which is occasioned by its being supplied from the Onondago salt works, in the upper part of the state of New York, from whence it is brought by water with a few portages, through part of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, and down French creek and the Allegheny to Pittsburgh, where it is a great article of trade, giving employment to several keel boats on the river.
The situation of Pittsburgh is unrivalled with respect to water communication, with a great extent and variety of country; and would also be so in beauty was it not hemmed in too closely by high and steep hills. It may notwithstanding be called a beautiful situation, as there is a variety in those very hills, which all differ in appearance from each other, and admit between them fine vistas up the Allegheny and Monongahela, and down the Ohio, which river is formed by the confluence of the other two, and which after flowing eleven hundred miles through all its sinuosities, is itself lost in the Mississippi, at a point about W. S. W. from Pittsburgh, from whence eleven hundred miles more carry that chief of Atlantick rivers (whether with regard to unimpeded navigation, or the immense body of water discharged through it) into the ocean below New Orleans, in {225} about a south direction from its confluence with the Ohio.
Standing on the point which was the scite of the old French Fort Du Quesne, about the middle of the last century, and of which there is now no vestige, and looking up the Allegheny to the northward, a chain of hills, with a narrow bottom partially cultivated between the hills and the river, bound the view on the left, while two beautiful little islands, the uppermost one cultivated, and owned by a Mr. Wainwright from England, terminate the water prospect in front.
Turning gradually to the right, the eye looks over the dry ditch and old ramparts of the former English Fort Pitt,
