CELEBRATED FRONTIER FORTS. 235 



Way," laboriously constructed by the skill of ancient 

 Roman craftsmen, endures but for a day. 



But Time leaves no trace of its destructive power 

 upon the natural landscape, and so it comes to pass 

 that we constantly find a wonderful resemblance in 

 the cast of thought and mode of expression among 

 the people of the wilderness, wherever their lot may 

 have been cast : here we see the same idea striking the 

 dweller beneath the shadows of the great equatorial 

 forests, and the wanderer through the pathless wilds 

 of the Canadian woods, which, at the time we refer 

 to, covered almost the whole of the eastern side of 

 North America in one continuous labyrinth of trees. 



Now in the early colonial days in America the 

 prosperity of a frontier town mainly depended, as we 

 have already explained, upon its inland trade with the 

 Indian tribes; and in consequence those advanced 

 posts of which we have spoken were pushed on 

 further and further into the unknown wilderness be- 

 yond, where it was their main objective to hold the 

 pass to some point which lay upon the head waters 

 of some great inland river system, upon which canoes, 

 and bateaux, the white man's form of boat, could float 

 down, it might be for thousands of miles, throughout 

 the then almost wholly unexplored interior, and from 

 whence they could sally forth as from a maritime port, 

 and subsequently return laden with costly furs and 

 other merchandise, obtained from the native tribes in 

 exchange for articles of European manufacture. 



Two such places were: the celebrated Fort Du- 

 quesne, built by the French in 1754, at the point of 

 junction of the Monagahela with the Ohio, where the 

 present city of Pittsburg now stands the other was 



