ALTER SCOTT, aged twenty-two, teacher of English and the rudiments of Greek and Latin, sat alone in his classroom at the Union Academy of Jamaica, Long Island. The day's teaching Was over, but a strange lethargy held him in his chair. Perhaps that was because it was spring.

      Spring! In the year of 1819. America! It was only last summer that he had come. His ship had sailed into New York Harbor July 7, 1818. His Uncle George Innes, who worked in the United States Customs Office, had been waiting for him. Uncle George had given him a home, introduced him to friends his own age, and put him on the trail of this tutorship.

      He liked teaching and he was meant for it. This was his first experience with the exciting privilege of shaping young minds, but it had been good. The boys liked him, too, he believed. Could it be that his Scotch burr fascinated them? No, surely not simply that. He had succeeded in making Latin fascinating in its own right.

      This was the last day of the term, and he would not be back. He regretted that. He would miss the boys, and he was sorry to part with his uncle so soon after coming to know him; but he was going west!

      Walter's first months had been in that part of America which looked out over the Atlantic toward the Old World, but his mind was not turned in that direction. Eyes all about him were set toward the West. The nation was leaning toward the Ohio and the Northwest Territory. Talk of it was on every tongue. [9] Imaginations were fired by it. There was not a town or village that had not said its farewells to friends and neighbors in order to commit them to that swelling westward river of migrants which flowed ceaselessly toward new lands. The urge to go west became a contagion sweeping the nation from New England to Georgia.

      The young Latin tutor took the fever. City-bred and reared in a world where venerable tradition impressed the hold of the past, he burned with curiosity to see a world where men were hacking a new order of life out of the raw wilderness. Accordingly, he resolved to go there, to see it for himself, and, if he could find a toe hold in the land where all was future, to become a part of its exciting adventure. He was confirmed in his resolution when he ran upon an acquaintance of his own age who felt as he did. Together they planned it.

      They would be called pioneers, he supposed. He did not feel much like one, nor, it must be admitted, did he look much like one. No rawboned, weather-hardened woodsman, he was slight and delicate. A high forehead crowned by raven-black hair, high cheekbones, a long nose with sensitive nostrils, and piercing, dark eyes gave him away as an imaginative intellectual. But even an intellectual can be curious, and curiosity engulfed Walter Scott. For nearly eight months he had heard almost no word of conversation that was not about "the West." What was this West like? He tried to picture it. But how could he picture it, he, a musician and teacher of Latin who had been reared in cities and who had never even seen a virgin forest? There could be no picturing of it until he had seen it. He had to see it! He would see it! [10]

      Early the next morning, with small packs on their backs and their scanty savings in their pockets, the two young men set out on foot for Philadelphia and the Old Forbes Road to Pittsburgh. It was April, 1819.

      From one end to the other, the Old Forbes Road was a long, antlike column crawling ceaselessly westward. Only a few months before, the paving of this turnpike had been completed all the way to the headwaters of the Ohio. Before that, traveling had not been so pleasant or so rapid. Hard-pulling teams of horses hitched to covered wagons, faster stagecoaches, and plodding foot travelers made their way most of the year only by wading and struggling through a "road" which was little more than a glutinous river of mud. But make their way they did. There was no stopping their restless pilgrimage.

      As Walter Scott lengthened his stride to the pace of the journey, he and his companion reflected that only a score of years earlier long trains of pack horses, roped in single file with their lone riders astride lead horses, had threaded their winding ways through narrow mountain trails.

      The Old Forbes Road over which they were walking had been hacked through the wilderness by the British general, John Forbes, as he drove his armies across the Allegheny Mountains to capture Fort Duquesne from the French. His troops called him "Old Iron Head." It was in 1758 that he lay gasping out his orders from the litter that bore his sick body in the line of march. By sheer strength of will and with lashing tongue he goaded his six thousand ragged soldiers to their hardy task. After the capture of Fort Duquesne, it was "Old Iron Head" himself who had renamed it "Pittsburgh," after Pitt, the elder. [11] Walter recalled that this volatile general had been a native Scotsman, and that he had died in Philadelphia only a few months after this campaign was completed.

      Young Scott and his fellow traveler knew that the westward expansion had been growing rapidly since the Revolutionary War. It was as though that war and the War of 1812 had broken a dam and the pent-up populations rushed in to fill up the uninhabited places.

      The two young men felt the authentic thrill of pioneers, and yet they knew that other frontiersmen had gone before them. In general, these pioneers had surged out in three waves. First there had been the daring soldiers of fortune, reckless adventurers, lone hunters, and roving traders who sought the wilds because they were lured by the wilderness or because civilization repelled them. Walter Scott was in no sense such a pioneer, and he knew it. Nor did he belong to the second wave, made up of settlers who followed hard upon the heels of the first woodsmen. These settlers staked out claims, cleared forest, planted crops, built homes, and prepared to root in. While the settlers were doing this, life became "too crowded" for the frontiersmen of the first wave, and they pushed on into the wilderness still farther westward.

      No, the young nephew of George Innes was not venturing into a world entirely without settlers. As he walked toward it, he expected to find homes, farms, cities, schools, and churches, for over two million Americans now lived west of the Allegheny Mountains.¹ Many of them had been lured by the generous Federal Land Law of 1800, which allowed them to buy small tracts with a down payment of fifty cents an [12] acre and a promise to pay the balance of $1.50 per acre over a period of four years.²

      Scott was not that kind of pioneer. He belonged rather to the third wave. This was composed of the social organizers--teachers, ministers, editors, and businessmen, who would open academies, establish churches, publish newspapers, and furnish the commercial heart of towns and cities. These were the ones who would give structure to the vast national energy. "We," thought Scott, "are the formers of the social molds into which the flux of the people is pouring itself." To be a teacher in that new world where tradition was nonexistent and the future was everything was to live at the apex of opportunity!

      America was not as yet in its great era of immigration. In the year of Scott's voyage from Greenock to New York, scarcely 8,000 had entered America from all ports. This movement to the West was a migrant, not an immigrant movement. The peoples of the East who had settled there were breaking up their homesteads and pouring westward. The whole nation had become an inland tidal wave.

      "Look there!" said Scott to his companion as he pointed out a strange group on the crowded highway. It was a company of f our, an elderly couple and a young couple. They had a cart but no horse. The elderly father, walking between the shafts, pushed his weight against a strap passed over his shoulder, across his chest and under the opposite arm. His son pulled at traces fastened to the end of the shafts. The young woman rode in the cart, which was piled high with belongings. The old woman walked, driving a cow! Before they had gone the full length of their journey, the two young men saw many groups like [13] this one. The poor and the defeated made up a great section of this pilgrimage to "The Land of Beginning Again."

      All day long the footwise Scott brushed past heavily loaded covered wagons, each drawn by six horses. They were called Conestoga wagons for the Philadelphia firm that built them. Their cargoes, which nestled low into the boat-shaped beds, ranged from 3,000 to 6,000 pounds. Their progress was slow. The two youths in their vigorous early twenties overtook and passed many of them in the course of a day, for such freight carriers averaged twelve or fifteen miles from morning till night, whereas foot travelers could cover from fifteen to twenty miles in the same time.

      They also overtook and passed drovers with their herds and flocks of hogs and cattle, crawling along at the rate of five or six miles a day. There were, as well, scores of walkers, with whom they could strike up a conversation to sate their curiosity and beguile the hours.

      Now and then Brahmans of the road charged by in egg-shaped stagecoaches. These fine vehicles, richly ornamented in gilt and luxuriously fitted out, carried twelve passengers, nine of them in the comfortable interior, and three more perched high in front with the driver. The rate of speed made by the stages was an envious ten miles an hour. Their horses were changed every twelve miles.³

      Scott and his friend knew very well why they were not riding in one of these coaches. They felt their pockets and remembered that the fare from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh alone was $20 for one passenger and twenty pounds of luggage, and that each hundredweight of luggage cost $12 more.⁴ It was some [14] satisfaction to know that these swift queens of the road also carried the United States mails.

      That overland walk from New York to Pittsburgh required nearly four weeks of continuous trudging. The two footsore pioneers drew up for the night in an inviting field, where they slept under the clear sky and the friendly stars. Sometimes they stayed in a settler's cabin and shared the simple friendliness and the happy hospitality of those who had come like themselves out of the East, but at an earlier day. Occasionally they took their night's repose at a great wayside inn. Built of stone, these great inns stood at intervals of a normal day's journey all along the way. Their central feature was a large hall with an enormous fireplace. This hall was dining room, parlor, and barroom. The fire was fed by logs hauled in through the wide door by horse, up to the very hearth! There, from time to time, the host poked the embers with a giant six-foot poker, turned the meat on a spit, or stirred the pot which hung over the hot coals. There on a cool evening gathered the travelers for stories and songs before retiring. Scott often charmed the ears of such a gathering and washed away the weariness with the liquid music of his flute, which he played with a skill bordering on genius.

      In such an inn supper was thirty-three and one-half cents. Breakfast could be had for the same price, while dinner served at noon, was a little more expensive. It cost thirty-seven and one-half cents.⁵ In this same inn a few "bits" (one cent), "fippenny bits" (six and one-half cents), and "levies" (twelve and one-half cents) would buy a night's lodging.⁶

      Rising on the morrow, the two companions were again at the seemingly endless task--walking, [15] walking. And yet, Scott was not tired. Each day held new surprises, and the scenery, to his city-bred eyes, was a never-ending source of delight. His wonder at the stretching miles of natural beauty sometimes became an uncontainable singing ecstasy within him. He burst into song or raced from the road to hug the great trunks or tug at the leafy boughs. Every day the great panorama kept edging westward. The level lands of eastern Pennsylvania gradually yielded to rolling hills, and the rolling hills gave way to the giant ridges of the Allegheny Mountains. Up and down them they toiled. Then at last they were over the mountains, trending toward Pittsburgh.

      A week later they arrived, tired but triumphant. It was May 7, 1819. The proud city which called itself the "Gateway of the West" was little more than an overgrown village. In 1800 it had numbered 1,565 inhabitants.⁷ It now had 767 buildings, a steam mill that could grind five hundred bushels of grain a day, four glass factories, two cotton mills, a wire mill and iron foundry, together with several breweries and distilleries.⁸ This town was wedged into a triangle where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers flowed together to form the Ohio. Across this wedge of land hundreds of thousands had beaten a path to the Ohio and its flatboats. For more than a dozen years, Pittsburgh had been an important shipbuilding center. Sailing vessels built in its docks were floated down the Ohio and Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico and out to sea. Many of them plied their trade on the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.⁹

      Even more thriving was the business of supplying flatboats. As early as 1788, nearly a thousand of these rafts had carried more than 18,000 men, women, [16] and children down the Ohio in one year. This flood of migration surging through the "Gateway of the West" had been released by the Revolutionary War and was increasing with each season.

      In such a city stood Walter Scott in May of 1819. At the tip of the triangle, the moving tide of humanity washed around and past him, his friend among them. After farewells, he stood and watched a while. Families boarded their newly possessed flatboats. Wagons, household goods, and livestock were all moved onto the decks. Taking to the water, they began poling their way farther into the sunset.

      Walter Scott, ten months in America, stood where the formal East was melted down, became fluid, and flowed into the formless but forming West. Perhaps he could have a part in the shaping. But before he could do that, he must find lodgings and, what was even more urgent, a means of livelihood. Where should he turn? He was, after all, a schoolteacher. With all his walking, he had not left himself behind, nor the peculiar bents of his talents. Was there a school or academy in Pittsburgh? [17]

[WSVGO 9-17]