ne or Brownsville, it was, in its day, like most
"jumping off" places on the edge of civilization, a veritable Sodom.
Wrote good old John Pope, in his Journal of 1790, and in the same
strain scores of other veracious chroniclers: "At this Place we were
detained about a Week, experiencing every Disgust which Rooks and
Harpies could excite." Here thrived extensive yards in which were
built flatboats, arks, keel boats, and all that miscellaneous
collection of water craft which, with their roisterly crews, were the
life of the Ohio before the introduction of steam rendered vessels of
deeper draught essential; whereupon much of the shipping business went
down the river to better stages of water, first to Pittsburg, thence
to Wheeling, and to Steubenville.

All that is of the past. Brownsville is still a busy corner of the
world, though of a different sort, with all its romance gone. To
the student of Western history, Brownsville will always be a
shrine--albeit a smoky, dusty shrine, with the smell of lubricators
and the clang of hammers, and much talk thereabout of the glories of
Mammon.

The Monongahela is a characteristic mountain trough. From an altitude
of four or five hundred feet, the country falls in sharp steeps to a
narrow alluvial bench, and then a broad beach of shale and pebble; the
slopes are broken, here and there, where deep, shadowy ravines come
winding down, bearing muddy contributions to the greater flood.
The higher hills are crowned with forest trees, the lower ofttimes
checkered with brown fields, recently planted, and rows of vines
trimmed low to stakes, as in the fashion of the Rhine. The stream,
though still majestic in its sweep, is henceforth a commercial
slack-water, lined with noisy, grimy, matter-of-fact manufacturing
towns, for the most part literally abutting one upon the other all
of the way down to Pittsburg, and fast defiling the once picturesque
banks with the gruesome offal of coal mines and iron plants.
Surprising is the density of settlement along the river. Often, four
or five full-fledged cities are at once in view from our boat, the air
is thick with sooty smoke belched from hundreds of stacks, the ear
is almost deafened with the whirr and roar and bang of milling
industries.

Tipples of bituminous coal-shafts are ever in sight--begrimed
scaffolds of wood and iron, arranged for dumping the product of the
mines into both barges and railway cars. Either bank is lined with
railways,