7
Colonel Washington’s Mission
IF NEW FRANCE HAD been populated by families like the Washingtons of Virginia, King Louis XIV would have been delighted with his New World empire. The Washingtons and their ilk were interested in land not for hunting, trapping, and trading but for settling. When young George Washington cast about for a profession, he took to surveying as if he had been born to it and was barely seventeen in July 1749 when he began tramping through Culpeper County and beyond, measuring off lots for settlement. He would pursue this profitable enterprise through October 1752, not only collecting handsome fees but scouting out and acquiring promising tracts for himself.
Just as George was embarking on his surveying career, his half brother Lawrence set out for London on a double mission. Long afflicted with what would soon prove to be a terminal case of tuberculosis, he hoped to find a physician who might cure him, even as he pursued an extraordinary business opportunity with a syndicate of British and American traders and speculators who were calling themselves the Ohio Company. On March 16, 1749, King George II granted 200,000 acres to the syndicate—with, however, the kind of stipulation Louis XIV would have enthusiastically endorsed. Within seven years, the Ohio Company had to plant a settlement of one hundred families and build a fort for their protection on the grant or forfeit the land. If Lawrence and his partners managed to attract the required number of settlers, the company would not only keep its 200,000 acres but would be granted an additional 300,000.
For more than two centuries now, the history of colonial America has been explained as a grand narrative of evolving national, ethnic, and racial allegiances, alliances, and enmities. Yet, as we have seen, more pragmatic motives of business often had effects that were both more immediate and at least equally far-reaching. The Ohio Company project, on which his family’s fortune depended, would shape George Washington’s early military career and, through that career, by bringing Anglo-American fortunes into direct conflict with Franco-American fortunes, would in large measure determine the destiny of North America.
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Lawrence Washington found no cure in London, but he was so excited by the prospects of the Ohio Company that his health generally improved when he returned to his northern Virginia estate, Mount Vernon, in 1750. Yet as he found himself wrestling with threats from the French, who laid claim to lands King George II had granted him and his fellow investors, and laboring in vain to find firm allies among the Indians at the fringes of the land grant, his health once again slipped into decline. At the time, the salubrious sea air of Barbados was widely regarded as a sovereign cure for those afflicted in the lungs. He persuaded George to suspend his surveying career and accompany him to the islands. The pair took ship on September 28, 1751, and settled near Carlisle Bay.
By the end of 1751, Lawrence, his condition unimproved, decided to give the Bermudas a try. He sent his half brother home to Virginia, recognizing that the young man’s surveying career had been interrupted long enough. George Washington landed at Yorktown on January 28, 1752, and, en route to Mount Vernon, to bring Lawrence’s wife, Nancy, tidings of her husband, he detoured to Williamsburg to introduce himself to Robert Dinwiddie, Virginia’s energetic lieutenant governor. Little is known of this visit, but the young man must have made a good impression on Dinwiddie, who was also a principal Ohio Company investor. Within less than two years, Dinwiddie would send George Washington on a hazardous diplomatic mission, the outcome of which was critical to the future of Virginia and the significant portions of both the Dinwiddie and Washington fortunes that were tied to the Ohio Company.
In the meantime, Lawrence Washington’s letters from Bermuda grew increasingly dark. He confessed that his illness made him feel “like a criminal condemned,” and, giving up on Bermuda, he returned to Mount Vernon in June, scribbled his will within days of his arrival, and, on July 26, 1752, died. He was thirty-four. His half brother, grief-stricken, executed the hastily composed will, most of the estate, including Lawrence’s stock in the Ohio Company, going to Nancy and their infant daughter, Sarah. George would share equally in real estate that would go to Lawrence’s brothers in the event that daughter Sarah should die childless. Further, upon Nancy’s death—and if Sarah died without issue—George would inherit Mount Vernon, together with all of his half brother’s other Fairfax County holdings. The young man’s more immediate inheritance was Lawrence’s speculative faith in the future of the Ohio Company.
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Upon Lawrence Washington’s death, the presidency of the Ohio Company passed to his fellow investor Lieutenant Governor Dinwiddie. Lawrence had also held another important office, adjutant general of the Virginia colony, with the rank of major and the responsibility for raising, organizing, and training the colonial militia. In view of the business relationship between Lawrence and the lieutenant governor, George believed himself entitled to inherit his half brother’s position as adjutant general, even though he had no experience as a soldier, let alone as a commander of soldiers. On November 6, 1752, the Council of Virginia decided to divide the colonial adjutancy into four districts but, at Dinwiddie’s urging, did offer the Southern District to the callow Washington, who eagerly took the oath of office on February 1, 1753, three weeks before turning twenty-one.
By law, all Virginia men over twenty-one were obliged to render militia service if called, but, like so much other British colonial legislation, the law had long languished unenforced. Feeling a growing threat from the French, Dinwiddie called for the first general muster of the Virginia militias to commence in September 1753. As adjutant, it fell to Washington to instruct his subordinate officers sufficiently so that they could instill in the men under their command some level of discipline and combat effectiveness. Yet no record survives of young Major Washington’s ever meeting with the militia officers under his supervision or even of his visiting any of the counties under his jurisdiction during 1753. None of his letters or diary entries during this period so much as mentions military matters or his military responsibilities. Did he take the French threat seriously?
On June 26, 1749, less than a year after the end of King George’s War, Roland-Michel Galissonière, marquis de La Galissonière, governor of New France, sent Captain Pierre-Joseph Céleron de Blainville with 213 men on an expedition into the Ohio Country—the very tracts King George II had awarded the Ohio Company. Céleron de Blainville traveled as far west as Logstown, site of modern-day Ambridge, Pennsylvania, on the east bank of the Ohio River, eighteen miles northwest of Pittsburgh. He carried with him a message to all of the Indians he encountered: The English want to rob you of your country. I am warning them to stay away. He also lugged a load of lead plates, each inscribed with the French emperor’s claim to sovereignty, which he buried at intervals along his round-trip of some three thousand miles.
In August 1749, La Galissonière was replaced as governor by Jacques-Pierre de Jonquière, who decided to enforce French claims with something more than a few words to the Indians and bundle of lead plates. He built Fort Rouillé at the location of modern Toronto with the purpose of reclaiming the fur trade for French traders while severing British trade between the northern Great Lakes and Oswego, the British stronghold on the south shore of Lake Ontario in New York. Jonquière also built up and augmented the French fortifications at Detroit, a fur-trading headquarters that rivaled that of the Hudson’s Bay Company, then launched a raid against the Shawnee, who were the most powerful of the tribes doing business with the few English traders working the Ohio Country.
Jonquière’s move against the Shawnee was not big enough to inflict decisive damage or even to intimidate them. If anything, it was a strategic error, which served only to drive the Shawnee more deeply into the English fold; however, the French fur traders, licensed and unlicensed, were, on their own, steadily edging out English traders and, in the process, cementing good French relations with Indian hunters and trappers. The Washingtons and the Dinwiddies were far more interested in land than in beaver pelts. They wanted to build settlements and great plantations. Nevertheless, they understood that skins were the currency of the far frontier, and by the mid-eighteenth century, the richest harvest of pelts was to be had in the Ohio Country, the more easterly environments having been hunted and trapped to virtual extinction. Thus, whoever controlled the region of the Ohio laid claim not only to the future—of the country and of the family fortune—but to the present as well. With the peltries of the Ohio Country came cash liquidity as well as influence over the Indians, who, much as they resented any Euro-American incursions into their homeland, also craved the profitable trade they brought.
In response to Jonquière’s aggressive expansion into the region, British colonial authorities encouraged English traders to be more aggressive. They authorized the purchase of more western land from the Indians and, during May–July 1752, negotiated the Treaty of Logstown between what was now the Six Iroquois Nations (Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, Cayuga, Mohawk, and Tuscarora) and the Delaware, the Shawnee, and the Wyandot Indians on the one side, and Virginia as well as the Ohio Company on the other. By the Treaty of Logstown, the colony and the company secured an Indian “quitclaim” to the entire Ohio Country.
Quitclaim. The word, redolent as it was of old English common law, was highly significant. Typically, the French sought to create productive relations with various Indian tribes through religious conversion or through even more intimate contact; French traders brought their business to the Indians, lived among them, intermarried with them. Whether the agents of New France were missionaries or traders, their effect was to create a blended Franco-Native community. In the case of the English colonies, in contrast, even “friendly” Indian relations were based not on creating a blended community but on trade and monetary exchange grounded in English law. The English assumption underlying the acquisition of land was that the Indians owned the land they occupied by virtue of what the law called “primitive right.” Ownership, as the English saw it, was inherently transferable. Such transfer could legitimately be made by seizure—conquest through battle—or by purchase. In either case, the acquisition of property from those who held it by primitive right gave the transferee an exclusive legal claim. As the English understood it, the Logstown Treaty “quitclaim” legally excluded the French from the Ohio Country; therefore, ownership of what was then the American West had been settled.
The French, naturally, did not see it this way.
To the legalistic approach of the English they responded with violence. While delegates from the Miami tribe were negotiating at Logstown, news reached them that French-led Indian forces had raided and destroyed Pickawillany (present-day Piqua, Ohio), the Miami “capital,” on June 21, 1752. Tanaghrisson, a much-venerated Seneca chief known to the English as the Half-King, asked the Virginia delegates at Logstown to tell their government to build a fort at the “Forks of the Ohio” (the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, site of present-day Pittsburgh), the better to defend the Seneca and other western tribes (including the Miami) against the French and their Indian allies.
We do not know what answer the colonial delegates gave the Half-King, but the Virginia authorities hardly rushed to build the requested fort, nor did they take retaliatory action for the attack on Pickawillany. These failures quickly led to the unraveling of the Logstown Treaty, which presented a golden opportunity to Ange Duquesne de Menneville, marquis Duquesne, who had replaced La Jonquière as governor of New France on July 1, 1752. Duquesne immediately ordered the construction not just of a single fort, but a fortress chain running from Montreal in the north to New Orleans in the south. It was nothing less than a chain gate drawn across the Ohio Country, physically closing that territory to the English. Worse, the action thoroughly intimidated the western Iroquois, thereby neutralizing the most important Indian ally the English had. Duquesne understood the exquisite interdependence of the colonial-tribal alliance system. With the Iroquois taken out of the picture, most of the lesser tribes that had professed friendship with the English folded as well throughout the whole Ohio Country. As for the few that expressed their desire to remain loyal to the English, their appeals for aid in resisting the French were met with haughty indifference and, in some cases, outright refusal.
By the summer of 1753, the prospects for the Ohio Company—and all those heavily invested in it—were at low ebb. Seeking a remedy, in August 1753, in London, Lord Halifax, principal booster of Britain’s North American empire and himself an Ohio Company investor, prodded the royal cabinet to declare war against France. Was a cause needed? He cited the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht (ending both the War of the Spanish Succession and Queen Anne’s War), which stipulated the status of the Iroquois as British subjects. (That no one had asked the Iroquois about this hardly mattered. The agreement, made in the Netherlands and not in North America, was between European governments, not Euro-Americans and Indians.) In conjunction with this provision, Halifax also unearthed allusions to certain deeds drawn up between the English and Iroquois during 1701–26. Based on this fistful of deeds and the treaty-decreed status of the Iroquois, Halifax indignantly proclaimed the English legal right to a vast expanse of Iroquois lands, including those the Iroquois themselves had acquired by conquest. In other words, Halifax explained to the cabinet that all of the Ohio Country was by law part of the British Empire and had been invaded by French thieves. Declare war? France was already at war. It was now time to fight. Cabinet and crown immediately authorized Dinwiddie to take whatever action he deemed necessary to evict the French from the British Empire in the Ohio Country.
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Young Major Washington waited neither for word nor action from the British crown or the lieutenant governor. He had read the colonial newspaper accounts, including those in the Virginia Gazette, announcing the arrival of some fifteen hundred French regulars—the king’s soldiers, not Canadian militiamen—in the spring of 1753, and he certainly knew of the construction of French forts. Without being summoned, he rode off to Williamsburg, arriving on or about October 26, 1753. There he found the customarily sleepy capital uncharacteristically bustling as the burgesses gathered for an extraordinary early session of the assembly to debate how best to counter the French “invasion.” In August, Dinwiddie had written to England for help. King George II promised men and matériel, ordering Dinwiddie in the meantime to make every possible effort to safeguard the Ohio Country. The king—or a minister over the king’s signature—also directed Dinwiddie to convey a warning to the French that amounted to a landlord’s notice of eviction.
In Europe, such a direction and such a note seemed quite reasonable, but on the edge of a vast wilderness, delivering eviction papers was far from a matter of routine. As early as May 1753, Dinwiddie had asked Governor George Clinton of New York, whose colony bordered the main territory of New France, to make discreet inquiries as to why the French were sending regular troops into English territory. Receiving no answer, he then sent the fur traders William Trent and William Russell to locate the key French outposts and to warn their commanders that they were trespassing. Neither Trent nor Russell proved very venturesome, however, and they never traveled west of Logstown. So by the time he received the king’s orders, Dinwiddie was blind. He knew the French were out there, but he had no idea of where. Even more important, he did not know how many. While it was true that the newspapers had reported the arrival of fifteen hundred regulars on the southern shore of Lake Erie in the spring, Dinwiddie understood the reality of armies operating in the wilderness. They got sick. Paper strength was always one thing, effective strength quite another. It was the effective numbers that counted, and it was the effective numbers that remained unknown to him.
Just when Dinwiddie needed both reliable reconnaissance and a messenger, in walked George Washington.
“The Governor acquainted the Board that George Washington Esqr. Adjutant General for the Southern District had offered himself to go properly commissioned to the Commandant of the French Forces, to learn by what Authority he presumes to make Incroachments on his Majesty’s Lands of the Ohio,” the journal of the Council of Virginia recorded on October 27, 1753. The council approved Washington’s appointment swiftly and drew up a letter for him to put into the hands of the “Commandant of the French Forces on the Ohio.”
Dinwiddie’s commission, dated October 30, the day before it was handed to the major, appointed Washington as the governor’s “express Messenger,” empowering him “to proceed hence with all convenient & possible Dispatch, to that Part, or Place, on the River Ohio, where the French have lately erected a Fort, or Forts, or where the Commandant of the French Forces resides, in order to deliver my Letter & Message to Him; & after waiting not exceeding one Week for an Answer, You are to take Your Leave & return immediately back.”
Accompanying this commission were detailed instructions directing the major to proceed first to Logstown and there “address Yourself to the Half King, to Monacatoocha & other the Sachems of the Six Nations; acquainting them with Your Orders to visit & deliver my Letter to the French commanding Officer; & desiring the said Chiefs to appoint You a sufficient Number of their Warriors to be Your Safeguard, as near the French as You may desire, & to wait Your further Direction.”
Dinwiddie and Washington well knew that the Half-King had already warned the French that they were trespassing on Indian lands in the Ohio Country. Monacatoocha, more familiarly known to the English as Scarouady, was an Oneida chief who ranked in prestige just below the Half-King and who, like him, had played an important role in the Logstown Treaty. In directing Washington to make contact with these two men, Dinwiddie sought to provide protection for his messenger while also demonstrating to the Indian leaders that he was looking out for their interests against the French. What he left entirely to Washington’s discretion was the decision as to how close he should bring the chiefs to the French commandant. This suggests that the lieutenant governor was unsure whether their presence would enhance or diminish Washington’s apparent authority. Was it better for the French to see that the English had powerful sachems on their side? Or was it better to make the mission appear to be that of a royal British envoy communicating with a French official?
Although Dinwiddie left the status of the Indians vague, he made it very clear that Washington’s mission was not strictly diplomatic:
You are to take Care to be truly inform’d what Forts the French have erected, & where; How they are Garrison’d [manned] & appointed [fortified], & what is their Distance from each other, & from Logstown: And from the best Intelligence You can procure, You are to learn what gave Occasion to this Expedition of the French. How they are like to be supported, & what their Pretentions are.
Not to put too fine a point on the matter, Washington was a spy. Yet Dinwiddie took care to instruct him not to behave like one. After “the French Commandant has given You the requir’d & necessary Dispatches” in response to the notice of eviction, Dinwiddie wrote, Washington was to “desire of him that, agreeable to the Law of Nations,” he would provide “a proper Guard, to protect You as far on Your Return, as You may judge for Your safety, against any stragling Indians or Hunters that may be ignorant of Yr Character & molest You.” In other words, the spy was instructed to request bodyguards—and to request them from the very people on whom he spied.
To his written instructions Dinwiddie added a verbal order. He instructed Washington to demand that the French commandant explain why the French were holding two British traders and in particular why they had driven John Frazier (or Fraser), a Pennsylvania gunsmith and Indian trader, from his trading post at Venango, which was now occupied by the French. The lieutenant governor also directed Washington to call on Christopher Gist at Wills Creek, which was on the way to Logstown. He was to formally request Gist to serve as his guide, for Gist knew the Ohio frontier better than just about any other white man. An explorer and surveyor, he had been commissioned by the Ohio Company in 1750 to explore the Ohio region as far as the mouth of the Scioto River, and in 1751 he had pushed as far south as the Great Kanawha River. At the Logstown treaty negotiations in 1752, he had served as the representative of the Ohio Company.
Gist was an example of the frontier trader at his best—intrepid explorer, shrewd businessman, and natural diplomat—and Washington was pleased to bring him on board. In addition to his other skills and knowledge, Gist would also serve as an Indian interpreter. Washington also needed a man with a good working knowledge of French, but, given the nature of his mission, hiring a Frenchman was out of the question. Although he knew of no British colonist fluent in French, he was aware that living near Fredericksburg was a young Dutchman named Jacob Van Braam, who spoke his native Dutch as well as enough French to have emboldened him to advertise himself, in Annapolis in 1752, as a teacher of it. English was his third language, but it would have to do. When he reached Fredericksburg on November 1, Washington located Jacob Van Braam and hired him on the spot.
From Fredericksburg, Washington and Van Braam set off for Alexandria, where they purchased some of the supplies and equipment necessary for the expedition. This done, they headed through Vestal’s Gap to Winchester, where Washington purchased horses and more supplies, including a tent. From here, the pair headed northwest and across the Potomac to Wills Creek, which they reached on November 14, and located the cabin of Christopher Gist, who readily agreed to be part of the expedition. Washington next recruited four “servitors”: men to do the grunt work of hauling weapons, powder, ammunition, a tent, food, wampum (strings of shell beads used as a kind of currency in dealing with Indians), and trade goods. He chose Barnaby Currin, a Pennsylvania Indian trader; John MacQuire (or McGuire or McGuier), an Indian trader and former Fairfax County militiaman; William Jenkins, who often served Dinwiddie as a courier; and Henry Steward, an all-round frontier hand.
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The party of seven men set out from Wills Creek on November 15 and camped at the end of the first day at George’s Creek, having made just over eight miles. A breathless runner caught up with them here, delivering to Gist a letter from one of his sons. The young man had fallen ill on his way home from Cherokee country and was camped, laid up, at the mouth of the Conegocheague River, some six miles southwest of present-day Hagerstown, Maryland. Among Gist’s many skills was frontier medicine, and that is what his son now sought from him. For his part, Washington did not order Gist to stay, but he did remind him that he was a critical member of an important embassy. Gist hurriedly compounded a remedy from materials he had on hand, wrote out instructions to his son, and, difficult as it must have been for him, handed the medicine and the letter to the messenger, asking him to carry them to the Conegocheague. The boy would have to treat himself.
Clearly, Gist was a man committed to doing what he understood as his duty, and in this Washington was most fortunate. Gist enjoyed the kind of thoroughly comfortable relations with Indians—they called him Annosanah—more typical of French than of English traders. At the same time, he was educated well beyond the level of most men who plied the frontier. Years after the mission, in a letter to Speaker of the Virginia House of Burgesses John Robinson, on May 30, 1757, Washington praised Gist as one who “has had extensive dealings with the Indians, is in great esteem among them, well acquainted with their manners and customs, indefatigable and patient.… As for his capacity, honesty, and zeal, I dare venture to engage.”
By November 17, the embassy had reached Laurel Hill and had climbed its 2,400-foot height, then descended about 700 feet to a wide and boggy plateau, which was distinguished from the surrounding country by the comparative thinness of its forest growth. Gist told Washington that the clearing was known as Great Meadows. From here, they would have to trek over another set of mountains, known as Chestnut Ridge, west and northwest of Great Meadows, then continue to the Monongahela River, which would take them to the Ohio River and the French commandant. Even the experienced Christopher Gist did not know if the Monongahela at the point due west of Chestnut Ridge was navigable by canoe. He therefore advised a more arduous but more prudent overland march to the north and directly to the Ohio River. On November 18, before they could set out, they were met by the first large snowfall of the season. Gist advised riding out the storm at what he called his “new settlement,” a rude outpost consisting of a twenty-by-thirty-foot house and a few small outbuildings between the Youghiogheny and Monongahela rivers.
They were now about seventy miles from Wills Creek, and even though the snow had not let up by the twentieth, Washington insisted on making the twenty miles to Jacobs Cabins, an abandoned settlement believed to have been named after Captain Jacobs, a Delaware Indian chief. They rested through a night that turned from snow to freezing rain, and first light revealed that a number of the expedition’s horses had wandered off. There was nothing for it but to lean into the weather and find the horses.
By eleven o’clock, all of the animals had been recovered, and on November 22, the expedition reached the Monongahela at the mouth of Turtle Creek, near the settlement of John Frazier, the gunsmith and Indian trader whom the French had driven out of Venango. Doubtless, Washington asked him Dinwiddie’s question: Why had the French forces evicted him? We do not know his reply, but Washington did record that Frazier presented him with a string of wampum from the Half-King together with a message for Dinwiddie from the sachem. It warned that three tribes of French-allied Indians had “taken up the hatchet” (declared war) against the English. That was a sobering tidbit; however, Frazier also noted that the French troops had been advancing from Lake Erie toward the Ohio River, but were overtaken by messengers who delivered the news that the so-called general of French forces, Pierre Paul de la Malgue, sieur de Marin, had died suddenly. This prompted most of the Ohio-bound French army to turn around. Things were looking up after all. Perhaps Washington would find the French commandant more receptive to Dinwiddie’s message than he might otherwise have been.
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Of course, he still had to find the Frenchman—and each day brought worsening weather. “The Waters,” Washington observed in his diary, “were quite impassable, without Swimming our Horses.” Therefore, he secured the “loan of a Canoe from Mr. Frazer” and sent “Barnaby Currin & Henry Steward down Monongahela, with our Baggage” while he and the rest of his party rode through icy rain unencumbered to “the Forks of Ohio,” where they would meet up with Currin, Steward, and the expedition’s baggage.
This rendezvous successfully accomplished, Washington contemplated completing the journey to Logstown, where he would meet the Half-King. First, apparently acting on Gist’s advice, he decided to call upon Shingas, principal chief of the Turkey, or Unalachtigo, tribe of Delaware Indians. At this time, Shingas was a friend of the English and lived on the site of a fort planned for the Ohio Company. Gist persuaded Washington that it would be good politics to invite him to accompany the expedition to meet with the Half-King. Shingas accepted, and the party pressed on to Logstown, only to find that the Half-King had gone hunting. Washington sent Monacatoocha to find him.
On the next day, November 25, while awaiting the Half-King’s arrival, Washington was visited by four or five men in faded and stained French uniforms, led by a British trader named Brown, who announced the Frenchmen as deserters from the army of regulars. Washington summoned his interpreter, Van Braam, and opened an interrogation, which confirmed the darkest rumors of French activity in the Ohio Country. The men said that they had been members of a hundred-man company sent up the Mississippi to rendezvous at Logstown with another hundred French troops. United, they were to advance farther up the Ohio and deeper into Ohio Company territory. Washington could only conclude that the two hundred were being sent to build and garrison a fort on the Forks of the Ohio, the most strategically commanding point in the whole Ohio Company grant—the gateway to the West.
The situation was looking serious indeed, and Washington’s questions became commensurately more urgent. How many men did the French have on the Mississippi? How many forts?
Through the halting English of Van Braam, Washington understood that there were four small forts, with cannon, each garrisoned with thirty to forty men. They were distributed between a larger fort at New Orleans and another at what Van Braam translated as the “Black Islands,” explaining that the Frenchmen said “Îles Noires.” Presumably, what they meant was “Illinois,” at the time an obscure reference to a western Indian tribe entirely unknown to Washington. He was, however, able to make out the names of two other western tribes: Obiash (Wabash) and Chawanon (Shawnee). From this information, it seemed clear to Washington that the French were assembling an extensive Indian alliance that included at least two tribes, the Illinois and the Wabash, hitherto unknown to the English, and one, the Shawnee, that had been an English ally in King George’s War. It was as if the French were poisoning the whole western wilderness against the English, recruiting two fresh allies while trying to turn an old friend of the English into a new friend of New France.
Washington may at least have taken comfort in hearing of the small numbers of Frenchmen garrisoning each fort, but his relief could not have lasted long. The deserters went on to report that, while the forts between New Orleans and the “Black Islands” were thinly manned, there were “35 Companies of 40 Men each, with a pretty strong Fort, mounting 8 large Carriage Guns” at New Orleans and, at the other end of the chain of fortifications, the “Black Islands,” there were “several Companies, & a Fort with 6 Guns.”
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Apparently, Washington completed his interrogation by three in the afternoon, because he recorded in his diary at this hour the long-anticipated arrival of the Half-King. The sachem greeted him with the welcome information that the commandant was to be found at Fort LeBoeuf but observed that “the nearest & levelest Way” to it “was now impassable, by reason of the many large miry Savannas” and that the only route now lay through Venango, some fifty miles northeast of Logstown, at the confluence of French Creek and the Allegheny River. From Venango, it would be a march of another thirty miles. Once arrived at Fort LeBoeuf, the Half-King warned, Washington could not expect a warm welcome. He had met with Pierre-Paul de la Malgue, sieur de Marin. That commandant had recently died, but, the Half-King implied, there was no reason to expect more cordial treatment from his replacement. He then recited for Washington the speech he himself had made to the sieur de Marin, how he had reminded him that “in former Days [the French had] set a Silver Bason before us wherein there was the Leg of a Beaver, and desir’d of all Nations to come & eat of it; to eat in Peace & Plenty, & not to be Churlish to one another; & that if any such Person shou’d be found to be a Disturber; I here lay down by the Edge of the Dish a rod, which you must Scourge them with.” Then the Half-King related how he told the Frenchman that it was now “you that is the Disturber in this Land, by coming & building your Towns, and taking it [our land] away unknown to us & by Force.”
FATHERS [Half-King told the Frenchman] We kindled a Fire a long Time ago at a Place call’d Morail, where we desir’d you to stay, & not to come & intrude upon our Land. I now desire you may dispatch to that Place; for be it known to you Fathers, this is our Land, & not yours. FATHERS I desire you may hear me in Civilness; if not, We must handle that rod which was laid down for the Use of the obstropulous. If you had come in a peaceable Manner like our Brothers the English, We shou’d not have been against your trading with us as they do, but to come Fathers, & build great Houses upon our Land, & to take it by Force, is what we cannot submit to.
Doubtless, Washington took comfort in this narrative, which proved that the Half-King saw the French as invaders and the English as trading partners. We cannot even guess whether he also recognized the degree of political sophistication the account demonstrated: how the Iroquois skillfully exploited divisions between the Euro-Americans with the purpose of using one faction to help drive another from their land. While the Half-King wanted to exhibit his loyalty to Washington, his speech also suggested that this loyalty was distinctly conditional:
FATHERS Both you & the English are White. We live in a Country between, therefore the Land does not belong either to one or the other; but the GREAT BEING above allow’d it to be a Place of residence for us; so Fathers, I desire you to withdraw, as I have done our Brothers the English, for I will keep you at Arm’s length. I lay this down as a Tryal for both, to see which will have the greatest regard to it, & that Side we will stand by, & make equal Sharers with us: Our Brothers the English have heard this, & I come now to tell it to you, for I am not affraid to discharge you off this Land.
Whichever side, French or English, came closest to abiding by the permanent, proper, God-given state of things, the Iroquois would befriend.
Whether or not Washington appreciated the conditional nature of the alliance, the Frenchman had clearly and rudely rejected it. “NOW MY CHILD,” he had begun his reply—his form of address making a sharp contrast to the “FATHERS” formula the Half-King had employed—
I have heard your Speech … but you need not put yourself to the Trouble of Speaking for I will not hear you: I am not affraid of Flies or Musquito’s; for Indians are such as those; I tell you down that River I will go, & will build upon it according to my Command: If the River was ever so block’d up, I have Forces sufficient to burst it open, & tread under my Feet all that stand in Opposition together with their Alliances; for my Force is as the Sand upon the Sea Shoar.… Child, you talk foolish; 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 Shawnesse & you were at War: Lead was the Man that went down, & took Possession of that River; it is my Land, & I will have it let who will stand up for, or say against it. I’ll buy & sell with the English (mockingly). If People will be rul’d by me they may expect Kindness but not else.
There was yet more affront. Dinwiddie had instructed Washington to find out what had happened to the two English traders taken prisoner by the French. The Half-King had already asked about it “& receiv’d this Answer”: “CHILD You think it is a very great Hardship that I made Prisoners of those two People at Venango, don’t you concern yourself with it we took & carried them to Canada to get Intelligence of what the English were doing in Virginia.”
Washington now had pictures of his ally and of his enemy. More practically, he also had some more concrete intelligence. The Half-King informed him that the French had built “two Forts, one on Lake Erie, & another on French Creek,” and even gave Washington “a Plan of them of his own drawing.” The next day, a grateful Washington addressed the assembled sachems. Rejecting the appellation Half-King had used with the French—“Fathers”—as well as that the commandant had used to disparage Half-King—“Child”—he called the assembled chiefs “Brothers”:
I have call’d you together in Council, by Order of your Brother the Governor of Virginia, to acquaint you that I am sent with all possible Dispatch to visit & deliver a Letter to the French Commandant of very great Importance to your Brothers the English: & I dare say to you their Friends & Allies. I was desir’d Brothers, by your Brother the Governor, to call upon you, the Sachems of the Six Nations, to inform you of it, & to ask your Advice & Assistance to proceed the nearest & best Road to the French. You see Brothers I have got thus far on my Journey. His Honour likewise desir’d me to apply to you for some of your young Men to conduct and provide Provisions for us on our Way: & to be a Safeguard against those French Indians, that have taken up the Hatchet against us. I have spoke this particularly to you Brothers, because His Hon. our Governor, treats you as good Friends & Allies, & holds you in great Esteem. To confirm what I have said I give you this String of Wampum.
After conferring with the other sachems for some time, the Half-King gave Washington a message to deliver to Dinwiddie: “I rely upon you as a Brother ought to do, as you say we are Brothers, & one People. We shall put Heart in Hand, & speak to our Fathers the French, concerning the Speech they made to me, & you may depend that we will endeavour to be your Guard.” The Half-King then addressed Washington directly: “BROTHER, as you have ask’d my Advice, I hope you will be ruled by it, & stay ’til I can provide a Company to go with you.… I intend to send a Guard of Mingoes, Shawnesse, & Delawar’s, that our Brothers may see the Love and Loyalty We bear them.” Washington recorded his response: “As I had Orders to make all possible Dispatch, & waiting here very contrary to my Inclinations; I thank’d him in the most suitable Manner I cou’d, & told that my Business requir’d the greatest Expedition, & wou’d not admit of that Delay.” The Half-King persisted and insisted—“this is a Matter of no small Moment, & must not be enter’d into without due consideration”—and Washington relented, deciding to await the arrival of the “Guard,” more (he recorded) out of unwillingness to offend the Half-King than to benefit from any protection the escort might provide.
* * *
A day passed. Then, on November 28, the Half-King, Monacatoocha, and two other sachems entered Washington’s tent “& beg’d … to know what Business we were going to the French about.”
Did this query suggest to Washington an underlying reason for the delay the Half-King had requested? The fact was that Washington had behaved like a salesman who was eager to close the sale. He had omitted from his speech all detail concerning what Dinwiddie and the other English hoped to get from the French. Clearly, the Half-King had not wanted to be rushed into a bargain. It was, Washington wrote in his diary, “a Question I all along expected, & [I] provided as satisfactory Answers as I cou’d, which alay’d their Curiosity a little.”
Did it allay their curiosity, though? Washington’s response, still quite vague, elicited not an expression of satisfaction but, from Monacatoocha, a report of sinister news. A “few Days ago,” he said, an Indian from Venango had brought word that a Captain Joncaire, the French “Interpreter in Chief, living at Venango, & a Man of Note in the Army,” had “call’d all the Mingo’s, Delawar’s &ca. together … & told them that [the French] intended to have been down the River this Fall” but postponed their advance until spring, when they would come into the country “with a far greater Number.” When they did come, Joncaire cautioned, the Indians had better be “quite Passive, & not intermeddle, unless they had a mind to draw all [the French] force upon them; for that they expected to fight the English three Years … in which Time they shou’d Conquer.”
So far, this was a disturbing though familiar threat; but Monacatoocha continued, explaining that Joncaire told the Indians that “shou’d [the English] prove equally strong [as the French], that they [the French] & the English wou’d join to cut [the Indians] off, & divide the Land between [the English and the French]: that … there was Men enough to … make them Masters of the Ohio.”
This was an extraordinary thing for the Frenchman to have said—assuming that Monacatoocha was telling the truth. Washington operated on the assumption that the Half-King and his fellow sachems believed that the French were the common enemies of the English and the Indians. Now Monacatoocha was telling him that the Indians did not take this for granted. The question the Half-King had was about racial loyalty—whether the enmity between the French and the English was stronger than that between the Indians and Euro-Americans.
That Washington failed to answer this sophisticatedly skeptical question to his satisfaction is suggested by what happened the next day, November 29. Early in the morning, the Half-King and Monacootcha “beg’d me to stay one Day more,” Washington wrote. Anxious as he was to leave, Washington accepted the Half-King’s explanation that the Shawnee chiefs had not yet sent him their wampum and that Chief Shingas (who was to form part of the escort) had not yet assembled his warriors and had also been detained by the sickness of his wife. Washington understood that possession of the wampum was important, because returning it to the French would signify that whatever agreements existed between the tribes and the French were officially terminated. Giving back the wampum, Washington wrote, “was shaking of[f] all Dependence upon the French”; therefore, “I consented to stay, as I believ’d an Offence offer’d at this Crisis, might have been attended with greater ill Consequence than another Day’s Delay.”
So yet another day passed, and when Washington awoke on November 30, he was finally introduced to the promised escort. It consisted not of Shingas and a host of warriors but of one ancient chief named Jeskakake, another old man called by the English White Thunder, and one young hunter (whose job would be to kill game for the expedition), in addition to the Half-King. Four men. This was all the escort the Half-King had been able to recruit. He had an explanation. “A greater Number,” he said, “might give the French Suspicion of some bad Design, & cause them to be treated rudely.” To his credit, Washington didn’t swallow this whole. “I rather think they cou’d not get their Hunters in,” he wrote in his diary. Nevertheless, at nine o’clock, he and Gist set off with their meager escort—two old men, one important chief, and a callow young hunter—on a mission intended to intimidate a French commander, who was ensconced with men and cannon in one of a chain of forts, and persuade him to meekly slink out of the Ohio Country.