Celoron's expedition went well enough.He advanced as far west on the Ohio as the mouth of the Great Miami River, then up that river, and by difficult portages back to Lake Erie.It was a remarkable journey; but in the late autumn he was back again in Montreal, not sure that he had achieved much.The natives of the country were, he thought, hostile to France and devoted to the English who had long traded with them.This opinion was in truth erroneous, for, when the time of testing came, the Indians of the West fought on the side of France.Montcalm had many hundreds of them under his banner.The expedition meant the definite and final throwing down of the gauntlet by France.With all due ceremony she had declared that the Ohio country was hers and that there she would allow no English to dwell.
Legardeur de Saint-Pierre could hardly have known, when he left the hard region of the Saskatchewan in 1752, that a year later he would be sent to protect another set of outposts of France in the West.In 1753 we find him in command of the French forces in the Ohio country.Celoron had been sent to Detroit.If Saint-Pierre had played his part feebly on the Saskatchewan, he was now made for a brief period one of the central figures in the opening act of a world drama.It is with a touch of emotion that we see on the stage, as the opponent of this not great Frenchman, the momentous figure of George Washington.
The fight for North America was now rapidly approaching its final phase in the struggle which we know as the Seven Years' War.
During forty years, commissioners of the two nations had been trying to reach some agreement as to boundaries.Each side, however, made impossible demands.France claimed all the lands drained by the St.Lawrence and the Great Lakes and by the Mississippi and its tributaries a claim which, if made good, would have carried her into the very heart of the colony of New York and would have given her also the mastery of the Ohio and the regions beyond.Britain claimed all the lands ever occupied by the Iroquois Indians, who had been recognized as British subjects by the Treaty of Utrecht.As those Indians had overrun regions north of the St.Lawrence, the British thus would become masters of a good part of Canada.Neither side was prepared for reasonable compromise.The sword was to be the final arbiter.
Events moved rapidly towards war.In 1753 Duquesne, the new Governor of Canada, sent more than a thousand men to build Fort Le Boeuf, on upper waters flowing to the Ohio and within easy reach of support by way of Lake Erie.In the nest year the French were swarming in the Ohio Valley, stirring up the Indians against the English and confident of success.They jeered at the divisions among the English and believed their own unity so strong that they could master the colonies one by one.The two colonies most affected were Pennsylvania and Virginia, either of them quite ready to see its own citizens advance into the Ohio country and possess the land, but neither of them willing to unite with the other in effective military action to protect the frontier.
It is at this crisis that there appears for the first time in history George Washington of Virginia.In December, 1753, in the dead of winter, he made a long, toilsome journey from Virginia to the north through snow and rain, by difficult forest trails, over two ranges of mountains, across streams sometimes frozen, sometimes dangerous from treacherous thaws.On the way he heard gossip from the Indians about the designs of the French.They boasted that they would come in numbers like the sands of the seashore; that the natives would be no more an obstacle to them than the flies and mosquitoes, which indeed they resembled; and that not the breadth of a finger-nail of land belonged to the Indians.Washington was told by one of the French that "it was their absolute design to take possession of the Ohio and, by--, they would do it!" It was no matter that the French were outnumbered two to one by the English, for the English were dilatory and ineffective.
In the end, Washington arrived at Fort Le Boeuf and presented a letter from Dinwiddie, the Lieutenant-Governor of Virginia, pointing out that the British could not permit an armed force from Canada to invade their territory of the Ohio and requiring that the French should leave the country at once.Legardeur de Saint-Pierre, to whom this firm demand was delivered, "an elderly gentleman," says Washington, with "much the air of a soldier"gave, of course, a polite answer in the manner of his nation, but he intended, he said, to remain where he was as long as he had instructions so to do.Washington kept his eyes open and made careful observations of the plan of the fort, the number of men, and also of the canoes, of which he noted that there were more than two hundred ready and many others building.The French tried to entice away his Indians and he says, "I cannot say that ever in my life I suffered so much anxiety." On the journey back he nearly perished when he fell into an ice-cold stream and was obliged to spend the night on a tiny island in frozen clothing.
He brought comfort as cold to the waiting Dinwiddie.
