The southwestern corner of Cambria County, Pennsylvania, is high, burly mountain country with fast trout streams and miles of dark forest. The air smells clean and wonderful, even in the drab little coal towns tucked back in the hills, and the views are awesome, with far-off patches of green farmland under a sky filled with towering white clouds. Then, at Johnstown, it is as though the bottom dropped out of the old earth and left it angry and smouldering.

The city sits down in a great hole in the Alleghenies, along a gorge that is anywhere from 500 to 1,000 feet deep and has sides as steep as a sluice. It is shrouded in smoke most of the time, and you can hear it whistling and clanking from miles off. For, like Pittsburgh, which is seventy-five miles to the west, Johnstown is a steel center. Blast furnaces light up the sky at night; carloads of coal rumble along the main line of the Pennsylvania Railroad within a few blocks of the tree-shaded town square; and the rivers, the Stony Creek and the Little Conemaugh, are the color of a new baseball glove.

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