I.
A PROLOGUE; THE GOVERNOR’S ENVOY.
A thousand vague rumors came over the Allegheny mountains during the year 1753 to Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia, of French aggressions into the Ohio River valley, the more alarming because vague and uncertain.
Orders were soon at hand from London authorizing the Virginian Governor to erect a fort on the Ohio which would hold that river for England and tend to 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 cast about him for an envoy whom he could trust to find out what was really happening in the valley of the Ohio.
Who was to be this envoy? The mission called for a person of unusual capacity; a diplomat, a soldier and a frontiersman. Five hundred miles were to be threaded on Indian trails in the dead of winter. This was woodman’s work. There were cunning Indian chieftains and French officers, trained to intrigue, to be met, influenced, conciliated. 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 a strategist.
After failing to induce one or two gentlemen to undertake this perilous but intrinsically important task, the services of a youthful Major George Washington, one of the four adjutant-generals of Virginia, were offered, and the despairing Scotch Governor, whose zeal always approached rashness, accepted them.
But there was something more to the credit of this audacious youth than his temerity. The best of Virginian blood ran in his veins, and he had shown already 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 in Lord 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 had met the Indians—that race upon which no man ever wielded a greater influence than Washington. Here he learned 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 had come 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 came to know and believe 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 Allegheny 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 Alleghenies and Mississippi than are these central commonwealths dependent on them.
The same divine Providence which directed this youth’s steps into the Alleghenies 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 had been 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 the 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. His keen eyes, quick perception and daring spirit were now to be turned to something of more moment than a tripod’s reading or a shabby line of Virginia militia. All in all, he was far better fitted for this mission than anyone could have known or guessed.