This region, on May 31, 1889, was the scene of one of the most appalling disasters of modern times. A deluge of rain for the greater part of two days had fallen upon the Alleghenies, and made great freshets in both the Juniata and the Conemaugh. On the South Fork of the Conemaugh, fifteen miles above Johnstown, is Conemaugh Lake, a reservoir there formed by damming the stream, so that it covered a surface of five hundred acres—the dam, a thousand feet long, being in places one hundred feet high. This had been made as a fishing-ground by a club of Pittsburg anglers. The excessive rains filled the lake, and the weakened dam burst, its twenty millions of tons of waters rushing down the already swollen Conemaugh in a mass a half-mile wide stretching across the valley and forty to fifty feet high, carrying everything before it. The lake level was about three hundred feet higher than Johnstown, and every village, tree, house, and the whole railway, with much of the soil and rocks, were carried before the resistless flood to Johnstown, where the mass was stopped by and piled up behind the stone railway bridge, and there caught fire, the resistless flood, to get out, sweeping away nearly the whole town in the valley bottom. This vast calamity destroyed from three to five thousand lives, for no accurate estimate could be ever made, and ten millions of property. It took the flood about seven minutes of actual time to pass over the fifteen miles between the lake and Johnstown, and there was left, after it had passed, a wide bed, like a great Alpine glacial moraine, filled with ponderous masses of sand and stones and wreckage of every description, the resistless torrent being afterwards reduced to a little stream of running water. It required many months to recover from this appalling destruction; but the people went to work with a will and rebuilt the town, the steel works and the railway, which for a dozen miles down the valley had been completely obliterated. This terrible disaster excited universal sympathy, and a relief fund amounting to nearly $3,000,000 was contributed from all parts of the world.

LIGONIER AND HANNASTOWN.

The whole mountain district west of Johnstown is filled with coal mines, coke ovens and iron furnaces, this being the "Pittsburg Coal District." The Conemaugh breaks through the next western ridge, the Laurel Mountain, and the broadening river winds along its deep valley between high wooded hills. It is a veritable "Black Country," and ten miles beyond, the river passes the finest mountain gorge on the western slope of the Alleghenies, the deep and winding canyon of the Packsaddle Narrows, by which the Conemaugh breaks out of the Chestnut Ridge, the western border of the Allegheny ranges. For two hundred miles the railroad has gone through or over range after range, and this grand pass, encompassed by mountains rising twelve hundred feet above the bottom of the gorge, is the impressive exit at the final portal. The main railroad then leaves the Conemaugh, and goes off southwestward along the slope of Chestnut Ridge towards Greensburg and Pittsburg. The river unites with the Loyalhanna Creek below, and then flows as the Kiskiminetas down to the Allegheny. The name of Loyalhanna means the "middle stream," while the tradition is that an impatient Indian warrior, anxious to move forward, shouted in the night to his comrades encamped on the other river—"Giesh-gumanito"—"let us make daylight"—and from this was derived its name of Kiskiminetas. A branch railroad from here goes to Blairsville, named in memory of the solitary pioneer of Blair's Gap, and another northward leads to the town of Indiana. The great Chestnut Ridge which the main railway runs along, gradually descending the slope, is the last mountain the westbound traveller sees until he reaches the Rockies. For seventy miles to the southwestward the Chestnut Ridge and Laurel Mountain extend in parallels, their crest lines being almost exactly ten miles apart, and enclosing the Ligonier Valley, out of which flows northward the Loyalhanna Creek, breaking through the Chestnut Ridge. Near this pass in 1757 was built Fort Ligonier, another of the frontier outposts which resisted the incursions of the French and Indians, who then held all the country to the westward. In the Chestnut Ridge at Hillside is the "Great Bear Cave," an extensive labyrinth of passages and spacious chambers stretching more than a mile underground, which, like most such places, has its subterranean river and its tale of woe. A young girl, stolen by gypsies, to escape from them took refuge in this cave, and losing her way, perished, her bones being found years afterwards. Explorers since have always unwound balls of twine in this labyrinth, to be able to retrace their steps.

In a good farming district of the Westmoreland region is Greensburg, another railway junction where branches go southward to the Monongahela coalfields. Robert Hanna built a house near here in the eighteenth century, around which gathered some thirty log cabins, and the place in course of time became known as Hannastown, prominent in the early history of Western Pennsylvania. Here was held the first court convened west of the Alleghenies, and here were passed the patriotic resolutions of May 16, 1775, upon receipt of the news of the battle of Lexington at the opening of the Revolution, which sounded the keynote for the Declaration of Independence the following year. Here also first appeared during the Revolution General Arthur St. Clair, an immigrant from Scotland, the grandson of the Earl of Roslyn, who lived in an humble house on Chestnut Ridge. He served in the French and Indian wars, and was the British commander at Fort Ligonier. Horrible Indian massacres and terrible retributions by the settlers were the chief features of the Revolutionary War in Westmoreland. At its close, the whites sent an expedition in 1782 against the Wyandottes, which was defeated. The savages soon wreaked fearful vengeance, raiding the region in July of that year and burning Hannastown, which was never rebuilt. Greensburg appeared soon afterwards, however, and in 1875 it celebrated the centenary of the Hannastown resolutions with patriotic spirit. In its Presbyterian churchyard lie the remains of General St. Clair, who, after founding and naming the city of Cincinnati, returned here, and died in 1818, at the age of eighty-four, in his lonely cabin on Chestnut Ridge, in unmerited poverty and obscurity. The stone over his grave has this significant inscription: "The earthly remains of General Arthur St. Clair are deposited beneath this humble monument, which is erected to supply the place of a nobler one due from his country." Being in a region of fine agriculture and prolific mines, Greensburg is a prosperous and wealthy town.

BRADDOCK'S DEFEAT.

Natural gas is added to coal and coke in the region beyond Greensburg, and the villages display flaring gas torches at night for street lamps. The whole country, north, south and west, is a network of railways and a maze of mines, having long rows of burning coke ovens lighting the sky with their lurid glare. Here are mined the Westmoreland gas coals. The valley of the Monongahela River, coming up from West Virginia, approaches from the southward, a great highway for coal boats out to the Ohio and the West, also receiving a large coal tribute from its branch, the Youghiogheny, flowing by crooked course through Fayette County. Alongside the Monongahela is the great Edgar Thomson Steel Works, one of the chief establishments of the Carnegie Steel Company, making railway rails. Here is the famous Colonial battlefield of Western Pennsylvania, made immortal by General Braddock's defeat in July, 1755. This region was then a thick forest, through which an Indian trail coming over the Monongahela led to the junction of the two rivers forming the Ohio, where the French had established their stockade and trading post of Fort Duquesne. Braddock came into this region from beyond the mountains, his object being the capture of the fort. His defeat, a great event in our Colonial history, was due to his ignorance of the methods of Indian fighting and his refusal to listen to those who understood it; but he paid the penalty with his life, being shot, as was believed at the time, by one of his own men, after having had five horses shot under him. It was in rallying the defeated remnant that Washington, the senior surviving officer, won his first military laurels. Braddock crossed the river and was caught in an ambuscade, eight hundred and fifty French and Indians surprising and defeating his force of about twenty-five hundred British regulars and Virginia Provincial troops, the loss being nearly eight hundred. Washington led the remnant back to Virginia, carrying Braddock about forty miles on the retreat, when he died. He was buried at night in the centre of the road, Washington reading the Episcopal burial service by torchlight, and the defeated army marched over the grave to conceal its location from the enemy. A handsome monument is erected on the battlefield at Braddock's. And thus, through iron mills and coal mines, amid smoke and busy industry, the Pennsylvania Railroad enters Pittsburg, the "Iron City."

THE GREAT IRON CITY.

The Monongahela River coming from the southward, and the Allegheny River flowing from the northward, drain the western defiles of the Alleghenies, and at Pittsburg unite to form the Ohio River. Each comes to the junction through a deeply-cut canyon, and at the confluence is a triangular flat upon which the original town was built. Like most American rivers, all these have names of Indian origin. Monongahela is the "river of high banks, breaking off in places and falling down." Ohio is a Seneca word, originally pronounced "O-hee-o," and meaning the "beautiful river" or the "fair water," and Allegheny in the language of the Delawares has much the same signification, meaning "the fairest stream." All the Indians regarded the two as really the same river, of which the Monongahela was a tributary. The first white men exploring this region were the French, who came down from the lakes and Canada, when they spread through the entire Mississippi Valley. In 1753, however, Washington with a surveying party was sent out by Virginia and carefully examined the site of Pittsburg, advising, on his return, that a fort should be built there to check the advance of the French, and the next year this was done. Scarcely was it completed, however, when the French sent a summons to surrender, addressed "From the Commander-in-chief of His Most Christian Majesty's troops now on the Beautiful River to the Commander of those of Great Britain." A French force soon appeared, and the fort was abandoned. This began the French and Indian Colonial War that continued seven years, the French then erecting their famous fort and trading-post guarding the head of the Ohio, which they named after the great French naval commander of the seventeenth century, Marquis Abraham Duquesne. Then came Braddock's defeat in 1755, and for some time the region was quiet. Moravian missionary influence, however, had by 1758 detached many of the Indians from the French interest, and after another British attack and repulse, General Forbes came with a large force, and the French abandoned the fort and blew it up. Immediately rebuilt by the English, a Virginia garrison occupied the post, and it was named Fort Pitt. Then a larger fort was built at a cost of $300,000 and garrisoned by artillery, which the enemy vainly besieged in 1763. The next year a town site was laid out near the fort, and in 1770 it had twenty log houses. After the long succession of wars and massacres on that frontier had ceased, the village grew, and business began developing—at first, boat- and vessel-building, and then smelting and coal mining and the manufacture of glass. In 1812 the first rolling-mill started, and the war with England in that year caused the opening of a cannon foundry, which became the Fort Pitt Iron Works. The village of Fort Pitt had become Pittsburg, and expanded vastly with the introduction of steam, and it became an extensive steamboat builder for the Western waters. Railroad connections gave it renewed impetus; natural gas used as a manufacturing fuel was a wonderful stimulant; and it now conducts an enormous trade with all parts of the country, and is the seat of the greatest iron, steel and glass industries in America.

Few views are more striking than that given from the high hills overlooking Pittsburg. Rising steeply, almost from the water's edge, on the southern bank of the Monongahela River, is Mount Washington, three hundred and fifty feet high. Inclined-plane railways are constructed up the face of this hill, and mounting to the top, there is a superb view over the town. The Allegheny River comes from the northeast and the Monongahela from the southeast, through deep and winding gorges cut into the rolling tableland, and uniting form the Ohio, flowing away to the northwest also through a deep gorge, although its bordering ridges of hills are more widely separated. Pittsburg stands upon the low flat surface of the peninsula, above the junction of the rivers, which has some elongated ridgy hills, stretching eastward through the centre. Its situation and appearance have thus not inaptly been compared to a flatiron, the point being at the head of the Ohio, and these ridgy hills making the handle. The city has overflowed into extensive suburbs across both rivers, the aggregate population being more than a half-million. Numerous bridges span the rivers, the narrow shores between the steep hills bearing a mixed maze of railways and factories. Countless chimney-smokes and steam-jets come up in all directions, overhanging the town like a pall; and so impressive is the obscuration, combined with the lurid glare of furnaces and the weird white gleam of electric lights, that the elevated view down into Pittsburg seems a veritable pandemonium. So startling is it on a lowering day that it has been pointedly described by one who thus for the first time looked upon the "Smoky City," far down in its deep basin among the high hills, as appearing like "Hell with the lid off." There are plenty of railways in the scene, and scores of odd-looking, stumpy-prowed little steamboats built high above the water, having huge stern-wheels to drive them, with their noses thrust up on the sloping levee along the river bank, whereon is piled the cargoes, chiefly of iron products. The swift current turns all the sterns down stream, so that they lie diagonally towards the shore. Fleets of flat, shallow coal barges are moored along, waiting to be made up into tows for their journey down the Ohio, as Pittsburg has an extensive river trade, covering over twenty thousand miles of Western waters. Out of the weird and animated scene there come all sorts of busy noises, forges and trip-hammers pounding, steam hissing, railroad trains running, whistles screeching, locomotives puffing, bells ringing, so that with the flame jets rising, and the smokes of all colors blowing about, there is got a good idea of the active industries of this very busy place.

PITTSBURG DEVELOPMENT.