With George Washington into the wilderness

by Edwin L. Sabin

Captain Mackaye arrived with his South Carolina company of one hundred men, with sixty cows, but scarcely any ammunition or flour. The South Carolina men would not work on the fort or at cleaning brush unless they were paid extra. They said they were soldiers in the service of the King and not of Virginia; and Captain Mackaye said that they did not have to obey Washington, who commanded only the Virginia Volunteers.

So the Captain Mackaye King’s soldiers sat idly, which displeased Tanacharison.

“Washington is too good-natured,” he complained. “These men of Mackaye should be made to work or else sent to fight. We stay here from one full moon to another and nothing is done except to start this little thing called a fort, in the open meadow, as if the French would march out of the woods against it and be killed. Meanwhile the French are growing and care nothing about the fort. Why do not the English march on and shut the French up? Where are the other soldiers whom Assaragoa is sending?”

But the Half-King kept scouts out; they brought word that the French at the Forks were growing indeed. Scarouady was still absent with his hatchets and scalps and wampum. The Shingis Delawares had not come in, neither had the Shawnees or Miamis or Wyandots. Scarouady, however, sent the message that certain chiefs would join Washington at Redstone Creek. He asked Washington not to attack the French fort until he should be back.

There now were four hundred men at the Great Meadows. Washington, too, was tired of waiting. No other companies showed up. So he left the Mackaye soldiers to guard the half-completed fort; and he took his three hundred Long Knives, to cut a road to the mouth of Redstone Creek, at the Monongahela, and build another fort there, nearer to the Forks.

Gist’s place, thirteen miles beyond the Laurel Hills, was to be the first stop. And they all had been on the way a week, making only a mile a day in order to open a road through the forest and a rocky gorge, in order that the wagons and the cannon might be hauled; and the war paint of Robert the Hunter had been washed off by sweat and rain; and as tired as the tiredest he was trying to rest, this evening, when he felt a pebble strike his cheek.

He looked aside, and what should he see, in the dusk, but the face of Bright Lightning, White Thunder’s daughter, twinkling at him from behind a tree. She beckoned to him to come.

Wah! This was no place for women or girls. The Mingo women and children had stayed down at the Great Meadows, where they would be safe. But Bright Lightning was pretty and spoiled, and usually did as she chose. Thereupon he got up and followed her into the shadows.

“What are you doing here?” he asked. “You’d better go home.”