Historic Highways of America Volume III Part 2

The astonishment and anger of the French on the St. Lawrence knew no bounds. Immediately the French governor Galissoniere set on foot plans which would result in the withdrawal of the English colonists.

Looking back through the years, it may seem very strange that the governors of New France never antic.i.p.ated a clash with England on the Ohio and prepared for it, but it appears, that, of all the West, _Lake Erie and the Ohio river were the least known to the French_. This can be understood by following the romantic story of French exploration:

On a wild October day, Cartier, who raised the altar at Quebec and claimed the new continent, stood on Mt. Royal, looking wistfully westward. Behind him lay the old world throbbing with an intuition of a northwest pa.s.sage to China and India. Before him s.h.i.+mmered in the sun two water-ways. As we know them now, the southern was the St. Lawrence, the western the Ottawa.

It was a strange providence which compelled Cartier to set the tide of French trade and exploration over the Ottawa rather than up the St.

Lawrence. By this France lost, we are told, the Hudson valley--the key to the eastern half of the continent--but gained the Great Lakes. This tide of trappers, merchants, Jesuits, and adventurers went up the western river, across into Georgian Bay, through the lakes, down the Allegheny, Wabash, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Mississippi. Some few braved the dangers of traveling in the domains of the Iroquois and went up the St. Lawrence to Lake Ontario, then across to Lake Simcoe and Georgian Bay. The important result was that Lake Erie was the last of all the Great Lakes to be discovered and the country south of it was the last to be explored and claimed by the French. Lakes Ontario and Huron were discovered in 1615, Lake Superior in 1629, Lake Michigan in 1634. Lake Erie was not discovered until 1669--half a century after the two lakes which it joins; and then for a hundred years it was a mystery. Champlain drew it on his map as a widened river; other maps of the day make it a brook, river, strait, or lake, as their authors fancied. One drew it as a river, and, in perplexity over its outlet, ran it into the Susquehanna and down into Chesapeake Bay. And as late as 1750, in the map of Celoron, is written along the southern sh.o.r.e of Lake Erie, "This sh.o.r.e is almost unknown."

It is a custom peculiar to the French to declare possession of a land by burying leaden plates, upon which their professions of sovereignty are incised, at the mouths of its rivers. This has been an immemorial custom, and has been done in recent times in the Pacific sea. La Salle buried a leaden plate at the mouth of the Mississippi in 1682, claiming possession of that river and all streams emptying into it and all lands drained by them. But, now, more plates were needed. And so Celoron de Bienville, a gallant Chevalier of St. Louis, departed from Quebec in the fall of the same year with a detachment of eight subaltern officers, six cadets, an armorer, twenty soldiers, one hundred and eighty Canadians, thirty friendly Iroquois, and twenty-five Abnakis, with a load of leaden plates to be buried at the mouths of all the rivers in the Central West. Two plates were buried in what we now call the Allegheny river and one at the mouths of Wheeling creek, the Muskingum, Great Kanawha, and Miami rivers. At the burial of each plate a given formality was observed. The detachment was drawn up in battle array. The leader cried in a loud voice "_Vive le Roi_," and proclaimed that possession was taken in the name of the king. In each instance, the _Arms of the King_, stamped upon a sheet of tin, were affixed to the nearest tree, and a _Proces Verbal_ was drawn up and signed by the officers. Each plate bore the following inscription:

"In the year 1749, of the reign of Louis XV., King of France, We, Celoron, commander of a detachment sent by Monsieur the Marquis de la Galissoniere, Governor General of New France, to reestablish tranquillity in some Indian villages of these cantons, have buried [_here a s.p.a.ce was left for the date and place of burial_] this plate of lead near the river Ohio otherwise _Belle Riviere_, as a monument of the renewal of possession we have taken of the said river Ohio, and of all those which empty into it, and of all lands on both sides as far as the sources of said rivers, as enjoyed by the Kings of France preceding, and as they have there maintained themselves by arms and treaties, especially those of Ryswick, Utrecht, and Aix-la-Chapelle."

Ah! but leaden bullets were more needed in the West than leaden plates!

This Celoron found out before he had gone a dozen leagues. Suspicious savages dug up his first plate and hurried with it to the English at Albany. Is it strange that the Indians soon came to the conclusion that there was ever some fatal connection between the art of writing and their home-lands? At Logstown, near the present city of Pittsburg, he found some detested English traders, and a strong anti-French influence.

He drove off the intruders with a sharp letter to their governor, but here his Iroquois and Abenaki Indians deserted him, and, on their way north, tore from the trees those sheets which contained yet more of that horrid writing. Celoron hurried homeward by the shortest route--up the Miami river and down the Maumee and through the lakes--and rendered his alarming report. It was decided immediately to fortify Celoron's route.

The enterprising successor of Galissoniere--Governor Duquesne--sent a detachment from Quebec with orders to proceed to Lake Erie and begin the building of a line of forts down the Ohio frontier, from Lake Erie to the Ohio river. This party, under the command of M. Marin, landed near the present site of Erie, Pennsylvania, and raised a fort.

The ruins of this fort in the West are still perceptible within the limits of the city of Erie. It was a strong work built of chestnut logs, fifteen feet high and one hundred and twenty feet square, with a blockhouse on each side. It had a gate to the south and one to the north, but no portholes. It was first called Fort Duquesne, but later was named Fort Presque Isle from the promontory which juts out into the lake. From Fort Presque Isle M. Marin hewed a road southward, a distance of thirteen miles, twenty-one feet in width, to the Riviere aux Boeufs--river of Buffaloes--later named French creek by Was.h.i.+ngton.

This was the first white man's road--military or otherwise--ever made in the Central West. It was built in 1753, and though it has not been used over its entire length since that day, it marks, in a general way, the important route from the lakes to the Allegheny and Ohio, which became early in the century the great thoroughfare for freight to and from the Ohio valley and the east. For a distance of seven miles out of the city of Erie the old French road of a century and a half ago is the main road south. At that distance from the city the new highway leaves it, but the old route can be followed without difficulty until it meets the Erie-Watertown plank road, the new Shun pike. This plank road follows the road cut by the French general one hundred and forty-nine years ago.

Those that traveled over the same road in 1795, speak of the trees which were growing up and blocking the thoroughfare. It seems to have been the first intention of the French to make this road a military road in the European sense, leveling hills and filling the valleys. And for half the distance between Erie and French creek the road had been grubbed by hauling out the stumps of the trees. Travelers refer to the great cavities which were left open, for the road was never completed on the lines originally laid out. It was built with some care and served for the hauling of cannon to the forts along the Allegheny and Ohio. Cannon b.a.l.l.s, accoutrements, and pieces of harness were found along the route as late as 1825. In the day of the pioneer, the route was lessened from Erie to French creek to thirteen miles. This Watertown turnpike was a princ.i.p.al thoroughfare for the great salt trade between the east and Pittsburg and Louisville. In return, iron, gla.s.s, and flour were freighted over it eastward from the Monongahela, and bacon from Kentucky. The tradition prevails in Erie that, when the French abandoned Fort Presque Isle, at the close of the French and Indian war, treasures were buried either on the site of the fort or on the old road. Spanish silver coins to the value of sixty dollars were found while plowing the site of the old fort within twenty-five years, but these may not have been left by the French. Old walls have been excavated again and again but without extraordinary results. Pottery of singular kinds, knives, bullets, and human bones have been found. Thus, something of the air of romance of the old French days still lingers over this first pathway of the French in the Central West.

At the end of this road was erected Fort La Boeuf on the north bank of the west fork of Riviere aux Boeufs, at the intersection of High and Water streets in what is now the city of Watertown, Pennsylvania. Being an inland fort, it was not ranked or fortified as a first-cla.s.s one; yet, as a trading fort, it was of much importance in the chain from Quebec to the Ohio. Of it Was.h.i.+ngton said, "The bastions were made of piles driven into the ground, standing more than twelve feet above it, and sharp at the top, with portholes cut for the cannon, and loopholes for the small arms to fire through. There are eight six-pound pieces mounted in each bastion, and one piece of four pounds before the gate.

In the bastions are a guardhouse, chapel, doctor's lodging, and the commander's private stores, round which are laid platforms for the cannon and the men to stand on. There are several barracks without the fort, for the soldiers' dwellings, covered, some with bark, and some with boards, made chiefly of logs. There are also several other houses, such as stables, smith's shop, etc."

Late in the summer of 1753, M. Marin sent fifty men to erect a third fort in the chain from Lake Erie, at Venango, just below the junction of French creek and the Allegheny river, on the present site of Franklin, Pennsylvania. Possession was taken of the site by Captain Chabert de Joncaire, who spent the winter in the trader Frazier's hut, having been opposed by the Delaware chieftain Half King who said "that the land was theirs, and that they would not have them build upon it." In the spring, however, machinery for a sawmill was brought from Canada, and oak and chestnut trees were cut down and sawn into timbers for a new fort which was completed in April. It was not an elaborate work but answered its purpose as an entrepot for goods going down to Fort Duquesne. It was named Fort Machault, from Jean Baptiste Machault, a celebrated French financier and politician and favorite of La Pompadour. The fort was a parallelogram about seventy-five by one hundred and five feet with bastions in the form of polygons at the four angles. The gate fronted the river. It contained a magazine protected by three feet of earth, and five barracks two stories high furnished with stone chimneys. The soldiers' barracks consisted of forty-four buildings erected around the fort on the north and east sides.

Thus, strong in her resources of military and civil centralization, France at last moved swiftly into the West. In this, her superiority over the English colonies was as marked as her success in winning her way into the good graces of the Indians. French and English character nowhere show more plainly than in the nature of their contact with the Indians as each met them along the St. Lawrence, Allegheny, and the Great Lakes. The French came to conciliate the Indians, with no scruples as to how they might accomplish their task. The coureur-de-bois threw himself into the spirit of Indian life and very nearly adopted the Indian's ideals. The stolid English trader, keen for a bargain, justly suspicious of his white rival, invariably distant, seldom tried to ingratiate himself into the friends.h.i.+p of the red man. The voyageur flattered, cajoled, entertained in his wild way, regaled at tables, mingled without stint in Indian customs. Sir Guy Carleton wrote, "France did not depend on the number of her troops, but on the discretion of her officers who learned the language of the natives ... distributed the king's presents, excited no jealousy and gained the affections of an ignorant, credulous but brave people, whose ruling pa.s.sions are independence, grat.i.tude, and revenge." The Englishman little affected the conceits of the red man, seldom opened his heart and was less commonly familiar. He ignored as much as possible Indian habits; the Frenchman feigned all reverence for them, with a care never to rupture their stolid complacency. The English trader clad like a ranger or trapper, made no more use of Indian dress than was necessary. The voyageur adopted Indian dress commonly, ornamented himself with vermilion and ochre, and danced with the aborigines before the fires; he wore his hair long, crowned with a coronet of feathers; his hunting frock was trimmed with horse-hair fringe and he carried a charmed rattlesnake's tail. "They were the most romantic and poetic characters ever known in American frontier life. Their every movement attracts the rosiest coloring of imagination. We see them gliding along the streams in their long canoes, shapely and serviceable as any water craft that man has ever designed, yet buoyant and fragile as the wind-whirled autumn leaf. We catch afar off the thrilling cadences of their choruses floating over the prairie and marsh, echoing from forest and hill, startling the buffalo from his haunt in the reeds, telling the drowsy denizens of the posts of the approach of revelry and whispering to the Indian village of gaudy fabrics, of trinkets and of fire water." This was not alone true of the French voyageur, it was more or less true of French soldier and officer. Such deportment was not unknown among English traders but it must have been comparatively rare. Few men of his race had such a lasting and honorable hold upon the Indian as Sir William Johnson and we cannot be wrong in attributing much of his power (of such momentous value to England through so many years) to the spirit of comrades.h.i.+p and familiarity which underlay his studied deportment.

"Are you ignorant," said the French governor Duquesne to a deputation of Indians, "of the difference between the king of France and the English?

Look at the forts which the king had built: you will find that under their very walls, the beasts of the forests are hunted and slain; that they are, in fact, fixed in places most frequented by you merely to gratify more conveniently your necessities. The English, on the contrary, no sooner occupy a post, than the woods fall before their hand--the earth is subjected to cultivation--the game disappears--and your people are speedily reduced to combat with starvation." M. Garneau, the French historian, frankly acknowledges that the marquis here accurately described the chief difference between the two civilizations. In 1757, M. Chauvignevie, Jr., a seventeen-year-old French prisoner among the English, said that at Fort La Boeuf the French plant corn around the fort for the Indians, "whose wives and children come to the fort for it, and get furnished also with clothes at the king's expense."

Horace Walpole, speaking of the French and English ways of seating themselves in America, said: "They enslaved, or a.s.sisted the wretched nations to butcher one another, instructed them in the use of firearms, brandy, and the New Testament, and at last, by scattered extension of forts and colonies, they have met to quarrel for the boundaries of empires, of which they can neither use nor occupy a twentieth part of the included territory." "But," he sneers elsewhere, "_we_ do not ma.s.sacre; we are such good Christians as only to cheat."

But, while the French moved down the lakes and the Allegheny, and the English came across the mountains, what of the _poor_ Indian for whose _rich_ lands both were so anxious?

An old Delaware sachem did not miss the mark widely when he asked the question: "The French claim all the lands on one side of the Ohio, and the English on the other: now, where does the Indian's land lie?" Truly, "between their father the French and their brothers the English, they were in a fair way of being lovingly shared out of the whole country."

In 1744, the English paid four hundred pounds to the representatives of the Six Nations for a.s.suming to cede to them the land between the Alleghany Mountains. But, as we have seen, the Six Nations had practically given up their Alleghany hunting-grounds to the other nations who had swarmed in, the Delawares (known to the French as the _Loups_, "wolves"), and the Shawanese. So, in a loose way, the confederacy of the Six Nations was friendly to the English, while the actual inhabitants of the land which the Six Nations had "sold" were hostile to the English and usually friendly to the French. Besides these (the Delaware and Shawanese nations), many fugitives from the Six Nations, especially Senecas, were found aiding the French as the momentous struggle drew on.

CHAPTER IV

THE VIRGINIAN GOVERNOR'S ENVOY

A thousand vague rumors came over the mountains to Governor Dinwiddie of Virginia in 1753, of French aggressions on the upper Ohio, the more alarming because vague and uncertain.

Orders were now at hand from London, authorizing the erection of a fort on the Ohio to hold that river for England and conciliate the Indians to English rule. But the governor was too much in the dark as to the operations of the French to warrant any decisive step, and he immediately looked about him for a person whom he could trust to find out what was really happening in the Ohio valley.

Who was to be this envoy? The mission called for a person of unusual capacity: a diplomat, a soldier, and a frontiersman. There were five hundred miles to be threaded on Indian trails in the dead of winter.

This was woodsman's work. There were cunning Indian chieftains and French officers, trained in intrigue, to be met, conciliated, influenced. This, truly, demanded a diplomat. There were forts to be marked and mapped, highways of approach to be considered and compared, vantage sites on river and mountain to be noted and valued. This was work for a soldier and strategist.

After failing to induce one or two gentlemen to undertake this perilous but intrinsically important task, a youthful Major, George Was.h.i.+ngton, one of the four adjutant-generals of Virginia, offered his services, and the despairing Scotch governor, whose zeal always approached rashness, accepted them.

But there was something more to the credit of this ambitious youth than his temerity. The best of Virginian blood ran in his veins and he had already shown a taste for adventurous service quite in line with such a hazardous business. Acquiring, when a mere lad, a knowledge of mathematics, he had gone surveying in Lord Fairfax's lands on the south branch of the Potomac. There he spent the best of three years, far beyond the settled limits of Virginia, fortifying his splendid physique against days of stress to come. In other ways this life on his country's frontier was of advantage. Here he met the Indian--that race over which no man ever wielded a greater influence than Was.h.i.+ngton. Here he came to know frontier life, its charms, its deprivations, its fears, and its toils--a life for which he was ever to entertain so much sympathy and so much consideration. Here he studied the Indian traders, a cla.s.s of men of much more importance, in peace or war, than any or all others in the border land--men whose motives of action were as hard to read as an Indian's, and whose flagrant and oft practiced deceptions on their fellow white men were fraught with disaster. It was of utmost fortune for his country that this youth went into the West in his teens, for he was to be, under Providence, a champion of that West worthy of its influence on human affairs. Thus he came to it early and loved it; he learned to know its value, to foresee something of its future, to think for and with its pioneer developers, to study its roads and rivers and portages; thus he was fortified against narrow purposes, and made as broad in his sympathies and ambitions as the great West was broad itself. No statesman of his day knew and believed in the West as Was.h.i.+ngton did; and it is not difficult to think that had he not so known and loved it, the territory west of the Alleghany Mountains would never have become a portion of the United States of America. There were far too many serious men like Thomas Jefferson who knew little about the West and boasted that they cared less. Yet today the seaboard states are more dependent commercially and politically on the states between the Alleghanies and Mississippi than these central commonwealths are on them.

The same divine Providence which directed this youth's steps into the Alleghanies had brought him speedily to his next post of duty, for family influence secured him an appointment as adjutant-general (with rank of major) over one of the four military districts into which Virginia was now divided for purposes of defense, a position for which he was as fitted by inclination as by frontier experience.

This lad now received Dinwiddie's appointment. As a practical surveyor in the wilderness he possessed frontiersman's qualifications; as an apt and diligent student of military science, with a brother--trained under Admiral Vernon--as a practical tutor, he had in a degree a soldier's qualifications; if not a diplomat he was as shrewd a lad as chivalrous old Virginia had within her borders, still, at twenty-one, that boy of the sixty maxims, but hardened, steadied and made exceeding thoughtful by his life on Virginia's great black forest-bound horizon. All in all, he was far better fitted for this mission than any one could have known or guessed. His keen eye, quick perception, and daring spirit were now to be turned to something of more moment than links and chains or a shabby line of Virginian militia.

It is not to be doubted that George Was.h.i.+ngton knew the danger he courted, at least very much better than we can appreciate it today. He had not lived three years on the frontier for nothing. He had heard of these French--of their bold invasion of the West, their growing trade, their cunning conciliation of the Indian, their sudden pa.s.sion for fort building when they heard of the grant of land to the Ohio Company, to which his brothers belonged. Let who can doubt that he looked with envious eyes upon those fearless fleets of coureurs-de-bois and their woodland pilgrimaging. Who can doubt that the few stolid English traders who went over the mountains on poor Indian ponies made a sorry showing beside these roistering, picturesque, irrepressible Frenchmen who knew and sailed the sweet rivers of the great West? But the forests were filled with their sly, red-skinned proselytes. One swift rifle ball might easily be sent from a hidden covert to meet the stripling envoy from the English who was come to spy out the land and report both its giants and its grapes. Yet, after one day's preparation, he was ready to leave a home, rich in comfort and culture, a host of warm friends, and bury himself five hundred miles deep in the western forests, to sleep on the ground in the dead of winter, wade in rivers running with ice, and face a hundred known and a thousand unknown risks.

"Faith, you're a brave lad," broke out the old Scotch governor, "and, if you play your cards well, you shall have no cause to repent your bargain," and Major Was.h.i.+ngton departed from Williamsburg on the last day of October but one, 1753. The first sentence in the _Journal_ he now began suggests his zeal and promptness: "I was commissioned and appointed by the Honourable _Robert Dinnwiddie_, Esq; Governor, _&c_ of _Virginia_, to visit and deliver a Letter to the Commandant of the _French_ Forces on the _Ohio_, and set out on the intended Journey the same Day." At Fredericksburg he employed his old fencing tutor Jacob van Braam as his interpreter and pushed on westward over the trail used by the Ohio Company to Wills Creek (c.u.mberland, Maryland) on the upper Potomac, where he arrived November 14.

Wills Creek was the last Virginian outpost, where Fort c.u.mberland was soon erected. Already the Ohio Company had located a storehouse at this point. Onward the Indian trail wound in and out through the Alleghanies, over the successive ranges known as Wills, Savage, and Meadow Mountains.

From the latter it dropped down into Little Meadows. Here in the open ground, covered with rank gra.s.ses, the first of the western water was crossed, a branch of the Youghiogheny river. From "Little Crossings," as the ford was called, the narrow trail vaulted Negro Mountain and came down upon the upper Youghiogheny, this ford here being named "Big Crossings." Another climb over Briery Mountain brought the traveler down into Great Meadows, the largest tract of open land in the Alleghanies.

By a zigzag climb of five miles the summit of the last of the Alleghany ranges--Laurel Hill--was reached, where the path turned northward and followed the line of hills, by Christopher Gist's clearing on what is known as Mount Braddock, toward the lower Youghiogheny, and forded at "Stewart's Crossing." Thence the trail ran down the point of land where Pittsburg now lies between the "Forks of the Ohio."

[Ill.u.s.tration: WAs.h.i.+NGTON'S ROAD]

Christopher Gist, whom Was.h.i.+ngton engaged as guide, knew well this "Road of Iron" through the mountain, and perhaps was the first white man to travel it who left record of it. On July 16, 1751, he had been commissioned by the committee of the Ohio Company to visit their grant of land in the West, and, among other things, "to look out & observe the nearest & most convenient Road you can find from the Company's Store at Will's Creek to a Landing at Mohongeyela."[1] The path started from the buildings Hugh Parker had erected for the Ohio Company in 1750 on land purchased from Lord Fairfax.[2] It followed the course outlined to Laurel Hill; here it left what was perhaps the main trail to the Ohio, and bore westward to the Monongahela river which it touched at Redstone Old Fort (Brownsville, Pa.) It was the course of the shortest portage between the Potomac and Monongahela.

It was the main trail to the Ohio over which Gist now guided the young envoy. This path had no name until it took that of a Delaware Indian, Nemacolin, who blazed its course, under the direction of Captain Thomas Cresap, for the Ohio Company. To those who love to look back to beginnings, and read great things in small, this Indian path, with its border of wounded trees, leading across the first great divide into the Central West, is worthy of contemplation. Each tree starred white by the Indian's ax spoke of Saxon conquest and commerce, one and inseparable.

In every act of the great world-drama now on the boards, this little trail with its blazed trees lies in the foreground.

And the rise of the curtain shows the lad Was.h.i.+ngton and his party of seven hors.e.m.e.n, led by the bold guide Christopher Gist, setting out from Wills Creek on the 15th of November, 1753. The character of the journey is nowhere better described than in Was.h.i.+ngton's words when he engaged Gist's services: "I engaged Mr _Gist_ to pilot us out."

It proved a rough voyage! A fierce, early winter came out of the north, as though in league with the French to intimidate, if not drive back, these spies of French aggression. It rained and snowed, and the little pathway became well-nigh impa.s.sable. The brown mountain ranges, which until recently had been burnished with the glory of a mountain autumn, were wet and black. Scarce eighteen miles were covered a day, a whole week being exhausted in reaching the Monongahela. But this was not altogether unfortunate. A week was not too long for the future Father of the West to study the hills and valleys which were to bear forever the precious favor of his devoted and untiring zeal. And in this week this youth conceived a dream and a purpose, the dearest, if not the most dominant, of his life--the union, commercial as well as political, of the East and the West. Yet he pa.s.sed Great Meadows without seeing Fort Necessity, Braddock's Run without seeing Braddock's unmarked grave, and Laurel Hill without a premonition of the covert in the valley below, where shortly he should shape the stones above a Frenchman's grave. But could he have seen it all--the wasted labor, nights spent in agony of suspense, humiliation, defeat, and the dead and dying--would it have turned him back?

The first roof to offer Was.h.i.+ngton hospitable shelter was the cabin of the trader Frazier at the mouth of Turtle creek, on the Monongahela, near the death-trap where soon that desperate handful of French and Indians should put to flight an army of five times its own number. Here information was at hand, for it was none other than this Frazier who had been driven from Venango but a few weeks before by the French force sent there to build a fort. Joncaire was spending the winter in Frazier's old cabin, and no doubt the young Virginian heard this irrepressible French officer's t.i.tle read clear in strong English oaths. Here too was a "Speech," with a string of wampum accompanying, on its way from a few anti-French Indians on the Ohio to Governor Dinwiddie, bringing the ominous news that the Chippewas, Ottawas, and Wyandots had taken up the hatchet against the English.

Was.h.i.+ngton took the Speech and the wampum--and pushed on undismayed.

Sending the baggage down the Monongahela by boat, he traveled on overland to the "Forks," where he chose a site for a fort, the future site, first, of Fort Duquesne, and later, Fort Pitt. But his immediate destination was the Indian village of Logstown, fifteen miles down the Ohio. On his way thither he stopped at the lodge of s.h.i.+ngiss, a Delaware king, and secured the promise of his attendance upon the council of anti-French (though not necessarily pro-English) Indians. For this was the Virginian envoy's first task--to make a strong bid for the allegiance of the red men; it was not more than suggested in his instructions, but was none the less imperative, as he well knew whether his superiors did or not.

It is extremely difficult to construct anything like a clear statement of Indian affiliations at this crisis. This territory west of the Alleghanies, nominally purchased from the Six Nations, was claimed by the Shawanese and Delawares who, as we have seen, had come into it, and also by many fugitives from the Six Nations, known generally as Mingoes, who had come to make their hunting ground their home. Though the Delaware king was only a "Half King" (because subject to the Council of the Six Nations) yet they claimed the land and had even resisted French encroachment. "Half King" and his Delawares believed the English only desired commercial intercourse and favored them as compared with the French who had already built forts in the West. The northern nations who were nearer the French soon surrendered to their blandishments; and soon the Delawares and the Shawanese were overcome by French allurements and were generally found about the French forts and forces. In the spring of the year Half King had gone to Presque Isle and spoken firmly though vainly to the French.

In so far as the English were more backward than the French in occupying the land, the unprejudiced Delawares and Mingoes were inclined to further English plans. When, a few years later, it became clear that the English cared not a whit for the rights of the red men, the latter hated and fought them as they never had the French. Was.h.i.+ngton was well fitted for handling this delicate matter of sharpening Indian hatred of the French and of keeping very still about English plans--his past experiences were now of utmost value to him.

Here at Logstown unexpected information was had. Certain French deserters from the Mississippi gave the English envoy a description of French operations on that river between New Orleans and Illinois. The latter word "Illinois" was taken by Was.h.i.+ngton's old Dutch interpreter to be the French words _Isle Noire_, and Was.h.i.+ngton speaks of Illinois as the "Black Islands" in his _Journal_. But this was not to be old Van Braam's only blunder in the role of interpreter!

Half King was ready with the story of his recent journey to Presque Isle, which he affirmed Was.h.i.+ngton could not reach "in less than five or six nights' sleep, good traveling." Little wonder, at such a season, a journey was measured by the number of nights to be spent in the frozen forests. Marin's answer to Half King had been no less spirited because of his own dying condition. The Frenchman had frankly stated that two English traders had been taken to Canada _to get intelligence of what the English were doing in Virginia_. So far as Indian possession of the land was concerned, Marin was quickly to the point: "_You say this Land belongs to you, but there is not the Black of my Nail yours. I saw that Land sooner than you did, before the Shannoahs and you were at War:_ Lead _was the Man who went down, and took Possession of that River: It is my Land, and I will have it, let who will stand-up for, or say-against, it. I'll buy and sell with the English_, [mockingly]. _If People will be ruled by me, they may expect Kindness, but not else._" La Salle had gone down the Ohio and claimed possession of it long before Delaware or Shawanese, Ottawa or Wyandot had built a single fire in the valley. The claim of the Six Nations only, antedated that of the French--but the Six Nations had sold their claim to the English for 400 pounds at Lancaster in 1744. This, however, did not settle the question.

At the council on the following day (26th) Was.h.i.+ngton delivered an address, asking for guides and guards on his trip up the Allegheny and Riviere aux Boeufs, adroitly implying, in word and gesture, that his audience were the warmest allies of the English and equally desirous to oppose French aggression. The council was for granting each request, but the absence of the hunters necessitated a detention; undoubtedly, fear of the French also provoked delay and counseling. Little wonder: Was.h.i.+ngton would soon be across the mountains again and the rough Frenchman who claimed even the earth beneath his finger-nails, and had won over the Ottawas, Chippewas, and fierce Wyandots, would make short work with all who had housed and counseled with the English envoy!

And--perhaps most ominous of all--Was.h.i.+ngton had not announced his business in the West, undoubtedly fearing the Indians would not aid him did they know it. When at last they asked the nature of his mission, he answered just the best an honest-hearted lad could; "this was a Question I had all along expected," he wrote in his _Journal_, "and had provided as satisfactory Answers to, as I could; which allayed their Curiosity a little." This youthful diplomat would have allayed the burning curiosity of hundreds of others had he mentioned the reason he gave those suspicious chieftains for this five-hundred-mile journey in the wintry season to a miserable little French fort on Riviere aux Boeufs!

It is safe to a.s.sume that, could he have given the real reasons, he would have been saved the difficulty of providing "satisfactory" ones.