Colonel Washington

by Archer Butler Hulbert

It is not to be doubted that George Washington knew the dangers he courted, at least very much better than we can appreciate them today. He had not lived three 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. Who can doubt that he looked with envious eyes upon those fearless fleets of coureur 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 the roistering, picturesque, irrepressible Frenchmen who knew and sailed those sweet, clear rivers that flowed through the dark, green forests of the great West? But the forests were filled with their sly, redskinned proselytes. One swift rifle ball might easily be sent from a hidden covert to meet the stripling envoy from the English who had 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 six hundred miles deep in the western forests, to sleep on the ground in the dead of winter, wade 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 the Major Washington departed from Williamsburg on the last day of October, but one, 1753. The first sentence in the Journal he now began suggests his avidity and promptness: “I was commissioned and appointed by the Honourable Robert Dinwiddie, Esq; Governor, &c of Virginia, to visit and deliver a Letter to the Commandant of the French Forces on the Ohio, 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 new road built by the Ohio Company to Will’s Creek (Fort Cumberland, Maryland) on the upper Potomac, where he arrived November 14th.

Will’s Creek was the last Virginian outpost, where Fort Cumberland was soon erected. Already the Ohio Company had located a store house at this point. Onward the Indian trail wound in and out through the Alleghenies, 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 waters was crossed, a branch of the Youghiogeny River. From “Little Crossings,” as the ford was called, the narrow trail vaulted Negro Mountain and came down upon the upper Youghiogeny, this ford here being named “Big Crossings.” Another climb over Briery Mountain brought the traveller down into Great Meadows, the largest tract of open land in the Alleghenies. By a zig-zag climb of five miles the summit of the last of the Allegheny 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 Youghiogeny, at “Stewart’s Crossing.” Thence the trail ran down the point of land where Pittsburg now lies in its clouds of smoke between the “Forks of the Ohio.”

This trace of the buffalo and portage path of the Indian 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 whitely by the Indian’s axe 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 Will’s 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 Mr. Gist to pilot us out.”

It proved a rough voyage! A fierce, early winter came out of the north, as though in league with the French to intimidate, if not drive back, these spies of French aggression. It rained and snowed, and the little roadway 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 horde of French and Indians should put to flight an army 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 German oaths. Here too was a Speech, with a string of wampum accompanying, on its way from the 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 the wampum and pushed on undismayed. Sending the baggage down the Monongahela by boat he pushed 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 Loggstown, 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 redmen; 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 Alleghenies, nominally purchased from the Six Nations, was claimed by the Shawanese and Delawares who had since come into it, and also by many fugitives from the Six Nations, known generally as Mingoes, who had come to make their hunting grounds 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 that 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 (called Loups by the French) 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 to Marin, declaring that the land was not theirs but the Indians’.