f Fallen Timbers, broke the
backbone of savagery east of the Mississippi; the Tecumseh uprising
(1812-13) came too late seriously to affect the dwellers on the Ohio.

There were two great over-mountain highways thither, one of them being
Braddock's Road, with Redstone (now Brownsville, Pa.) and Pittsburg as
its termini; the other was Boone's old trail, or Cumberland Gap. With
the latter, this sketch has naught to do.

By the close of the Revolution, Pittsburg--in Gist's day, but a
squalid Indian village, and a fording-place--was still only "a distant
out-post, merely a foothold in the Far West." By 1785, there were
a thousand people there, chiefly engaged in the fur-trade and in
forwarding emigrants and goods to the rapidly-growing settlements on
the middle and lower reaches of the river. The population had doubled
by 1803. By 1812 there was to be seen here just the sort of bustling,
vicious frontier town, with battlement-fronts and ragged streets,
which Buffalo and then Detroit became in after years. Cincinnati and
Chicago, St. Louis and Kansas City, had still later, each in turn,
their share of this experience; and, not many years ago, Bismarck,
Omaha, and Leadville. From Philadelphia and Baltimore and Richmond,
there were running to Pittsburg or Redstone regular lines of stages
for the better class of passengers; freight wagons laden with immense
bales of goods were to be seen in great caravans, which frequently
were "stalled" in the mud of the mountain roads; emigrants from all
parts of the Eastern States, and many countries of Europe, often
toiled painfully on foot over these execrable highways, with their
bundles on their backs, or following scrawny cattle harnessed to
makeshift vehicles; and now and then came a well-to-do equestrian with
his pack-horses,--generally an Englishman,--who was out to see the
country, and upon his return to write a book about it.

At Pittsburg, and points on the Alleghany, Youghiogheny, and
Monongahela, were boat-building yards which turned out to order a
curious medley of craft--arks, flat- and keel-boats, barges, pirogues,
and schooners of every design conceivable to fertile brain. Upon
these, travelers took passage for the then Far West, down the
swift-rolling Ohio. There have descended to us a swarm of published
journals by English and Americans alike, giving pictures, more or
less graphic, of the men and manners of the frontier; none is without
interest, even if in its pages th