ing clearly that large portions of the strata had been removed from the tops of the hills as well as from the valleys. I was surprised, in the course of our ride along the bottom of a wooded valley, to find the air infected far and wide with a fetid odour, which, my companion informed me, proceeded from a skunk. The animal, he supposed, might be half a mile or more to windward of our path. 20 ALLEGHANY MOUNTAINS. CHAP. XV. CHAPTER XV. Alleghany Mountains.—Union.—Horizontal Coal Formation.Brownsville on the Monongahela.-—Facilities of working Coal. -Navigable Rivers.- Great future Resources of the Country.— Pittsburg-Illinois Coal Field.-Fossil Indian Corn.—Indian Mounds near Wheeling.-General Harrison on their high Antiquity.-Dr. Morton on the aboriginal Indians.-Remarks on the Civilisation of the Mexicans and other Tribes.-Marietta. Silicified Trees or Psarolites of Ohio.-Coal of Pomeroy.-New Settlements.-Cincinnati. AFTER leaving the small mining village of Frostburg, which is about 1500 feet above the level of the sea, we continued to ascend and descend a succession of steep ridges till we came to the summit level, where the climate was sensibly colder, and the oaks and other trees still leafless. At Smithfield we crossed a river flowing westward, or towards the Monongahela and Gulf of Mexico, and soon afterwards passed the grave of General Braddock, and followed the line of his disastrous march towards Fort Duquesne, now Pittsburg. At length we reached Laurel Hill, so called from its rhododendrons, the last of the great parallel ridges of the Alleghanies. From this height we looked down upon a splendid prospect, the low undulating country to the west, appearing spread out far and wide before us, and glowing with the rays of the setting sun. At our feet lay the small town of Union, its site being marked by a thin cloud of smoke, which pleased us by recalling to our minds a familiar feature in the English landscape, not seen in our tour through the regions where they burn anthracite, to the east of the Alleghanies. After enjoying the view for some time we began to descend rapidly, and at every step saw the forest, so leafless and wintry a few hours before, recover its foliage, till the trees and the climate spoke again of spring. I had passed several times over the Pyrenees and the Alps, and witnessed the changes of vegetation between the opposite flanks, or between the summits and base of those mountains; but this was the first time I had crossed a great natural barrier, and found on the other side people speaking the same language, and having precisely the same laws. and political institutions. The parallel ridges before alluded to, between Frostburg and Union, were formed partly of red sandstones (Old Red), but chiefly of white grit, the lowest member of the carboniferous group, each flexure or arch opening out and flattening as we went westward, in the manner explained in my description of the section at page 92, Vol. I., the strata at the same time becoming more and more horizontal. At the town of Union, which may be said to lie at the western foot of the mountains, I had an opportunity of seeing coal exposed to view in an open quarry of building stone. The coal seam was three and a half feet thick, with an intervening layer, as usual, between it and the freestone of dark slate or shale, four feet thick. When traced farther, the shale thinned out gradually, and in a neighbouring quarry, about thirty yards distant, it gave place to the yellow micaceous sandstone, which then formed the roof of 22 ABUNDANCE OF COAL. CHAP. XV. the coal. These sandstone roofs are comparatively rare in America, as in Europe. From Union, we went to Brownsville on the Monongahela, a large tributary of the Ohio, where the country consists of coal measures, like those at Union, both evidently belonging to the same series as those more bent and curved beds at Frostburg before described. I was truly astonished, now that I had entered the hydrographical basin of the Ohio, at beholding the richness of the seams of coal, which appear everywhere on the flanks of the hills and at the bottom of the valleys, and which are accessible in a degree I never witnessed elsewhere. The time has not yet arrived, the soil being still densely covered with the primeval forest, and manufacturing industry in its infancy, when the full value of this inexhaustible supply of cheap fuel can be appreciated; but the resources which it will one day afford to a region capable, by its agricultural produce alone, of supporting a large population, are truly magnificent. In order to estimate the natural advantages of such a region, we must reflect how three great navigable rivers, such as the Monongahela, Alleghany, and Ohio, intersect it, and lay open on their banks the level seams of coal. I found at Brownsville a bed ten feet thick of good bituminous coal, commonly called the Pittsburg seam, breaking out in the river cliffs near the water's edge. I made a hasty sketch of its appearance from the bridge, looking down the river, in which the reader will see (a, Pl. VI.) the coal, ten feet thick, covered by carbonaceous shale (b), and this again by micaceous sandstone(c). Horizontal galleries may be driven everywhere at very slight |