only could he see a river on his right, and this was the Allegheny, for he was traveling the old Forbes road from Bedford, which took the high ground coming into Pittsburgh from Turtle Creek, and when within six miles of the town of Pittsburgh could look down upon and enter the East Liberty Valley-almost all of the level portion of Pittsburgh's East End, as that section is most commonly called.

We must admit Tourist Ashe has given us a fairly good account of the forest wilderness of Western Pennsylvania, as he observed it and its lights and shadows. There were variations from the woods he traveled through-changes caused by man designedly. Callahan has some account of these changes. He says:

During the Indian's occupancy he left his mark in the form of burned woods. He burned much less in regions farther west, but there is no question that he was vigorously applying the torch up to the time he took his departure. The clearings made by the Indians for agricultural purposes were comparatively large, but they were small in comparison with openings made by fires set accidentally, wantonly, or to the end that more wild game might abound, with improved opportunities for hunting. Though white men are rated high as destroyers of forests, they are not in the same class with the Indian. He used little wood, destroyed vastly more to make room for his fields, but his real work of forest destroying was done by fire. He was wasteful and destructive as savages usually are, and the word economy had no place in his vocabulary. The Indian is by nature an incendiary, and forest burning was his besetting sin. The few poles and trees which he took for use, and the thousands he destroyed to make his cornfields, were a small drain on the forests in comparison with the millions which his woods fire consumed. It is not known how long before the white men came to Virginia, but the custom was general at the time of the first settlement, and was apparently of long standing and evidently growing worse.

The same was also true of the country of Western Pennsylvania. Callahan thinks the custom of destruction was learned from the western Indians. He noted that swampland too damp to burn had escaped repeated visitations by fire. Few if any other kinds of land escaped. Throughout hundreds of square miles the undergrowth had been injured or destroyed; in places the mature trees alone remained, so thin in localities that the woods resembled parks rather than forests, and these facts have been abundantly set forth in contemporaneous writings. When the first whites came, the forests in Virginia had apparently reached the last stage before their fall. No small wood was coming on to take the place of the old trees, and the death of the mature timber presaged that many regions would be treeless. Callahan quotes Philip A. Bruce, author of the "Economic History of Virginia."18 Freedom from undergrowth was one of the most notable features of the original woods of the State west of the mountains; these conditions were not so bad as in the eastern section. This may have been due to the

18"Genealogical and Personal History of the Upper Monongahela Valley, W. Va., with an Account of the Resources and Industries of the Upper Monongahela Valley and Tributory Region," by J. M. Callahan, with various historical articles by staff writers under the Editorial Supervision of Bernard L. Butcher, Lewis His. Pub. Co., 1912; Vol. I, p. 208, et seq.

fact that the mountain section was almost unknown for eighty years after the Indians departed. In that time, burnt woods will recuperate in a damp climate and on a rich soil. In that section the first whites were generally impressed with the burned or open tracts, and there were instances where the savages were interrupted in the act of burning. The Indians reasoned that the end justified the means. Their food supply was directly increased by fires which facilitated hunting operations and, indirectly, by opening the way for the growth of grass, nuts, fruits and berries, thereby inviting game to congregate in certain localities. The cunning red man observed, too, that fruitbearing trees multiply more rapidly and yield more abundantly when grown on the edges of burned tracts than in the forest. The fall of millions of feet of fine timber was nothing to the Indians if briers and grass followed, for this brought together beasts and birds which furnished the Indians more food than they could have procured in the standing timber before the timber was destroyed.

There were burned tracts in many places in the western country. Had Ashe been a pioneer, he would have noted the open spaces in the woods to have been once burned over, if such had been the case. What was true of burned-over woodland in the transmontane region of Western Pennsylvania does not appear to have been observed in the Upper Ohio Valley, for many travelers have noted the closely wooded shores of the Ohio other than those quoted in this chapter. As late as 1847 this forest growth was remarkable. It was observed by Dickens in descending the Ohio from Pittsburgh. He said:

A fine broad river always, but in some parts much wider than others, and then there is usually a green island covered with trees, dividing it into two streams. Occasionally we stopped for a few minutes, maybe to take in wood, maybe for passengers at some small town or village, (I ought to say city, for every place is a city here); but the banks are for the most part deep solitude, overgrown with trees which hereabout are already in leaf and very green. For miles and miles and miles, these solitudes are unbroken by any sign of human life or a trace of human footsteps, nor is anything seen to hover about them but the bluejay, whose color is so bright and yet so delicate that it looks like a flying flower. At lengthened intervals a log cabin with its little space of cleared land about it, nestles under a rising ground and sends its thread of blue smoke curling up into the sky. It stands in the corner of the poor field of wheat, which is full of great unsightly stumps like earthy butcher's blocks. Sometimes the ground is only just now cleared, the felled trees lying upon the soil, and the log house only this morning begun.

And still there is the same eternal foreground. The river has washed away its banks and stately trees have fallen down into the stream. Some have been there so long that they are mere dry, grisly skeletons. Some have just toppled over and, having earth yet about their roots, are bathing their green heads in the river and putting forth new shoots and branches. Some are almost sliding down, as you look at them, and some were drowned so long ago that their bleached arms start out from the middle of the current, and seem to try to grasp the boat and drag it under water.19

"What might be expected," asks Mr. Archibald Prentice, the Manchester editor, in comment, "after this description, but an unbroken

19" American Notes;" Chap. XI

solitude and an eternal monotony relieved only by an occasional deformity?" Prentice criticizes his distinguished countryman, saying: "Reading his description again, I am tempted to transcribe it as a curious specimen of the author's utter indifference to the beautiful scenery under which he remained sitting in 'the little stern gallery' of the ladies' cabin, rather than mounting on the paddle box or on the upper deck to see that which it is to be presumed he went to see.'

"20

Mr. Prentice was in Pittsburgh in June, 1848. He followed Dickens' route six years later than Dickens, and he has given us a charming description of the "Belle Riviere of the French." His final shot at Dickens was suggested when he arose one morning and found the boat tied to the bank in a fog so dense he could not see ten yards on either side-not much of a fog to a Pittsburgher. Prentice ventures the assertion "that in such a mist, Charles Dickens might have come down the river, only he does not say so."

Nevertheless, Dickens has described the forest wilderness on its river boundaries quite accurately. The settlers' clearings were only breaks in its monotony. His description, fifty years later than H. M. Brackenridge's, differs from Brackenridge's only in this respect.

It was a wonderful wilderness-that of the Western Country before the white man came. In it were traces of a people who lived in the long, long-ago. These traces suggest a story, for they were to be seen about Pittsburgh until quite recently, and their exploration was a matter of moment. Then, too, when the white came to stay, the red man left for good, and this fact, too, suggests a chapter on his departure, and why he went and what happened as he took up "the trail of the setting sun," as the orators used to put it.

20"A Tour of the United States," Archibald Prentice, London; also Halifax Ed., 1858, pp. 51-52.

CHAPTER II.

Historic Mounds and Prehistoric Mound Builders.

The first wilderness was not altogether uninhabited by human beings before the white man came. This we know, for the history of the aboriginal inhabitants, the Indians, runs concurrently with the history of our country from the first discoveries on the continent of North America. There were people in the region about Pittsburgh for ages, perhaps, before the invention of letters, perhaps before the age of history writing, certainly anterior to the discovery of America. To quote Dr. Doddridge here is pertinent, for his thoughts as he has set them forth in his "Notes" have given the inspiration to write this chapter, which might have been suggested by the mention of the historic mounds in and near Pittsburgh. Little has been said of these mounds in Pittsburgh history; their existence has been noted briefly, as will be seen. Everts' artists thought well enough of the McKee's Rocks Mound to draw a picture of it, a representation now most valuable, as the mound has been destroyed.1 The history of its destruction is Pittsburgh history, as will appear and which will follow in this chapter, and as part of the history of the mound builders, if the word "history" may be permitted in this connection.

The researches of archæologists in other sections of the United States as tending to show the builders of all mounds in the United States were the same people, and that the local mounds were similar in structure, workmanship, design and contents, to other mounds, are judged to be relevant, and the descriptions of many mounds by tourists, travelers, authors and scientists, will naturally be included. While a new and strange chapter in the "History of Pittsburgh and Its Environs," it is none the less interesting, and justification for its insertion can be found in the long and frequent items in the newspapers when the McKee's Rocks explorations were under way. Additional justification can be found in Dr. Doddridge's "Notes." Doubtless the thoughts he penned there were the thoughts of his neighbors also, for as one proceeds in the reading of this chapter it will be evident that the mounds were objects of great curiosity to the early settlers, and that eminent men explored them and wrote the results in book form. While these may not be in consonance with the deductions of more modern archæologists, they are none the less interesting. Among the early writers on the work of the mound builders was the Pittsburgh "Author, Traveler and Jurist," Henry Marie Brackenridge, who, born in Pittsburgh in 1787, knew of the historic mounds in this region, and as a boy played

1See "History of Allegheny County, Pa.;" (Everts & Co.) 1876, p. 126, for view of Mound.

about one, at least. Early tourists such as Ashe and Cuming, who tarried in Pittsburgh while on their travels in North America, have left us most readable stories of the impressions these mounds made upon them, and some history of them as they obtained it in the localities under their observation.

Dr. Doddridge's reflections resulting from the state of the wilderness as he and other pioneers knew it, have been given in Chapter I. We cannot doubt their truth and his sincerity. He recites this and its influence and tendencies. He tells us:

Many circumstances concurred to awaken in the mind of the early adventurer into this country the most serious and even melancholy reflections. He saw everywhere around him indubitable evidences of the former existence of a large population of barbarians which had long ago perished from the earth. Their arrowheads furnished him with gunflints; stone hatchets, pipes and fragments of earthenware were found in every place. The remains of their rude fortifications were met with in many places; some of them of considerable extent and magnitude. Seated on the summit of some sepulchral mound containing the ashes of tens of thousands of the dead, he said to himself: "This is the grave, and this no doubt, the temple of worship of a long succession of generations long since mouldered into dust; these surrounding valleys were once animated by their labors, hunting and wars, their songs and dances; but oblivion has drawn her impenetrable veil over their whole history; no lettered page, no sculptured monument, informs who they were, from whence they came, the period of their existence, or by what dreadful catastrophe the iron hand of death has given so complete an overthrown and made the whole of this country an immense Golgotha."

Dr. Doddridge writes truly. He had in mind such elaborate works of this adjudged prehistoric race as remain evident today at Moundsville, West Virginia, and at Marietta, Circleville, Fort Ancient, and many other places in Ohio; though, as he states, ancient mounds were once numerous in the whole region about Pittsburgh. He mentions these relics and the mounds as aspects of the Western Country at the coming of the first adventurers into the bosom of its forests. What they saw and found pertained, he thought, to the story of the settlements, and incidentally to the poor and hazardous lot of the settlers.

These evidences of a population in his time considered to have been numerous and to have existed and perished long anterior to the period of history, led Dr. Doddridge to insert in his "Notes" the chapter headed "The Remains of an Extinct People," in which he describes such of the antiquities of the region as came under his notice, with much mention and history of similar mounds in all parts of the earth. He had himself procured ten copper beads of sixty which were taken from an ancient grave on Grave Creek Flat, in Marshall county, West Virginia, near Moundsville, the county seat, once called Elizabeth. This was not far from his home in Wellsburg, Brooke county. Naturally, from his expressions above quoted, he was greatly interested in these sepulchral mounds and the smaller graves of that region, and familiar with the researches of Dr. Caleb Atwater, the historian of Ohio, and those of Thomas Jefferson, both of whom he mentions. Some of Doddridge's speculations upon the extinct people are instructive, and what he tells of the mounds as he knew them is real history now.