This “small trade” which Lee speaks of was to develop in a very few years to gigantic proportions, and was to make Pittsburgh for the while the commercial metropolis of the West.  She maintained this position until the westward march of civilization had left her far in the rear; and then the garrison which the vast army of pioneers left here found in the coal and iron under their very feet a Fortunatus’s purse.  Thus, far different was the fate of Pittsburgh from that of Marietta, Portsmouth, Lexington, and the like, which sank into comparative obscurity as soon as they had ceased to be outposts of Uncle Sam’s army of emigrants.

Here, then, do we lack materials for history?  What historian could ask for a more romantic starting-point than Old Fort Du Quesne? a more interesting topic for a chapter than Fort Pitt? a more picturesque subject than the batteurs and voyageurs of the Ohio?  What more fruitful themes can there be than the rise of the iron, the glass, the oil industry, the steamboat commerce of our interior, the subjection of the Monongahela, the combination of a city which reminds the traveler of Hades, with suburbs which suggest metaphors about Paradise?  And can he not find food for inquiry and thought in the great riots of 1877?

Yet the only historian of Pittsburgh is Neville B Craig, whose short and not over-attractive history ends with the middle of this century, if we remember rightly.  His subject is neither thoroughly nor ably treated, and it is not presented to the public in an agreeable form.  The book is one of the past generation, and we publish better histories than did our fathers.  In 1876, Samuel H. Thurston presented the public with a small volume, entitled Pittsburgh and Alleghany in the Centennial.  It contained a little history and a great deal of bombast; and, moreover, the greater part of it was filled with statistical details pertaining to the Centennial year alone.  Yet from this book had to be taken most of the historical sketch which will be found in the Census Report.  Egle’s History of Pennsylvania tells us something about Pittsburgh, and magazine articles are plenty, though historically of little value.

St. Louis is more plentifully supplied with histories than any other Western city, and these histories are as much worse as they are more numerous.  One of these deserves notice, from the fact that its title-page so ridiculously and exasperatingly misrepresents its contents.  This page reads as follows:  “Edwards’s Great West and her Commercial Metropolis, embracing a complete History of St. Louis, from the landing of Ligueste, in 1764, to the present time; with portraits and biographies of some of the old settlers, and many of the most prominent business men.  By Richard Edwards and M. Hopewell, M.D.  Splendidly illustrated. 1860. $5.”  This seemed to promise well, but when we turned the page and read the introduction, our expectations were, to say the least, somewhat shaken, and our sense of the eternal fitness of things somewhat shocked, when we found the citizens of St. Louis called “a powerful Maecenas.”  Shade of Virgil!  What a profanation!