Robert Hunter!
This was his name, now, in the year Seventeen Hundred and Fifty-eight, for he had become a white American and had learned to live as the people of Washington’s country lived.
But during the three years since the fight of Braddock’s Field things had been going badly for the American frontier. The English soldiers were busy against the French soldiers of Canada. The French and their Indians still held the Ohio; Fort Duquesne had not been marched upon again and after the English had been driven back so easily almost all the Indians had joined the French.
Just why Fort Duquesne was permitted to stand, nobody appeared to know. Scarouady himself had sent word to the Governor of Virginia and to Washington:
“I still have men who will join with you, my brothers, to take up the hatchet again. We do not want the soldiers from across the big water. They are unfit to fight in the woods. Let us go, ourselves; for we came out of this ground and we understand what to do.”
Washington had been made commander of all the Virginia soldiers, but it seemed hard work to get men who would leave their homes and march into the woods again. For the Indians of the French were very bold—especially the Delawares and Shawnees. They came across the mountains to attack the Virginia and Maryland border; no one knew where they might strike next; it looked as though northern Virginia was to be put to the hatchet and knife, and a great alarm had seized the town of Winchester, near which, in the Valley of the Shenandoah, old Lord Fairfax lived upon his plantation of Greenway.
And having been working and learning upon this same plantation, under the rule of the queer old lord whom he had first met with Gist and Washington in camp at Will’s Creek that night several years back, Robert Hunter also was in the midst of alarms.
Lord Fairfax would not run. He had raised a troop of horse and he had men both white and black, and he said that at his age it didn’t matter to him whether he fell by the tomahawk or by sickness.
Washington himself rode into Greenway, and on into Winchester and did his best to quiet the people there. But the trail to Fort Cumberland in the north was watched by the enemy, and a scouting party from Winchester was attacked by French and Indians only twenty miles out and Captain John Mercer and several men killed: so that, as said, it was difficult to get the settlers to leave their homes.
With the skeleton of a regiment, the First Regiment of Virginia Militia, Washington was supposed to guard the long line of the Virginia frontier.