 km
Catchment area 29,992 km²
Drain MQ
 559 m³ / s
Left tributaries Kiskiminetas River , Clarion River
Right tributaries French Creek
Reservoirs flowed through Allegheny Reservoir
Big cities Pittsburgh
Small towns Oil City
Navigable 110 km between Pittsburgh and East Brady

The Allegheny River (also Alleghany River , O-hee-yo or O-hi-o ) is the right source river of the Ohio River in the eastern United States .

Origin of name

The name Allegheny may come from the Lenape welhik hane or oolikhanna, which means "well flowing river of the mountains" or "wonderful stream".

Another indication of the origin of the word Allegheny was given in 1780 by David Zeisberger , a missionary of the Moravian Brethren : "All this land and region, stretching as far as the creeks and waters that flow into the Alleghene the Delawares called Alligewinenk, which means' a land into which they came from distant parts'. The river itself, however, is called Alligewi Sipo. The whites have made Alleghene out of this, the Six Nations calling the river the Ohio. ”So it would be the“ river in the country where people came from far away ”.

For the North American Native Americans of the Iroquois League , the Ohio and its largest headwaters, the Allegheny, were always just one river, which they called the Ohio along its entire length.

Geography and hydrography

Location of the Allegheny

The Allegheny rises on Cobb Hill near the village of Gold ( Allegany Township ), in Potter County in the US state of Pennsylvania . From there it flows northwest through New York State and back to Pennsylvania. At Point State Park in Pittsburgh , the Allegheny and the Monongahela River become the Ohio River, which then flows into the Mississippi River .

The Allegheny is 523 km long, 110 km of which are navigable between Pittsburgh and East Brady .

The water flow of the Allegheny River exceeds with 559 m³ / s that of the Monongahela River (358 m³ / s; see there ), which makes it the main source river of the Ohio. Since the Ohio is also the significantly larger river at the confluence with the Mississippi (mean water flow: 7,973 m³ / s compared to 5,865 m³ / s), hydrologically the Allegheny is even the upper reaches of the Mississippi river system.

Web links

Commons : Allegheny River  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Natrona gauge (PDF; 67 kB), 40 kilometers above the confluence with the Monongahela River
  2. ↑ US Board on Geographic Names . BGN work cards. 01-Jun-1897
  3. ↑ a b Beauchamp, William M. Aboriginal Place Names of New York . New York State Museum Bulletin 108, Archeology 12. Albany: NY State Education Department, 1907, 333pp. p32
  4. ↑ welhik. In: Lenape Talking Dictionary. Archived from the original on September 11, 2012 ; accessed on December 15, 2017 .
  5. ^ David Zeisberger : David Zeisberger's History of the Northern American Indians in 18th Century Ohio, New York and Pennsylvania . Wennawoods Publishing, Lewisburg (Pennsylvania) 1999, ISBN 1-889037-17-6 , pp. 33 .
  6. ↑ George R. Stewart: Names on the Land . Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston (Massachusetts) 1967, ISBN 0-938530-02-X , pp. 8 .
  7. ↑ Frits van der Leeden, Fred L. Troise, David Keith Todd: The Water Encyclopedia , 2nd edition, p. 126, Chelsea, Mich. (Lewis Publishers), 1990, ISBN 0-87371-120-3
  8. ↑ (before the Ohio confluence, the Thebes gauge): Federal Institute for Hydrology (BfG), Global Runoff Data Center: Long-Term Mean Monthly Discharges and Annual Characteristics of GRDC Station , Koblenz 2009.