CONTEMPORARY VIEW OF OSWEGO
Duquesne has come out governor of Canada, and by 1753 has dispatched a thousand men into the Ohio valley, who blaze a trail through the wilderness and string a line of forts from Presqu' Isle (Erie) on Lake Erie southward to Fort Duquesne at the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela, where Pittsburg stands to-day.
One December night at Fort Le Boeuf, on the trail to the Ohio, the French commandant was surprised to see a slim youth of twenty years ride out of the rain-drenched, leafless woods, followed by four or five whites and Indians with a string of belled pack-horses. The young gentleman introduces himself with great formality, though he must use an interpreter, for he does not speak French. He is Major George Washington, sent by Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia to know why the French have been seizing the fur posts of English traders in this region. The French commander, Saint Pierre, receives the young Virginian courteously, plies master and men with such lavish hospitality that Washington has much trouble to keep his drunk Indians from deserting, and dismisses his visitor with the smooth but bootless response that as France and England are at peace he cannot answer Governor Dinwiddie's message till he has heard from the Governor of Canada, Marquis Duquesne. Not much satisfaction for emissaries who had forded ice-rafted rivers and had tramped the drifted forests for three hundred miles.
GOVERNOR DINWIDDIE OF VIRGINIA
By January of 1754 Washington is back in Virginia. By May he is on the trail again, blazing a path through the wilderness down the Monongahela towards the French fort; for what purpose one may guess, though these were times of piping peace. Come an old Indian chief and an English bushwhacker one morning with word that fifty French raiders are on the trail ten miles away; for what purpose one may guess, spite of peace. Instantly Washington sends half a hundred Virginia frontiersmen out scouting. They find no trace of raiders, but the old chief picks up the trail of the ambushed French. Here they had broken branches going through the woods; there a moccasin track punctures the spongy mold; here leaves have been scattered to hide camp ashes. At midnight, with the rain slashing through the forest black as pitch, Washington sets out with forty men, following his Indian guide. Through the dark they feel rather than follow the trail, and it is a slow but an easy trick to those acquainted with wildwood travel. Leave the path by as much as a foot length and the foliage lashes you back, or the windfall trips you up, or the punky path becomes punctured beneath moccasin tread. By day dawn, misty and gray in the May woods, the English are at the Indian camp and march forward escorted by the redskins, single file, silent as ghosts, alert as tigers. Raindrip swashes on the buckskin coats. Muskets are loaded and carefully cased from the wet. The old chief stops suddenly … and points! There lie the French in a rock ravine sheltered by the woods like a cave. The next instant the French had leaped up with a whoop. Washington shouted "Fire!" When the smoke of the musket crash cleared, ten French lay dead, among them their officer, Jumonville; and twenty-two others surrendered. No need to dispute whether Washington was justified in firing on thirty bush rovers in time of peace! The bushrovers had already seized English forts and were even now scouring the country for English traders. For a week their scouts had followed Washington as spies.
Expecting instant retaliation from Fort Duquesne, Washington retreated swiftly to his camping place at Great Meadows and cast up a log barricade known as Fort Necessity. A few days later comes a company of regular troops. By July 1 he has some four hundred men, but at Fort Duquesne are fourteen hundred French. The French wait only for orders from Quebec, then march nine hundred bushrovers against Washington. July 3, towards midday, they burst from the woods whooping and yelling. Washington chose to meet them on the open ground, but the French were pouring a cross fire over the meadow; and to compel them to attack in the open, Washington drew his men behind the barricade. By nightfall the Virginians were out of powder. Twelve had been killed and forty-three were wounded. Before midnight the French beat a parley. All they desired was that the English evacuate the fort. To fight longer would have risked the extermination of Washington's troops. Terms of honorable surrender were granted, and the next day—the day which Washington was to make immortal, July 4—the English retreated from Fort Necessity. Such was the peace in the Ohio valley.
Though the peace is still continued, England dispatches in 1755 two regiments of the line under Major General Braddock to protect Virginia, along with a fleet of twelve men-of-war under Admiral Boscawen. France keeps up the farce by sending out Baron Dieskau with three thousand soldiers and Admiral La Motte with eighteen ships. Coasting off Newfoundland, the English encounter three of the French ships that have gone astray in the fog. "Is it peace or war?" shout the French across decks. "Peace," answers a voice from the English deck; and instantaneously a hurricane cannonade rakes the decks of the French, killing eighty. Two of the French ships surrendered. The other escaped through the fog. Such was the peace!
So began the famous Seven Years' War; and Major General Braddock, in session with the colonial governors, plans the campaign that is to crush New France's pretensions south of the Great Lakes. Acadia, Lake Champlain, the Ohio,—these are to be the theaters of the contest.