It is a custom peculiar to the French to declare possession of a land by burying leaden plates, upon which their professions of sovereignty are incised, at the mouths of its rivers. This has been an immemorial custom, and has been done in recent times in the Pacific sea. La Salle buried a leaden plate at the mouth of the Mississippi in 1682, claiming possession of that river and all streams emptying into it and all lands drained by them. But, now, more plates were needed. And so Céloron de Bienville, a gallant Chevalier of St. Louis, departed from Quebec in the fall of the same year with a detachment of eight subaltern officers, six cadets, an armorer, twenty soldiers, one hundred and eighty Canadians, thirty friendly Iroquois, and twenty-five Abnakis, with a load of leadenplates to be buried at the mouths of all the rivers in the Central West. Two plates were buried in what we now call the Allegheny river and one at the mouths of Wheeling creek, the Muskingum, Great Kanawha, and Miami rivers. At the burial of each plate a given formality was observed. The detachment was drawn up in battle array. The leader cried in a loud voice “Vive le Roi,” and proclaimed that possession was taken in the name of the king. In each instance, theArms of the King, stamped upon a sheet of tin, were affixed to the nearest tree, and aProcès Verbalwas drawn up and signed by the officers. Each plate bore the following inscription:
“In the year 1749, of the reign of Louis XV., King of France, We, Céloron, commander of a detachment sent by Monsieur the Marquis de la Galissonière, Governor General of New France, to reëstablish tranquillity in some Indian villages of these cantons, have buried [here a space was left for the date and place of burial] this plate of lead near the river Ohio otherwiseBelle Rivière, as a monument of the renewalof possession we have taken of the said river Ohio, and of all those which empty into it, and of all lands on both sides as far as the sources of said rivers, as enjoyed by the Kings of France preceding, and as they have there maintained themselves by arms and treaties, especially those of Ryswick, Utrecht, and Aix-la-Chapelle.”
Ah! but leaden bullets were more needed in the West than leaden plates! This Céloron found out before he had gone a dozen leagues. Suspicious savages dug up his first plate and hurried with it to the English at Albany. Is it strange that the Indians soon came to the conclusion that there was ever some fatal connection between the art of writing and their home-lands? At Logstown, near the present city of Pittsburg, he found some detested English traders, and a strong anti-French influence. He drove off the intruders with a sharp letter to their governor, but here his Iroquois and Abenaki Indians deserted him, and, on their way north, tore from the trees those sheets which contained yet more of that horrid writing. Céloron hurried homeward by the shortest route—upthe Miami river and down the Maumee and through the lakes—and rendered his alarming report. It was decided immediately to fortify Céloron’s route. The enterprising successor of Galissonière—Governor Duquesne—sent a detachment from Quebec with orders to proceed to Lake Erie and begin the building of a line of forts down the Ohio frontier, from Lake Erie to the Ohio river. This party, under the command of M. Marin, landed near the present site of Erie, Pennsylvania, and raised a fort.
The ruins of this fort in the West are still perceptible within the limits of the city of Erie. It was a strong work built of chestnut logs, fifteen feet high and one hundred and twenty feet square, with a blockhouse on each side. It had a gate to the south and one to the north, but no portholes. It was first called Fort Duquesne, but later was named Fort Presque Isle from the promontory which juts out into the lake. From Fort Presque Isle M. Marin hewed a road southward, a distance of thirteen miles, twenty-one feet in width, to the Rivière aux Bœufs—river of Buffaloes—later named French creek by Washington. This was the first white man’s road—military or otherwise—ever made in the Central West. It was built in 1753, and though it has not been used over its entire length since that day, it marks, in a general way, the important route from the lakes to the Allegheny and Ohio, which became early in the century the great thoroughfare for freight to and from the Ohio valley and the east. For a distance of seven miles out of the city of Erie the old French road of a century and a half ago is the main road south. At that distance from the city the new highway leaves it, but the old route can be followed without difficulty until it meets the Erie-Watertown plank road, the new Shun pike. This plank road follows the road cut by the French general one hundred and forty-nine years ago. Those that traveled over the same road in 1795, speak of the trees which were growing up and blocking the thoroughfare. It seems to have been the first intention of the French to make this road a military road in the European sense, leveling hills and filling the valleys. And for half the distance between Erie and French creek the road had been grubbed by hauling out the stumps of the trees. Travelers refer to the great cavities which were left open, for the road was never completed on the lines originally laid out. It was built with some care and served for the hauling of cannon to the forts along the Allegheny and Ohio. Cannon balls, accoutrements, and pieces of harness were found along the route as late as 1825. In the day of the pioneer, the route was lessened from Erie to French creek to thirteen miles. This Watertown turnpike was a principal thoroughfare for the great salt trade between the east and Pittsburg and Louisville. In return, iron, glass, and flour were freighted over it eastward from the Monongahela, and bacon from Kentucky. The tradition prevails in Erie that, when the French abandoned Fort Presque Isle, at the close of the French and Indian war, treasures were buried either on the site of the fort or on the old road. Spanish silver coins to the value of sixty dollars were found while plowing the site of the old fort within twenty-five years,but these may not have been left by the French. Old walls have been excavated again and again but without extraordinary results. Pottery of singular kinds, knives, bullets, and human bones have been found. Thus, something of the air of romance of the old French days still lingers over this first pathway of the French in the Central West.
At the end of this road was erected Fort La Bœuf on the north bank of the west fork of Rivière aux Bœufs, at the intersection of High and Water streets in what is now the city of Watertown, Pennsylvania. Being an inland fort, it was not ranked or fortified as a first-class one; yet, as a trading fort, it was of much importance in the chain from Quebec to the Ohio. Of it Washington said, “The bastions were made of piles driven into the ground, standing more than twelve feet above it, and sharp at the top, with portholes cut for the cannon, and loopholes for the small arms to fire through. There are eight six-pound pieces mounted in each bastion, and one piece of four pounds before the gate. In the bastions are a guardhouse, chapel, doctor’s lodging,and the commander’s private stores, round which are laid platforms for the cannon and the men to stand on. There are several barracks without the fort, for the soldiers’ dwellings, covered, some with bark, and some with boards, made chiefly of logs. There are also several other houses, such as stables, smith’s shop, etc.”
Late in the summer of 1753, M. Marin sent fifty men to erect a third fort in the chain from Lake Erie, at Venango, just below the junction of French creek and the Allegheny river, on the present site of Franklin, Pennsylvania. Possession was taken of the site by Captain Chabert de Joncaire, who spent the winter in the trader Frazier’s hut, having been opposed by the Delaware chieftain Half King who said “that the land was theirs, and that they would not have them build upon it.” In the spring, however, machinery for a sawmill was brought from Canada, and oak and chestnut trees were cut down and sawn into timbers for a new fort which was completed in April. It was not an elaborate work but answered its purpose as an entrepôt for goods going down to Fort Duquesne.It was named Fort Machault, from Jean Baptiste Machault, a celebrated French financier and politician and favorite of La Pompadour. The fort was a parallelogram about seventy-five by one hundred and five feet with bastions in the form of polygons at the four angles. The gate fronted the river. It contained a magazine protected by three feet of earth, and five barracks two stories high furnished with stone chimneys. The soldiers’ barracks consisted of forty-four buildings erected around the fort on the north and east sides.
Thus, strong in her resources of military and civil centralization, France at last moved swiftly into the West. In this, her superiority over the English colonies was as marked as her success in winning her way into the good graces of the Indians. French and English character nowhere show more plainly than in the nature of their contact with the Indians as each met them along the St. Lawrence, Allegheny, and the Great Lakes. The French came to conciliate the Indians, with no scruples as to how they might accomplish their task. The coureur-de-bois threw himself intothe spirit of Indian life and very nearly adopted the Indian’s ideals. The stolid English trader, keen for a bargain, justly suspicious of his white rival, invariably distant, seldom tried to ingratiate himself into the friendship of the red man. The voyageur flattered, cajoled, entertained in his wild way, regaled at tables, mingled without stint in Indian customs. Sir Guy Carleton wrote, “France did not depend on the number of her troops, but on the discretion of her officers who learned the language of the natives ... distributed the king’s presents, excited no jealousy and gained the affections of an ignorant, credulous but brave people, whose ruling passions are independence, gratitude, and revenge.” The Englishman little affected the conceits of the red man, seldom opened his heart and was less commonly familiar. He ignored as much as possible Indian habits; the Frenchman feigned all reverence for them, with a care never to rupture their stolid complacency. The English trader clad like a ranger or trapper, made no more use of Indian dress than was necessary. The voyageur adoptedIndian dress commonly, ornamented himself with vermilion and ochre, and danced with the aborigines before the fires; he wore his hair long, crowned with a coronet of feathers; his hunting frock was trimmed with horse-hair fringe and he carried a charmed rattlesnake’s tail. “They were the most romantic and poetic characters ever known in American frontier life. Their every movement attracts the rosiest coloring of imagination. We see them gliding along the streams in their long canoes, shapely and serviceable as any water craft that man has ever designed, yet buoyant and fragile as the wind-whirled autumn leaf. We catch afar off the thrilling cadences of their choruses floating over the prairie and marsh, echoing from forest and hill, startling the buffalo from his haunt in the reeds, telling the drowsy denizens of the posts of the approach of revelry and whispering to the Indian village of gaudy fabrics, of trinkets and of fire water.” This was not alone true of the French voyageur, it was more or less true of French soldier and officer. Such deportment was not unknown among Englishtraders but it must have been comparatively rare. Few men of his race had such a lasting and honorable hold upon the Indian as Sir William Johnson and we cannot be wrong in attributing much of his power (of such momentous value to England through so many years) to the spirit of comradeship and familiarity which underlay his studied deportment.
“Are you ignorant,” said the French governor Duquesne to a deputation of Indians, “of the difference between the king of France and the English? Look at the forts which the king had built: you will find that under their very walls, the beasts of the forests are hunted and slain; that they are, in fact, fixed in places most frequented by you merely to gratify more conveniently your necessities. The English, on the contrary, no sooner occupy a post, than the woods fall before their hand—the earth is subjected to cultivation—the game disappears—and your people are speedily reduced to combat with starvation.” M. Garneau, the French historian, frankly acknowledges that the marquis here accurately described the chief difference between the two civilizations. In 1757, M. Chauvignevie, Jr., a seventeen-year-old French prisoner among the English, said that at Fort La Bœuf the French plant corn around the fort for the Indians, “whose wives and children come to the fort for it, and get furnished also with clothes at the king’s expense.”
Horace Walpole, speaking of the French and English ways of seating themselves in America, said: “They enslaved, or assisted the wretched nations to butcher one another, instructed them in the use of firearms, brandy, and the New Testament, and at last, by scattered extension of forts and colonies, they have met to quarrel for the boundaries of empires, of which they can neither use nor occupy a twentieth part of the included territory.” “But,” he sneers elsewhere, “wedo not massacre; we are such good Christians as only to cheat.”
But, while the French moved down the lakes and the Allegheny, and the English came across the mountains, what of thepoorIndian for whoserichlands both were so anxious?
An old Delaware sachem did not missthe mark widely when he asked the question: “The French claim all the lands on one side of the Ohio, and the English on the other: now, where does the Indian’s land lie?” Truly, “between their father the French and their brothers the English, they were in a fair way of being lovingly shared out of the whole country.”
In 1744, the English paid four hundred pounds to the representatives of the Six Nations for assuming to cede to them the land between the Alleghany Mountains. But, as we have seen, the Six Nations had practically given up their Alleghany hunting-grounds to the other nations who had swarmed in, the Delawares (known to the French as theLoups, “wolves” ), and the Shawanese. So, in a loose way, the confederacy of the Six Nations was friendly to the English, while the actual inhabitants of the land which the Six Nations had “sold” were hostile to the English and usually friendly to the French. Besides these (the Delaware and Shawanese nations), many fugitives from the Six Nations, especially Senecas, were found aiding the French as the momentous struggle drew on.
A thousand vague rumors came over the mountains to Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia in 1753, of French aggressions on the upper Ohio, the more alarming because vague and uncertain.
Orders were now at hand from London, authorizing the erection of a fort on the Ohio to hold that river for England and conciliate the Indians to English rule. But the governor was too much in the dark as to the operations of the French to warrant any decisive step, and he immediately looked about him for a person whom he could trust to find out what was really happening in the Ohio valley.
Who was to be this envoy? The mission called for a person of unusual capacity: a diplomat, a soldier, and a frontiersman. There were five hundred miles to bethreaded on Indian trails in the dead of winter. This was woodsman’s work. There were cunning Indian chieftains and French officers, trained in intrigue, to be met, conciliated, influenced. This, truly, demanded a diplomat. There were forts to be marked and mapped, highways of approach to be considered and compared, vantage sites on river and mountain to be noted and valued. This was work for a soldier and strategist.
After failing to induce one or two gentlemen to undertake this perilous but intrinsically important task, a youthful Major, George Washington, one of the four adjutant-generals of Virginia, offered his services, and the despairing Scotch governor, whose zeal always approached rashness, accepted them.
But there was something more to the credit of this ambitious youth than his temerity. The best of Virginian blood ran in his veins and he had already shown a taste for adventurous service quite in line with such a hazardous business. Acquiring, when a mere lad, a knowledge of mathematics, he had gone surveying inLord Fairfax’s lands on the south branch of the Potomac. There he spent the best of three years, far beyond the settled limits of Virginia, fortifying his splendid physique against days of stress to come. In other ways this life on his country’s frontier was of advantage. Here he met the Indian—that race over which no man ever wielded a greater influence than Washington. Here he came to know frontier life, its charms, its deprivations, its fears, and its toils—a life for which he was ever to entertain so much sympathy and so much consideration. Here he studied the Indian traders, a class of men of much more importance, in peace or war, than any or all others in the border land—men whose motives of action were as hard to read as an Indian’s, and whose flagrant and oft practiced deceptions on their fellow white men were fraught with disaster. It was of utmost fortune for his country that this youth went into the West in his teens, for he was to be, under Providence, a champion of that West worthy of its influence on human affairs. Thus he came to it early and loved it; he learned to know its value,to foresee something of its future, to think for and with its pioneer developers, to study its roads and rivers and portages; thus he was fortified against narrow purposes, and made as broad in his sympathies and ambitions as the great West was broad itself. No statesman of his day knew and believed in the West as Washington did; and it is not difficult to think that had he not so known and loved it, the territory west of the Alleghany Mountains would never have become a portion of the United States of America. There were far too many serious men like Thomas Jefferson who knew little about the West and boasted that they cared less. Yet today the seaboard states are more dependent commercially and politically on the states between the Alleghanies and Mississippi than these central commonwealths are on them.
The same divine Providence which directed this youth’s steps into the Alleghanies had brought him speedily to his next post of duty, for family influence secured him an appointment as adjutant-general (with rank of major) over one of the four military districts into which Virginia was now divided for purposes of defense, a position for which he was as fitted by inclination as by frontier experience.
This lad now received Dinwiddie’s appointment. As a practical surveyor in the wilderness he possessed frontiersman’s qualifications; as an apt and diligent student of military science, with a brother—trained under Admiral Vernon—as a practical tutor, he had in a degree a soldier’s qualifications; if not a diplomat he was as shrewd a lad as chivalrous old Virginia had within her borders, still, at twenty-one, that boy of the sixty maxims, but hardened, steadied and made exceeding thoughtful by his life on Virginia’s great black forest-bound horizon. All in all, he was far better fitted for this mission than any one could have known or guessed. His keen eye, quick perception, and daring spirit were now to be turned to something of more moment than links and chains or a shabby line of Virginian militia.
It is not to be doubted that George Washington knew the danger he courted, at least very much better than we can appreciate it today. He had not livedthree years on the frontier for nothing. He had heard of these French—of their bold invasion of the West, their growing trade, their cunning conciliation of the Indian, their sudden passion for fort building when they heard of the grant of land to the Ohio Company, to which his brothers belonged. Let who can doubt that he looked with envious eyes upon those fearless fleets of coureurs-de-bois and their woodland pilgrimaging. Who can doubt that the few stolid English traders who went over the mountains on poor Indian ponies made a sorry showing beside these roistering, picturesque, irrepressible Frenchmen who knew and sailed the sweet rivers of the great West? But the forests were filled with their sly, red-skinned proselytes. One swift rifle ball might easily be sent from a hidden covert to meet the stripling envoy from the English who was come to spy out the land and report both its giants and its grapes. Yet, after one day’s preparation, he was ready to leave a home, rich in comfort and culture, a host of warm friends, and bury himself five hundred miles deep in thewestern forests, to sleep on the ground in the dead of winter, wade in rivers running with ice, and face a hundred known and a thousand unknown risks.
“Faith, you’re a brave lad,” broke out the old Scotch governor, “and, if you play your cards well, you shall have no cause to repent your bargain,” and Major Washington departed from Williamsburg on the last day of October but one, 1753. The first sentence in theJournalhe now began suggests his zeal and promptness: “I was commissioned and appointed by the HonourableRobert Dinnwiddie, Esq; Governor,&cofVirginia, to visit and deliver a Letter to the Commandant of theFrenchForces on theOhio, and set out on the intended Journey the same Day.” At Fredericksburg he employed his old fencing tutor Jacob van Braam as his interpreter and pushed on westward over the trail used by the Ohio Company to Wills Creek (Cumberland, Maryland) on the upper Potomac, where he arrived November 14.
Wills Creek was the last Virginian outpost, where Fort Cumberland was soon erected. Already the Ohio Company hadlocated a storehouse at this point. Onward the Indian trail wound in and out through the Alleghanies, over the successive ranges known as Wills, Savage, and Meadow Mountains. From the latter it dropped down into Little Meadows. Here in the open ground, covered with rank grasses, the first of the western water was crossed, a branch of the Youghiogheny river. From “Little Crossings,” as the ford was called, the narrow trail vaulted Negro Mountain and came down upon the upper Youghiogheny, this ford here being named “Big Crossings.” Another climb over Briery Mountain brought the traveler down into Great Meadows, the largest tract of open land in the Alleghanies. By a zigzag climb of five miles the summit of the last of the Alleghany ranges—Laurel Hill—was reached, where the path turned northward and followed the line of hills, by Christopher Gist’s clearing on what is known as Mount Braddock, toward the lower Youghiogheny, and forded at “Stewart’s Crossing.” Thence the trail ran down the point of land where Pittsburg now lies between the “Forks of the Ohio.”
Washington’s RoadWashington’s Road
Christopher Gist, whom Washington engaged as guide, knew well this “Road of Iron” through the mountain, and perhaps was the first white man to travel it who left record of it. On July 16, 1751, he had been commissioned by the committee of the Ohio Company to visit their grant of land in the West, and, among other things, “to look out & observe the nearest & most convenient Road you can find from the Company’s Store at Will’s Creek to a Landing at Mohongeyela.”[1]The path started from the buildings Hugh Parker had erected for the Ohio Company in 1750 on land purchased from Lord Fairfax.[2]It followed the course outlined to Laurel Hill; here it left what was perhaps the main trail to the Ohio, and bore westward to the Monongahela river which it touched at Redstone Old Fort (Brownsville, Pa.) It was the course of the shortest portage between the Potomac and Monongahela.
It was the main trail to the Ohio overwhich Gist now guided the young envoy. This path had no name until it took that of a Delaware Indian, Nemacolin, who blazed its course, under the direction of Captain Thomas Cresap, for the Ohio Company. To those who love to look back to beginnings, and read great things in small, this Indian path, with its border of wounded trees, leading across the first great divide into the Central West, is worthy of contemplation. Each tree starred white by the Indian’s ax spoke of Saxon conquest and commerce, one and inseparable. In every act of the great world-drama now on the boards, this little trail with its blazed trees lies in the foreground.
And the rise of the curtain shows the lad Washington and his party of seven horsemen, led by the bold guide Christopher Gist, setting out from Wills Creek on the 15th of November, 1753. The character of the journey is nowhere better described than in Washington’s words when he engaged Gist’s services: “I engaged MrGistto pilot us out.”
It proved a rough voyage! A fierce, early winter came out of the north, asthough in league with the French to intimidate, if not drive back, these spies of French aggression. It rained and snowed, and the little pathway became well-nigh impassable. The brown mountain ranges, which until recently had been burnished with the glory of a mountain autumn, were wet and black. Scarce eighteen miles were covered a day, a whole week being exhausted in reaching the Monongahela. But this was not altogether unfortunate. A week was not too long for the future Father of the West to study the hills and valleys which were to bear forever the precious favor of his devoted and untiring zeal. And in this week this youth conceived a dream and a purpose, the dearest, if not the most dominant, of his life—the union, commercial as well as political, of the East and the West. Yet he passed Great Meadows without seeing Fort Necessity, Braddock’s Run without seeing Braddock’s unmarked grave, and Laurel Hill without a premonition of the covert in the valley below, where shortly he should shape the stones above a Frenchman’s grave. But could he have seen it all—the wasted labor, nights spent in agony of suspense, humiliation, defeat, and the dead and dying—would it have turned him back?
The first roof to offer Washington hospitable shelter was the cabin of the trader Frazier at the mouth of Turtle creek, on the Monongahela, near the death-trap where soon that desperate handful of French and Indians should put to flight an army of five times its own number. Here information was at hand, for it was none other than this Frazier who had been driven from Venango but a few weeks before by the French force sent there to build a fort. Joncaire was spending the winter in Frazier’s old cabin, and no doubt the young Virginian heard this irrepressible French officer’s title read clear in strong English oaths. Here too was a “Speech,” with a string of wampum accompanying, on its way from a few anti-French Indians on the Ohio to Governor Dinwiddie, bringing the ominous news that the Chippewas, Ottawas, and Wyandots had taken up the hatchet against the English.
Washington took the Speech and thewampum—and pushed on undismayed. Sending the baggage down the Monongahela by boat, he traveled on overland to the “Forks,” where he chose a site for a fort, the future site, first, of Fort Duquesne, and later, Fort Pitt. But his immediate destination was the Indian village of Logstown, fifteen miles down the Ohio. On his way thither he stopped at the lodge of Shingiss, a Delaware king, and secured the promise of his attendance upon the council of anti-French (though not necessarily pro-English) Indians. For this was the Virginian envoy’s first task—to make a strong bid for the allegiance of the red men; it was not more than suggested in his instructions, but was none the less imperative, as he well knew whether his superiors did or not.
It is extremely difficult to construct anything like a clear statement of Indian affiliations at this crisis. This territory west of the Alleghanies, nominally purchased from the Six Nations, was claimed by the Shawanese and Delawares who, as we have seen, had come into it, and also by many fugitives from the Six Nations, known generally asMingoes, who had come to make their hunting ground their home. Though the Delaware king was only a “Half King” (because subject to the Council of the Six Nations) yet they claimed the land and had even resisted French encroachment. “Half King” and his Delawares believed the English only desired commercial intercourse and favored them as compared with the French who had already built forts in the West. The northern nations who were nearer the French soon surrendered to their blandishments; and soon the Delawares and the Shawanese were overcome by French allurements and were generally found about the French forts and forces. In the spring of the year Half King had gone to Presque Isle and spoken firmly though vainly to the French.
In so far as the English were more backward than the French in occupying the land, the unprejudiced Delawares and Mingoes were inclined to further English plans. When, a few years later, it became clear that the English cared not a whit for the rights of the red men, the latter hated and fought them as they never had the French.Washington was well fitted for handling this delicate matter of sharpening Indian hatred of the French and of keeping very still about English plans—his past experiences were now of utmost value to him.
Here at Logstown unexpected information was had. Certain French deserters from the Mississippi gave the English envoy a description of French operations on that river between New Orleans and Illinois. The latter word “Illinois” was taken by Washington’s old Dutch interpreter to be the French wordsIsle Noire, and Washington speaks of Illinois as the “Black Islands” in hisJournal. But this was not to be old Van Braam’s only blunder in the rôle of interpreter!
Half King was ready with the story of his recent journey to Presque Isle, which he affirmed Washington could not reach “in less than five or six nights’ sleep, good traveling.” Little wonder, at such a season, a journey was measured by the number of nights to be spent in the frozen forests. Marin’s answer to Half King had been no less spirited because of his own dying condition. The Frenchman had frankly statedthat two English traders had been taken to Canadato get intelligence of what the English were doing in Virginia. So far as Indian possession of the land was concerned, Marin was quickly to the point: “You say this Land belongs to you, but there is not the Black of my Nail yours. I saw that Land sooner than you did, before the Shannoahs and you were at War:Leadwas the Man who went down, and took Possession of that River: It is my Land, and I will have it, let who will stand-up for, or say-against, it. I’ll buy and sell with the English, [mockingly].If People will be ruled by me, they may expect Kindness, but not else.” La Salle had gone down the Ohio and claimed possession of it long before Delaware or Shawanese, Ottawa or Wyandot had built a single fire in the valley. The claim of the Six Nations only, antedated that of the French—but the Six Nations had sold their claim to the English for 400 pounds at Lancaster in 1744. This, however, did not settle the question.
At the council on the following day (26th) Washington delivered an address, asking for guides and guards on his trip up the Allegheny and Rivière aux Bœufs,adroitly implying, in word and gesture, that his audience were the warmest allies of the English and equally desirous to oppose French aggression. The council was for granting each request, but the absence of the hunters necessitated a detention; undoubtedly, fear of the French also provoked delay and counseling. Little wonder: Washington would soon be across the mountains again and the rough Frenchman who claimed even the earth beneath his finger-nails, and had won over the Ottawas, Chippewas, and fierce Wyandots, would make short work with all who had housed and counseled with the English envoy! And—perhaps most ominous of all—Washington had not announced his business in the West, undoubtedly fearing the Indians would not aid him did they know it. When at last they asked the nature of his mission, he answered just the best an honest-hearted lad could; “this was a Question I had all along expected,” he wrote in hisJournal, “and had provided as satisfactory Answers to, as I could; which allayed their Curiosity a little.” This youthful diplomat would have allayedthe burning curiosity of hundreds of others had he mentioned the reason he gave those suspicious chieftains for this five-hundred-mile journey in the wintry season to a miserable little French fort on Rivière aux Bœufs! It is safe to assume that, could he have given the real reasons, he would have been saved the difficulty of providing “satisfactory” ones.
For four days Washington remained, but on the 30th he set out northward, accompanied only by the faithful Half King and three other Indians, and on the 4th of December (after four “nights’ sleep” ) the party arrived at the mouth of Rivière aux Bœufs, where Joncaire was wintering in Frazier’s cabin. The seventy miles from Logstown were traversed at about the same poor rate as the 125 from Wills Creek. To Joncaire’s cabin, over which floated the French flag, the Virginian envoy immediately repaired. He was received with much courtesy, though, as he well knew, Legardeur de St. Pierre at Fort La Bœuf, the successor of the dead Marin, was the French commandant to whom his letter from Dinwiddie must go.
However, Washington was treated “with the greatest Complaisance” by Joncaire. During the evening the Frenchmen “dosed themselves pretty plentifully,” wrote the sober, keen-eyed Virginian, “and gave a License to their Tongues. They told me, That it was their absolute Design to take Possession of theOhio, and by G— they would do it: For that although they were sensible theEnglishcould raise two Men for their one; yet they knew, their Motions were too slow and dilatory to prevent any Undertaking of theirs.” For a true picture of this Washington (who is said to be forgotten) what one would be chosen before this: a youth from Virginia sitting before the log fire in a German’s cabin from which the French had driven its owner, on the Allegheny river; about him are sitting leering, tipsy Gauls, bragging with oaths of a conquest they were never to make: he is dressed for a five-hundred-mile ride through a wilderness in winter, and his sober eyes rest thoughtfully upon the crackling logs while the oaths and boasts and smell of foreign liquor fill the hot and heavy air. No picture could show better thethree commanding traits of this youth who was father of the man: hearty daring, significant homespun shrewdness, dogged, resourceful patience. Basic traits of character are often displayed involuntarily in the effervescence of youthful zest. These this lad had shown and was showing in this brave ride into a dense wilderness and a braver inspection of his country’s enemies, their works, their temper, and their boasts. Let this picture hang on the walls of every home where the lad in the foreground before the blazing logs is unknown save in the rôle of the general or statesman he became in later life.
How these French officers looked this tall, stern boy up and down! How they enjoyed sneering to his face at English backwardness in crossing the Alleghanies into the great West which their own explorers had honeycombed with a hundred swift canoes! As they even plotted his assassination, how, in turn, that young heart must have burned to stop their mouths with a clenched hand. Little wonder that when the time came, his voice first ordered “Fire!” and his finger first pulledthe trigger in the great war which won the West from France!
But with the boasts came no little information concerning the French operations on the Great Lakes, the number of their forts and men. But Washington did not get off for Fort La Bœuf the next day, as the weather was exceedingly rough. This gave the wily Joncaire a chance to tamper with his Indians, and the opportunity was not neglected. Upon learning that Half King was in the envoy’s retinue, he professed great regret that Washington had not “made free to bring him in before.” The Virginian was quick with a stinging retort: since he had heard Joncaire “say a good deal in dispraise of theIndiansin general” he did not “think their company agreeable.” But Joncaire had his way and “applied the Liquor so fast” that, lo! the poor Indians “were soon rendered incapable of the Business they came about.”
In the morning Half King came to Washington’s tent hopefully sober but urging that another day be spent at Venango, since “the Management of the Indian Affairs was left solely to MonsieurJoncaire.” Tothis the envoy reluctantly acquiesced. But on the day after, the embassy got on its way, thanks to Christopher Gist’s influence over the Indians. When Joncaire found them going, he forwarded their plans “in the heartiest way in the world” and detailed Monsieur La Force (with whom this Virginian was to meet in different circumstances within half a year) to accompany them. Four days were spent in floundering over the last sixty miles of this journey, the party being driven into “Mires and Swamps” to avoid crossing the swollen Rivière aux Bœufs. On the 11th of December, Washington reached his destination, having traveled over 500 miles in forty-two days.
A Map of the Country between Wills Creek and Lake ErieClick here for larger image sizeA Map of the Country between Wills Creek and Lake Erie[Showing the designs of the French for erecting forts southward of the lake; drawn, before the erection of Fort Duquesne, evidently on the basis of Washington’s information secured in 1753. From the original in the British Museum]
Click here for larger image size
[Showing the designs of the French for erecting forts southward of the lake; drawn, before the erection of Fort Duquesne, evidently on the basis of Washington’s information secured in 1753. From the original in the British Museum]
Legardeur de St. Pierre, the one-eyed commander at Fort La Bœuf, had arrived but one week before Washington. To him the Virginian envoy delivered Governor Dinwiddie’s letter the day after his arrival. Its contents read:
“Sir,
“The lands upon the RiverOhio, in the Western Parts of the Colony ofVirginia, are so notoriously known to be the Propertyof the Crown ofGreat-Britain; that it is a Matter of equal Concern and Surprize to me, to hear that a Body ofFrenchForces are erecting Fortresses, and making Settlements upon that River, within his Majesty’s Dominions.
“The many and repeated Complaints I have received of these Acts of Hostility, lay me under the Necessity, of sending, in the Name of the King my Master, the Bearer hereof,George Washington, Esq; one of the Adjutants-General of the Forces of this Dominion; to complain to you of the Encroachments thus made, and of the Injuries done to the Subjects ofGreat-Britain, in open Violation of the Law of Nations, and the Treaties now subsisting between the two Crowns.
“If these Facts are true, and you shall think fit to justify your Proceedings, I must desire you to acquaint me, by whose Authority and Instructions you have lately marched fromCanada, with an armed Force; and invaded the King ofGreat-Britain’sTerritories, in the Manner complained of? that according to the Purport and Resolution of your Answer, I may actagreeably to the Commission I am honoured with, from the King my Master.
“However, Sir, in Obedience to my Instructions, it becomes my Duty to require your peaceable Departure; and that you would forbear prosecuting a Purpose so interruptive of the Harmony and good Understanding, which his Majesty is desirous to continue and cultivate with the most Christian King.
“I persuade myself you will receive and entertain MajorWashingtonwith the Candour and Politeness natural to your Nation; and it will give me the greatest Satisfaction, if you return him with an Answer suitable to my Wishes for a very long and lasting Peace between us. I have the Honour to subscribe myself,
SIR,Your most obedient,Humble Servant,Robert Dinwiddie.”
While an answer was being prepared, the envoy had an opportunity to take careful note of the fort and its hundred defenders. The fortress which Washington carefully described in hisJournalwas notso significant as the great host of canoes along the river shore. It was French canoes the English feared more than French forts. The number at Fort La Bœuf at this time was over two hundred, and others were being made. And every stream flowed south to the land “notoriously known” to belong to the British crown.
On the 14th, Washington was planning his homeward trip. His horses, lacking proper nourishment and exhausted by the hard trip northward, were totally unfit for service, and were at once set on the road to Venango, since canoes had been offered the little embassy for the return trip. Anxious as Washington was to be off, neither his business nor that of Half King’s had been despatched with any celerity until now; but this day Half King secured an audience with St. Pierre and offered him the wampum which was promptly refused, though with many protestations of friendship and an offer to send a load of goods to Logstown. Every effort possible was being put forth to alienate Half King, and the Virginian lad frankly wrote: “I can’t say that ever in my Life I suffered so muchAnxiety as I did in this Affair.” This day and the next, the French officers outdid themselves in hastening Washington’s departure and retarding Half King’s. At last Washington complained frankly to St. Pierre, who denied his duplicity—and doubled his bribes. But on the day following Half King was gotten away, Venango being reached in six long days, a large part of the time being spent dragging the canoes over icy shoals.
Four days were spent with Joncaire, when, abandoning both horses and Indians, Washington and Gist set out alone and afoot by the shortest course to the Forks of the Ohio. It was a daring alternative but altogether the preferable one. At Murdering Town, a fit place for Joncaire’s assassin to lie in wait, some French Indians were come up with, one of whom offered to guide the travelers across to the Forks. At the first good chance he fired upon them and was disarmed and sent away. The two, building a raft, reached an island in the Allegheny after heroic suffering, but were unable to cross to the eastern shore until the following morning. They then passedover on the ice which had formed and went directly to Frazier’s cabin. There they arrived December 29th. On the first day of the new year, 1754, Washington set out for Virginia on the little path over which he had come out. On the sixth he met seventeen horses loaded with materials and stores “for a fort at the Fork of theOhio.” Governor Dinwiddie, indefatigable if nothing else, had commissioned Captain Trent to raise a company of a hundred men to erect a fort on the Ohio for the protection of the Ohio Company.
On the 16th of January the youthful envoy rode again into Williamsburg, one month from the day he left Fort La Bœuf. St. Pierre’s reply to Governor Dinwiddie’s letter read as follows:
“Sir,
“As I have the Honour of commanding here in Chief, Mr.Washingtondelivered me the Letter which you wrote to the Commandant of theFrenchTroops.
“I should have been glad that you had given him Orders, or that he had been inclined to proceed toCanadato see our General; to whom it better belongs than tome to set-forth the Evidence and Reality of the Rights of the King, my Master, upon the Lands situated along the RiverOhio, and to contest the Pretensions of the King ofGreat-Britainthereto.
“I shall transmit your Letter to the MarquisDuguisne. His Answer will be a Law to me; and if he shall order me to communicate it to you, Sir, you may be assured I shall not fail to dispatch it to you forthwith.
“As to the Summons you send me to retire, I do not think myself obliged to obey it. What-ever may be your Instructions, I am here by Virtue of the Orders of my General; and I intreat you, Sir, not to doubt one Moment, but that I am determin’d to conform myself to them with all the Exactness and Resolution which can be expected from the best Officer.
“I don’t know that in the Progress of this Campaign any Thing passed which can be reputed an Act of Hostility, or that is contrary to the Treaties, which subsist between the two Crowns; the Continuation whereof as much interests, and is as pleasing to us, as theEnglish. Had you beenpleased, Sir, to have descended to particularize the Facts which occasioned your Complaint, I should have had the Honour of answering you in the fullest, and, I am persuaded, most satisfactory Manner.
“I made it my particular Care to receive MrWashington, with a Distinction suitable to your Dignity, as well as his own Quality and great Merit. I flatter myself that he will do me this Justice before you, Sir; and that he will signify to you in the Manner I do myself, the profound Respect with which I am,
SIR,Your most humble, andmost obedient Servant,Legardeur de St. Pierre.”
Washington found the Governor’s council was to meet the day following and that his report was desired. Accordingly he rewrote hisJournalfrom the “rough minutes” he had made. From any point of view this document of ten thousand words, hastily written by this lad of twenty-one, who had long since left his school desk, is far more creditable and remarkable than any of the feats of physical endurance for which the lad is idolized by the youthful readers of our school histories. It is safe to say that many a college bred man today could not prepare from rough notes such a succinct and polite document as did this young surveyor, who had read few books, and, it can almost be said, had studied neither his own nor any foreign language. The author did not “in the least conceive ... that it would ever be published.” Speaking afterward of its “numberless imperfections,” he said all that could recommend it to the public was its truthfulness of fact. Certain features of this first public service of Washington’s are worthy of remark: his frankness, as in criticizing Shingiss’s village as a site for a fort, as proposed by the Ohio Company; his exactness in giving details (where he could obtain them) of forts, men, and guns; his estimates of distances; his wise conforming to Indian custom; his careful note of the time of day of important events; his frequent observations of the character of the lands through which he passed; his knowledge of Indian character.
This mission prosecuted with such raretact and skill was an utter failure, considered from the standpoint of its nominal purpose. St. Pierre’s letter was firm, if not defiant. Yet Dinwiddie, despairing of French withdrawal, had secured the information he desired. Already Trent had reached the Forks of the Ohio where an English fort was being erected. Peaceful measures were exhausted with the failure of Washington’s embassy. England’s one hope was—war!
No literary production of a youth of twenty-one ever electrified the world as did the publication of theJournalof this dauntless envoy of the Virginian governor. No young man more instantly sprang into the notice of the world than George Washington. The journal was copied far and wide in the newspapers of the other colonies. It sped across the sea, and was printed in London by the British government. In a manly, artless way it told the exact situation on the Ohio frontier and announced the first positive proof the world had had of hostile French aggression into the great river valley of the West. Despite certain youthful expressions, the prudence, tact, capacity, and modesty of the author were recognized by a nation and by a world.
Without waiting for the House of Burgesses to convene, Governor Dinwiddie’s council immediately advised the enlistment of two hundred men to be sent to build forts on the Monongahela and Ohio rivers. The task of recruiting two companies of one hundred men each was given to the tried though youthful Major Washington, since they were to be recruited from the northern district over which he had been adjutant-general. His instructions read as follows:
“Instruct’s to be observ’d by Maj’r Geo. Washington, on the Expedit’n to the Ohio.
“MAJ’R GEO. WASHINGTON: You are forthwith to repair to the Co’ty of Frederick and there to take under Y’r Com’d 50 Men of the Militia who will be deliver’d to You by the Comd’r of the s’d Co’ty pursuant to my Orders. You are to send Y’r Lieut. at the same Time to the Co’ty of Augusta, to receive 50 Men from the Comd’r of that Co’ty as I have order’d, and with them he is to join You at Alexandria, to which Place You are to proceed as soon as You have rec’d the Men in Frederick. Having rec’d the Detachm’t, You are to train anddiscipline them in the best Manner You can, and for all Necessaries You are to apply Y’rself to Mr. Jno. Carlisle at Alex’a who has my Orders to supply You. Having all Things in readiness You are to use all Expedition in proceeding to the Fork of Ohio with the Men under Com’d and there you are to finish and compleat in the best Manner and as soon as You possibly can, the Fort w’ch I expect is there already begun by the Ohio Comp’a. You are to act on the Defensive, but in Case any Attempts are made to obstruct the Works or interrupt our Settlem’ts by any Persons whatsoever You are to restrain all such Offenders, and in Case of resistance to make Prisoners of or kill and destroy them. For the rest You are to conduct Y’self as the Circumst’s of the Service shall require and to act as You shall find best for the Furtherance of His M’y’s Service and the Good of His Dom’n. Wishing You Health and Success I bid you Farewell.”[3]
The general command of the expedition was given to Colonel Joshua Fry, formerlyprofessor of mathematics in William and Mary College and a geographer and Indian commissioner of note. His instructions were as follows:
“Instruction’s to Joshua Fry, Esqr., Colo. and Com’r-in-Chief of the Virg’a Regiment.
March, 1754.
“SIR: The Forces under Y’r Com’d are rais’d to protect our frontier Settlements from the incursions of the French and the Ind’s in F’dship with them. I therefore desire You will with all possible Expedition repair to Alexandria on the Head of the Poto. River, and there take upon You the com’d of the Forces accordingly; w’ch I Expect will be at that Town the Middle of next Mo. You are to march them to will’s Creek, above the Falls of Poto. from thence with the Great Guns, Amunit’n and Provisions. You are to proceed to Monongahela, when ariv’d there, You are to make Choice of the best Place to erect a Fort for mounting y’r Cannon and ascertain’g His M’y the King of G. B’s undoubt’d right to those Lands. My Orders to You is to be on the Defensive and if any foreign Force sh’dcome to annoy You or interrupt Y’r quiet Settlem’t, and building the Fort as afores’d, You are in that Case to represent to them the Powers and Orders You have from me, and I desire they w’d imediately retire and not to prevent You in the discharge of your Duty. If they sh’d continue to be obstinate after your desire to retire, you are then to repell Force by Force. I expect a Number of the Southern Indians will join you on this expedit’n, w’ch with the Indians on the Ohio, I desire You will cultivate a good Understanding and Correspondence with, supplying them with what Provisions and other Necessaries You can spare; and write to Maj’r Carlyle w’n You want Provisions, who has my Orders to purchase and Keep a proper Magazine for Your dem’ds. Keep up a good Com’d and regular Discipline, inculcate morality and Courage in Y’r Soldiers that they may answer the Views on w’ch they are rais’d. You are to constitute a Court Martial of the Chief of Your Officers, with whom You are to advise and consult on all Affairs of Consequence; and as the Fate of this Expedition greatly depends on You, fromthe Opinion I have of Your good Sense and Conduct, I refer the Management of the whole to You with the Advice of the Court Martial. Sincerely recommending You to the Protection of God, wishing Success to our just Designs, I heartily wish You farewell.”[4]
Dinwiddie’s expedition was in no sense the result of general agitation against French encroachment. And, as in Virginia, so it was in other colonies to which Governor Dinwiddie appealed; the governors said they had received no instructions; the validity of English title to the lands upon which the French were alleged to have encroached was doubted; not one of them wished to precipitate a war through rash zeal.
Before the bill voting ten thousand pounds “for the encouragement and protection of the settlers on the Mississippi,” as it was called, passed the House of Burgesses, Governor Dinwiddie had his patience well-nigh exhausted, but he overlooked both the doubts raised as to England’s rights in the West and personal slights, and signed the bill which provided for the expenses of the expedition of the Virginia Regiment.
Major Washington was located at Alexandria on the upper Potomac in February, where he superintended the rendezvous of his men, and the transportation of supplies and cannon. It was found necessary to resort to impressments to raise the required quota of men. As early as February 19th, so slow were the drafts and enlistments, Governor Dinwiddie issued a proclamation granting two hundred thousand acres of land on the Ohio, to be divided among the officers and men who would serve in the expedition. This had its effect.
By April 20th, Washington arrived at Wills Creek (Cumberland, Maryland) with three companies, one under Captain Stephen who had joined him on the way. The day previous, however, he met a messenger sent from Captain Trent on the Ohio announcing that the arrival of a French army was hourly expected. And on the day following, at Wills Creek, he was informed of the arrival of the French andthe withdrawal of the Virginian force under Trent from the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela, where they had been sent to build a fort for the protection of the Ohio Company. Without any delay, he forwarded this information to the governors of Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.
Fancy the state of mind of this vanguard of the Virginian army at the receipt of this news. They were then at the last frontier fort with eleven companies of troops. Their orders were to push on to the Ohio, drive off the French army (which was then reported to number a thousand men), and build a fort there. Before them the only road was the Indian path, which was hardly wide enough to admit the passage of a packhorse.
A ballot was cast among Washington’s captains—the youngest of whom was old enough to have been his father—and the decision reached was to advance. The Indian path could at least be widened, and bridges built, as far as the Monongahela. There they determined to erect a fort and await orders and reinforcements. Thereasons for this decision are given as follows in Washington’sJournalof 1754:[5]
“1st.That the mouth ofRed-Stoneis the first convenient place on the River Monongahela.
“2nd.The stores are already built at that place for the provisions of the Company, wherein the Ammunition may be laid up, our great guns may be also sent by water whenever we shall think it convenient to attack the Fort.
“3rd.We may easily (having all these conveniences) preserve our men from the ill consequences of inaction, and encourage theIndiansour Allies, to remain in our interests.”[6]
Thus Washington’s march must be looked upon as the advance of a vanguard opening the road, bridging the streams, preparing the way for the commanding officer and his army. Nor was there, now, need for haste—had it been possible or advisable to hasten. The landing of the French at the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela already thwarted Governor Dinwiddie’s object in sending out the expedition, “to prevent their [French] building any Forts or making any Settlem’ts on that river, [Ohio] and more particularly so nigh us as that of the Logstown [fifteen miles below the forks of the Ohio].” Now that a fort was building, with an army of a thousandmen (as Washington had been erroneously informed) encamped about it, nothing more was to be thought of than a cautious advance.
And so Washington gave the order on the 29th of April, three score men having been sent ahead to widen the Indian trail. The march was difficult and exceedingly slow. In the first ten days they covered but twenty miles. Yet each mile must have been anticipated seriously by the young commander. He knew not whether his colonel with reinforcements or the enemy were nearest. Governor Dinwiddie wrote him (May 4) concerning reinforcements, as follows:
“The Independ’t Compa from So. Car. arriv’d two days ago; is compleat; 100 Men besides Officers, and will re-embark for Alexanext Week, thence proceed imediately to join Colo. Fry and You. The two Independ’t Compa’s from N. York may be Expected in ab’tten days. The N. Car. Men, under the Com’dof Colo. Innes, are imagin’d to be on their March, and will probably be at the Randezvous ab’tthe15th. Inst.”...
“I hope Capt. McKay who Com’ds the Independ’t Compa., will soon be with You And as he appears to be an Officer of some Experience and Importance, You will, with Colo. Fry and Colo. Innes, so well agree as not to let some Punctillios ab’tCom’d render the Service You are all engag’d in, perplex’d or obstructed.”[7]
Relying implicitly on Dinwiddie, Washington pushed on and on into the wilderness, opening a road and building bridges for a colonel and an army that was never to come. As he advanced into the Alleghanies he found the difficulty of hauling wagons very serious, and long before he reached the Youghiogheny he determined to test the possibility of transportation down that stream and the Monongahela to his destination at the mouth of Redstone creek.
May 11th, he sent a reconnoitering force forward to Gist’s, on Laurel Hill, the last spur of the Alleghanies, to locate a French party, which, the Indians reported, had left Fort Duquesne, and to find if there waspossibility of water transportation to the month of Redstone creek, where a favorable site for a fort was to be sought.
Slowly the vanguard of the army felt its way to Little Meadows and across the smaller branch of the Youghiogheny, which it bridged at Little Crossings. On the 16th, according to the French version of Washington’sJournal, he met traders who informed him of the appearance of French near Gist’s and expressed doubts as to the possibility of building a wagon road from Gist’s to the mouth of Redstone creek. This made it imperatively necessary for the young lieutenant-colonel to attempt to find a water passage down the Youghiogheny.
The day following, much information was received both from the front and the rear, perhaps most vividly stated in theJournalas follows:
“The Governor informs me that Capt. McKay, with an independent company of 100 men, excluding the officers, had arrived, and that we might expect them daily; and that the men from New-York would join us within ten days.
“This night also came twoIndiansfrom theOhiowho left the French fort five days ago; They relate that the French forces are all employed in building their Fort, that it is already breast-high, and of the thickness of twelve feet, and filled with Earth, stones, &c. They have cut down and burnt up all the trees which were about it and sown grain instead thereof. TheIndiansbelieve they were only 600 in number, although they say themselves they are 800: They expect a greater number in a few days, which may amount to 1,600. Then they say they can defy theEnglish.”[8]
Arriving on the eastern bank of the Youghiogheny the next day, the river being too wide to bridge and too high to ford, Washington put himself “in a position of defence against any immediate attack from the Enemy,” and went straightway to work on the problem of water transportation.
By the 20th, a canoe having been provided, Washington set out on the Youghiogheny with four men and an Indian. By nightfall they reached “Turkey Foot”(Confluence, Pennsylvania), which Washington mapped for the site of a fort. Below “Turkey Foot” the stream was found too rapid and rocky to admit of any sort of navigation and Washington returned to camp on the 24th, with the herculean hardships of an entire overland march staring him in the face. Information was now at hand from Half King concerning alleged movements of the French; thus the letter read:
“To any of his Majesty’s officers whom this May Concern.
“As ’tis reported that the French army is set out to meet M. George Washington I exhort you my brethren, to guard against them, for they intend to fall on the firstEnglishthey meet; They have been on their march these two days, the Half King and the other chiefs will join you within five days, to hold a council, though we know not the number we shall be. I shall say no more; but remember me to my brethren the English.
Signed, The Half King.”
At two o’clock of that same May day(24th) the little vanguard came down the eastern wooded hills that surround Great Meadows, and looked across the waving grasses and low bushes which covered the field they were soon to make classic ground. Immediately upon arriving at the future battle-field, information was secured from a trader confirming Half King’s alarming letter. Below the roadway, which passed the meadow on the hillside, the lieutenant-colonel found two natural intrenchments near a branch of Great Meadows Run, perhaps old courses of the brook through the swampy land. Here the troops and wagons were placed.
Great Meadows may be described as two large basins, the smaller lying directly westward of the larger and connected with it by a narrow neck of swampy ground. Each is a quarter of a mile wide, and the two a mile and a half in length.
The old roadway descends from the southern hills, coming out upon the meadows at the eastern extremity of the western basin. It traverses the hillside south of the western meadow. The natural intrenchments or depressions behind whichWashington huddled his army on this May afternoon were at the eastern edge of the western basin. Back of him was the narrow neck of lowland which soon opened into the eastern basin. Behind him to his left on the hillside his newly made road crept eastward into the hills. The Indian trail followed the edge of the forest westward to Laurel Hill, five miles distant, and on to Fort Duquesne.
On this faint opening into the western forest the little band and its youthful commander kept their eyes as the sun dropped behind the hills, closing an anxious day and bringing a dreaded night. How large the body of French might have been, not one of the one hundred and fifty men knew. How far away they might be, no one could guess. Here in this forest meadow the little vanguard slept on their arms, surrounded by watchful sentinels, with fifty-one miles of forest and mountain between them and the nearest settlement at Wills Creek. The darkling forests crept down the hills on either side as though to hint by their portentous shadows of the dead and dying that were to be.
But the night waned and morning came. With increasing energy, as though nerved to duty by the dangers which surrounded him, the twenty-two-year-old commander Washington gave his orders promptly. A scouting party was sent on the Indian trail in search of the coming French. Squads were set to threshing the forests for spies. Horsemen were ordered to scour the country and keep look-out for French from neighboring points of vantage.
At night all returned, none the wiser for their vigilance and labor. The French force had disappeared from the face of the earth. It may be believed that this lack of information did not tend to ease the intense strain of the hour. It must have been plain to the dullest that serious things were ahead. Two flags, silken emblems of an immemorial hatred, were being brought together in the Alleghanies. It was a moment of utmost importance to Europe and America. Quebec and Jamestown were met on Laurel Hill; and a spark struck here and now was to “set the world on fire.”
However clearly this may have been seen,Washington was not the man to withdraw. Indeed, the celerity with which he precipitated England and France into war made him the most criticized man on both continents.
Another day passed—and the French could not be found. On the following day Christopher Gist arrived at Great Meadows with the information that M. la Force with fifty men (whose tracks he had seen within five miles of Great Meadows) had been at his house on “Mount Braddock,” fifteen miles distant. Acting on this reliable information, Washington at once dispatched a scouting party in pursuit.
The day passed and no word came to the anxious men in their trenches in the meadows. Another night, silent and cheerless, came over the mountains upon the valley, and with the night came rain. Fresh fears of strategy and surprise must have arisen as the cheerless sun went down.
Suddenly, at eight in the evening, a runner brought word that the French were run to cover. Half King, while coming to join Washington, had found La Force’s party in “a low, obscure place.”
It was now time for a daring man to show himself. Such was the young commander at Great Meadows.
“That very moment,” wrote Washington in hisJournal, “I sent out forty men and ordered my ammunition to be put in a place of safety, fearing it to be a stratagem of the French to attack our camp; I left a guard to defend it, and with the rest of my men set out in a heavy rain, and in a night as dark as pitch.”