All these advantages joined together have, within these ten years, increased ten-fold the population and price of articles in the town, and contribute to its improvements, which daily grow more and more rapid.
The major part of the merchants settled at Pittsburgh, or in the environs, are the partners, or else the factors, belonging to the houses at Philadelphia. {62} Their brokers at New Orleans sell, as much as they can, for ready money; or rather, take in exchange cottons, indigo, raw sugar, the produce of Low Louisiana, which they send off by sea to the houses at Philadelphia and Baltimore, and thus cover their first advances. The barge-*men return thus by sea to Philadelphia or Baltimore, whence they go by land to Pittsburgh and the environs, where the major part of them generally reside. Although the passage from New Orleans to one of these two ports is twenty or thirty days, and that they have to take a route by land of three hundred miles to return to Pittsburgh, they prefer this way, being not so difficult as the return by land from New Orleans to Pittsburgh, this last distance being fourteen or fifteen hundred miles. However, when the barges are only destined for Limeston, in Kentucky, or for Cincinnati, in the state of Ohio, the bargemen return by land, and by that means take a route of four or five hundred miles.
The navigation of the Ohio and Mississippi is so much improved of late that they can tell almost to a certainty the distance from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, which
- [Footnote: during Pontiac's War (1763), but appears to have been garrisoned by the time
of Lord Dunmore's War (1774). It was the rendezvous for Clark's men in 1778, and in 1791 the assembly place for fomenters of the Whiskey Rebellion. In 1785 the town of Brownsville was incorporated, and for many years continued to be an important starting point for Western emigration. See Thwaites, On the Storied Ohio, for descriptions of this movement, and of the region in general.—Ed.]
