This spot affords the most pleasing view, produced by the perspective of the rivers, overshadowed with forests, and especially the Ohio, which flows in a strait line, and, to appearance, loses itself in space.
The air is very salubrious at Pittsburgh and its environs; intermittent fevers are unknown there, although so common in the southern states, neither are they tormented in the summer with musquitoes. A person may subsist there for one-third of what he pays at Philadelphia. Two printing-offices have been long established there, and, for the amusement of the curious, each publish a newspaper weekly.[21]
Pittsburgh has been long considered by the Americans as the key to the western country. Thence the federal forces were marched against the Indians who opposed the former settlement of the Americans in Kentucky, and on the banks of the Ohio. However, now the Indian nations are repulsed to a considerable distance, and reduced to the impossibility {60} of hurting the most remote settlers in the interior of the states; besides, the western country has acquired a great mass of population, insomuch that there is nothing now at Pittsburgh but a feeble garrison, barracked in a fort belonging to the town, on the banks of the river Allighany.[22]
However, though this town has lost its importance as a military post, it has acquired a still greater one in respect to commerce. It serves as a staple for the different sorts of merchandise that Philadelphia and Baltimore send,
