Pittsburgh is situated at the conflux of the rivers Monongahela and Alleghany, the uniting of which forms the Ohio. The even soil upon which it is built is not more than forty or fifty acres in extent. It is in the form of an angle, the three sides of which are enclosed either by the bed of the two rivers or by stupendous mountains. The houses are principally brick, they are computed to be about four hundred, most of which are built upon the Monongahela; that side is considered the most commercial part of the town. As a great number of the houses are separated from each other by large spaces, the {59} whole surface of the angle is completely taken up. On the summit of the angle the French built Fort Duquesne, which is now entirely destroyed, and nothing more is seen than the vestige of the ditches that surrounded it.[20] This spot affords the most pleasing view, produced by the perspective of the rivers, overshadowed with forests, and especially the Ohio, which flows in a strait line, and, to appearance, loses itself in space.

The air is very salubrious at Pittsburgh and its environs; intermittent fevers are unknown there, although so common in the southern states, neither are they tormented in the summer with musquitoes. A person may subsist there for one-third of what he pays at Philadelphia. Two printing-offices have been long established there, and, for the amusement of the curious, each publish a newspaper weekly.[21]

Pittsburgh has been long considered by the Americans as the key to the western country. Thence the federal forces were marched against the Indians who opposed the former settlement of the Americans in Kentucky, and on the banks of the Ohio. However, now the Indian nations are repulsed to a considerable distance, and reduced to the impossibility {60} of hurting the most remote settlers in the interior of the states; besides, the western country has acquired a great mass of population, insomuch that there is nothing now at Pittsburgh but a feeble garrison, barracked in a fort belonging to the town, on the banks of the river Allighany.[22]

However, though this town has lost its importance as a military post, it has acquired a still greater one in respect to commerce. It serves as a staple for the different sorts of merchandise that Philadelphia and Baltimore send, in the beginning of spring and autumn, for supplying the states of Ohio, Kentucky, and the settlement of Natches.

The conveyance of merchandise from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh is made in large covered waggons, drawn by four horses two a-breast. The price of carrying goods varies according to the season; but in general it does not exceed six piastres the quintal. They reckon it to be three hundred miles from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, and the carriers generally make it a journey of from twenty to twenty-four days. The price of conveyance would not be so high as it really is, were it not that the waggons frequently return empty; notwithstanding they sometimes bring back, on their return to Philadelphia or {61} Baltimore, fur skins that come from Illinois or Ginseng, which is very common in that part of Pensylvania.

Pittsburgh is not only the staple of the Philadelphia and Baltimore trade with the western country, but of the numerous settlements that are formed upon the Monongahela and Alleghany. The territorial produce of that part of the country finds an easy and advantageous conveyance by the Ohio and Mississippi. Corn, hams and dried pork are the principal articles sent to New Orleans, whence they are re-exported into the Carribbees. They also export for the consumption of Louisiana, bar-iron, coarse linen, bottles manufactured at Pittsburgh, whiskey, and salt butter. A great part of these provisions come from Redstone, a small commercial town, situated upon the Monongahela, about fifty miles beyond Pittsburgh.[23] All these advantages joined together have, within these ten years, increased ten-fold the population and price of articles in the town, and contribute to its improvements, which daily grow more and more rapid.

The major part of the merchants settled at Pittsburgh, or in the environs, are the partners, or else the factors, belonging to the houses at Philadelphia. {62} Their brokers at New Orleans sell, as much as they can, for ready money; or rather, take in exchange cottons, indigo, raw sugar, the produce of Low Louisiana, which they send off by sea to the houses at Philadelphia and Baltimore, and thus cover their first advances. The bargemen return thus by sea to Philadelphia or Baltimore, whence they go by land to Pittsburgh and the environs, where the major part of them generally reside. Although the passage from New Orleans to one of these two ports is twenty or thirty days, and that they have to take a route by land of three hundred miles to return to Pittsburgh, they prefer this way, being not so difficult as the return by land from New Orleans to Pittsburgh, this last distance being fourteen or fifteen hundred miles. However, when the barges are only destined for Limeston, in Kentucky, or for Cincinnati, in the state of Ohio, the bargemen return by land, and by that means take a route of four or five hundred miles.

The navigation of the Ohio and Mississippi is so much improved of late that they can tell almost to a certainty the distance from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, which they compute to be two thousand one hundred miles. The barges in the spring season {63} usually take forty or fifty days to make the passage, which two or three persons in a pirogue[24] make in five and twenty days.

What many, perhaps, are ignorant of in Europe is, that they build large vessels on the Ohio, and at the town of Pittsburgh. One of the principal ship yards is upon the Monongahela, about two hundred fathoms beyond the last houses in the town. The timber they make use of is the white oak, or quercus alba; the red oak, or quercus rubra; the black oak, or quercus tinctoria; a kind of nut tree, or juglans minima; the Virginia cherry-tree, or cerasus Virginia; and a kind of pine, which they use for masting, as well as for the sides of the vessels which require a slighter wood. The whole of this timber being near at hand, the expense of building is not so great as in the ports of the Atlantic states. The cordage is manufactured at Redstone and Lexinton, where there are two extensive rope-walks, which also supply ships with rigging that are built at Marietta and Louisville. On my journey to Pittsburgh in the month of July 1802, there was a three-mast vessel[25] of two {64} hundred and fifty tons, and a smaller one of ninety, which was on the point of being finished. These ships were to go, in the spring following, to New Orleans, loaded with the produce of the country, after having made a passage of two thousand two hundred miles before they got into the ocean. There is no doubt but they can, by the same rule, build ships two hundred leagues beyond the mouth of the Missouri, fifty from that of the river Illinois, and even in the Mississippi, two hundred beyond the place whence these rivers flow; that is to say, six hundred and fifty leagues from the sea; as their bed in the appointed space is as deep as that of the Ohio at Pittsburgh; in consequence of which it must be a wrong conjecture to suppose that the immense tract of country watered by these rivers cannot be populous enough to execute such undertakings. The rapid population of the three new western states, under less favourable circumstances, proves this assertion to be true.[26] Those states, where thirty years ago there was scarcely three hundred inhabitants, are now computed to contain upwards of a hundred thousand; and although the plantations on the roads are scarcely four miles distant from each other, it is very rare to find one, even among {65} the most flourishing, where one cannot with confidence ask the owner, whence he has emigrated; or, according to the trivial manner of the Americans, “What part of the world do you come from?” as if these immense and fertile regions were to be the asylum common to all the inhabitants of the globe. Now if we consider these astonishing and rapid ameliorations, what ideas must we not form of the height of prosperity to which the western country is rising, and of the recent spring that the commerce, population and culture of the country is taking by uniting Louisiana to the American territory.

The river Monongahela derives its source in Virginia, at the foot of Laurel Mountain, which comprises a part of the chain of the Alleghanies; bending its course toward the west, it runs into Pennsylvania, and before it reaches Alleghany it receives in its current the rivers Chéat and Youghiogheny, which proceed from the south west. The territory watered by this river is extremely fertile; and the settlements formed upon the banks are not very far apart. It begins to be navigable at Morgan Town, which is composed of about sixty houses, and is situated upon the right, within a hundred miles of its embouchure.[27] Of all the little towns built upon {66} the Monongahela, New Geneva and Redstone have the most active commerce. The former has a glass-house in it, the produce of which is exported chiefly into the western country; the latter has shoe and paper manufactories, several flour mills, and contains about five hundred inhabitants. At this town a great number of those who emigrate from the eastern states embark to go into the west. It is also famous for building large boats, called Kentucky boats, used in the Kentucky trade; numbers are also built at Elizabeth Town,[28] situated on the same river, about twenty-three miles from Pittsburgh—​the Monongahela Farmer was launched there, a sailing vessel of two hundred tons.

Alleghany takes its source fifteen or twenty miles from lake Eria; its current is enlarged by the French Creek, and various small rivers of less importance. The Alleghany begins to be navigable within two hundred miles of Pittsburgh. The banks of this river are fertile; the inhabitants who have formed settlements there export, as well as those of Monongahela, the produce of their culture by the way of the Ohio and Mississippi. On the banks of this river they begin to form a few small towns; among the most considerable are Meadville, situated two {67} hundred and thirty miles from Pittsburgh; Franklin, about two hundred; and Freeport, scarcely one; each of which does not contain above forty or fifty houses.

Let the weather be what it will, the stream of the Alleghany is clear and limped; that of the Monongahela, on the contrary, grows rather muddy with a few days incessant rain in that part of the Alleghany Mountains where it derives its source.

The sugar-maple is very common in every part of Pennsylvania which the Monongahela and Alleghany water. This tree thrives most in cold, wet, and mountainous countries, and its seed is always more abundant when the winter is most severe. The sugar extracted from it is generally very coarse, and is sold, after having been prepared in loaves of six, eight, and ten pounds each, at the rate of seven-pence per pound. The inhabitants manufacture none but for their own use; the greater part of them drink tea and coffee daily, but they use it just as it has passed the first evaporation, and never take the trouble to refine it, on account of the great waste occasioned by the operation.