On the twenty-ninth the two reached the shore of the Allegheny about two miles from Shannopin’s Town. One glance at the stream was enough to dishearten: Instead of the solid sheet across which he had expected to walk, George saw only about fifty yards of ice adjoining each of the banks. In midstream was angry, open water, down which broken ice was driving. A raft offered the only means of traversing that turbulent and forbidding stream, a raft that had to be built of standing timber, for felling which the pack included only one hatchet! An all-day job the two men had, but just after sundown the raft was complete. George and Gist shoved it to open water and got the rough platform into the stream. Before they could push halfway across they were in an ice jam that threatened to overwhelm the raft. It flashed over George, on the downstream side, that he might be able to stop the raft and let the ice run past. Quickly and with all his strength, he pushed his pole downward in about ten feet of water. Then he swung to it. On the instant, the force of the current threw the raft against the pole with so much violence that the top of the pole was dashed forward—with George hanging to it. He fell into the water and might have lost his life had not one of his long arms reached a log of the raft. He gripped it, pulled himself up, and, in freezing garments gave such help as he could to Gist in handling the raft. It was to no purpose. The two men could not push to either shore. At last, finding a little island in the river, they left the raft and got on the bit of ground. George was sheeted in ice; Gist had his fingers frost-bitten. The island was of all resting-places the bleakest and the coldest; but the two men were still alive and had their packs, their guns, their hatchet . . . and the dispatch to Dinwiddie.
Daylight brought an entrancing sight: from the shore of the little island to the bank, the river was frozen over stoutly enough to bear the weight of men with packs. George and Gist crossed without any trouble and, after a tramp of ten miles, entered the hospitable door of Frazier’s trading post.
The remaining days of the mission were tedious but not dangerous. At Gist’s new settlement, which he reached January 2, 1754, Washington bought a horse and saddle, so that Frazier’s might be sent back to him. Then George started for Wills Creek. It was speed, speed, speed to arouse Virginia for the prompt occupation of the country the French were preparing to seize. George was at Belvoir on January 11, but he did not feel he could linger when he had news for the Governor. He hurried to Williamsburg and, on January 16, 1754, placed the letter from St. Pierre in the hand of the official who anxiously had been awaiting his return.
The firm but noncommital answer and George’s description of conditions on the frontier so impressed Dinwiddie that he asked Washington to write a report that could be laid before Council the next day. This required George to throw together hastily the entries he had made almost daily in his journal. The product was a narrative of seven thousand words, loosely constructed and in some passages obscure; but it had interest and it contained much information at once accurate and apropos.
When George moved about Williamsburg he found himself and his mission the objects of much curiosity. He was applauded by the friends of the Governor and accused secretly by the enemies of His Honor and by rival speculators of magnifying the danger in order to get help for the Ohio Company. Washington’s immediate desire was to know what would be done to anticipate the advance of the French to the Ohio. Dinwiddie believed that success hung on speed. Unless the English hastened their march, the French would get to the Ohio first and would so strongly secure themselves that the might of England would be taxed to drive them away. As surely as with Washington on the way home, it was speed, all speed. Soon after George’s return, the Governor changed the date for the meeting of the prorogued Assembly from April 18 to February 14.
In advance of the session of the lawmakers, Dinwiddie felt he should provide an adequate guard for the protection of the men whom he already had dispatched to build a fort at the junction of the Monongahela and the Allegheny. Accordingly, on January 21, five days after his return, Major Washington, as Adjutant of the Northern Neck District, was authorized to enlist one hundred of the militia of Augusta and Frederick Counties; the Indian trader, Capt. William Trent, was directed to raise a like force among men of his own calling, whose property and livelihood were most threatened. The quota did not seem high. Of the three hundred English traders who went out yearly into the Indian country, a third should be expected to volunteer. By the time these two hundred men had reached the Ohio, four hundred to be requested of the General Assembly could be enlisted. If other Colonies then would send contingents, these combined forces, “with the conjunction of our friendly Indians,” Dinwiddie explained, “I hope will make a good impression on the Ohio and be able to defeat the designs of the French.”
George examined the instructions given him. He found that fifty of his men were to be supplied from the militia of Frederick by Lord Fairfax, County Lieutenant. James Patton, County Lieutenant of Augusta, was to furnish a similar number. By February 20 these two detachments were to be in Alexandria, where George was to train and discipline them. Many of the militiamen were expected to volunteer for service; but if volunteers did not suffice, the required total was to be reached through a draft by lot.
To speed the muster, George procured the Governor’s permission to send Jacob van Braam to assist the County Lieutenant of Augusta. George hurried to Frederick to act with Fairfax. He quickly uncovered that the militia, as the Governor phrased it, were in “very bad order.” George waited impatiently but helplessly until about February 11 and then, disillusioned, started back to Williamsburg with a letter in which Fairfax confessed that the draft was a failure. Like reports came from Augusta, though it had suffered during the previous summer from an Indian raid.
About the time George brought to Williamsburg the news from Frederick, the General Assembly met. On the opening day Dinwiddie delivered a message in which he summarized Major Washington’s report of the mission to Fort Le Boeuf. His Honor gave warning that 1500 French, with their Indian allies, were preparing to advance early in the spring, rendezvous at Logstown, and “build many more fortresses” on the Ohio. With a fervent description of the horrors of a frontier war, the Governor called on the Burgesses to vote a “proper supply.”
With this information in hand, the Burgesses began to review the Governor’s appeal for funds. There was no enthusiasm for an expedition to the Ohio. Some officials insisted that the report was “a fiction and a scheme to promote the interest of a private company”—the Ohio Company, of course. Debate was precipitated; dissent was vigorous. “With great application,” Dinwiddie subsequently reported, “many arguments and everything I possibly could suggest, the [Burgesses] at last voted £10,000 for protecting our frontiers.”
As soon as the £10,000 had been voted, Dinwiddie undertook to raise six companies of fifty men each and to dispatch these new soldiers to the contested river. To command the volunteers, officers had now to be commissioned by the Governor—a fact that immensely interested George; if new military service was to be offered and new honors won, Washington must have a share in them! Ambitious as George had become, he told himself in all candor that he did not have the age or the experience to justify him in aspiring immediately to the general command of the expedition to the Ohio; but he believed that if he could get a commission as Lieutenant Colonel under a qualified senior, he would not fail.
George went about the task of recruiting for the new force. His headquarters were in Alexandria, where he had close relations with John Carlyle. That gentleman, on January 26, had been appointed Commissary of Supply for the expedition to the Ohio. George had a good opinion of Carlyle and, after experience with him, concluded that the Commissary was altogether capable and most painstaking. At the time there was nothing in Carlyle’s record to indicate that he was a man too ready to accept promise as performance.
There was no enthusiasm for enlisting. After approximately a week of hard persuasion, George enlisted about twenty-five individuals, most of whom he des
cribed as “loose, idle persons,” devoid of shoes and almost every garment. Haplessly, there were no uniforms and no credit for buying any. A few recruits who were enlisted elsewhere drifted into Alexandria, but the upbuilding of the force to the stipulated strength of three hundred was slow, dangerously slow in the light of news that came from Trent on the Ohio. Trent repeated in a letter to Washington what friendly Indians had told him of great threats made by the French and urged that Washington hasten to him.
Dinwiddie, sifting all he knew, soon chose Joshua Fry as the man best qualified to command the expedition. Fry, a former professor of mathematics at William and Mary, an engineer and cartographer who had gone in 1745 to the new County of Albemarle in the Piedmont, had done no fighting but he knew men, won their respect easily, and displayed always a justice and serenity of spirit in dealing with them. George Muse was named Captain and soon was promoted Major. Of the appointment of a third officer, Capt. Adam Stephen, George probably heard also. The other commissions, as he ascertained gradually, went in most instances to ambitious young men who wished to learn something of the frontier.
Of his place in the organization, George had received some assurance before he knew who were and were not to be his companions-in-arms. By March 20 a messenger brought him a letter of instructions from the Governor and a note in which Richard Corbin said briefly: “I enclose your commission. God prosper you with it.” The commission was at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel, the second in command of the expedition. Dinwiddie expressed surprise that the French were expected to move so early in the season to the Ohio. This, said he, “makes it necessary for you to march what soldiers you have immediately to the Ohio, and escort some wagons, with the necessary provisions.” Colonel Fry was to follow with the other troops as soon as possible. There was an opportunity! The Lieutenant Colonel was to command the vanguard on an advance to the river and meet whatever adventure awaited the Virginians there.
The speed of preparation increased at Alexandria. As George tried to make soldiers of his homeless and destitute volunteers, Carlyle sought to procure supplies and equipment. George decided to start with supplies sufficient only for the march to Winchester and get additional wagons and provisions there for the long journey to the Ohio. When his troops at Alexandria increased to 120, he organized them into two companies, one temporarily under van Braam and the other under Peter Hog, who had the Governor’s commission as Captain. With these two officers, five subalterns, two sergeants and six corporals, all probably inexperienced, George continued to give his men such drill and inculcate such discipline as they would take; but they still were raw recruits when, at the beginning of April their Lieutenant Colonel issued marching orders. On the morning of April 2 George led his little column out of Alexandria and westward in the direction of the “Blew Mountains.” This was the first time he ever had commanded troops on the road. A long and a strange road it was to prove, the road of a career he coveted but had not planned.
When Washington reached Winchester he found there the company raised in that area by Captain Stephen. He looked next for the transportation to carry to Wills Creek and on to the Ohio the supplies his men and horses must have if the expedition was to succeed. Virtually nothing had been done to assemble the needed vehicles. Dinwiddie had called Carlyle’s attention to the impressment law and had said that it must be invoked if wagons could not be hired at reasonable rates, but no official in Frederick had acted. Forty wagons George impressed, fifty, sixty—and received at his camp not one in seven of them. He waited for the arrival of others that had been requisitioned, and when they did not arrive, he impressed still more. When a week of fruitless impressment and argument had passed, George felt he no longer could wait, because all indications had been that the French would start early for the Ohio. About April 18, Washington and 159 men started westward across the mountain.
Towards western country George rode over North Mountain and then northward down the right bank of the Cacapon. He had crossed this river when he met a man who rode rapidly towards him with an express. This horseman brought from Trent a number of letters that Washington read eagerly. They were an appeal for reenforcement at the forks of the Ohio with all possible speed: Eight hundred French troops were approaching, Trent wrote; he was expecting attack at any hour.
More trouble awaited George at Wills Creek. When he inquired for the pack animals to be used for a swift, light march westward, he found that Trent had failed to redeem the promise to collect the horses. Not one was there. Lack of transport might doom the expedition. Amid George’s first grim reflections on this paralysis came the blackest news of all: Ensign Edward Ward who had been in immediate command at the mouth of the Monongahela rode up to Wills Creek on the twenty-second and reported that the fort had been captured. The French had won control of the forks of the Ohio. George had lost the race almost before it had begun.
Ensign Ward had a humiliating story to tell—the forks of the Ohio lost, a French force estimated at more than one thousand men there to defy the 159 under Washington, the Indians clamoring for reenforcements, of whom only a few weak companies were within marching distance. Short of the defection of the Six Nations and the destruction of the little force at Wills Creek, the situation was about as bad as it could be, but it did not appall the young commander. He felt, instead, what he termed a “glowing zeal.” George’s mind and military inexperience would not yield to odds or circumstance. The Indians needed help and asked it in a spirit of loyalty that made George doubly anxious to extend it. Besides, to withhold aid would be to lose the savages’ support. Even with the insignificant force he had, George felt that he must advance as far as he could and must hold a position from which the column, when reenforced, would proceed to the forks, recover the fort and drive the French away.
When the young Virginian had reached this conclusion, his knowledge of the country shaped his action. The best station at which to hold his detachment until reenforcements arrived in sufficient number to justify an offensive was, he thought, a place he had not visited, the junction of Red Stone Creek with the Monongahela, thirty-seven miles above the forks. From that point it would be possible to send the artillery and the heavy supplies by water to the mouth of the river. In order to reach Red Stone Creek with the heavy guns and the wagons it would be necessary to widen the trail into a road, but this could be done with the men George had.
Progress was hideously slow. Everywhere the trail had to be widened and repaired. Effort availed scarcely at all. Never was the column able to advance more than four miles a day. When conditions were at their worst, night found the wagons no farther than two miles from their starting point. One English trader after another would arrive at camp from the west with his skins and his goods and explain that he was fleeing from the French and tell of the strength of the force that had come down from Lake Erie. Some merely repeated rumor; but one of them, Robert Callender, reached Washington’s detachment with information of a nearer potential enemy: At Gist’s new settlement, Callender had encountered a party of five French under Commissary La Force. The number was trifling; their proximity was suspicious. Ostensibly, they were searching for deserters; but actually, in Callender’s opinion, they were reconnoitring and studying the country.
That news was enough to give a faster beat to any young officer’s heart, especially when Callender brought word that Half King was marching with fifty men to join the English detachment. George determined to send out twenty-five men under Captain Stephen on May 11 to reconnoitre and to meet Half King.
There followed a week of discouraging reports, brightened by dispatches from Williamsburg. An express brought letters in which George was informed that Colonel Fry had reached Winchester with more than 100 men and soon would march to join the advanced contingent. Other troops were coming, too. North Carolina was to send 350 men; Maryland was to supply 200; although Pennsylvania would furnish no soldiers, she would contribute £10,000; from New England, Gov. William Shirley was to march 600 troops to harass the
French in Canada. George had not yet learned how readily hopes and half-promises might be accepted as assurances and guarantees. He took all the reports at face value and rejoiced, in particular, over the prospect of a demonstration against Canada.
Ensign Ward, whom Washington had sent on to Williamsburg, came back to camp on the seventeenth with a letter from Dinwiddie. The Governor told of the arrival in Virginia of an Independent Company from South Carolina and of the expectation that the two similar companies from New York would reach Virginia waters within about ten days. He wrote that Council approved of George’s caution in planning to halt at Red Stone Creek until reenforcements arrived. Somewhat deliberately in this same letter, George and the other Virginia officers were admonished not to let “some punctillios about command” interfere with the expedition.
Ward probably supplemented this with news that a committee controlling pay of the officers and men had limited to £1 6s. the allowance for enlisting each soldier, and Council had not raised the scale of compensation of officers or added to the ration previously allowed, which merely was that of the private soldier. This had been a sore subject with the officers. Now they soon would be serving with Captains, lieutenants and ensigns of Independent Companies who would be receiving higher pay. This prospect combined with hard work, wet weather and poor fare to produce near-mutiny among the Virginia officers. Under the chairmanship of Stephen, they drafted a formal protest to the Governor, and, reviewing their hardships, concluded with at least a threat of resignation en masse. This document they signed and brought to George for transmission. George felt the sting of poor pay as sharply as they did, but resignation was a different matter. Although he would not fail to stand his ground against discrimination, he wished to do this in a manner that would not jeopardize his continuance as Lieutenant Colonel.
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