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Updated: June 8, 2025
The French starting from Quebec floated from Lake Erie down the Allegheny to Pittsburgh, the English ascended the Potomac to Cumberland, and thence, following the most practicable watercourses, advanced on the French position at the junction of the Allegheny and the Monongahela.
Along the watercourses ducks, wild geese, cranes, herons, and other fowl sounded their harsh cries; gray squirrels, prairie chickens, and partridges the hunter found at every turn. Furthermore, the forests, as a rule, were not difficult to penetrate.
The watercourses by the side of the roads had a little water in them, but not a drop had reached those at the edge of the fields, so thirsty was the earth. The drought, thank God, was at an end! Now that twenty years have passed since I began the study of Spinoza it is good to find that he still holds his ground.
The whole face of the country had the same parched look, and the soil seemed to be composed entirely of small stones, without any signs of moisture even in the watercourses.
To-day, however, as the same route is practically shod with iron, the tourist, from the windows of his car on the Union Pacific, may safely contemplate the historic valley. Its beautiful towns and hamlets, its cultivated plains, its watercourses, its skyward-reaching peaks, may be seen in a security which would have passed the very dreams of a pioneer fifty years ago.
I found the hills open a good deal more as I proceeded, with nice grassy valleys between; and the hills themselves, though high and steep, were rounded at the summits, and richly clothed with vegetation: among them numerous watercourses took their rise in the gorges, and generally these were well marked by gum-trees.
"It always appears to me," he says, "that one of the chief defects of Hindustan is the want of artificial watercourses. I had intended, wherever I might fix my residence, to construct water-wheels, to produce an artificial stream, and to lay out an elegant and regularly planned pleasure ground.
By giving them a pack-horse to carry ten gallons of water, I hoped they would be able to examine all the watercourses so effectually as to secure the object of their search, for I felt satisfied that water was to be found somewhere among the high ranges we had seen in the direction they were going; I also directed the overseer to visit the camp where the two native children had been left, and to see what had been their fate.
Wherever in the lowlands any many-chimneyed city, proud of its size, rose by the sweep of watercourses, or any little inland town was proud of its smallness and of streets that terminated in the fields; whereever any hamlet marked the point at which two country roads this morning made the sign of the white cross, or homesteads stood proudly castled on woody hilltops, or warmed the heart of the beholder from amid their olive-dark winter pastures; or far away on the shaggy uplift of the Shield wherever any cabin clung like a swallow's nest against the gray Appalachian wall everywhere soon would begin the healthy outbreak of joy among men and women and children glad about themselves, glad in one another, glad of human life in a happy world.
The heat is great, the sun shining very strong and bright; and for more than a month it hath been exceeding dry, without any considerable fall of rain, so that the springs fail in many places, and the watercourses are dried up, which doth bring to mind very forcibly the language of Job, concerning the brooks which the drouth consumeth: "What time they wax warm they vanish; when it is hot they are consumed out of their place.
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