With George Washington into the wilderness

by Edwin L. Sabin

“All right,” said the Hunter. “I go to help keep the French out.”

Washington and Gist rode on. Robert turned around, for the trail back to Dekanawida, and the Mingos and Delawares, and perhaps that Logstown which was nothing like the white towns described by Washington. Tanacharison would be surprised.

There were thirty men, and seventeen pack horses loaded with fort-building material and trading-house goods. The men did not look to be the equal of the French; they were not all soldiers—they seemed more to be traders and woodsmen, and were poor and ragged, and badly armed. The soldier captain, Ensign Ward, appeared to be not much older than Washington, but he was younger acting—he talked more and as they travelled he asked many questions of the Hunter, and often laughed.

They were a long time in getting the pack horses over the rough, narrow trail; across the Savage Mountains, and the Great or Alleghany Mountains, and the swollen, icy Youghiogheny or Four-Streams-in-One River, and through the Great Meadows, and across the Laurel Ridge to Gist’s Place, and then on west to the Monongahela River at the mouth of Redstone Creek, where Nemacolin’s Trail ended.

Here they had to stay and build the first storehouse for the Ohio Company. Captain William Trent (the same man who had failed to reach the French, before Washington was sent) arrived with more men, dressed in red, and with ten cannon in carts, and eighty barrels of powder and muskets.

It was the middle of February when the storehouse was finished. Trader John Fraser had come in and had been made a lieutenant; but he said that he would not act unless he had permission to attend to his trading business too. Then Captain Trent left, to go back to Will’s Creek. A number of the men went, also, for they had grown tired. Lieutenant Fraser and Ensign Ward were told to march on and build the fort at the Forks, forty miles down the Monongahela. But Fraser stopped at his trading house, and after that they saw little of him; and when Ensign Ward reached the Forks he had only about forty men, and no great guns or powder.

While they were looking about for a good place for the fort, Tanacharison and White Thunder came up, to talk.

“I thought you were with Washington,” Half-King said to the Hunter.

“I went with Washington nearly to the Long Knife settlements; then he ordered me back to talk for this man who is to build the fort,” answered Robert.