HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA
VOLUME 3
[Illustration: MODERN ROAD ON LAUREL HILL
[_Follows track of Washington's Road; near by, on the right,
Washington found Jumonville's "embassy" hidden in the Ravine_]]
HISTORIC HIGHWAYS OF AMERICA
VOLUME 3
Washington's Road (NEMACOLIN'S PATH)
The First Chapter of the Old French War
BY
ARCHER BUTLER HULBERT
_With Maps and Illustrations_
[Illustration]
THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY
CLEVELAND, OHIO
1903
COPYRIGHT, 1903
BY
THE ARTHUR H. CLARK COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE 11
I. WASHINGTON AND THE WEST 15
II. THE HUNTING-GROUND OF THE IROQUOIS 40
III. THE ARMS OF THE KING OF FRANCE 63
IV. THE VIRGINIAN GOVERNOR'S ENVOY 85
V. THE VIRGINIA REGIMENT 120
VI. THE CHAIN OF FEDERAL UNION 189
ILLUSTRATIONS
I. MODERN ROAD ON LAUREL HILL, (Follows Track
of Washington's Road) _Frontispiece_
II. WASHINGTON'S ROAD 93
III. A MAP OF THE COUNTRY BETWEEN WILLS CREEK AND
LAKE ERIE (showing designs of the French
for erecting forts southward of the lakes;
from the original in the British Museum) 109
IV. LEDGE FROM WHICH WASHINGTON OPENED FIRE UPON
JUMONVILLE'S PARTY 145
V. SITE OF FORT NECESSITY 157
VI. TWO PLANS OF FORT NECESSITY
(_A_, Plan of Lewis's survey; _B_, Sparks's plan) 175
VII. DIAGRAMS OF FORT NECESSITY 179
PREFACE
The following pages are largely devoted to Washington and his times as
seen from the standpoint of the road he opened across the Alleghanies in
1754. Portions of this volume have appeared in the _Interior_, the _Ohio
State Archæological and Historical Quarterly_, and in a monograph,
_Colonel Washington_, issued by Western Reserve University. The author's
debt to Mr. Robert McCracken, Mr. Louis Fazenbaker, and Mr. James
Hadden, all of Pennsylvania, is gratefully acknowledged.
A. B. H.
MARIETTA, OHIO, November 17, 1902.
Washington's Road
(NEMACOLIN'S PATH)
The First Chapter of the Old French War
CHAPTER I
WASHINGTON AND THE WEST
If you journey today from Cumberland, Maryland, on the Potomac, across
the Alleghanies to Pittsburg on the Ohio, you will follow the most
historic highway of America, through scenes as memorable as any on our
continent.
You may make this journey on any of the three thoroughfares: by the
Cumberland Road, with all its memorials of the gay coaching days "when
life was interwoven with white and purple," by Braddock's Road, which
was used until the Cumberland Road was opened in 1818, or by
Washington's Road, built over the famous Indian trail known during the
first half of the eighteenth century as Nemacolin's Path. In certain
parts all three courses are identical, the two latter being generally
so; and between these three "streams of human history" you may read the
record of the two old centuries now passed away.
Come and walk for a distance on the old Indian trail. We leave the
turnpike, where it swings around the mountain, and mount the ascending
ridge. The course is hard, but the path is plain before us. Small trees
are growing in the center of it, but no large ones. The track, worn a
foot into the ground by the hoofs of Indian ponies laden with peltry,
remains, still, an open aisle along the mountain crest. Now, we are
looking down--from the Indian's point of vantage. Perhaps the red man
rarely looked up, save to the sun and stars or the storm cloud, for he
lived on the heights and his paths were not only highways, they were the
highestways. As you move on, if your mind is keen toward the long ago,
the cleared hillsides become wooded again, you see the darkling valley
and hear its rivulet; far beyond, the next mountain range appears as it
did to other eyes in other days--and soon you are looking through the
eyes of the heroes of these valleys, Washington, or his comrades Stephen
or Lewis, Gladwin, hero of Detroit, or Gates, conqueror at Saratoga, or
Mercer, who was to give his life to his country at Princeton. You are
moving, now, with the thin line of scarlet uniformed Virginians; you are
standing in the hastily constructed earthen fort; if it rains, you look
up to the dim outlines of the wooded hills as the tireless young
Washington did when his ignorant interpreter betrayed him to the
intriguing French commander; you march with Braddock's thin red line to
that charnel ground beyond the bloody ford--you stand at Braddock's
grave while the army wagons hurry over it to obliterate its sight from
savage eyes.
Explain it as you will, our study of these historic routes and the
memorials which are left of them becomes, soon, a study of its hero,
that young Virginian lieutenant-colonel. Even the battles fought here
seem to have been of little real consequence, for New France fell, never
to rise, with the capture of Quebec. But it is not of little consequence
that here a brave training school was to be had for the future heroes of
the Revolution. For in what did Washington, for instance, need a
training more than in the art of maneuvering a handful of ill-equipped,
discouraged men out of the hands of a superior army? What lesson did
that youth need more than the lesson that Right becomes Might in God's
own good time? And here in these Alleghany glades we catch the most
precious pictures of the lithe, keen-eyed, sober lad, who, taking his
lessons of truth and uprightness from his widowed mother's knee, his
strength hardened by the power of the mountain rivers, his heart, now
thrilled by the songs of the mountain birds, now tempered by a St.
Pierre's hauteur, a Braddock's rebuke, or the testy suspicions of a
provincial governor, became the hero of Valley Forge and Yorktown, the
immeasurable superior of St. Pierre, Dinwiddie, Forbes, Kaunitz, or
Newcastle.
For consider the record of the Washington of 1775, beneath the Cambridge
elm. Twenty-one years before, he had capitulated, with the first army he
ever commanded, after the first day's battle he ever fought. He marched
with Braddock's ill-starred army, in which he had no official position
whatever, until defeat and rout threw on his shoulders a large share of
the responsibility of saving the army from complete annihilation. For
the past sixteen years he had led a quiet life on his farms. Why, now,
in 1775, should he have had the unstinted confidence of all men in the
hour of his country's great crisis? Why should his march from Mount
Vernon to Cambridge have been a triumphal march? Professor McMaster
asserts that the General and the President are known to us, "but George
Washington is an unknown man." How untrue this was, at least, in 1775!
How the nation believed it knew the man! How much reputation he had
gained, while those by his side lost all of theirs! What a hero--of many
defeats! What a man to fight England to a standstill after many a wary,
difficult retreat and dearly fought battle-field! Aye--but he had been
to school with Gates and Mercer and Gladwin, Lewis and Boone, and
Stephen, on Braddock's twelve-foot swath of a road in the Alleghanies!
It was more than a century ago that George Washington died at Mount
Vernon. "I die hard," he said, "but I am not afraid to go." Motley's
true words of the death of William the Silent may be aptly quoted of
Washington: "As long as he lived, he was the guiding-star of a whole
brave nation, and when he died, the little children wept on the
streets."
If, as Professor McMaster has boldly said, "George Washington is an
unknown man," it is not, as might be inferred, because the man himself
was an enigma to his own generation, or that which immediately succeeded
him; it is because the General and the President have been remembered by
us, and the man, forgotten. If this is true, it is because our school
histories, the principal source from which the mass of the people
receive their information, are portraying only one of the fractions
which made the great man what he was. It is said: "He was as fortunate
as great and good." Do our school histories inform the youth of the land
why he was "fortunate" to the exclusion of why he was "great and good?"
If so, George Washington is, or soon will be, "an unknown man."
One hundred years ago he was not unknown as a man. "Washington is
dead," exclaimed Napoleon in the orders of the day, when he learned the
sad news; "this great man fought against tyranny; he consolidated the
liberty of his country. His memory will ever be dear to the French
people, as to all freemen in both hemispheres." Said Charles James Fox,
"A character of virtues, so happily tempered by one another and so
wholly unalloyed by any vices, is hardly to be found on the pages of
history." And these men spoke of whom--the General, the President, or
the man? If, as legend states, "the Arab of the desert talks of
Washington in his tent, and his name is familiar to the wandering
Scythian," what of other "fortunate" heroes, of William of Orange,
Gustavus Adolphus, and Cromwell, who, like Washington, consolidated the
liberties of their countries, and with an éclat far more likely to win
the admiration of an oriental?
Half a century ago, the attention of multitudes was directed to the man
Washington in the superb oratory of Edward Everett. Quoting that
memorable extract from the letter of the youthful surveyor, who boasted
of earning an honest dubloon a day, the speaker set before his
audiences "not an ideal hero, wrapped in cloudy generalities and a mist
of vague panegyric, but the real, identical man." And, again, he quoted
Washington's letter written to Governor Dinwiddie after Braddock's
defeat, that his hearers might "see it all--see the whole man." Was
Edward Everett mistaken, are these letters not extant today, or are they
unread? Surely, the last supposition must be the true one, if the man
Washington is being forgotten.
And look back to the school histories of Edward Everett's time. The
"reader" and "history" were one text-book in that day, and one of the
best known, "Porter's Rhetorical Reader," lies before me, prefaced May,
1831. From it notice two quotations which must have influenced youthful
ideas of Washington. One is the last verse of Pierpont's "Washington:"
"God of our sires and sons,
Let other Washingtons
Our country bless,
And, like the brave and wise
Of by-gone centuries,
Show that true greatness lies
In righteousness."
The other, from the address "America," of the Irish orator Phillips;
having exalted Washington as general, statesman, and conqueror, he
continues:
"If he had paused there, history might have doubted what station to
assign him; whether at the head of her citizens, or her soldiers, her
heroes, or her patriots. But the last glorious act crowns his career,
and banishes the hesitation. Who, like Washington, after having
emancipated a hemisphere, resigned its crown, and preferred the
retirement of domestic life to the adoration of a land he might be
almost said to have created? Happy, proud America! The lightnings of
heaven yielded to your philosophy! The temptations of earth could not
seduce your patriotism!"
A candid review of the more popular school histories will bring out the
fact that the man Washington is almost forgotten, in so far as the
general and the statesman do not portray him. In one, "Young Folks'
History of the United States" (to name the production of an author whom
criticism cannot injure), there seems to be but one line, of five words,
which describes the character of Washington. Could we not forego, for
once, what the Indian chieftain said of the "charmed life" Washington
bore at Braddock's defeat, to make room for one little reason why
Washington was "completer in nature" and of "a nobler human type" than
any and all of the heroes of romance?
Mr. Otis Kendall Stuart has written a most interesting account of "The
Popular Opinion of Washington" as ascertained by inquiry among persons
of all ages, occupations, and conditions. He found that Washington was
held to be a "broad," "brave," "thinking," "practical," man; an
aristocrat, so far as the dignity of his position demanded, but willing
to "work with his hands," and with a credit that was "A1!" And "when he
did a thing, he did it;" and, if to the question, "Was he a great
general and statesman?" there was some hesitation, to the question, "Was
he a great man?" the answer was an unhesitating "Yes."
One may hold that such opinions as these have been gained from our
school histories, but I think they are not so much from the histories,
as from the popular legends of Washington, which, true and false, will
never be forgotten by the common people until they cease to represent
the _man_--not the patient, brave, and wary general, or the calm,
far-seeing statesman, but that "simple, stainless, and robust
character," as President Eliot has so aptly described it, "which served
with dazzling success the precious cause of human progress through
liberty, and so stands, like the sunlit peak of Matterhorn, unmatched in
all the world."
The real essence of that "simple, stainless, and robust character" is
nowhere so clearly seen as on these Alleghany trails. In the West with
Washington we may still "see it all--see the whole man."
To us of the Central West, the memory of Washington and his dearest
ambitions must be precious beyond that of any other American, whether
statesman, general, or seer. Under strange providential guidance the
mind and heart of that first American was turned toward the territories
lying between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, and it is to be
doubted if any other portion of his country received so much of his
attention and study as this. Washington was the original
expansionist--not for expansion's sake, truly, but for country's sake
and duty's. If Washington was the father of his country, he was in a
stronger and more genuine sense the father of the West. It was begotten
of him. Others might have led the Revolutionary armies through the
valleys as deep and dark as those through which Washington passed, and
have eventually fought England to a similar standstill as did
Washington; at least Gates, Greene, and Putnam would never have
surrendered up the cause of the colonies. But of the West, who knew it
as Washington did? Who saw its possibilities, realized the advantages
which would accrue to the colonies from its possession, understood the
part it might play in the commercial development of the seaboard states?
Who else had traversed Nemacolin's little path before 1753?
If ever a finger was lifted by order of Providence it was the finger
which fired the first gun of the French and Indian war in that Alleghany
vale. And yet today what would the Washington of 1754 be
called--fighting redskins and foreigners with splendid relish in a far
distant portion of the country to gain possession of an almost pathless
wilderness?
Washington had, first, an extraordinary knowledge of the West which he
championed. Into Lord Fairfax's wild acres he went in his teens to earn
an honest dubloon a day. Each step of the young Washington in those
early years was fraught with the weight of destiny itself, and never has
human life showed more plainly the very hand of God directing,
preparing, guiding. These years were of incalculable value to the young
surveyor, bringing to his cheeks the brown of the forest leaves, to his
limbs the strength of the mountain rivers, and to his heart withal the
sweetness of the songs of mountain birds--for all the University of
Nature which he attended in the Alleghany mountains saw to it that her
pupil was built up in a most holy strength, as he had in him the most
holy faith--strength of limb, of mind, as well as soul.
Then the young man stepped upon the stage of history--not indirectly,
or obscurely, or undecidedly, but plain to the world and strong in his
conviction of the right of his cause and its ultimate triumph. His
mission to La Boeuf for Governor Dinwiddie marks the young Washington
conspicuously as a man fully alive to the questions of the hour and
their hidden meanings. In an unostentatious way he allowed the commander
of Fort Venango to imbibe too freely and rail with many an oath at
English presumption in hoping to oust France from the Ohio valley. Oh
that we might know in detail the young man's experience and feelings
during that one night on the Allegheny! What an example to young men is
this first public performance of Washington, to do as much more than
their mere duty as lies in their power! Washington did far more than was
expected of him, for, besides getting a clear idea of the genuineness of
French hostility, did he not report the strategic value of the point of
land at the junction of the Allegheny and Monongahela, the future sites
of Fort Duquesne and Pitt, and the present Pittsburg? And that point of
land has been, since Washington's attention was turned to it, the
strategic military position of the Central West.
As in the first, so in the second act of the drama of 1750-1760,
Washington was the chief figure. He signed the first treaty ever drawn
up in the Central West, with old Van Braam and Villiers, in a misty rain
at Fort Necessity. When, in quick succession, the French fortified the
spot Washington's genius had selected for a British fort, and the brave
bulldog Braddock came to his grave in the Monongahela forests,
Washington was perhaps the most conspicuous personage at the bloody ford
and battle-field.
When, then, in 1759, the young colonel took his bride, Martha Custis, to
Mount Vernon, he was well acquainted with the West, though it might seem
that thereafter its destiny and his were to be far apart. But not so.
The days that were passed in his early struggles for fame and fortune
were not forgotten. In the quiet of his farm life, and in the drowsy
halls of legislation the man could still hear the rippling of the
Alleghany streams and the soughing of those great forests, and many of
his daydreams found their setting in the rough, free land on whose
Indian trails and in whose meadow lands he had, as it were, found a new
world. Washington's seven or eight thousand acres near the Potomac were
not his only landed possessions. He counted his estates in far western
Pennsylvania, along the Ohio and the Great Kanawha. Something of his
interest in and solicitation for the future of the West must be
attributed to his interest in his own possessions. But his efforts for
the West benefited every acre of land and every insignificant squatter,
and no one can say with a shadow of reason that Washington's hope for
the West was a selfish hope. Yet his personal interest must not be
forgotten by a fair narrator. Together with his personal interest must
be mentioned the state pride which Washington had--and which every
healthy, hopeful, patriotic man should have. Washington was a Virginian
of Virginians and in view of the vast interests which his native state
had in the West (granted by ancient charter), his state pride and
ambition must have had large, appreciable influence in his contemplation
of western affairs. At times his prejudice made him a much criticized
man. Prior to the Revolution it may be said that Washington's interest
in the West was largely a personal one. He visited it at various times
in his own and in the interest of others. After the Revolution, his
interest may be said to have broadened--proportionately with the
broadening importance of the Central West to the new Republic whose best
interests were ever nearest his patriotic heart. Early in the eighties,
Washington's correspondence shows that his attention was devoted as
never before to the commercial aspect of the Central West. As we read
those letters, how strangely do the problems of transportation, for
instance, seem to us of this day! How the sight of a single fast freight
speeding from Chicago to Pittsburg would have made a laughing-stock of
the fondest theories of the great and wise men who were at the nation's
helm in those days! It is well known how the great transportation
companies struggle to get and hold certain strategic acres of land only
wide enough, it may be, for a single railway track. Who can believe
that any portion of this Central West, covered with swamps and primeval
forests, could have been so greatly prized a century and a quarter ago?
Yet this was true. It was not the river front at Cincinnati, nor the
lake shore at Cleveland or Chicago. These spots then could have been
bought for the shortest songs--and what was in that day considered of
priceless value could today be bought for $30 an acre. These were the
portages between the Cuyahoga and the Muskingum, the Scioto and the
Sandusky, the Maumee and the Wabash, etc. So all-important were these
strips of land in the eyes of Washington, that by the famous Ordinance
of 1787 they were voted by Congress "common highways and forever free."
But this was one of Washington's most determined ambitions, that the
headwaters of the Virginia rivers and the headwaters of the Ohio rivers,
both north and south, should be surveyed and made ready for the century
when the West should pour its riches toward the Atlantic seaboard. "The
navigation of the Ohio," he wrote in 1784 to General Harrison, "being
well known, they will have less to do in examination of it; but,
nevertheless, let the courses and distances be taken to the mouth of the
Muskingum and up that river to the carrying place of the Cuyahoga; down
the Cuyahoga to Lake Erie, and thence to Detroit. Let them do the same
with Big Beaver Creek and with the Scioto. In a word, let the waters
east and west of the Ohio which invite our notice by their proximity,
and by the ease with which land transportation may be had between them
and the lakes on the one side, and the rivers Potomac and James on the
other, be explored, accurately delineated, and a correct and corrected
map of the whole be presented to the public.... The object in my
estimation is of vast commercial and political importance." These words
were written little over a century ago, but were they the plans for the
canals from the Nile to the site of the pyramids they could hardly seem
more antiquated. Nevertheless they cannot but seem precious to us of the
Central West, for they portray the anxious, serious heart of the man,
and honest, high ambitions for things which seemed to many about him to
be the idlest dreaming.
Had Washington not held far different views from many of his
contemporaries, it is a moral certainty that the Central West would, at
the close of the Revolutionary War, have been divided up among European
powers, who for so long had been sending emissaries to Kentucky and the
Mississippi valley to alienate the border settlements from the
contemplated union with the colonies. England was ready at any moment to
urge Joseph Brant into Pontiac's old rôle of attempting to arouse the
old northwest, and she defiantly kept her flag floating over Sandusky
and Detroit and Fort Miami for twenty years after Cornwallis's bands
played _The World's Turned Upside Down_ at Yorktown. The world looked
for a partition of our West among the powers in 1780 as the partition of
the great hulk, China, is expected by many today. And indeed we escaped
such monstrous catastrophe by a narrower margin than is commonly known.
Spanish agents among high Kentuckians were looked upon with favor, and
their plan of joining Kentucky to Spain (who then held all the
trans-Mississippi realm) was not without advantages which the
struggling, bankrupt, jealous colonies, "one nation today, thirteen
tomorrow," could not possibly offer. The Cumberland Road, of which
Washington was the father, bound the East and West indissolubly
together, and "more than any material structure in the land, served to
harmonize and strengthen, if not to save, the Union."
With this glimpse of this man's ambitions for the commercial advancement
of the Central West, let us not omit his subsequent interest in the
military operations for its subjugation, an item which even the
far-seeing Washington had not fully anticipated. At the time of
Crawford's campaign, Washington was fully in favor of the advance toward
Sandusky, and it was through his influence or suggestion that the
command was given to his old friend of Revolutionary days, Colonel
William Crawford. True, Crawford was duly elected by the men he led, but
his presence in the expedition was due to Washington's influence. When
the immortal ordinance was under discussion, Washington's attitude was
strong in its favor, and it incorporated, as has already been shown, his
idea of the value of the portages between the rivers as the future
routes of commerce. During the long and bitter war with the western
Indians, 1790-1795, Washington had a clearer vision than most of his
advisers, and with better judgment and knowledge sought to gain the ends
best for the nation. His "search for a man" was nearly as pathetic as
was Lincoln's in another century, but, despite the intense opposition of
Kentucky with its seventy thousand inhabitants, he placed Mad Anthony
Wayne in command, who, in the tall grass and felled trees of Fallen
Timbers, justified his choice, as Appomattox justified Lincoln's. After
the campaign of 1791 under Harmar and the terrible defeat of the brave
St. Clair, Washington was the hope of the West. To him the nation looked
with that same confidence shown in the darker and more desperate days of
the Revolution. He bore the brunt of criticism and carried on his great
heart the sorrows of the bleeding frontier. No one knew better than he
the real meaning of the situation. No one saw with clearer eyes the
despicable affiliation of British interests with Indian in the last hope
of limiting the territories of the upstart colonies to the land east of
the mountains. And, while Jay was heroically working for the treaty
which at once quenched the dreams of certain British leaders in America,
Washington wrote him the whole situation as follows: "All the
difficulties we encounter with the Indians, their hostilities, the
murder of helpless women and children along all our frontiers result
from the conduct of the agents of Great Britain in this country."
Truly, Washington was in a special sense the father of the Central West.
It is impossible to tell what might have been its history had it not
been championed from the earliest day by this great, far-seeing man in
whom the people of the nation, as a people, believed and trusted as
perhaps no leader in history, with the possible exception of William the
Silent, has ever been trusted by his countrymen. Many of Washington's
plans seem strange to us, much as the times and customs of his day are
strange to our eyes. But his eye was clear; he saw greater possibilities
than his advisers; his great heart warmed toward the new West, which in
his day was sounding with axes, ringing a pioneer's welcome to a new
land. In his heart of hearts Washington was led foresee and to believe
in the dispensation of Providence which has become the wonder of our
time. And this belief appeared not in theorizing alone. What could he do
toward creating right conceptions concerning the future of the
Mississippi basin, Washington did; and if he had not so done and so
believed, it is sure that the progress of these great empires between
the Allegheny and the Mississippi, the Great Lakes and the Blue Ridge
would not have been what it is.
Has this been sufficiently realized? Have we remembered and appreciated
our debt to Washington? And when our united appreciation of the fact
influences these imperial commonwealths to put on record in lasting form
the gratitude which should be felt, let the monument rise tall and
stately from whatever site may seem appropriate, but let it show at the
summit the young man Washington, as he was when he came to know the
West best. Clothe him in the ranger's costume that he first wore on
Nemacolin's Path to the Ohio. Place in his hand the old-time musket he
bore to Fort La Boeuf, or carried in his canoe down the Ohio to the
Great Kanawha. That is the WASHINGTON OF THE WEST--the fearless,
dutiful, thoughtful youth, who came from his mother's knee to the West
that gave him a fame which he never could outgrow.