George Washington; or, Life in America One Hundred Years Ago.

by John S. C. Abbott

This total defeat of the English, established, for a time, the entire ascendency of the French in the valley of the Ohio and on the great lakes. Washington reached Mount Vernon on the 26th of July, in a very feeble condition of bodily health. He was probably well satisfied that there is but little pleasant music to be found in the whistling of hostile bullets. To his brother Augustine he wrote, in reference to his frontier experience:

“I was employed to go a journey in the winter, when I believe few or none would have undertaken it. What did I get by it? My expenses borne. I was then appointed, with trifling pay, to conduct a handful of men to the Ohio. What did I get for that? Why, after putting myself to a considerable expense in equipping and providing necessaries for the campaign, I went out, was soundly beaten and lost all! Came in, and had my commission taken from me; or, in other words, my command reduced, under pretence of an order from home [England]. I then went out a volunteer with General Braddock; and lost all my horses and many other things. But this, being a voluntary act, I ought not to have mentioned it; nor should I have done it, were it not to show that I have been on the losing order, ever since I entered the service, which is now nearly two years.”

The French and the English now alike infamously engaged in enlisting the Indians to aid them in the conflict. These benighted savages seem to have had no more idea of mercy than had the wolves. They burned the lonely cabins, tomahawked and scalped women and children, carried mothers and maidens into the most awful captivity, and often put their helpless victims to the torture. And yet the nobility of France and the lords of England looked complacently on, while they goaded the savages to their infernal deeds.

The English settlers outnumbered the French more than ten to one. But the French, in actual possession of the lakes and the valley, could rally around their banners a vastly more powerful force of savages than the English could summon. Thus the English were much more exposed than the French. The savages having lapped blood, and generally hating the English, entered eagerly upon the work of conflagration, plunder, and slaughter.

There were American hamlets of log huts, and lonely American farm-houses, scattered through the wilderness for a distance of four hundred miles along the western frontier of Virginia. But the court and cabinet of Great Britain considered their weal or woe a matter of but little consequence compared with the national glory to be obtained in driving the French from this whole continent.[41]

Fifteen hundred plumed, painted, howling savages were soon the allies of France, perpetrating deeds which one shudders to record. At midnight these demons of the human race would burst from the forest, and rush howling upon some hut where the poor defenceless emigrant, with his wife and his children, was tremblingly sleeping. In an hour the dreadful tragedy was completed. The yells of the savages drowned the shrieks of the mother and her babe, as they fell beneath the tomahawk. The cabin was in ashes. The savages had disappeared. The rising sun revealed but the gory corpses in their shocking mutilation.

For the protection of the frontier, thus exposed to the greatest woes of which the imagination can conceive, Virginia raised a force of seven hundred men, which was placed under the experienced command of Colonel Washington. For three years he was engaged in these arduous but almost unavailing labors. No one could tell at what point the wary Indian would strike a blow. Having struck it, the demoniac band vanished into the glooms of the wilderness, where pursuit was impossible. There is some excuse to be found for the fiend-like deeds of the savages, in the ignorance, and in the principles of war which they and their ancestors had ever cherished. But there is no excuse whatever to be found for those French and English statesmen, who employed such agents for the accomplishment of their ambitious projects. The scenes of woe, which Washington often witnessed, were so dreadful that, in after life, he could seldom bear to recur to them. We will give one instance, which he has related, as illustrative of many others.

One day as, with a small detachment of troops, he was traversing a portion of the frontier, he came to a solitary log cabin, in a little clearing, which the axe of a settler had effected in the heart of the forest. As they were approaching, through the woods, the report of a gun arrested their attention. Cautiously they crept through the underbrush, until they came in full sight of the cabin. Smoke was curling up through the roof, while a large party of savages, with piles of plunder by their side, were shouting and swinging their bleeding scalps, as they danced round their booty. As soon as they caught sight of the soldiers they fled into the forest with the swiftness of deer. In the following words Washington describes the scene which was then opened before them:

“On entering we saw a sight that, though we were familiar with blood and massacre, struck us, at least myself, with feelings more mournful than I had ever experienced before. On the bed, in one corner of the room, lay the body of a young woman, swimming in blood, with a gash in her forehead, which almost separated the head into two parts. On her breast lay two little babes, apparently twins, less than a twelve-month old, with their heads also cut open. Their innocent blood which once flowed in the same veins, now mingled in one current again. I was inured to scenes of bloodshed and misery, but this cut me to the soul. Never in my after life, did I raise my hand against a savage, without calling to mind the mother with her little twins, their heads cleft asunder.”

The soldiers eagerly pursued the fugitive savages. They had gone but a short distance from the house, when they found the father of the family and his little boy, both dead and scalped in the field. The father had been holding the plough, and his son driving the horse, when the savages came upon them. From ambush they had shot down the father, and the terrified little boy had run some distance toward the house, when he was overtaken and cut down by the tomahawk. Thus the whole family perished. Such were the perils of a home on the frontiers, in those sad days. In allusion to these awful scenes Washington wrote: