Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 7.djvu/351

 i8S4-]

��Town and City Histories.

��3'5

��fort by the French, in November, 175S, and its subsequent rebuilding as Fort Pitt. The fate of the little hamlet which sprang up around it was for a long time most dubious, but its posi- tion as a frontier post on the line of the ever westward-retreating Indians, and on the edge of the vast unknown wil- derness, just beginning- to allure adven- turous pioneers, kept it from falling into the oblivion with which it was threat- ened by the dismantling of the fort and the troublous Revolutionary times. Yet as late as 1784 so experienced a man as Arthur Lee, the Virginian, who had been a commissioner at the court of Versailles with Franklin and Deane, and who visited this hamlet in Decem- ber of this year, said of it : " Pittsburgh is inhabited almost entirely by Scots and Irish, who live in paltry log-houses, and are as dirty as in the north of Ireland, or even .in Scotland. There is a great deal of small trade carried on, the goods being brought at the vast expense of forty-five shillings per cwt. from Philadelphia and Baltimore. They take in the shops money, flour, and skins. There are in the town four attorneys, two doctors, and not a priest of any persuasion, nor church, nor chapel ; so that they are likely to be damned without the benefit of clergy. The place, I believe, will never be con- siderable."

This " small trade " which Lee speaks of was to develop in a very few years to gigantic proportions, and was to make Pittsburgh for the while the commercial metropolis of the West. She maintained this position until the westward march of civilization had left her far in the rear ; and then the garrison which the vast army of pioneers left here found in the coal and iron under their very feet a Fortunatus's

��purse. Thus, far different was the fate of Pittsburgh from that of Marietta, Portsmouth, Lexington, and the like, which sank into comparative obscurity as soon as they had ceased to be out- posts of Uncle Sam's army of emigrants.

Here, then, do we lack materials for history? What historian could ask for a more romantic starting-point than Old Fort Du Quesne? a more interesting topic for a chapter than Fort Pitt.'* a more picturesque subject than the batteurs and voyageurs of the Ohio? What more fruitful themes can there be than the rise of the iron, the glass, the oil industry, the steamboat commerce of our interior, the subjection of the Monongahela, the combination of a city which reminds the traveler of Hades, with suburbs which suggest metaphors about Paradise? And can he not find food for inquiry and thought in the great riots of 1877?

Yet the only historian of Pittsburgh is Neville B Craig, whose short and not over-attractive history ends with the middle of this century, if we remember rightly. His subject is neither thor- oughly nor ably treated, and it is not presented to the public in an agreeable form. The book is one of the past generation, and we publish better his- tories than did our fathers. In 1876, Samuel H. Thurston presented the pub- lic with a small volume, entitled Pitts- burgh and Alleghany in the Centennial. It contained a little history and a great deal of bombast ; and, moreover, the greater part of it was filled with statistical details pertaining to the Cen- tennial year alone. Yet from this book had to be taken most of the his- torical sketch which will be found in the Census Report. Egle's History of Pennsylvania tells us something about Pittsburgh, and magazine articles are

�� �