and deal with the French upon the western rivers would have to handle truly critical affairs, decisive of the fate of the continent, and it looked as if Virginia must undertake the fateful business. The northern borders, indeed, were sadly harried by the savage allies of the French; the brunt of the fighting hitherto had fallen upon the hardy militiamen of Massachusetts and Connecticut in the slow contest for English mastery upon the continent. But there was really nothing to be decided in that quarter. The French were not likely to attempt the mad task of driving out the thickly set English population, already established, hundreds of thousands strong, upon the eastern coasts. Their true lines of conquest ran within. Their strength lay in their command of the great watercourses which flanked the English colonies both north and west. 'Twas a long frontier to hold, that mazy line of lake and river that ran all the way from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the wide months of the sluggish Mississippi. Throughout all the posts and settlements that lay upon it from end to end there were scarcely eighty thousand Frenchmen, while the English teemed upon the coasts more than a million strong. But the forces of New France could be handled like an army, while the English swarmed slowly westward, without discipline or direction, the headstrong subjects of a distant government they would not obey, the wayward constituents of a score of petty and jealous assemblies tardy at planning, clumsy at executing plans. They were still far away, too, from the mid-waters of the lakes and from the royal stream of the Mississippi itself, where lonely boats floated slowly down, with their cargoes of grain, meat, tallow, tobacco, oil, hides, and lead, out of the country of the Illinois, past the long, thin line of tiny isolated posts, to the growing village at New Orleans and the southern Gulf. But they were to be feared, none the less. If their tide once flowed in, the French well knew it could not be turned back again. It was not far away from the Ohio now; and if once settlers out of Pennsylvania and Virginia gained a foothold in any numbers on that river, they would control one of the great highways that led to the main basins of the continent. It was imperative they should be effectually forestalled, and that at once.
The Marquis Duquesne, with his quick soldier blood, at last took the decisive step for France. He had hardly come to his colony, to serve his royal master as Governor upon the St. Lawrence, when he determined to occupy the upper waters of the Ohio, and block the western passes against the English with a line of military posts. The matter did not seem urgent to the doubting ministers at Versailles. "Be on your guard against new undertakings," said official letters out of France; "private interests are generally at the bottom of them." But Buquesne knew that it was no mere private interest of fur trader or speculator that was at stake now. The rivalry between the two nations had gone too far to make it possible to draw back. Military posts had already been established by the bold energy of the French at Niagara, the key to the western lakes, and at Crown Point upon Champlain, where lake and river struck straight towards the heart of the English trading settlements upon the Hudson. The English, accepting the challenge, had planted themselves at Oswego, upon the very lake route itself, and had made a port there to take the furs that came out of the West, and, though very sluggish in the business, showed purpose of aggressive movement everywhere that advantage offered. English settlers by the hundred were pressing towards the western mountains in Pennsylvania, and down into that" Virginian Arcady," the sweet valley of the Shenandoah: thrifty Germans, a few; hardy Scots-Irish, a great many—the blood most to be feared and checked. It was said that quite three hundred English traders passed the mountains every year into the region of the Ohio. Enterprising gentlemen in Virginia—Lawrence and Augustine Washington among the rest—had joined influential partners in London in the formation of an Ohio Company for the settlement of the western country and the absorption of the western trade; had sent out men who knew the region to make interest with the Indians and fix upon points of vantage for trading-posts and settlements; had already set out upon the business by erecting storehouses at Will's Creek, in the heart of the Alleghenies, and, farther westward still, upon Redstone Creek, a branch of the Monongahela itself.
It was high time to act; and Duquesne, having no colonial assembly to hamper him, acted very promptly. When spring came, 1753, he sent fifteen hundred men into Lake Erie, to Presque Isle, where a fort of squared logs was built, and a road cut through the forests to a little river whose waters, when at the flood, would carry boats direct to the Alleghany and the great waterway of the Ohio itself. An English lieutenant at Oswego had descried the multitudinous fleet of canoes upon Ontario carrying this levy to its place of landing in the lake beyond, and a vagrant Frenchman had told him plainly what it was. It was an army of six thousand men, he boasted, going to the Ohio, "to cause all the English to quit those parts." It was plain to every English Governor in the colonies who had his eyes open that the French would not stop with planting a fort upon an obscure branch of the Alleghany, but that they would indeed press forward to take possession of the Ohio, drive every English trader forth, draw all the native tribes to their interest by force or favor, and close alike the western lands and the western trade in very earnest against all the King's subjects.
Governor Dinwiddie was among the first to see the danger and the need for action, as, in truth, was very natural. In office and out, his study had been the colonial trade, and he had been merchant and official now a long time. He was one of the twenty stockholders of the Ohio Company, and had come to his governorship in Virginia with his eye upon the western country. He had but to look about him to perceive that Virginia would very likely be obliged to meet the crisis unaided, if, indeed, he could induce even her to meet it. Governor Hamilton, of Pennsylvania, also saw how critically affairs stood, it is true, and what ought to be done. His agents had met and acted with the agents of the Ohio Company already in seeking Indian alliances and fixing upon points of vantage beyond the Alleghanies. But the Pennsylvania Assembly could by no argument or device be induced to vote money or measures in the business. The placid Quaker traders were as stubborn as the stolid German farmers. They opposed warlike action on principle. The Germans opposed it because they could not for the life of them see the necessity of parting with their money to send troops upon so remote an errand. Dinwiddie did not wait or parley. He acted first, and consulted his legislature afterwards. It was in his Scots blood to take the business very strenuously, and in his trader's blood to take it very anxiously. He had kept himself advised from the first of the movements of the French. Their vanguard had scarcely reached Presque Isle ere he despatched letters to England apprising the government of the danger. Answer had come very promptly, too, authorizing him to build forts upon the Ohio, if he could get the money from the Burgesses; and meantime, should the French trespass further, " to require of them peaceably to depart." If they would not desist for a warning, said his Majesty, "we do hereby strictly charge and command you to drive them off by force of arms."
Even to send a warning to the French was no easy matter when the King's letter came and the chill autamn rains were at hand. The mountain streams, already swollen, presently to be full of ice, would be very dangerous for men and horses, and the forests were likely enough to teem with hostile savages, now the French were there. A proper messenger was found and despatched, nevertheless—young Major George Washington, of the Northern District. The errand lay in his quarter; his three years of surveying at the heart of the wilderness had made him an experienced woodsman and hardy traveller, had tested his pluck and made proof of his character; he was well known upon the frontier, and his friends were very influential, and very cordial in recommending him for this or any other manly service that called for steadiness, hardihood, and resource. Dinwiddie had been a correspondent of Lawrence Washington's ever since the presidency of the Ohio Company had fallen to the young Virginian upon the death of bis neighbor Thomas Lee, writing to him upon terms of Intimacy. He knew the stock of which George, the younger brother, came, and the interests in which he might be expected to embark with ardor; he could feel that he took small risk in selecting such an agent. Knowing him, too, thus through his family and like a friend, he did not hesitate in writing to Governor Hamilton, of Pennsylvania, to speak of this youth of twenty-one as " a person of distinction."
Washington performed his errand as Dinwiddie must have expected he would. He received bis commission and the Governor's letter to the French commandant on the last day of October, and set out the same day for the mountains. Jacob Vanbraam, the Dutch soldier of fortune who had been his fencing-master
