THROUGH HIS APPOINTMENT as district adjutant in February 1753, Washington was soon enmeshed in epochal events, as the British and French empires began to clash over their colonial possessions. In 1753 Britain’s North American colonies, mostly clustered along the eastern seaboard, inhabited a corridor flanked by the Atlantic Ocean and the Allegheny Mountains. French colonial holdings followed a sweeping arc from New Orleans to the southwest, up through the Mississippi River, into the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. When both major powers claimed control of the huge Ohio Country—covering present-day Ohio and Indiana, along with parts of western Pennsylvania and West Virginia—their imperial ambitions suddenly collided in ominous fashion.
On the British side, the impetus for this looming confrontation came from the huge royal grant to the Ohio Company. To encourage settlers and protect them from French encroachment, Lawrence Washington and his colleagues advocated establishing a fort and trading post at the Forks of the Ohio (the site of present-day Pittsburgh), which would act as the flash point of imperial conflict for many years. In 1752 the Marquis de Duquesne, governor general of French Canada, countered the British move by announcing plans to construct several forts between Lake Erie and the Ohio River system, buttressing French claims in a smooth crescent from Canada to the Mississippi. This aggressive move guaranteed a violent clash with British forces.
Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie, a portly, bewigged Scot, was a prime investor in the Ohio Company. Born in Glasgow and a former customs official in Bermuda, he had a beefy, well-fed face with a drooping chin, which one wag aptly described as the “face of a longtime tax collector.”
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He wanted to secure the Ohio Company’s interests as well as the lucrative fur trade with the Indians, so he lobbied London for permission to erect forts in the Ohio Country. In August 1753 his superiors returned a dispatch that forever altered the life of George Washington. Dinwiddie was empowered to create a chain of forts in the disputed area and to send an envoy to the French to deliver a solemn ultimatum that they should vacate this territory claimed by England. It was a sure recipe for military conflict.
Washington likely learned of this directive from Colonel William Fairfax and in late October galloped off to Williamsburg to proffer his services as the special envoy. His prompt resolve demonstrated his courage and confidence and suggested no ordinary craving for success. Incredibly enough, on October 31, 1753, Dinwiddie and his council entrusted the twenty-one-year-old with this perilous mission. Three decades later Washington reflected on the extraordinary circumstance “that so young and inexperienced a person should have been employed on a negotiation with which subjects of the greatest importance were involved.”
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The instructions that Dinwiddie had received from London—and that Washington presumably stashed in his saddlebag—stated categorically that if the French were found to be building forts on English soil, they should be peacefully asked to depart. If they failed to comply, however, “we do hereby strictly charge and command you to drive them off by force of arms.”
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This order was signed by none other than King George II.
How could young George Washington have snared this prestigious commission? At the time, few Virginians were seasoned in frontier warfare, creating a simple lack of competitors. Washington confirmed that he was picked to go “when I believe few or none would have undertaken it.”
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Some practical reasons made Washington an excellent choice. He knew the western country from surveying; had the robust constitution to survive the winter woods; was mostly unflappable; had a mature appearance and sound judgment; and was a model youth, with no tincture of rowdiness in his nature. In certain ways, he was a very old young man. In London’s
Gentleman’s Magazine,
an approving author explained Washington’s selection by stating that he was “a youth of great sobriety, diligence, and fidelity.”
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His friendship with leading personalities of the Ohio Company likely clinched the appointment. Four years later he admitted that there had been pervasive suspicions in other colonies that he represented only the interests of the company.
Such was the urgency of Washington’s mission that he set out for the western country the same day he pocketed the assignment. He stopped in Fredericksburg to enlist the services of Jacob Van Braam, a Dutchman by birth and a fellow Mason who would serve as his French interpreter. A proficient swordsman, Van Braam had taught Washington how to fence. Two weeks later, at Wills Creek on the Potomac River in western Maryland, he also signed up Christopher Gist, a skilled guide and surveyor of the backcountry, who knew “more of Indians and of the nature of the country than any man here,” as Washington was informed.
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He also recruited four other men from the backwoods, including two Indian traders.
Even for someone with Washington’s formidable stamina, this trip made incomparably daunting demands. Washington recalled how, “at a most inclement season,” he had traveled 250 miles “thro[ugh] an uninhabited wilderness country” to “within 15 miles of Lake Erie in the depth of winter, when the whole face of the earth was covered with snow and the waters covered with ice.”
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It proved “as fatiguing a journey as it is possible to conceive, rendered so by excessive bad weather.”
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Starting in mid-November, he and his party spent a week crossing the Allegheny Mountains, slogging along a tortuous wilderness trail that twisted through impenetrable forest, forcing them to wade across streams and scale high ridges. They traveled through “excessive rains and [a] vast quantity of snow” that drenched them at every turn.
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After a wretched week, they found warmth and comfort in the rough cabin of an Indian trader named John Fraser, at the junction of the Monongahela River and Turtle Creek.
The Monongahela was so swollen by incessant rain and snow that Washington found it “quite impassable.” To lighten the heavy load on his packhorses, he had two men transport the baggage downstream by canoe, while he and others rode ahead on horseback. When they reached the Forks of the Ohio, Washington boldly showed the equestrian prowess that would later assume legendary proportions. Where others balked at crossing the frigid, fast-moving Allegheny on horseback, Washington showed no qualms. He vigorously urged his horse into the freezing current, sitting upright as it glided across the water—a magnificent image repeated many times later in his career. The more cautious group members went across by canoe.
Part of Washington’s mandate was to evaluate this spot for a fort that would form a bulwark against French expansion. He gave the site his provisional approval and commended it as “extremely well situated for a fort, as it has the absolute command of both rivers.”
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But having traversed the Allegheny, Washington also worried that it was “a very rapid swift-running water,” and he came to prefer the navigation of the Monongahela River, which would offer a calmer waterway for Virginia’s frontier settlers.
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Washington had been directed to establish contact with the leaders of local Indian tribes—the “Sachems of the Six Nations” of the Iroquois—and extract intelligence from them about French operations.
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He was also supposed to wheedle them into providing an escort to the French commander at Fort Le Boeuf, just south of Lake Erie. Winning over the Indians was no easy matter, since the Ohio Country had long been their hunting grounds and they reacted warily to European interference. On November 22 Washington made his initial contact with the Indians, meeting Chief Shingas of the Delawares, whom he invited along to a parley with other chieftains at the village of Logstown (today the town of Baden, Pennsylvania).
From these early dealings with Native Americans, Washington was later spared either a racist attitude toward them or a tendency to sentimentalize them. He seemed cynical but accepting about Indian diplomacy: “The Indians are mercenary—every service of theirs must be purchased—and they are easily offended, being thoroughly sensible of their own importance.”
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Once at Logstown, with an assurance that belied his years, Washington not only summoned the Seneca tribal leader, Tanacharison—known to the English simply as the Half King—who was then off on a hunting trip, but also distributed needed largesse to his deputy, Monacatoocha. “I gave him a string of wampum and a twist of tobacco and desired him to send for the Half King, which he promised to do by a runner in the morning.”
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From the outset, Washington conveyed an authoritative air that seemed instinctive. While awaiting the Half King, he quizzed four French deserters who had come up the Mississippi River. From them, he was able to corroborate the prevalent suspicion in Williamsburg that the French planned to encircle the British by uniting their Louisiana territory with Canada and the Great Lakes.
When the Half King, a man in his fifties, arrived in Logstown on November 25, he must have been taken aback to find a young envoy less than half his age inviting him into his tent. The previous year the chieftain had signed a treaty with the British, making him their nominal ally, and he had sternly warned the French against incursions in the region. He had a visceral dislike of the French, claiming that they had murdered, cooked, and consumed his father. He had bristled at high-handed treatment from Sieur de Marin, the French commandant, who referred to Indians as “flies or mosquitoes.”
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It soon became clear why the Half King preferred the British: they had come (or so he thought) simply to trade, whereas the French wished to seize their lands. (Other Indians, however, suspected the British of having designs on their homelands and sided with the French for the same reason.) Washington quickly discovered that the Half King was an artful diplomat who expected the British to respect Indian rights. It is clear that Washington believed devoutly in his mission and was incensed at French machinations to woo the chieftain. At this stage of his life, he trusted implicitly in the wisdom and benevolence of the British Empire.
By all indications, Washington handled his talk with the Half King smoothly. A cordial feeling arose between them, even though the Indian chief gave Washington the same predatory nickname, Conotocarious, that had been bestowed on his great-grandfather, John Washington. There’s no evidence that Washington spurned the name as pejorative. In fact, he seemed proud of it, as if it were conferred with affection. After the Revolutionary War, he observed of the name that the Indians had “communicated [it] to other nations” and that it was “remembered by them ever since in all their transactions with [me] during the late war.”
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The next day, when Washington addressed an Indian council, he slid deftly into the requisite high-flown style: “Brothers, I have called you together in Council, by order of your brother the governor of Virginia.”
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At this first meeting, Washington concealed the true nature of his mission, testing, for the first time, the diplomatic merits of evasion. He asked the Indians to provide an escort of young warriors for his journey to the French commandant. The Half King requested a few days’ delay, so that Washington could receive ceremonial wampum from the Shawnee chiefs. Now a young man in a hurry, bearing the weight of an empire on his shoulders, Washington chafed at the notion, but his better judgment prevailed over his quick temper. “When I found them so pressing in their request … I consented to stay as I believed an offence offered at this crisis might have been attended with greater ill consequence than another day’s delay,” he wrote in his frontier journal.
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In the end, the Indians mustered a paltry four escorts, including the Half King, then rationalized the small party as a way to prevent the French from suspecting hostile intentions. Washington penetrated this cover story to spy the true reason for the tiny convoy: deep-seated Indian ambivalence about their British allies.
After a five-day journey north in a pounding rain, Washington’s party arrived at the trading post of Venango, located at the confluence of the Allegheny River and French Creek. Here he met a French officer, Captain Philippe Thomas de Joncaire, and had another chance to sharpen his diplomatic skills. The offspring of a French officer and a Seneca woman, Joncaire invited Washington to dine with some French officers. The Frenchmen drank freely and talked indiscreetly, while Washington never shed his steely self-control: “The wine, as they dosed themselves pretty plentifully with it, soon banished the restraint which at first appeared in their conversation and gave license to their tongues to reveal their sentiments more freely.” To his amazement, the French bragged about “their absolute design to take possession of the Ohio” and even spilled military secrets about the location of their forts.
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Washington’s sense of triumph was premature. The next day the Frenchmen seduced the Indians with so much food and drink that they got roaring drunk and were reluctant to proceed. Joncaire was obviously a more slippery foe than the callow Washington had realized. The young envoy was still feeling his way in a disorienting new world that did not abide by the polite rules of Virginia drawing rooms.
After three days in Venango, Washington pushed on toward Fort Le Boeuf amid more inclement weather. Now fortified by both an Indian and a French escort, he traversed forty miles of treacherous terrain, punctuated by “many mires and swamps.”
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Even though he usually had an iron constitution and was accustomed to harsh weather, the temperature had turned intolerably cold. He and Christopher Gist decided to ride on ahead of the others through a snow-encrusted landscape, logging as many as eighteen miles per day in unending rain and snow.
When Washington reached Fort Le Boeuf after dark on December 11, he found a crude structure of four buildings, patched together from bark and planks. The next morning he received an obliging reception from the silver-haired, one-eyed commander, Captain Jacques Legardeur de St. Pierre, whom Washington described as an “elderly gentleman” with “much the air of a soldier.”
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Despite the civil reception, Washington carried a truculent message that the French should quit the Ohio Valley, and St. Pierre requested several days to respond. During this time Washington reconnoitered the grounds and scribbled detailed notes on the fort’s military specifications. He noted the 220 birch and pine canoes lined up along the creek, which the French had assembled for military operations. St. Pierre made clear that he was not intimidated by the British and retained every right to arrest their traders poaching on French territory. “As to the summons you send me to retire,” he told Washington, “I do not think myself obliged to obey it.”
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Clearly the British had not misread the hostile intent lurking behind French expansion into the Ohio Country.