Illustration from From "Harpers' Popular Cyclopædia of United States History," 1892
Everybody knows that Cincinnati is the City of Seven Hills and yet, despite the inability of anyone to actually agree on which hills constitute the canonical heptad, we accept it on faith that there are precisely seven hills; no more, no less. We ignore the geologists who patiently explain there are, in reality, no hills at all in Cincinnati and that the topography we refer to as hills is technically an eroded peneplain and blah, blah, blah. Despite all evidence, we accept it as indisputable truth Cincinnati graces seven hills.
It might surprise modern Cincinnatians to learn that the whole concept of seven Cincinnati hills was first proposed by a legendary scoundrel, a notorious charlatan, a con man, a bigamist and, ultimately, a buffoon. His name was George Washington Lafayette Bickley.
Bickley was not born in Cincinnati. He was a native of Virginia and seems to have spent some time elsewhere in the South before arriving in Cincinnati, claiming to hold a medical degree from the University of London. That would be the London in England. On the basis of this bold-faced lie, Bickley was awarded a professorship at Cincinnati’s Eclectic Medical Institute. Bickley had few credentials other than some experience as a traveling phrenologist, fondling the bumps on bumpkin heads, but he wrote several medical texts and became editor of the Eclectic Medical Institute newsletter before marrying a rich Cincinnati widow, Rachel Dodson, and moving with her to a farm near Portsmouth, Ohio. Historian Frank L. Klement [Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin 32 (Spring-Summer 1974)] summarized Bickley’s maladroit résumé this way:
Illustration from Library of Congress
“In the years which followed, everything Bickley touched turned to dross. He joined a Know-Nothing lodge shortly before it was torn asunder by internal dissension. He tried to organize a Cincinnati branch of the Continental Union, but the effort fizzled. He founded a new literary magazine, the West American Review, but it lasted less than six months. Next he tried to establish ‘a conservative newspaper’ as an antidote to Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, but the project died aborning. While living on his wife’s farm in Scioto County he briefly edited the Ohio Pennant (Portsmouth) and tried his hand, quite unsuccessfully, at land speculation. He tried to transfer his wife’s property to
his own name, but a brother-in-law intervened in the nick of time and his wife gave him the gate.”
Back in Cincinnati, Bickley found work editing a journal to promote American inventions. He lasted only a few weeks. He then tried to organize a drill team of elaborately uniformed young men who would stage demonstrations of military precision, marching and rifle work in tours across the country. The team never materialized. Klement quotes an 1863 Cincinnati Gazette appraisal of Bickley’s incompetence:
” . . . an ignorant pretender, as restless and scheming as he was shallow, very vain of his person, exceedingly fond of military display, constantly engaged either in devices to borrow money and crazy schemes of speculation, or in debaucheries less creditable even than his swindling.”
It was during his residence in Cincinnati that Bickley first attempted to enumerate Cincinnati’s hills in that short-lived literary magazine, the West American Review. Bickley claimed high purpose for his monthly publication:
“The original design of this work was to elevate and purify the tone of American Literature by a critical examination of its defects and merits, and by the maintenance of an independent position on all subjects of National Literature.”
Beginning with the third issue of the Review, Bickley published a detailed analysis of Cincinnati, praising its location, its inhabitants and its future prospects. The six-part series was introduced in the June 1853 number and in this preliminary article Bickley devoted a paragraph each to Mount Adams, Walnut Hills, Mount Auburn, Vine Street Hill, Fairmount, Mount Harrison (Price Hill) and College Hill.
Curiously, Bickley did not come right out and announce that his identified hills total seven. He did not refer to these elevations as Cincinnati’s Seven Hills, nor did he make any reference to other cities built upon seven hills, notably ancient Rome. In fact, Bickley compared Cincinnati’s hills to a very different ancient city.
“The hills which skirt the city are somewhat remarkable for their regularity of outline, rising up to the height of three hundred feet. Over their sides are spread tasty dwellings, some of them, from the white columns which form their front, and the acclivities in their rear, remind one of the excavated palaces of Petra.”
Although Bickley seems to be the first person to suggest that Cincinnati sat upon seven hills, it took a long while for the concept to sink into Cincinnati’s consciousness. After Bickley’s 1853 list, mentions of Cincinnati’s seven hills are scarce until the 1880s. As Cincinnati prepared to celebrate its centennial birthday, a lot of doggerel poetry was inflicted upon the Queen City. Much of it jumbled together the Roman Cincinnatus and Rome’s seven hills with Cincinnati’s geography such that the Ohio River becomes the American Tiber. A squib from the Cincinnati Commercial [April 6, 1880] is typical:
“Rome sat on her seven hills while Cincinnati sprawls over hers.”
It is likely that Bickley’s influence waned because his next big venture was a secret society known as the Knights of the Golden Circle, dedicated to creating a slave-holding empire in the American West, Mexico and Central America. Over the years, various authors have blamed the Knights of the Golden Circle for spawning the Ku Klux Klan, unleashing the James-Younger Gang, coordinating the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and hording untold millions of gold dollars in caches around the South. The modern conspiracists seem to ignore the evidence of history and the breath-taking incompetence of the Knights’ founder. Not to put too fine a point on it, but George W.L. Bickley would have screwed up a one-car funeral.
Inept as he was, George W.L. Bickley embodied the old aphorism that even a blind squirrel will sometimes find a nut, because the Knights of the Golden Circle, even though they accomplished nothing at all, have secured Bickley’s reputation in some conspiracy-minded circles. This, despite abundant evidence that Bickley was constantly in debt while claiming that thousands of Knights purchased chivalries at $10 a pop. At one point, Bickley tried to disguise himself to avoid creditors in Cincinnati but was found out and skipped town on the midnight train. When Bickley tried to assemble his army in Texas for an 1860 invasion of Mexico, too few men turned up and the plan was abandoned. While in the South, Bickley married a Tennessee woman who was unaware he was still wed to that Cincinnati widow.
Although Bickley repeatedly failed at any scheme he concocted for his largely non-existent Knights, Northern Republicans made political hay by circulating rumors that the nefarious Knights of the Golden Circle were prepared to seize control of the Union government and surrender to the Confederacy. Detailed “exposés” of the Knights appeared in many border newspapers – especially in Cincinnati. Most of these investigative newspaper reports were based upon forged documents created by Republicans to smear Democratic candidates.
While Northern rumors flew about the insidious influence of his secret society, Southern Confederates would not give Bickley the time of day. Three times he applied for a position in the Confederate Army and was roundly ignored. When Bickley finally won a Confederate army position, as a field surgeon, he deserted. According to Klement, he was arrested by the Union Army and:
“Bickley was taken to the military prison in Louisville, while authorities conducted an investigation and inventoried the contents of his trunk, which proved Bickley a liar, a bigamist, and a pretender extraordinary.”
Bickley remained in Federal prisons in Louisville and Columbus until October 1865. Just two years later, he died in obscurity in Baltimore, a city with no hills to speak of. His only lasting legacy is the myth that Cincinnati has seven hills.
