ough not a few
were actually born abroad, they were the first whose plans, spirit,
and very life were dominated by the vision of an America of continental
dimensions.

The long story of French and English rivalry and of the war which ended
it concerns us here chiefly as a commercial struggle. The French at
Niagara (1749) had access to the Ohio by way of Lake Erie and any one of
several rivers--the Allegheny, the Muskingum, the Scioto, or the Miami.
The main routes of the English were the Nemacolin and Kittanning paths.
The French, laboring under the disadvantages of the longer distance over
which their goods had to be transported to the Indians and of the higher
price necessarily demanded for them, had to meet the competition of the
traders from the rival colonies of Pennsylvania and Virginia, each of
them jealous of and underbidding the other.

When Celoron de Blainville was sent to the Allegheny in 1749, by the
Governor of New France, his message was that "the Governor of Canada
desired his children on Ohio to turn away the English Traders from
amongst them and discharge them from ever coming to trade there again,
or on any of the Branches." He sent away all the traders whom he found,
giving them letters addressed to their respective governors denying
England's right to trade in the West. To offset this move, within two
years Pennsylvania sent goods to the value of nine hundred pounds in
order to hold the Indians constant. The Governor had already ordered
the traders to sell whiskey to the Indians at "5 Bucks" per cask and had
told the Indians, through his agent Conrad Weiser, that if any trader
refused to sell the liquor at that price they might "take it from him
and drink it for nothing." There was but one way for the French to meet
such competition. Without delay they fortified the Allegheny and began
to coerce the natives. Driving away the carpenters of the Ohio Company
from the present site of Pittsburgh, they built Fort Duquesne. The
beginning of the Old French War ended what we may call the first era of
the pack-horse trade.

The capture of Fort Duquesne by the English army under General Forbes
in 1758 and the final conquest of New France two years later removed the
French barrier and opened the way to expansion beyond the Alleghanies.
Thereafter settlements in the Monongahela country grew apace.
Pittsburgh, Uniontown, Morgantown, Brownsville, Ligonier, Greensburg,
Connellsville--we give the modern names--be