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CHAPTER II

WOODSMAN AND DIPLOMAT AT TWENTY-ONE

"The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. All history will convince you of this, and that wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement and leisure. Great necessities call out great virtues. When a mind is raised and animated by scenes that engage the heart, then those qualities, which would otherwise lie dormant, wake into life and form the character of the hero and the statesman."- MRS. JOHN ADAMS.

THE governor of Virginia, along with the other Colonial governors, was instructed by Great Britain, in 1753, to serve notice on the French that their forts built on western lands claimed by the English were an encroachment. He was also ordered, if the French resisted, to employ force. Looking about for a messenger to perform the hazardous mission, a journey through five or six hundred miles of forests, — an errand requiring diplomacy, courage, experience in the woods, tact with savages, and information about forts,-Governor Dinwiddie selected a man of twenty-one, whom, in a message to another governor, he described as "a person of distinction." This tall, grave, and handsome youth

set out for the Ohio River on the last day of October. Arrived the next day at Fredericksburg, he engaged as French interpreter his former fencing-master, Jacob Vanbraam, who had also served with Captain Lawrence. The Indian interpreter was John Davidson. Arrived at what is now Cumberland, Major Washington engaged as guide Christopher Gist, a trader who had made settlements and taken possession for the Ohio Company of the country claimed by both nations; and also engaged as aids four other men, two of them Indian traders. Heavy rains and deep snows made the forests even more than commonly difficult; their progress was slow, and they had to borrow a canoe from an Indian trader and send two of their men with the baggage down the Monongahela to meet the rest of the party at the forks of the Ohio. Washington studied these forks particularly with reference to situations for forts. While looking over the forks and their suitability to fortification, he called to invite Shingiss,

King of the Delawares," to the council that was to be held at Logstown, whither they arrived twenty-five days after leaving Williamstown. In the absence of "the Half-King," a principal chief of the allied tribes who owned the land for which two white races were contesting, Washington explained his errand to another chief, to whom he gave a string of wampum and some tobacco, re

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