Showing Fort Pitt by Charles W. Dahlinger

Excerpt from Fort Pitt In the olden time Pittsburgh was known indiscriminately as Pittsburgh and Fort Pitt, the latter designation being most generally used. The story of those far-away days has been told before, but as Sir Charles Wakefield of England is about to present to the city, a bust of William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham, for whom the place was named, it will not be inappropriate to repeat the tale, together with such incidents as may have been overlooked, or which did not come to the knowledge of the earlier historians. The story of the struggle for supremacy in America between the French and the English is of romantic interest. The French claimed the interior of the continent by right of discovery by LaSalle. The English claims were more comprehensive and just as inconclusive as those of the French. They claimed the country from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific on the ground of discovery, and the Ohio Valley by purchase at Lancaster in 1744 from the Six Nations, the ostensible owners. (1) The contest on the part of the French was hopeless from the beginning. Their settlements were widely scattered. Canada and Acadia, which last, had been ceded to England in 1713, were in the far north, while away to the south was Louisiana. The total population was only about eighty thousand, while the English Colonies, which were all closely connected and located on the Atlantic seaboard, numbered about one million one hundred and sixty thousand souls. (2) The French developed a comprehensive plan of building a line of forts from Canada southward, intended ultimately to connect Canada with Louisiana, and restrict the English to the seaboard. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfecti