Pittsburgh Rising: From Frontier Town to Steel City, 1750-1920

By Edward K. Muller and Rob Ruck

Over 170 years, Pittsburgh rose from remote outpost to industrial powerhouse. With the formation of the United States, the frontier town located at the confluence of three rivers grew into the linchpin for trade and migration between established eastern cities and the growing settlements of the Ohio Valley. Resources, geography, innovation, and personalities led to successful glass, iron, and eventually steel operations. As Pittsburgh blossomed into one of the largest cities in the country and became a center of industry, it generated great wealth for industrial and banking leaders. But immigrants and African American migrants, who labored under insecure, poorly paid, and dangerous conditions, did not share in the rewards of growth. Pittsburgh Rising traces the lives of individuals and families who lived and worked in this early industrial city, jammed into unhealthy housing in overcrowded neighborhoods near the mills. Although workers organized labor unions to improve conditions and charitable groups and reform organizations, often helmed by women, mitigated some of the deplorable conditions, authors Muller and Ruck show that divides along class, religious, ethnic, and racial lines weakened the efforts to improve the inequalities of early twentieth-century Pittsburgh—and persist today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: May 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9780822989899

Book preview

Pittsburgh Rising

FROM FRONTIER TOWN TO STEEL CITY, 1750–1920

EDWARD K. MULLER & ROB RUCK

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2023, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4772-1

ISBN 10: 0-8229-4772-2

Cover art: Hayley Lever, Allegheny River, Pittsburgh, ca. 1923. Oil on canvas, 20 x 24 inches. Westmoreland Museum of American Art.

Cover design: Joel W. Coggins

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8989-9 (electronic)

FOR KATE AND MAGGIE

CONTENTS

Introduction

1: On the Frontier

2: Frontier City

3: Fractures in the Commercial City

4: The Iron City

5: Second Industrial Revolution, 1880 to 1920

6: Coming to Pittsburgh

7: Italians and African Americans in Pittsburgh

8: Largely Ineffectual

Aftermath

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

INTRODUCTION

CATHECASSA BLACKHOOF IS LARGELY FORGOTTEN IN PITTSBURGH, except for a roughly cut stone marker in Schenley Park. But his life intersected with James Smith, Mike Fink, James O’Hara, and the men and women who forged the city from the 1750s into the early nineteenth century. The warrior fought against George Washington during General Braddock’s 1755 campaign to dislodge the French, and later clashed with US forces driving indigenous people from land they once roamed. After their defeat at Fallen Timbers in 1794, he acknowledged US supremacy. A year later he signed the Treaty of Greenville that conceded native claims to western lands and encouraged the Shawnee to coexist with white people. When the republic failed to deliver on its promises, he implored President Thomas Jefferson to stand by its word. Blackhoof, who remained the principal leader of the Shawnee until his death in 1831 at the age of 109, was sadly disappointed by Jefferson’s response. Though he resisted efforts to push the Shawnee across the Mississippi River, Blackhoof believed that continued warfare was futile. His attempt to coexist was a path not taken. Smith, Fink, and O’Hara had little interest in accommodating indigenous people, whom most white people feared and many loathed. Instead, they created Pittsburgh in their own image.

Thomas Mellon, Martin Delany, Margaret Carnegie, William Frank, Miranda Hollander, and thousands like them came to Pittsburgh in the first half of the nineteenth century knowing little of the people who had first lived in the region. They hoped to improve their prospects; only some succeeded. Following the Civil War, waves of immigrants from southern, central, and eastern Europe arrived. So did wayfarers from the Eastern Seaboard and African Americans from southeastern states. Many came to tap the opportunities the rapidly industrializing region offered in its mines, mills, and factories. George and Elena Kracha, Palmira and Agostino Carlino, Mamie and William Tinker, and other émigrés added new ethnic, religious, and racial pieces to the cultural mosaic established by earlier migrants.¹ More men came at first because Pittsburgh’s economy offered women fewer opportunities. Over time those who stayed made choices about where to live, whom to marry, what religious and social groups to join, whether to vote, and when to take their protests into the streets. Their decisions and those of their children and grandchildren propelled Pittsburgh into the twentieth century. They built the city and surrounding towns and defended their way of life during the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and World War I. But they also fought with each other as they endeavored to establish themselves in the region.²

Rapid industrial growth and a surging population created a dynamic, ever-changing urban economy and neighborhoods where people sometimes thrived but often struggled. Some came equipped with skilled trades, such as puddler James Davis of Welsh ancestry, or with education, such as Isaac Frank, the son of German Jews. Boys like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Oliver tapped their social connections in Allegheny City’s Scottish immigrant community, while philanthropist Kate McKnight benefited from her family’s lineage and ample wealth. They for the most part achieved considerable status and forged remarkable careers. Others without such advantages, such as Miranda Hollander and Mike Dobrejcak, settled here as unskilled, disposable workers in factories, mills, and mines or joined the ranks of domestic servants and day laborers in construction and hauling where low wages, insecure employment, and dangerous conditions circumscribed life.³

Class and cultural differences divided these diverse immigrants and native-born Pittsburghers between the shop floor and managerial offices, and thwarted efforts by unskilled and skilled workers to seek common ground. Ethnic, religious, and racial solidarities provided some comfort and mutual assistance but also sparked animosity. None carried a heavier burden of difference and discrimination than the Delanys and Tinkers, whose African American heritage visibly distinguished them. Irish, Italian, and southern and eastern European Catholic immigrants also felt the sting of perceived racial differences for a generation or longer. Through the eyes of management, Kracha’s son-in-law Mikhail Mike Dobrejcak, was just a Hunky.⁴ It did not matter that he learned English and became a citizen; Mike never escaped the limitations and injustices of unskilled millwork. Instead of entering the mills, Italian immigrant Agostino Carlino’s sons carried on their father’s stonework and, as second-generation ethnics, participated more fully in American life, speaking English, gaining education, and purchasing homes. Similarly, German Jew William Frank’s sons achieved success in business and the professions.⁵ So did William Tinker’s son Carl, who became a pharmacist, one of the few professions open to African Americans in the city. Though their names were not affixed to downtown skyscrapers or corporations, these immigrants’ tenacity and that of their sons and daughters shaped Pittsburgh’s emerging narrative.

Pittsburgh began as a remote colonial outpost on the North American frontier in the 1750s. Nearly a century and a half later it was a national powerhouse. The eighteenth century’s wars of empire, initiated by England and France, periodically enveloped southwestern Pennsylvania. These conflicts brought faraway rivalries to the succession of forts and villages at the forks of the Ohio River. Native Americans, the first people to rove through the region, were prominent actors in these imperial struggles and their aftermath. They bore the brunt of European expansion, which took their land and dismissed their humanity. Once stewards of the backwoods, most indigenous people would abandon the territory.

With the conclusion of the American Revolution and the formation of the United States, the frontier town of Pittsburgh at the confluence of the three rivers—the Allegheny, Monongahela, and Ohio—became the lynchpin for trade and migration between Philadelphia and Baltimore to the east and settlements rising in the Ohio Valley to the west. Insulated from more advanced eastern competitors by the seemingly endless ridges of the Allegheny Mountains, Pittsburgh grew into a modestly sized city with aspirations of becoming the mid-continent’s commercial emporium. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, western settlement had inexorably moved to and beyond the Mississippi River Valley, where newer cities—Louisville, Cincinnati, and St. Louis—more easily serviced the receding frontier. The rapid development of railroads further eroded the natural advantages of the city’s location at the headwaters of the Ohio River. Both freight and passengers could now bypass Pittsburgh as they journeyed westward.

As these commercial roles declined, manufacturers partnered with market-savvy, financially resourceful merchants to exploit nearby coalfields and develop nascent glass and iron industries. Demand for munitions during the Civil War and a burgeoning railroad market for rails and equipment transformed the once commercial city into a center for iron manufacturing. With the shift from iron to steel after 1880, several small partnerships evolved into modern industrial corporations led by entrepreneurs who were as innovative as they were aggressive. The likes of Andrew Carnegie, B. F. Jones, Henry Oliver, Henry Clay Frick, and George Westinghouse boosted Pittsburgh and southwestern Pennsylvania to national leadership in mass-produced steel, railroad equipment, coke, and machinery. Local investors and venture capitalists, notably but not only the Mellons, developed the capacity to underwrite new products such as aluminum and plate glass. They backed the costly transition to vertically integrated production. The latter entailed controlling primary resources such as coal and iron ore, engaging in each phase of production, and marketing finished goods under one corporate umbrella. The financiers also underwrote buyouts of competitors and engineered mergers to form ever-larger corporations that reverberated throughout the country and crossed borders. With its population surpassing a million before World War I, the Pittsburgh industrial region ranked among the nation’s half-dozen largest metropolitan areas. But its rapid growth came at a steep cost for many.

Pittsburgh’s industrialists, bankers, and professionals heartily embraced a private enterprise, free market ideology stressing individual initiative and responsibility. Many were Scottish and Scotch-Irish Presbyterians who believed that the accumulation of wealth and power was a sign of their favorable predestination by God. Business leaders saw only a limited role for government and favored leaving the economy to the operation of market forces. They considered individuals largely responsible for their own welfare. Men and women whose wealth derived from commercial and professional pursuits or family inheritance exercised substantial power and authority. Sharing family connections, neighborhoods, churches, clubs, and political affiliations, they forged a cohesive class identity. Protestants dominated the city’s upper class, while Catholics like Daniel Rooney and Jews like Isaac Frank who succeeded in Pittsburgh’s business and professional arenas built separate social spheres.⁶ As the region grew, the elite class became more varied in composition but remained self-consciously distinct from the socially diverse working and middle classes who comprised the bulk of the population. The wealthy enjoyed considerable control over the business and political life of the city, though their hegemony was weakening by 1900.⁷

The power and perspective of the upper class did not go unchallenged. Mass production, new waves of immigrants, and feeble governmental responses to public needs fomented dissatisfaction and conflict, even bloodshed. As owners’ and workers’ interests diverged in the first half of the nineteenth century, workers’ protests, strikes, and violence punctuated peaceful, though fragile, labor relations. Skilled craftsmen eventually gained a measure of power on the shop floor by leveraging their unity and knowledge of production. But between the Civil War and World War I, mechanization in factories and mills, along with the increasing scale of production, shattered skilled workers’ traditional craft practices and power. In spontaneous work stoppages, organized labor actions, and at the polls, Pittsburgh workers protested their deteriorating wages, working conditions, and status. Girls and women took axes to the doors of textile factory compounds in 1848. The entire community angrily protested the use of the state militia to suppress railroad protesters in 1877, and the Monongahela River turned red with the blood of Pinkerton detectives and mill workers in Homestead in 1892. But manufacturers, with the support of the upper class, the state’s police power, and the courts, usually prevailed. The arc bent toward justice in the workplace, but very slowly.⁸

Remarkable diversity along ethnic, religious, and racial lines further fragmented the region’s social cohesion. Those divisions both incited conflict among different groups of working people and fueled opposition to upper-class rule. Long-standing animosities between Protestants and Catholics turned vicious at times and exacerbated underlying citizen distrust of civic leaders. Enmity among ethnic groups and between skilled and unskilled workers frequently disrupted labor’s unity in their episodic challenges to manufacturers. As industry decentralized, spreading along the rivers beyond the original urban core, and improved transportation facilitated residential suburbanization, Pittsburgh’s classes and cultures grew farther apart. This spatial separation, reinforced by western Pennsylvania’s hilly topography and rivers, splintered the region into dozens of small, autonomous civil divisions, triggering its legendary fragmentation.⁹ The uneven distribution of public services, such as water, sewers, street paving, and lighting, underscored stark political and class inequalities. Environmental and health problems especially burdened industrial neighborhoods and mill towns.¹⁰ These inequities provoked sporadic political mobilization to bring about more satisfactory conditions for underserved communities.

Pittsburgh’s neighborhoods and the region’s small towns forged strong identities based on class, ethnicity, race, and place. They also encountered powerful centralizing counterforces. Huge corporations, such as the Carnegie Steel Company with its sprawling network of plants, mines, railroads, and Minnesota ore reserves, centralized operations and set new standards for industrial efficiency and output. In response, labor groped toward overcoming its internal divisions in order to field commensurate organizational power. Similarly, Pittsburgh’s rapid growth, especially the annexation of the South Side in 1872 and Allegheny City in 1906, cried out for a central government authority that could manage citywide infrastructure. A budding cohort of professional managers in business and government added to the separation of, and friction among, classes and local communities. These large, centralized institutions with growing bureaucracies threatened community control over schools and governance, even churches and charities. These forces contributed to a pervasive and almost innate distrust of outside authority that can be traced as far back as the Whiskey Rebels in the 1790s.

In sync with the nation’s free market, individualistic, and political economy, Pittsburgh became a leading industrial metropolis. A few individuals grew unimaginably wealthy, and the city’s East End, where Westinghouse, H. J. Heinz, Frick, the Mellon brothers, and other industrial magnates lived, became one of the most affluent neighborhoods in the country during the late 1800s. A comfortable middle class also emerged, but the largest share of the population lived with neither a secure nor adequate income. Mike Dobrejcak and steel laborers across the region feared the destitution that frequently accompanied workplace injury, illness, or layoffs. Clustered in neighborhoods fouled by a degraded environment, they lived in ramshackle dwellings and crowded tenements. Women like Elena Kracha and Mary Dobrejcak suffered the consequences of industrial capitalism as much as men. Largely excluded from the workplace, they were tasked with keeping the family healthy, bearing and rearing the children, and supplementing household income by taking on piecework or taking in boarders. Providing a bed and food for single men who labored in the mills, washing their clothes, and offering them a semblance of family life were the only ways many families survived, but added to women’s already strenuous familial duties. In the struggle to remain afloat, the Carlinos and other immigrant, low-income families often depended on churches, charitable groups, and a marginally responsive government to ameliorate their situation. Voluntary philanthropic and reform efforts, occasionally supported by local and state government, experienced modest success. But whenever environmental, housing, and health reform proposals impinged on the conduct of business, they faltered in the face of powerful forces that privileged industrial growth and the assumed rights of private property.¹¹ Consequently, the problems associated with treacherous workplace conditions, poverty, and severely polluted air, water, and land challenged civic leaders throughout the twentieth century.

While economic and social inequalities diminished for European immigrants’ children and grandchildren, racial discrimination stifled African Americans’ prospects. Having fled slavery, Martin Delany and other African Americans in antebellum Pittsburgh formed a small, viable, and free community, only to have the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law tear it apart. They slowly rebuilt their community after the Civil War. Beginning in the 1890s, a new wave of black migrants began making their way to the city. Those who came with education and expertise, like Cumberland Posey Sr. and Robert L. Vann, redefined African American success in business and journalism. But among them were many poorly educated, unskilled, rural southern folk. Tensions arose between long-term black residents and these impoverished migrants. The latter in particular suffered discrimination in employment and segregation in housing that made it difficult to escape poverty and find a reason to remain in Pittsburgh, which contributed to higher residential turnover for African Americans than most other émigrés to the city.

The centralization of corporate and financial power under the control of the city’s elite, whose skyscraping headquarters downtown bore their names, increasingly distanced them from the working-class communities spread throughout the city and region. A growing rancor and distrust across the widening class divide aggravated the municipal fragmentation already hindering the cooperation necessary to resolve metropolitan issues. In short, the rapacious industrial capitalism that carried Pittsburgh to the front ranks of American industrial metropolises came at a terrible cost. It left the city and region economically and socially imbalanced, environmentally degraded, and racially divided, challenges that defined the region for the next century.

Ironically, this rapacious phase of industrial capitalism was already changing by World War I. With reformers, local government, and labor organizations nibbling at upper-class prerogatives, the elite’s grip was eroding. A handful of powerful national corporations wrested ownership of the iron and steel industry away from them.¹² Carnegie Steel’s demise exemplified this shift. Though the company was Pittsburgh’s premier industrial corporation at the end of the nineteenth century, it and nearly two dozen other local iron and steel companies merged in 1901 to form the U.S. Steel Corporation. The industrial behemoth, the largest company on the planet, was headquartered more than three hundred miles away in New York City. During the twentieth century large national organizations with priorities that had little to do with Pittsburgh replaced other corporate decision makers. The process was uneven and slower than in several, often smaller, industrial cities, but no less painful when Pittsburgh corporations and banks were gobbled up. Of course, Pittsburgh businesses were not just victims of the nationalizing process. Some corporate and financial powers, including Alcoa, Gulf Oil, Heinz, Westinghouse, and Mellon Bank, had been investing and expanding into national and international markets as early as 1920 and did so even more aggressively after World War II. By then corporate Pittsburgh’s branch plants, satellite offices, and investments in real estate developments were scattered from coast to coast.

The pre–World War I industrial metropolis was the product of more than 150 years of innovation, cooperation, and conflict. Those decades set the foundation on which Pittsburgh and the region—its citizens as much as its business leaders and their companies—would navigate the twentieth century. In terms of economic and population growth, Pittsburgh was at the top of its game, but the twentieth century was not kind to the city or the region. Increasing competition from other metropolitan areas, the Great Depression, and an overspecialized industrial base diminished the region’s growth rate. Fear of long-term economic decline after World War II fostered a new, coordinated relationship between Pittsburgh’s corporate leaders and local government officials to finally confront the region’s persistent problems and diversify its economy. Despite significant success, especially in addressing air and water pollution, and national acclaim for its redevelopment program known as Renaissance I, Pittsburgh remained overly concentrated in its capital-intensive, pre–World War I industries and vulnerable to the harsh effects of globalization. At the same time, civic leaders cavalierly overlooked the damaging effects of urban redevelopment on low-income residents.

During the 1970s and 1980s overspecialization and globalization’s irresistible pressure devastated much of the region’s economic base, forcing it to turn away from its traditional industries. Unthinkable plant closures, the departure of iconic corporations, massive unemployment, racial strife, and steep population loss stimulated aggressive, partially successful redevelopment programs. But redevelopment and the shift to medicine, education, and high tech left a trail of winners and losers across southwestern Pennsylvania. Highly educated technology workers and professionals thrived, while former industrial and unskilled, low-wage workers floundered, many leaving the region forever. They held on to their emotional ties and clutched Terrible Towels as the Steel City became the City of Champions, but they could no longer support themselves in their hometown as industry contracted and their livelihoods crumbled.¹³

Still, Pittsburgh and southwestern Pennsylvania endured the twentieth century’s tribulations. Pittsburgh’s prospects for the twentieth-first century look decidedly more favorable than they have for more than half a century. Many attribute this persistence and transformation to the resilience and roguishness forged by the workers, entrepreneurs, and their families in the cauldron of the nineteenth century’s rugged, impressive, and unsympathetic industrialization. Others point to the financial resources of its legacy foundations, the innovative impacts of its research universities, and the increasingly attractive amenities of its recuperating environment. These positive attributes can be traced in one way or another back to its formative years. This book spans the creation of Pittsburgh through World War I.

ONE

ON THE FRONTIER

ON JULY 3, 1755, AS JAMES SMITH AND ARNOLD VIGORAS RODE WEST through the Allegheny Mountains, they were fired on from a blind of bushes set off from the trail. Hit twice, Vigoras died before he struck the ground. Unscathed but thrown from his horse, Smith was seized by his captors, two Delaware and a Caughnawaga. While one of the assailants scalped Vigoras, another asked the Pennsylvanian in English if there were other white men nearby. He answered that he knew of none, and without deliberation the three warriors and their eighteen-year-old prisoner set off north through the mountains, running at what for Smith was a punishing pace. They did not stop until they had covered fifteen miles and passed the night without a fire, the first night of four years that Smith spent among indigenous people west of the Alleghenies.

Geopolitics and a respite from romance had brought the young man to western Pennsylvania. I had fallen violently in love with a young lady, Smith recalled, possessed of a large share of both beauty and virtue.¹ But in May 1755 Smith joined General Edward Braddock’s campaign against the French, leaving his sweetheart in central Pennsylvania. Smith reckoned he would be back in her embrace by summer’s end. He was as wrong in this as were the British forces who expected their march to the headwaters of the Ohio River would meet with quick success.

While Smith desired only a summer’s adventure, the British sought control over the immense expanse of land west of the mountains. Their expedition aimed to seize Fort Duquesne, a French stockade recently erected on the triangle of land at the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers. There, at the future site of Pittsburgh, the British challenged the French for access to the vast heartland of North America.

Pittsburgh emerged as a military and pioneer outpost during the long and violent struggle in which Native Americans, Europeans, and colonists fought with and against each other to command the region. James Smith played a part in each of these overlapping conflicts. In the first, Britain wrested control of North America from France. In the second, the British and their colonial allies squashed indigenous resistance. In the third, the British, now with considerable indigenous support, tried to suppress their rebellious colonies. This time they lost. The fourth conflict determined whether Virginia or Pennsylvania would oversee the Ohio River Valley.

The unlikely winners in these clashes were colonists who joined the successful national liberation movement of 1776 and, in its wake, made Pittsburgh their home. These struggles left a lasting imprint, defining the region’s economy and altering its ecosystem. They influenced the city’s architecture and planning, as well as its languages, religions, and sports. And as they learned to distrust distant governments’ willingness to protect them and offer them stability, the colonists developed a combative, antiauthoritarian localism, a political culture which has echoes in the present. Later waves of immigrants added their own legacies to the city at the Point as Pittsburgh has often been called.²

IMPERIAL CLAIMS

During the half-century before James Smith arrived in the Ohio River Valley, three aspiring empires—France, Britain, and Iroquoia—fought over the region. Resorting to force rather than reason or law, each tried to impose its authority over the sparsely populated territory. Each failed, but their imperial ambitions swept western Pennsylvania into the century-long Great War for Empire between France and England. Conflict at the headwaters of the Ohio River reignited that global confrontation, which was waged in Europe, India, the Philippines, and the Caribbean, as well as in Canada and west of the Appalachian Mountains. Known as the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), this conflict cost France its North American colonies and left Britain poised for global hegemony. While few at the time could have found the region on a map, the first blows of war were struck there.

James Smith, whose Scotch-Irish family had emigrated from the Isle of Skye to Ulster and then Pennsylvania, had little sense of the geopolitical drama unfolding in the summer of 1755.³ He had scant knowledge of the waterways linking France’s Canadian possessions to its foothold in New Orleans, or that the road he was carving through the mountains led to what Europeans perceived as North America’s last great uninhabited and unexplored domain. Smith knew only that he was hungry, tired, and scared. Just the day before he had been working with three hundred Pennsylvanians hired by his brother-in-law to cut a wagon road from Fort Loudon in Franklin County west to the Youghiogheny River. Their path would carry provisions for General Braddock’s force of 1,400 British regulars and 450 Virginians marching north from Maryland to confront the French.

Smith and Arnold Vigoras were checking on supply wagons when they were ambushed by indigenous scouts supporting the French at Fort Duquesne. When they didn’t return to camp, a party of twelve men searched for them. They found Vigoras’s body, but not his hair, and Smith’s horse and hat, but not the youth. After small bands attacked the road company that night and the next day, thirty of them quit and headed home. No further efforts were made to find Smith.

The morning after Smith’s capture, the warriors shared their meager breakfast with him, scrupulously dividing a few ounces of moldy biscuit and roasted groundhog served cold. They then trekked fifty miles, through thickets of mountain laurel and across a series of hills, until they reached the Loyalhanna Creek on the western slopes of Laurel Mountain. When Smith’s captors uttered several long yells, which he became familiar with as the scalp halloo announcing that a scalp or prisoner had been taken, a party nearby answered with musket fire.

Once in camp Smith hungrily accepted their offer of turkey and venison. The next morning the combined parties headed toward Fort Duquesne. Reaching the fort, Smith stood numbly on the banks of the Allegheny River as the French greeted the warriors by firing muskets and detonating artillery pieces, all the while shouting in tongues foreign to him. Warriors bivouacked by the fort came racing toward them. Dressed in breechcloths and painted in what Smith considered the most hideous hues of vermilion, black, brown, and blue, they formed two rows. Smith realized that he had to run their gauntlet to reach the safety of the fort. Despite being flogged repeatedly, Smith had almost made it to the end of the line when he was knocked to the ground. As he tried to rise, a warrior tossed sand into his eyes, blinding him. They continued to beat me most intolerably, until I was at length insensible, he wrote in his journal. Before I lost my senses, I remember my wishing them to strike the fatal blow, for I thought they intended to kill me, but apprehended that they were too long about it.⁴

Smith awoke to find a French doctor hovering over him. The doctor opened a vein in his arm to bleed him and washed his wounds with brandy. Officers interrogated him about the road, threatening him with torture if he failed to answer truthfully. When the English-speaking Delaware who had captured Smith visited him in the infirmary, Smith asked if he had offended them so that they had cause to beat him so unmercifully. The Delaware responded that Smith had been treated in customary fashion, but that from here on he would be well used. To Smith’s chagrin, that meant he wouldn’t remain with the French but go with his captors after they and their French allies met Braddock’s forces on the field of battle, a confrontation expected within days.⁵

European claims to western Pennsylvania were tenuous. England asserted its right to rule by virtue of John Cabot’s voyage to North America in 1497. From a ship off the North Atlantic coast, the explorer claimed all lands stretching west to the Pacific Ocean. France countered in 1669, when Robert de La Salle and Louis Joliet, wintering on the shores of Lake Erie, declared possession of the lake and the unoccupied territory adjoining it. After reaching the spot where the Mississippi River empties into the Gulf of Mexico, La Salle expanded French pretensions, proclaiming sovereignty over all the land drained by the river. However, neither European power questioned its right to make such assertions or considered indigenous peoples’ stewardship of the region.

By then the English monarch Charles II had granted the upper Ohio River Valley to William Penn to pay a debt owed the Quaker’s father. The Province of Pennsylvania would extend to the west and north of the Delaware River, but its exact western boundary was not set. As Pennsylvania’s proprietor, Penn exercised great latitude in shaping the colony. Mindful of the abuse Quakers had suffered in England and Massachusetts, he designated it as a religious refuge for them and other Christians. With no established church or religious taxes, Pennsylvania attracted a mix of immigrants that Penn envisioned living together in a colonial utopia.

Penn dealt honestly with native people. Seeking to coexist peacefully, he pledged not to take their lands without consent. As historian Daniel Richter wrote, Infused with its Founder’s personal vision and the Quaker values of many early colonists, Pennsylvania enjoyed remarkably peaceful relationships with its Native neighbors for more than half a century.⁶ Penn considered them the true lords of the soil.⁷ Some colonists east of the Alleghenies grew close to indigenous people, eating and drinking with them, conducting trade, and even paying rent to farm their land. But this era of amity did not last.

After William Penn returned to England in 1701, his sons, who displayed few of their father’s scruples, contrived to sell native lands in the eastern part of the colony to settle debts.⁸ Harmony was even more fleeting in western Pennsylvania where both colonists and Native Americans committed massacres. As the influx of settlers seeking land grew, discord prevailed. So did Euro-American fears and anxieties.⁹

By the time James Smith was captured, the European presence along the Atlantic Seaboard had shaken indigenous life to its core. Even before many Europeans ventured across the Alleghenies, traders, settlers, and the microbes they carried had altered native culture and the landscape.¹⁰ Europeans exchanged guns, powder, bullets, and other goods for furs and pelts, especially beaver. Firearms made conflict among native peoples deadlier, while the slaughter of beavers wiped the animal out in some locales, altering the ecological balance their dams sustained. Europeans then began seizing land for farming and animal husbandry. These sedentary farming practices introduced notions of private ownership alien to Native Americans who saw the land as a resource to be used but not owned. They chose to migrate with the season, minimizing impact on forests and meadows.¹¹

The headwaters of the Ohio became a virtual no-man’s land. European diseases coursed through the native population, striking as tribes were taking up arms against each other. Never again in North America, historian Richard White argued, would Indians fight each other on this scale or with this ferocity. War and disease bolstered European colonial power at the expense of Native Americans. Meanwhile, losses from epidemic and war were so catastrophic that tribes adopted prisoners taken in battle to replace those who had died. That kept James Smith and thousands of others alive.¹²

The Iroquois ruled western Pennsylvania by right of conquest from their homeland in the Mohawk Valley and Finger Lakes (present-day upstate New York). They stood in the way of French penetration from Canada and the Great Lakes and blocked British access via the Mohawk Valley. The Cherokee and Catawba made migration through the southern mountains almost as difficult. Nor was western Pennsylvania worth enough to risk tribal wrath. Other than pelts, the area was too far from the coast to market whatever goods it might produce.¹³

The Iroquois confederation known as the League of Five Nations was well positioned because the headwaters of the Hudson, Delaware, and Susquehanna Rivers lay within Iroquoia. These rivers and their tributary streams constituted the primary transportation grid for trade and travel. After all but wiping out the Erie in 1653, the Iroquois used western Pennsylvania as a hunting ground and demilitarized buffer zone between themselves and other tribes. Few dwelt there, nor did the region seem to matter—until the eighteenth century.

In the early 1700s settlers and land speculators along the Eastern Seaboard began squeezing the tribes living there. No longer able to freely range over the land, bands of Lenni Lenape, Seneca, and Shawnee crossed the Alleghenies. With the region hardly inhabited, a multi-tribal mix of Native Americans set up seasonal camps along the rivers. English and French traders lived among them, summering with tribes and exchanging metalware, guns, and alcohol for skins and furs. They brought packhorses loaded with trade goods over mountain trails and returned with beaver, fox, bear, and deer pelts.

Neither England nor France paid much attention to the disputed expanse between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River until the 1740s. By then the French had reason to fear that English influence over the tribes would undermine their fledgling North American empire. Unable to compete with better-made, less expensive British trade goods, they felt compelled to act when England claimed dominion over the Iroquois.

New France at mid-century consisted of Canada and Louisiana connected by a 1,500-mile artery of lakes and rivers. A Frenchman could leave Quebec and travel along the St. Lawrence River, across Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, down French Creek to the Allegheny River, from there to the Ohio, and finally float the Mississippi to New Orleans. He might portage on occasion or wait for rain to make the rivers navigable, but this watery highway was then state of the art. It offered better access to the interior than the mountain trails that the British trod.¹⁴

The Iroquois, however, saw the headwaters of the Ohio River as their fiefdom and recognized no claims to the land but their own. In 1744 they negotiated a treaty in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with the Virginia Colony. The Virginians walked away four hundred pounds poorer but contending that the Iroquois had sold them all the land within the province to the setting sun, including the Ohio River Valley. The Iroquois, on reflection, said they had understood the treaty to extend only as far west as the ridge of the Allegheny Mountains. That disagreement remained a sore spot for decades, until the sheer force of European arms and settlement made it moot.¹⁵

George Croghan, a Dublin-born immigrant known as the King of the Traders, built a small empire in the region and became the Pennsylvania colony’s de facto representative to Native Americans. From his headquarters where Pine Creek empties into the Allegheny (today the town of Etna) a few miles upriver from Fort Duquesne, Croghan’s twenty-five-man operation included a boatyard, one hundred packhorses, and trading posts as far away as Lake Erie. In the spring of 1748 Croghan gathered delegations of Delaware, Shawnee, and Wyandot at Logstown, an indigenous town along the Ohio River. There Pennsylvania and Virginia presented a thousand pounds of powder, lead, and goods to the tribes, strengthening their ties to the colonies. Courted by the French and the British, Native Americans made tactical alliances with both. They welcomed the acquisition of copper kettles, textiles, steel knives, and muskets but recognized that rum caused grief and muskets required repair, powder, and lead available only from Europeans. Still, they realized that Europeans coveted the territory.

Fearing that loss of the Ohio River Valley would cost them Canada and Louisiana, France wagered it could impose its will on the region. Instead of relying on Native American allies to block the British, the French would occupy the region. Their gamble would cost them New France. In June 1749 Pierre Joseph Celeron de Blainville led twenty French soldiers and two hundred indigenous warriors to the Ohio River on a mission to reclaim the region and solidify ties with its inhabitants.¹⁶ Paddling the St. Lawrence to Lake Erie, Celeron’s flotilla portaged to Lake Chautauqua and made for the Allegheny River. Heading downstream to the Ohio, they nailed the French royal arms to trees and buried lead markers stating their claims to the region. Celeron warned the Native Americans he encountered that if they did

Reviews for Pittsburgh Rising

[drgrinnell · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Edward K. Muller and Rob Ruck's new book, Pittsburgh Rising: From Frontier Town to Steel City, 1750-1920 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) provides a fascinating view of the development of Pittsburgh through the lense of individuals who lived it. While its not a view through rose colored glasses, it frames the activities of the region which are often brutal and distrubing -- yet it shows great resiliance and truimphs. While so many people view Pittsburgh through the stories of the 19th and early 20th century industrialists and financiers like Carnegie, Frick, Westinghouse, Heinz, and Mellon -- this book provides us with an examination of the lives of common and hard working people who, without their labor, committment to establishing communities, and caring for one another would not have made modern Pittsburgh possible. The source material is rich. They bring together many separate academic studies on immigration, migration, industry, western expansion, war, and biography by scholars such as Bodnar, Gottlieb, Faires, Weber, Ingham, Tarr, Hays, Glasco, Couvares, Lubove, Montgomery, and Dickerson, into a cohesive focus, one that tells the story of the people of the region in engaging and approachable ways.Excellent Read! Thanks Ted and Rob!