The First Frontier

by Scott Weidensaul

  Mischief to whom? To those who had been pulling the strings in the backcountry for years—not just the Penns and their underlings but the Onondaga council in Iroquoia, which had spent generations building a façade of their supremacy over the Indians of the Middle Colonies. Many of the very people marginalized and dispossessed by the land deals of the Penns and the Iroquois were now gathering under Montour’s umbrella. French Andrew was making a lot of powerful people nervous.

  The Walking Purchase was hardly the only land fraud of the period, and the tricks cut both ways, even between supposed partners. In 1744, the Iroquois agreed to several large cessions, including one to Virginia for the Shenandoah Valley, which was even then filling up with German immigrants passing down the Great Valley from Pennsylvania. The Iroquois didn’t really own the valley, but claimed it by nebulous “right of conquest” over the resident tribes. In council at Lancaster that summer, the Six Nations agreed to renounce their claims to “all the lands within the said colony” of Virginia, for which they gained explicit recognition of supremacy over land they’d never really controlled in the first place.

  But the league was itself trumped in a breathtaking piece of legerdemain. Virginia conveniently neglected to point out to the Iroquois that its royal land grant extended all the way to the Pacific coast. By choosing to honor the dubious Iroquois claim of conquest, the British could ignore legitimate Indian claims to a monumental sweep of land. “Virginia resumes its ancient Breadth, and has no other limits to the West . . . to the South Sea, including the Isl’d of California,” Virginia governor Robert Dinwiddie would later exult.

  California could wait; the province had just acquired an open door into the Ohio country. To exploit it, a number of influential Virginia investors, including “the Maryland Monster,” Thomas Cresap,15 formed the Ohio Company. In 1749, the company received a royal grant of half a million acres there—provided it settled a hundred families, with a well-built fort for protection, within seven years. Instead, the entry of the company into the delicate balance of conflicting interests and powers in the Ohio would, in a few years, result in one of the worst wars the world had ever seen, brought on by “the heedless greed of a few headstrong men,” historian Francis Jennings said. “That they lost money in the process is only a crowning irony.”

  To navigate the understandable opposition of the French, the Pennsylvanians, the hoodwinked Iroquois, and the Ohio Indians who actually lived on the frontier—and who would resent any attempt to settle it—the company turned to an experienced backwoods hand, Christopher Gist. For seven months beginning in the fall of 1750 and for five months again the next winter, Gist scouted the Ohio country as far west as Kentucky, where he saw “beautiful natural Meadows, covered with . . . blue Grass and Clover, and abound[ing] with Turkeys, Deer, Elks and most Sorts of Game particularly Buffaloes.”

  He was keeping his eyes open for possible settlement sites, such as the valley of “good level farming Land, with fine Meadows, the Timber white Oak and Hiccory,” along the Monongahela River in western Pennsylvania, which Gist found so appealing he later established a farm near there himself. Just to the east was a place known as Great Meadows, or the Flats, even more extensive relict prairies nestled within the mountains. Gist crossed paths with Croghan, who made light of the fact that the French were offering an enormous bounty for his scalp, and with Montour, who frequently served as Gist’s interpreter among the Lenape and Shawnee, to whom he promised large gifts.

  Gist didn’t reveal his purpose to the Indians, but Croghan knew what Virginia was planning. The French, no longer relying on Céloron’s buried plates, had started seizing English traders and their pelts. Croghan saw that the security of his business depended on a stronger military presence in the Ohio and pressed Pennsylvania hard to build a fort there, despite the reluctance of its Quaker-dominated assembly. (The assembly’s actions have long been cast as those of naive, blinkered pacifists, when in fact much of the friction between the assembly and Pennsylvania’s governors had more to do with the Friends’ principled opposition to an erosion of their strong governing role, as laid out in William Penn’s founding charter. The Quakers would eventually prove the only force pragmatic enough to end the coming frontier war.)

  Croghan brought the issue of a fort to a head in the spring of 1751, carrying a message from the Ohio tribes directly asking for a fort to provide them with protection against the increasingly potent French threat. The Quakers wavered, despite their pacifist beliefs. Yet when the assembly called Montour to corroborate Croghan’s report, the métis shocked everyone by contradicting his longtime friend and collaborator, saying that the fort was Croghan’s idea and the tribes would never go along with it. (Subsequent events suggest that Croghan was right. Why Montour blind-sided him in such a public, damaging way remains a mystery.)

  The door for Virginia opened even wider. In fact, Hamilton quietly shifted Montour’s services to Dinwiddie and encouraged the Virginia governor to pursue the course that Hamilton’s own assembly had refused. But Virginia would need explicit permission from both the Six Nations and the Ohio tribes to bring in settlers. Gist was expected to deliver a confirmation of the fraudulent 1744 treaty at Lancaster—with the help of Croghan, Montour, and a mountain of gifts—to a council at Logstown in June 1752.

  The Virginia commissioners called the treaty an opportunity for “polishing and strengthening the Chain of Friendship subsisting between us,” but historians suspect that backroom dealing led Tanaghrisson and other representatives of the Six Nations to sell out the Lenape once again at Logstown, since the formal agreement permitting Virginia to settle the southeast side of the Ohio bore the names of no Delaware sachems. At least some of the Indians saw Virginia’s interest for what it was. “An Indian who spoke good English came to me and desired to know where the Indian’s Land lay, for that the French claimed all the Land on one Side of the River Ohio & the English on the other side,” Gist said. “I was at a Loss to answer Him.”

  While the Logstown treaty was taking place, more than two hundred French, Ottawas, and Ojibwas swept into the Miami town of Pickawillany, killing Croghan’s resident trader there and thirty others. A special fate was reserved for Memeskia, the Miami leader known as “Old Briton,” who was boiled and ceremoniously eaten. The French were snapping up traders and their goods, leaving many Indians destitute and without supplies. Croghan and his partners, their business already foundering, went bankrupt as the entire frontier trading system collapsed. The Ohio tribes clamored for arms and ammunition, the military support Brother Onas had long promised, but they got almost nothing.

  A year later, meeting with the Iroquois in Albany in August, Conrad Weiser heard rumors of “a very numerous Army of Men well armed and some great Guns,” with which the French “would build Strong Houses . . . and so take Possession quite down [the Ohio] till they meet the French coming from below.” He had blunt advice for Virginia: “Raise about 2000 men and take possession of ohio by force[.] Build [forts] . . . and if in the time of peeace will admit knock every french man on ohio that won’t run to the head . . . If we don’t do it now we never again shall so be able to do it. And our posterity will Condemn us for our neglect.”

  In fact, with an alacrity the British couldn’t muster, the French displayed a military commitment suggesting they’d learned a few lessons from Céloron’s feeble bluster. The newly arrived governor-general, Ange Duquesne de Menneville, the Marquis Duquesne, whipped the lax troops into shape, tightening discipline. Mustering two thousand soldiers in the winter of 1752–53 despite strident complaints about the cost, Duquesne used them the next summer to build three forts in rapid succession: one on Lake Erie at Presque Isle Bay; another, Fort LeBoeuf, fifteen miles inland at the headwaters of the Rivière au Boeuf (French Creek to the British; the Venango to the Ohio Indians); and the third, Fort Machault, where French Creek meets the Allegheny River.

  Plans called for a fourth fort at Logstown, but the French would have to overcome the animosity
of the Indians there if they were to force the issue. Tanaghrisson issued a tense warning to the intruders: “Therefore now I come to forbid You . . . I tell you in plain Words You must go off this Land.” He repeated it three times, as required by tradition. The French dismissed him in a “very contemptuous manner,” and seeing them move with such determination made many of the Ohio Indians question their already shaky loyalty to the British and to Tanaghrisson.

  Both sides recognized that the Forks of the Ohio was the linchpin of the west. The French were dug in about seventy miles to the north, and the Virginians were eighty miles to the southeast at Will’s Creek. Dinwiddie was authorized to build a British fort, but unwilling to confront the French without explicit instructions from the Crown, he dispatched an urgent request to London. (“Urgent,” that is to say, within the realities of eighteenth-century communications. The messenger sailed in June, Dinwiddie’s letter was received in August and responded to immediately, and the governor had his firm instructions from the king in mid-November.) “You are to require of Them peaceably to depart,” he was told, but if the French chose to ignore the warning, “We do hereby strictly charge, & command You, to drive them off by Force of Arms.”

  To deliver that ultimatum, Dinwiddie accepted the services of an ambitious but untested twenty-one-year-old who volunteered to confront the French. On the surface, George Washington had few qualifications. His commission as a major in the newly formed local militia was less than a year old and probably had more to do with family and social connections than any evident ability. But Dinwiddie knew the young man had worked as a land surveyor in the wilds of the Shenandoah Valley and western mountains, and at nearly six feet four, he was a physically imposing presence—not an insignificant consideration in a military envoy.

  George Washington as Colonel in the First Virginia Regiment

  This Charles Willson Peale portrait, painted in 1772, shows the middle-aged Washington in the uniform he wore in 1758, when, as a colonel in the First Virginia Regiment, he again marched on Fort Duquesne. (Washington-Custis-Lee Collection, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia)

  The ink barely dry on his instructions, Washington left Williamsburg on October 31, traveling north to Will’s Creek, the Ohio Company’s station in the mountains of what is now Cumberland, Maryland. Along the way, he hired a Dutch-born, French-speaking soldier named Jacob van Braam to act as his interpreter, and at Will’s Creek he hired Christopher Gist and “four others as Servitors,” including an Indian trader named Currin who had worked for Croghan.

  Despite heavy rain and snow, and having to traverse what he called “extream good & bad Land” and to swim their horses across the freezing Allegheny River, Washington’s party reached Logstown in late November. There he met with Shingas, the leader of the Delaware, and with Tanaghrisson, who recounted his humiliating reception at Presque Isle that summer. Although the French wanted to fortify Logstown, Washington, casting an eye over the village, found it wanting from a military perspective. A fort upriver at the Forks of the Ohio would be cheaper and more effective, he felt, “equally well situated on Ohio, & have the entire Command of Monongahela.”

  Washington and his men labored farther upriver to Fort Machault—probably still just the trading stronghold the French had commandeered from Croghan—where the French garrison uncorked wine and “dos’d themselves pretty plentifully with it.” The captain was Philippe-Thomas de Joncaire, an influential interpreter who had grown up among the Seneca, had been with Céloron in 1749, and was now the leading French voice in the Ohio country trying to win over the Indians. He must have been charming; Washington and Gist both said that he treated them “with the greatest Complaisance” for three days before passing them up the chain of command to Fort LeBoeuf to meet the French commander, Jacques Legardeur de Saint-Pierre. A weathered military hand whom Washington called “an elderly Gentleman” (he was fifty-three), Legardeur had arrived at LeBoeuf only days earlier and held a sufficiently lofty rank to accept Dinwiddie’s floral demand that the French get lost.

  “Sir, in Obedience to my Instructions it becomes my Duty to require Your peaceable Departure, & that You wou’d forbear prosecuting a Purpose so interruptive of the Harmony & good Understanding which his Majesty is desirous to continue,” Dinwiddie wrote. Drafting a reply took Legardeur and his staff some days, during which Washington suspected him of “ploting every Scheme that the Devil & Man cou’d invent” to keep his Indian escort behind and leave Gist and Washington vulnerable. The young officer responded in kind, quietly assessing the fortifications, counting up the number of soldiers, evaluating the weight of the cannons, even tallying how many canoes lay along the river. He wrote nothing down, however; to be caught actively spying would be a grievous and dangerous breach of his embassy.

  At last, Legardeur handed a sealed reply to the young man he must have found insufferably callow and arrogant. “As to the Summons you send me to retire, I don’t think myself obliged to obey it,” Legardeur informed the Virginia governor. “Whatever may be your Instructions, I am here by Virtue of the Orders of my General; and I intreat you, Sir, not to doubt one Moment that I am determined to conform myself to them.”

  Now all Washington had to do was get the letter back to Virginia. He and his companions perilously threaded their way downriver by canoe, breaking through thickening ice, until they reclaimed their horses. The Indian hunters kept them well supplied with bear meat, but the cold, snow, and lack of forage had weakened their mounts to such an extent that Washington elected to abandon them and the rest of the party and to continue on foot with Gist. For his part, the guide was deeply skeptical of the plan. In fact, Gist’s opinion of Washington may not have been much higher than Legardeur’s. “I was unwilling that he should undertake such a travel, who had never been used to walking before this time,” Gist said, “but as he insisted on it, I set out with our packs, like Indians, and travelled eighteen miles.”

  “The Cold incres’d very fast, & the Roads were geting much worse by a deep Snow continually Freezing,” Washington wrote in his journal. “I took my necessary Papers, pull’d off my Cloths; tied My Self up in a Match Coat; & with my Pack at my back, with my Papers & Provisions in it, & a Gun, set out with Mr. Gist, fitted in the same Manner.”

  It was an exhausting trip even for Gist, who was used to rough travel, while Washington was “much fatigued.” Nor was the weather the only danger. A suspiciously ingratiating Indian who fell in with them along the way, trying to steer them back to the north toward French territory, suddenly turned and fired his musket at the men, just missing Gist. The next day, while crossing the river on a jury-rigged raft, Washington was flung into deep water amid the ice floes, and both men were trapped that night on an island, Gist’s fingers and toes frostbitten and Washington shivering in his frozen clothes.

  The young major straggled into Williamsburg on January 16, presenting Dinwiddie with Legardeur’s letter and a copy of his own journal, which the governor then passed on to the newspapers. Soon the journal was being reprinted up and down the colonies—the first time anyone outside of tidewater Virginia heard the name George Washington. One reader in particular—a Glasgow-born shopkeeper named Robert Stobo, who ran a store in Petersburg—was on such fire to see the frontier that he cadged a captain’s commission from his friend Dinwiddie and bought a uniform, a sword, and a copy of A Treatise of Military Discipline, a handbook for newly minted officers. He loaded hundreds of pounds of supplies, including a cask of wine, into a specially built wagon. Robert Stobo—“a slender man five feet and ten inches tall . . . with a dark complexion, a penetrating eye, an aquiline nose, and a cheerful, round face,” in the words of a biographer—was ready to go to war.

  No sooner was Washington home, with his recommendation for a fort at the Forks of the Ohio, than Dinwiddie ordered George Croghan’s one-time business partner William Trent to build it. Trent set out immediately, while Washington, promoted to lieutenant colonel, was tasked with raising one hundred mi
litiamen, then following Trent’s party to man the fort until reinforcements could arrive.

  Croghan, wintering in the Ohio ountry, was still pushing the idea of a Pennsylvania fortification—“If ye government wold Build a Strong Log’d house & Stockead itt Round, itt wold Do,” he wrote to Richard Peters in early February—but even as he was dashing off a similarly misspelled note to James Hamilton the same day, Trent and his Ohio Company workmen appeared on the scene. Croghan, who was about to leave, decided instead to stay, along with Montour, and translate, as Trent “Can’t talk ye Indian Languidge.” A few weeks later, Croghan departed, informing Hamilton that Trent “had enlisted about Seventy Men before I left Ohio. I left him and his Men at the Mouth of Mohongialo building a Fort, which seemed to give the Indians great Pleasure and put them in high Spirits.” Tanaghrisson helped lay the first log.

  Everyone knew that such a direct provocation, on the doorstep of the French outposts at Machault and LeBoeuf, was sure to draw a response. Shortly after Croghan and Montour left Logstown, a French officer arrived there with a stern warning. “I am convinced that You have thrown away your Fathers and taken to your Brothers the English,” he told the Indian leaders. “I tell You now that You have but a short Time to see the Sun, for in Twenty Days You and your Brothers the English shall all die.”