southwesterly to the Holston River and Knoxville in Tennessee.
Those who passed over these roads intending to farm had at least good prospects, but the printers who decided to cast their fortunes with the settlers beyond the mountains faced the probability of failure, for there was nothing to advertise. Even in the centers of western population, money was scarce and barter was still the principal mode of exchange.
The principal road had been completed in 1785, leading from Philadelphia, then the metropolis of the nation, to the forks of the Ohio,—a distance of three hundred miles. An express line of Conestoga wagons passed to and fro on this turnpike, and paper, type, ink and presses had to be transported over it, at the rate of six dollars a hundredweight.
Pittsburgh, at that time the frontier of civilization, was a shabby little river port with a population not exceeding three hundred souls, in less than forty log houses scattered along the levee where many flatboats and river craft waited to carry the immigrants and their goods into the western country.
To this uninviting settlement, with a noble purpose went John Scull, a Quaker boy of twenty-one and a true pioneer. He had seen the chaotic conditions in the country and had decided that it would be a fine thing to print and publish a journal that would arouse the western country to the necessity of standing by the union. He had come west with that idea in mind and on July 29, 1786, the Pittsburgh Gazette was printed. Following a historic precedent, Scull—who was known as "the handsome young man with the white hat,"[1]—eked
- ↑ W. H. Venable, Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley.
