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Updated: May 8, 2025
At McKeesport, the hills on the right are of a relatively low altitude, smooth and well rounded. It was here that Braddock, in his slow progress toward Fort Duquesne, first crossed the Monongahela, to the wide, level bottom on the left bank.
A south-eastern breeze ruffled the waters of the Yough, and for the first time the Doctor ordered up the sail, with W at the sheet. It was not long before Pilgrim had the water "singing at her prow." With a rush, we flew past the factories, the house-boats, and the shabby street-ends of McKeesport, out into the Monongahela, where, luckily, the wind still held.
Our supper cooked and eaten by lantern-light, we vote ourselves as, after all, serenely content out here in the starlight at peace with the world, and very close to Nature's heart. There come to us, on the cool evening breeze, faint echoes of the never-ceasing clang of McKeesport iron mills, down on the Monongahela shore.
And then the thing broke out all over the country, in steel towns like Pittsburgh and Johnstown and Lorain and McKeesport and men working in little independent factories in towns down in Indiana began drilling and chanting the march song on summer evenings on the village baseball ground. How the people, the comfortable well-fed middle class people were afraid!
But it is not of these we talk, lounging in the welcome warmth of the camp-fire; it is of the age of romance, a hundred and forty odd years ago, when Major Washington and Christopher Gist, with famished horses, floundered in the ice hereabout, upon their famous midwinter trip to Fort Le Boeuf; when the "Forks of the Yough" became the extreme outpost of Western advance, with all the accompanying horrors of frontier war; and later, when McKeesport for a time rivaled Redstone and Elizabethtown as a center for boat-building and a point of departure for the Ohio.
From McKeesport I drove to Pittsburgh, and there put the team into winter quarters to remain until the fifth of March. Thence I shipped by boat on the Ohio River to Cincinnati, stopping in that city but one day, and from there I shipped by rail to St. Louis, Missouri.
A score or two of house-boats lay tied to the McKeesport shore or were bolstered high upon the beach; a fleet of Yough steamers had their noses to the wharf; a half-dozen fishermen were setting nets; and, high over all, with lofty spans of iron cobweb, several railway and wagon bridges spanned the gliding stream.
President Roosevelt was a man who loved the pioneers and who understood the true West. His warm welcome remains in my heart as one of the richest rewards of the many that have come as compensation for my struggle to carry out my dream. On the eighth of January, 1908, I left Washington, shipping my outfit over the Allegheny Mountains to McKeesport, Pennsylvania.
It was seven o'clock when we struck camp, and our frugal repast was finished by lantern-light. The sun sets early in this narrow trough through the foothills of the Laurel range. McKeesport, Pa., Saturday, May 5th.
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