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 considerable_."

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 outposts 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 thoroughly 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 histories than did our
fathers. In 1876, Samuel H. Thurston presented the public with a small
volume, entitled Pittsburgh 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 Centennial year alone. Yet from th