Pittsburgh is known as the Steel City, the gritty home of Gilded Age business magnates and orange-glowing steel mills. But before the three rivers were packed with boats carrying steel, the confluence of those waterways brought agriculture, trade and even war to the region.
“If we’re going to talk about Pittsburgh as a center for trade and commerce, that begins long before even this is an American settlement,” said James A. Hill, an assistant professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of History.
The Meadowcroft Rockshelter and Historic Village in Washington County shows evidence of Native American activity in the area as far back as 19,000 years ago. By the early 18th century, Native Americans from the Iroquois Confederacy and the Lenape had dominion over the region.
“It’s a crossroads for people from different European empires and different Native American groups here. It’s a central trading location. So that foundation is set in the early 18th century,” Hill said.
Much of this activity is owed to the rivers.
As settlers from Europe began to claim more land and the colonial economy boomed, they relied heavily on ships along the Eastern seaboard to transport goods back to Europe. Sending commodities from the frontier via the rivers to port cities such as Philadelphia and New York was cheaper and easier than traversing the Appalachian Mountains on foot or horseback.
Michael Burke, assistant director of the Heinz History Center’s Fort Pitt Museum, said most of the few hundred settlers in the mid-18th century were in commerce, worked as artisans or made a living in agriculture.
“There’s a town of Pittsburgh that pops up in 1759, as the British are first coming here. There’s a town of Pittsburgh before Fort Pitt was constructed. But they’re mostly people who are working in the fur trade as traders going down the Ohio River,” Burke said.
Slavery was less common in this region, Hill said, but enslaved Africans and Native Americans existed. Marcus Rediker, a longtime professor of history at Pitt, agreed.
“Per capita, the economic well- being of Americans on the eve of the American Revolution probably was the highest in the world,” said Rediker, who hold the title Distinguished Professor of Atlantic History. “A tremendous amount of the wealth of the 13 colonies was produced by enslaved people.”
Settlers in Western Pennsylvania were the homesteaders of their day. The Ohio Country, as the region was known, was the western frontier of the 18th century. It was also an agricultural haven, according to Rediker.
“The quality of land is, in general, very high,” he said. “It was very productive land. Pennsylvania is going to become known as the breadbasket of the Atlantic.”
Many of the homesteaders who came to the region to acquire land and begin farming were Scotch-Irish. Their speech patterns would greatly influence the modern-day Pittsburgh accent and linguistic regionalisms.
To some extent, the strategic topographical position of the Pittsburgh region when it came to trade precipitated the events of the French and Indian War, starting in 1754.
“Economics were crucial, but at that time, economics were politics and economics were diplomacy,” Hill said. “Trade and trading relationships between European powers and Native people are important, but only partially for economic gain. They’re also seen as a way to ensure good relationships with Native people, and those good relationships are crucial for these various European powers.”
It is also important not to discount that European settlers often were taking land from Native people. It became a point of necessity and survival for Native Americans to maintain trade and diplomatic relationships with the colonial powers.
“The Scots-Irish were intrepid settlers, and they were quite militant in defense of the land that they wanted. They were major players in a lot of the ‘Indian Wars,’ ” Rediker said.
From the French side, control of the waterways was crucial because they were heavily involved in the fur trade and needed as many ways as possible to transport their furs to the coast.
“Beaver pelts were unbelievably popular throughout Europe. Consequently, the beaver becomes a major commodity of these colonial economies in the West,” Rediker said.
“The French, they have access to the St. Lawrence (River) and the Great Lakes, and they’re actively trying to take control of the forest of the Ohio so they can continue their inland connection all the way down to Louisiana,” Burke said. “The British want to come and trade, but they also want to buy the land, and people are very eager to buy the land and sell it to settlers.”
Prospecting became an enormous industry, especially for land at this crossroads of so many different powers and industries.
As the region moved past the Revolutionary War, it began to diversify economically, even though the population was still in the hundreds.
“You see some commerce, some agriculture, you start to see some boat building,” Hill said.
As the fledgling nation took root and the calendar turned to the 19th century, the beginnings of the region’s industrial boom weren’t far off.
“The steel manufacturing really starts in the 1830s,” Hill said. “It’s not the big colossus that it will become later, but the beginnings of iron and steel manufacturing are probably around that time.”
Eventually, the city would boom with immigrants, fortune seekers and African Americans during the Great Migration of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
But before all of that, it was a crossroads, a trade center and a sought-after region of fertile land connected to the rest of the New World through the veins of the three rivers.