It is not primarily a
market-place, this point of land, one of the places where the French and
English traders used to barter guns, whiskey, and trinkets for furs. It is
a making place--a pit between the hills, where the fires of creation are
still burning.
Celoron and his sombre voyage had been in my mind all day, as I sat in a
beautiful library of that city among books of the past; but in the
evening, as Dante accompanied by Virgil, I descended circle by circle to
the floor of the valley--with this difference, that it was not to a place
of torment but to the halls of the swarth gods of creation, those great,
dim, shadowy sheds that stretch along the river's edge. Into these, men of
France, has your Fort Duquesne grown--mile on mile of flame-belching
buildings, with a garrison as great as the population of all New France in
the day of Duquesne.
The new-world epic will find some of its color and incident there--an epic
in which we have already heard the men of France nailing the sheets of
"white iron" against the trees of the valley of La Belle Riviere.
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