Governor Wolf stepped into office at the time the financial affairs were in a deplorable condition. His only remedy was to push the public works to rapid completion. This was done, and in a few years he, with others, had the proud satisfaction of beholding how far these needed improvements went toward developing the natural resources of Pennsylvania.
Major George Washington Meets French
Commander Joncaire at Logstown,
November 30, 1753
The contention between Great Britain and France for the possession of what is now Western Pennsylvania began about the middle of the eighteenth century. The Treaty of Aix la Chapelle, signed October 18, 1748, while it nominally closed the war between those two countries, failed to establish the boundaries between their respective colonies in America, and this failure, together with the hostile and conflicting attitude of the colonists in America, was the cause of another long and bloody war.
An association was formed in Virginia about 1748, called the Ohio Company, which was given a royal grant. The object of the company, according to its charter, was to trade with the Indians, but its actual purpose was to settle the region about the forks of the Ohio, now Pittsburgh, with English colonists from Virginia and Maryland.
All the vast territory from the Mississippi to the Alleghany Mountains, south of the Great Lakes, had been explored and partly occupied by the French. They had forts, trading posts and missions at various points and they made every endeavor to conciliate the Indians. It was apparent they intended to extend their occupancy to the extreme tributaries of the Ohio, which they claimed by virtue of prior discovery.
So it was but natural when the English sought to gain a permanent occupancy of the Ohio Valley that the French should begin actively to assert their claims to the same region.
The Governor-General of Canada, the Marquis de la Galissoniere, sent Captain Bienville de Celeron in 1749 down the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers to take possession in the name of the King of France. His command consisted of two hundred and fifteen French and Canadian soldiers and fifty-five Indians. The principal officers under him were Captain Contrecœur, who afterwards built Fort Duquesne, Coulon de Villiers, and Joncaire-Chabet.
They planted leaden plates, properly inscribed, at different points, beginning at the present town of Warren, and then along the Allegheny River, then along the Ohio, and up the Miami, and they reached Lake Erie, October 19, 1749.