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."