USA > Ohio > History of Ohio; the rise and progress of an American state, Volume One > Part 19
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CHAPTER XII. THE OPENING SKIRMISH
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T HE reply of Saint Pierre, borne by Washington to Dinwiddie, was to the effect that the com- mandant at Le Boeuf would transmit the communication of the Virginia governor to the Marquis Duquesne at Quebec, to whom it better belonged to "set forth the evidence and reality of the rights of the King, my master, upon the lands situated along the River Ohio and to contest the pretensions of the King of Great Britain." Such answer was a flaunt that the French would not yield in their claims or plans. The letter was evidently only a pretext to gain time. Dinwiddie was not to be deceived by such a ruse, he was a mettlesome Scotchman, full of fight and not to be bluffed. With the approval of the Council and the support of the House of Burgesses, which voted ten thousand pounds for the expense of an expedition, the governor resolved to enlist three hundred men, to be divided into six companies, with Colonel Joshua Fry as chief officer, while Washington, who had declined the colonelcy, modestly alleging lack of sufficient experience, was made lieutenant-colonel and second in command. Cannon and military supplies were placed in readiness at Alexandria. That no time be lost in waiting for the enlistment and equipment of troops, Captain William Trent, familiar with the frontier involved, was hastened ahead with orders to enroll men among the traders and back-settlers and make all despatch to the Ohio Forks and there erect a fort before the French could preempt the situation. Trent acted promptly, raised a company of half a hundred men or more, and marched to the mouth of the Redstone Creek, where the Ohio Company had erected
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a temporary storehouse, in which to place the supplies, thence to be carried to the mouth of the Monongahela. By the middle of February (1754) Trent and his com- pany were at the Forks, engaged in building the wooden stockade as ordered. The work was progressing, "which," George Croghan who was present says, "seemed to give the Indians great pleasure and put them in high spirits," when Trent left the work, yet uncompleted, in charge of Lieutenant John Frazier. This officer while on a journey to his home, at Turtle Creek, ten miles distant, passed the temporary com- mand on to a subordinate officer, one Ensign Ward.
The building of the fort was by this time well under way, when a body of several hundred French troops, the American historians say a thousand, but that is improbable, Kingsford, the Canadian historian, says five hundred, which is more likely, with eighteen pieces of cannon, "in sixty batteaux, and three hundred canoes, " under command of Captain Contrecœur, sud- denly came down the Allegheny River from Venango and surprised Ward and his forty-one fort builders, who were ordered instantly to surrender. Ward in his perplexity counseled with Tanacharison who was present at the fort making. The wise Half-King advised delay till one of the absent commanding officers could be reached. Contrecœur brooked no postpone- ment, the incipient stockade must be evacuated instanter. There was no alternative and Ward acceded to the demands for capitulation and gave up the fort, but was permitted to retire with his men, withdraw- e ing to Will's Creek, where he broke the news of the ill-fated ending of the expedition.
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The French who had thus succeeded in the first encounter, enlarged and completed the fort and called it Duquesne, after the French governor of Canada, garrisoning it with a large force under such officers as Jumonville, De Villiers and La Force, Contrecœur being in command.
The day of parleying had passed. It was now a question of the greater force of arms. Dinwiddie called on the other colonies to make common cause against the French, and they began to respond with money and men. Colonel Fry being incapacitated by illness for the field, the command in chief, in spite of his disinclination, fell upon Washington and the last of April the latter set out from Will's Creek at the head of one hundred and sixty men, having among his officers Lieutenant Jacob Van Braam.
Washington was to proceed over Nemacolin's path, henceforth to be known as Washington's road, which had to be widened and leveled for the passage of soldiers and artillery, to Redstone and thence to the Forks. Young Washington was expected to retrieve the loss sustained by the misbehavior of Trent, who, Washing- ton wrote "has been very tardy and has convinced the world of what they before suspected-his great timid- ity."
The progress of Washington's little army was difficult and tedious, underbrush had to be cleared, great trees had to be cut away, rocks removed and bridges built; four miles a day was the speed attained. From the traders and Indians fleeing from the Canadian invasion, Washington daily received news of the approach of the French. We need not follow this
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march in minute detail for it has been told time and again, in standard American histories-Sparks, Irving, Parkman, Bancroft, Avery,-Washington's own journal and letters at the time, being the surest authority.
The young commander, for he was scarcely twenty- two, reached the Youghiogheny, where a bridge was being constructed, when a message was brought to him from his old friend Tanacharison, then with his people near the Monongahela River, warning the colonial commander to be on his guard as a party of the French was advancing from the Forks. Such indeed was the case; the French force was paddling up the Monongahela to the mouth of Redstone Creek. Washington, not to be entrapped unprepared, took his position at a place called the Great Meadows, a long, level tract in a wide gap, bordered on either side by wooded hills, that on the west being Laurel Hill, and that on the east belonging to what is known as the Woodcock Range. The exact site selected and described by Washington as "a charming field for an encounter," was on a small branch of the Great Meadows Run. Here he cleared the underbrush, threw up an intrenchment, made ready to defend him- self, and awaited events.
Christopher Gist arrived, from his home, some twelve miles north, to tell Washington that La Force, "a bold enterprising man, and a person of great subtlety and cunning" and fifty men were only a few miles away. Meanwhile Tanacharison with some friendly Ohio Indians was advancing from the Ohio, to the aid of Washington. When about six miles distant from Great Meadows, the Half King sent a scout to inform
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Washington that the French detachment was in his (Half King's) vicinity. Washington immediately selected a band of forty men, leaving the rest to guard the camp, and set off to join the Half King. It was night, as the colonel's report states, "black as pitch," and the rain heavy, the paths narrow and intricate. It was a march up and down the steep hill to La Force's concealed position in a "low, obscure place." Wash- ington in his letter to Dinwiddie says: "I set out with forty men before ten (P. M.) and it was from that time till near sunrise before we reached the Indian's camp, having marched in small paths through a heavy rain and a night as dark as it is possible to conceive; we were often tumbling over one another, and often so lost, that fifteen or twenty minutes search could not find the path again." This march of five miles required ten hours, a weary drag at the rate of a mile in two hours. "Beside this all-night march from Great Meadows to Washington's Spring, " says Hulbert, "Wolfe's ascent to the Plains of Abraham at Quebec was a pastime." And after visiting both localities mentioned, the present writer is prepared to confirm the truth of the comparison. The English reached the Half King's camp at early morning,
"And the woods against the stormy sky Their giant branches tossed."
Joined by the Half King and his associate sachems, Scarouady, also spelled Scarooyadi, Monakatoocha- likewise Monakatuatha-and their followers, who com- posed the left wing, Washington advanced to the encounter against La Force and the French. The skirmish was short, sharp and decisive, lasting "only
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about fifteen minutes." It was Washington's first battle, and in a letter to his brother, describing the affair, he wrote, "the right wing where I stood was exposed to and received all the enemy's fire; I heard the bullets whistle, and believe me, there is something charming in the sound." Thus the warrior Washing- ton was born and received his "baptism of fire, " in the heart of the gloomy forest on the mountain sides of Laurel Hill, between the Youghiogheny and the Monon- gahela, barely sixty miles from the banks of the Ohio, in the valley of which latter river, this little battle was really fought, and "judge it as we may, " says Parkman, "this obscure skirmish began the war that set the world on fire."
Washington reported, "We killed ten, wounded one and took twenty-one prisoners." Only one Canadian escaped. Washington had one man killed and three wounded. Among the prisoners was La Force, and among those killed was Coulon de Jumonville, whom the Half King boasted he dispatched with his tomahawk. It was claimed by the French that Jumonville was an. embassador, under military escort, on a mission as a civil messenger to warn the English not to trespass on the French territory, and that his "killing off " under the circumstances, was in violation of the usage of nations, as no declaration of war had yet been made. This accusation by the French led to many govern- mental charges pro and con and to much crimination and recrimination, but after examination by the Virginia House of Burgesses, Washington's first victory was declared by that body, untarnished as to his honor or soldiership. The claim, adverse to Washing-
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ton, was only a phase of French duplicity. Washington in his letter to Governor Dinwiddie giving all particu- lars of the skirmish said; "these officers pretend they were coming on as an embassy, but the absurdity of this pretext is too glaring as your honor will see by the instructions and summons inclosed. These instruc- tions were to reconnoitre the country, roads, creeks, etc., to the Potomac." He continues that these "enterprising gentlemen were purposely chose out to get intelligence, * * * which could be through no other view than to get sufficient reinforcements to fall upon us immediately after."
William Makepeace Thackery, that master of English novelists, speaking of this incident-of Washington's first battle-in his realistic and partly historic story the "Virginians," comments thus on Washington: "It was strange that in a savage forest of Pennsylvania, a young Virginian officer should fire a shot, and waken up a war which was to last for sixty years, which was to cover his own country and pass into Europe, to cost France her American colonies, to sever ours from us, create the great western republic, to rage over the Old World when extinguished in the New; and of all the myriads engaged in the vast contest, to leave the prize of the greatest fame with him who struck the irst blow."
Washington now fell back to his camp at Great Meadows, where he completed the entrenchments already begun and called the crude, earth-packed palisades, forming a triangular enclosure of about a hird of an acre, "Fort Necessity." The name was uggested by the scarcity of provisions and ammunition
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and the deprivations endured by the garrison. To this fortification came the Half King Tanacharison and Queen Aliquippa and "about twenty-five or thirty Indian families, making in all about eighty or one hundred persons, including women and children." A band of Shawnees from the Ohio and many Indian traders were also among the incomers. Washington sent his prisoners, taken in the encounter with La Force, to Winchester and the returning officers in- formed him of the death of Colonel Fry and the formal appointment of himself to full command.
Dinwiddie issued a proclamation granting two hun- dred thousand acres of Virginia land on the Ohic River, to be distributed among the troops who should engage in the proposed expedition and releasing the same from quit rents for fifteen years. Companies were being organized, not only by Virginia but also by Maryland, Pennsylvania, Carolina, New York and other colonies; Dinwiddie also sent Gist and other messengers to the Catawbas, Cherokees, Chickasaws and the Iroquois of the Ohio, urging them "to take up the hatchet," against the French. Warlike prep- arations were rapidly maturing in all directions.
Meanwhile additional troops, including an inde- pendent South Carolina Company under Captain Mackey, reached Washington in his little Fort Neces- sity, until he had some four hundred soldiers in or about the enclosure, which as Sparks describes, "was situate in a level meadow, about two hundred and fifty yards broad and covered with long grass and low bushes h the foot of the nearest hill came within one hundred yards of the fort and at one place within sixty.'
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Just before noon on July 3d there appeared, from among the trees on the hillside facing the fort, Captain De Villiers, brother of Jumonville, "eager to avenge the death of his relative," at the head of more than five hundred French and some four hundred Indian allies, the latter a motley aggregation representing nine different tribes. The skirmish lasted throughout the day; the French and Indians skulking under cover and getting as near the fort as the protecting trees would permit. The rain fell in torrents, nearly drown- ing the English soldiers in the stockade trenches, where the men stood knee-deep in the water and soft mud. At eight o'clock at night the French requested a parley. It was held in the rain by the light of a candle fitfully sputtering in the wet wind, Van Braam acting as interpreter. Washington, realizing the in- equality of the contest on his part, his troops and ammunition being water-soaked, the enemy far greater, indeed more than double, in numbers, agreed to a capitulation, which permitted him to retire with all his garrison and return peacefully to his own country, carrying with him all that belonged to his troops except the swivels or small cannons. Early on the norning of July 4th, Washington, with his weary, nud-bespattered troops marched from the fort, "his egimental colors borne in front, and the men carrying on their backs their wounded comrades and such of heir baggage as they were able to convey in this way." Though beaten, the young Virginian proudly withdrew vith the honors of war. It was Washington's first defeat and his only surrender. According to Kingsford -the historian of Canada-the French lost seventy-
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two in killed and wounded and the English seventy, the latter number tallies closely with the report of Washington. The French tore down the palisades of Fort Necessity and marched back to Fort Duquesne.
Washington and his little army "with all lost save honor," wended their weary way back, as best they could, without horses or cattle, to Will's Creek. The French and Indian War had thus begun. The Half King, who had witnessed it all, expressed himself as perfectly disgusted with the white man's mode of warfare. The "French," he said, "were cowards; the English fools," neither knew how to fight; "Washing- ton," he told Conrad Weiser, "was a good natured man, but had no experience and would by no means take advice from the Indians, but was always driving them on to fight by his directions; that he lay at one place from one full moon to another, and made nc fortifications at all, except that little thing upon the meadow, where he thought the French would come up to him in open field, whereas had he taken advice and built such fortifications as he (Half King) hac advised, he might easily have beat off the French.'
After the Fort Necessity defeat, the Half King tool his wife and children to a place of safety; soon there after he fell ill and died, at Aughquick. In his death the English lost a faithful friend. Tanacharison wa: succeeded as Half King by Scarouady.
Kingsford states De Villiers' victory removed al opposition to the French possession of the Ohio. No English trader dared show himself and "the whole o the Indians declared in favor of the French" as i seemed that the Canadian power was firmly established
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and not again to be disputed for "nearly all the western Indians drew their scalping knives for France," as Stone, in his life of Johnson, puts it; "thus were the French left in undisputed possession of the basin of the Ohio; and the evening guns, from the waters of Lake Erie to the delta of the Mississippi, saluted the lillies of France, which now waved proudly in the evening breeze. "
The contest for the Ohio country was now on in dead earnest. England sprang to arms. No more backwoods squabbles and Indian bush-whackings for her! His Majesty King George would send a few choice battalions to America and end this ridiculous situation without further child's play. The royal government, thereupon ordered to the colonies regi- ments of troops, the flower of the British army, some of the bravest of the brave. The French government at the same time began buckling on its armor. Large contingents of soldiers were made ready for Canada. And now while London and Paris are busy making ready for the war in America over the Ohio country, the colonial interests on each side strive to secure the alliance of the Indians. As Parkman notes, at this point, there was demand for joint action by the English colonies in making treaties with the Indians; "the practice of separate treaties made by each province n its own interest had bred endless disorders; the ohesion of all the tribes had been so shaken and the fforts of the French to alienate them were so vigorous nd effective, that not a moment was to be lost." oncaire had gained over most of the Senecas; Picquet,
Jesuit missionary, was strongly influencing the
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Onondagas; and the Mohawks offended at the encroach- ments upon their land by the Dutch were looking to the French for redress. The New York provincial authorities in alarm called upon William Johnson to stem the Iroquois stampede setting in towards the French cause.
For many years previous to this time and for many years thereafter, Sir William Johnson was a prominent and forceful personage in the Indian and frontier affairs, especially of the Ohio country. He was a talented and energetic military officer, born (1715) in County Meath, Ireland. An unfortunate love romance in his native country drove him in 1738 to America, where he was given charge of the landed property of his uncle, Admiral Sir Peter Warren, in the region of the Mohawk Valley. Here Johnson located, engaging extensively in the Indian trade and acquiring thereby great wealth. Dealing fairly and generously with the Indians and learning their language, he acquired their confidence and their admiration. He conformed to their customs and mode of life and was adopted, as a sachem, into the Mohawk tribe. After the death of his German wife, Catherine Wisenberg, he took Mary, a sister of the famous Mohawk chief, Brant, to his luxurious home to serve him as his wife. By this Molly Brant, as she was called, a singularly gifted anc handsome Indian woman, Johnson had several children some of whom subsequently became distinguished He was appointed (1748) by the Lords of Trade and Plantation, Superintendent for the English govern ment of Indian affairs in the American colonies, and in 1750 became a member of the New York provincia
SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON.
British soldier and British Superintendent of Indian Affairs in America from 1746 to 1774. Member of the Colonial Council of New York and Major General of the British Forces in French and Indian War. The most conspicuous and influential representative of England in her dealings with the American Indians.
ho a ren
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Onondaga :: 499HUURded at the encreall me
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French cause
For many years previous to this time and for years thereafter, Sir William Johnson was a promlien and forceful pensare in the Indian and Inoole affair, opelany of the Ohio country. He was a talented and morgetje military officer, born (1714) County Month, Ireland. An unfortunate love romand in hà native country drove him in 1738 to Amrey, where he was given charge of the landed property Ni unele, Admiral Sir Peter Warren, in the regine the Mohawk Valley. Here Johnson located, ens Extensively in the Indian trade and acquiring there great wealth. Dealing fairly and generously will ilu Indians and learning their language, he acquired the confidence and their admiration He conformid e their customs and mode of life and was adopted wa sachem, into the Mohawk tribe. After the death B his German wife, Catherine Wisenberg, be took Mary a sister of the famous Mohawk chief, Brant to luxurious home to serve him as his wife. By wish Molly Brant, as she was called, a singularly giftedl wn handsome Indian woman, Jolmson had several children some of whom subsequently became dieringuintel He was appointed (1748) by the Lords of Trade ab Plantation, Superintendeor for the English govert ment of Indian allain In the American colonies, au. in 1750 became a member of the New York provincial
2
--- பு வருடது பாய்கா மண்ட ஷ்மி நிறும்தானி!
S"William Johnson Bar' Majorlieuval of the English Forøre In North America .
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council. No other man had such power over the Six Nations. He likewise had great influence in British affairs; Stone, his biographer, says of him; "a man, who, from an humble origin, could rise by his own exertions to a position, in which from the backwoods of America he controlled the British Parliament, was of no ordinary mould." We shall hear much of this man from now on.
While Washington was engaged in erecting his rude little fortress at Great Meadows, an event of equal importance was occurring at the provincial capital of New York. A council of the colonies was called at Albany (June-July, 1754) which was attended by seven of the provinces, viz., New York, Pennsylvania, Mary- land, and the four New England colonies, New Hamp- shire, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts. The chiefs of the Six Nations were present, "glittering with ornaments and clothed in their richest robes and feathers." It was a memorable and potent occasion. The remarkable Mohawk chief Hendrik presented the grievances of his people, saying: "We cannot find after the strictest inquiry, that any leave to build forts has been given or land sold to the French; they have gone there without our consent; the governors of Vir- ginia and Canada are both quarreling about lands belonging to us; Virginia and Pennsylvania have made roads through our country without acquainting us of it." Governor de Lancey of New York appeased their anger towards the English colonies by telling them that the invaded country was still acknowledged to belong to the Indians under English guardianship and that the inroads of the English were made for the purpose
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of protecting them. At this council the Indians proposed the Alleghany mountains as the western boundaries of the colonies but the purchase made from them by Pennsylvania and the subsequent appearance of surveyors upon the Juniata and the Susquehannah, induced the Delawares, Shawnees, Nanticokes and other tribes settled in that vicinity, to withdraw either to Diahoga-site of Athens, on Chemung River-or to the Ohio.
The hatred the Delawares bore the Pennsylvania province, became very intense and they swore never to leave off killing Englishmen so long as there was one of that nation living on their lands. Sir Johnson accompanied Hendrik to the council-fire at Onondaga, where one of the Indian orators expressed the situation in the words, "We don't know what you Christians, English and French, intend; we are so hemmed in by you both that we hardly have a hunting place left; in a little while, if we find a bear in a tree, there will immediately appear an owner of the land to claim the property and hindering us from killing it, by which we live; we are so perplexed between you that we hardly know what to say or think."
It was at this Albany council that Benjamin Franklin presented his notable project of a union of the colonies; a scheme which both the provinces and the mother country rejected. The Albany council while not ac- complishing all intended and desired, braced the Six Nations in their allegiance to the English. The spring of 1755 saw the rival fleets of France and England on the high seas bound for America. The French had dispatched eighteen ships of war bearing three thousand
d
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men under Baron Dieskau; accompanying them was the Marquis de Vaudreuil, destined to succeed the ill and failing Duquesne as Canadian governor.
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