Louis. It is of his sowing that the main cities have sprung, for he
planted a plate of "repossession" at the entrance of every important
branch of the Ohio and fastened upon trees sheets of "white iron" bearing
the arms of France. Chief among them is Pittsburgh, which stands on the
carboniferous site of Fort Duquesne like the prow of a vessel headed
westward, a place which Celoron is believed to have had in mind when he
wrote in his journal, "the finest place on La Belle Riviere"--what was
then a wedge of wild black land lodged between two converging streams that
drained all the slope of the northern Alleghanies being now the foundation
of the world's capital of a sterner metal than lead--scarred with fires
and smothered with smoke from many furnaces, two of which alone, it has
been estimated by some one, have poured forth enough molten iron in the
last thirty years to cover with steel plates an inch thick a road fifty
feet wide stretching from the Alleghany edge of the valley not merely to
the mouth of the Ohio but on to the other mountain border, where all
dreams of a way to the western sea were ended.
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