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To the Plains in `49 into Prairie life; to my mind there is something inspiriting about the mode in which we travel, the appropriateness of our Costume, the nonnecessity of being prim & genteel & there is a feeling of immense satisfaction in wearing boots, thick, ugly-but comfort- able. March 22d Had an extensive perambulation over the City & suburbs & discovered nothing to alter my first impression. there are many very extensive manufactorys here & I found out that here too they were making locks, 9021 I saw, there are a great many coal pits in the immediate vicinity iron is also plentiful & Pitsburgh possessing all the resources must inevitably become a large & important place. The air must be inimical to beauty for the ordinary & smoke dried appearance of the women has been ob- served by us all, but as if to make amends the horses are particu- larly fine & are a manifest improvement upon the breeds met with in New York. At half after 8 the boat left the city & we gladly said farewell to a place that has so little to render it attractive, eternal smoke, dirt & during our stay unmitigated rain.17 The Hindoo one of the many boats that ply upon the Ohio being perfectly new there was a great deal of speculation respecting her fitness for the trip & accidents being very numerous upon these rivers we almost expected some accident. I learnt from a published account that one half of the boats now running will be lost by sinking burning or collision at the average age of 2 years & that last year there were 69 boats & 289 Persons lost. It was on board one of these boats that we had taken our passage to S. Louis a distance of 1300 miles. half an hour after we had started a concussion was felt, an alarm given I7 The 1850 population figures for Pittsburgh showed nine wards with 44,642 white residents and 1,959 "free colored." Of all the cities west of the mountains, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh were the most important manufacturing centers as well as being the most favored stopping places for steamboats plying the Ohio River. There was a great variety of manufacturing in Pittsburgh, with iron and metal-working being the most important industries followed by glass factories and seven cotton mills. A countryman of Hudson's, a Scottish immigrant named Andrew Carnegie, in 1848 started work at age thirteen as a bobbin boy in one of Pittsburgh's cotton factories. Michael Chevalier visited the city in 1835 and remarked on the hectic pace of life which also astounded Hudson, "Nowhere in the world is everybody so regularly and continually busy . . . there is no interruption of business for six days in the week, except during the three meals, the largest of which occupies hardly ten minutes." Seventh Census; James Hall, The West, Its Commerce and Navigation (Cincinnati: H. W. Derby and Company, Publishers, 1848), pp. 243, 251; Leland D. Baldwin, Pittsburgh: The Story of a City (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1937), p. 219; Stefan Lorant, Pittsburgh: The Story of an American City (New York: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1964), pp. 92, 123. 52 |
