y high even
after wagons began crossing the Alleghanies. For example, the cost
from Philadelphia and Baltimore was given by Arthur Lee, a member of
Congress, in 1784 as forty-five shillings a hundredweight, and a few
months later it is quoted at sixpence a pound when Johann D. Schoph
crossed the mountains in a chaise--a feat "which till now had been
considered quite impossible." Opinions differed widely as to the future
of the little town of five hundred inhabitants. The important product of
the region at first was Monongahela flour which long held a high place
in the New Orleans market. Coal was being mined as early as 1796 and was
worth locally threepence halfpenny a bushel, though within seven years
it was being sold at Philadelphia at thirty-seven and a half cents a
bushel. The fur trade with the Illinois country grew less important as
the century came to its close, but Maynard and Morrison, cooperating
with Guy Bryan at Philadelphia, sent a barge laden with merchandise to
Illinois annually between 1790 and 1796, which returned each season with
a cargo of skins and furs. Pittsburgh was thus a distributing center
of some importance; but the fact that no drayman or warehouse was to
be found in the town at this time is a significant commentary on the
undeveloped state of its commerce and manufacture.

After Wayne's victory at the battle of the Fallen Timber in 1794 and
the signing of the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, which ended the earlier
Indian wars of the Old Northwest and opened for settlement the country
beyond the Ohio, a great migration followed into Ohio, Indiana, and
Kentucky, and the commercial activity of Pittsburgh rapidly increased.
By 1800 a score of profitable industries had arisen, and by 1803 the
first bar-iron foundry was, to quote the advertisement of its owner,
"sufficiently upheld by the hand of the Almighty" to supply in part
the demand for iron and castings. Glass factories were established, and
ropewalks, sail lofts, boatyards, anchor smithies, and brickyards, were
soon ready to supply the rapidly increasing demands of the infant cities
and the countryside on the lower Ohio. When the new century arrived the
Pittsburgh district had a population of upwards of two thousand.

One by one the other important centers of trade in the great valley
beyond began to show evidences of life. Marietta, Ohio, founded in 1788
by Revolutionary officers from New England, became the metropolis of
the rich Musking