Having arrived in Pittsburgh two months prior to Lewis, Thaddeus Harris describes the city and surrounding area giving us a view of what Meriwether Lewis will see when he arrives on 15 July.
Thaddeus Mason Harris
Lithograph from Chester Harding (1792–1866)
Image and text 32 x 25 cm. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society.
Text below image: Born July 7th, 1768. Grad Harv. Col. 1787. Ordained Dorchester Octr. 23d. 1793. / C. Harding pinxt. Pendleton’s Lithography, Boston.
Harris’s Arrival
We this morning arrived at Pittsburg, a post-town in Pennsylvania, and the capital of Alleghany County. It is built at the point of land formed by the junction of the two rivers; and is in N. Lat. 40° 26′ 15″, and Longitude (in time) 5 hours, 19 minutes, and 53 seconds W. of Greenwich.
The Alleghany is remarkable for the clearness of its waters and the rapidity of its current; and the freshets in it are greater and more sudden than those of its connubial stream. It seldom happens that it does not mark its course across the mouth of the Monongahela, with whose turbid and fluggish waters it forms a very observable contrast. It is curious, also, in the time of the spring floods to see the Alleghany full of ice, and the Monongahela entirely free. These floods are occasioned by the dissolution of the immense bodies of ice and snow accumulated during winter in those northern regions through which the river passes, and by the heavy falls of rain at the setting in and breaking up of winter.
—Thaddeus Harris[1]The Journal of a Tour into the Territory Northwest of the Alleghany Mountains Made in the Spring of the Year 1803, 39–40 in Reuben G. Thwaites, Travels West of the Alleghanies (Cleveland: The … Continue reading
Thaddeus Harris
Thaddeus Mason Harris (1768–1842) was best known as a Harvard librarian and liberal Unitarian minister. In 1802, he contracted yellow fever, and the next year traveled to the west to recuperate. His journal provides accurate descriptions of Pittsburgh in the spring of 1803, just three months before Meriwether Lewis arrived there. Because no journal of Lewis’s time in Pittsburgh is known to exist, excerpts from the Harris journal are often used on this site to describe Lewis’s travel from Harpers Ferry (see July 13, 1803 and July 14, 1803) and time in Pittsburgh (see July 20, 1803 through August 30 1803.
After his western trip, a healthy and hale Harris returned to his academic and religious duties. According to Reubin Thwaites, Harris became a founding member of the “American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Humane Society, the American Peace Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Archaeological Society at Athens, and was chosen corresponding member of the New York Historical Society.” His literary works include The Journal of a Tour into the Territory Northwest of the Alleghany Mountains Made in the Spring of the Year 1803 (1805), The Natural History of the Bible (1820), and Biographical Memorials of James Oglethorpe (1841).[2]Thwaites, Travels West, 20–22.
