During this war young George Washington was first heard of. He was sent into the western wilderness in the dead of winter to carry a message from the English governor of Virginia to the French commander at a fort in western Pennsylvania. A few years later, General Braddock came over with an army of British regulars to fight the French and their allies in the region where the young messenger had been. Major George Washington was on the English general’s staff, and saved many of the British regulars after Braddock fell, defeated, near Fort Duquesne, where Pittsburgh now stands.
The British attacked the French also at Louisburg, in Nova Scotia, and at Ticonderoga, near the southern end of Lake Champlain; but the most important point to attack was Quebec, “the Gibraltar of America,” which Champlain had built nearly one hundred and fifty years before. The general then in military command at Quebec was the Marquis de Montcalm, a true Frenchman, devoted to his king, and to his mother, wife, and children, from all of whom he was separated because of his warm love of country.
In his frequent letters to his mother and his wife, Montcalm told all his troubles with the governor of Canada and the Canadian volunteers. He had brought from France to Quebec an army of regular soldiers. They looked with scorn upon the French Canadian raw recruits, who seemed about as rude as their Indian neighbors. The Canadian governor, on his side, saw with jealous eyes the French marquis who had come from Old France to command the Canadian companies along with his own French troops. It needed rare tact and true love of country for Montcalm to keep friendly with the Canadian governor, who pretended to be the friend of the marquis while secretly turning everybody he could against him.
When the general won a great victory at Oswego, hundreds of miles away, the governor, who was not there, wrote to his friends and the men over him in France about “my” victory and what “I” planned and “I” did with such great success. But though Montcalm wrote about his trials and troubles to his wife and mother, he managed to keep on good terms with the governor and to prevent an outbreak between the French regulars and the Canadian soldiers and Indian warriors.
General Montcalm knew that the British would attack the French stronghold of Quebec. To keep this fortress at the narrow point in the St. Lawrence River might mean the saving not only of all Canada, but also of the French forts and territory along the Wabash and Mississippi rivers, more than a thousand miles away to the southwest.