Archer Butler Hulbert

“ Let this picture hang on the walls of every home where the lad in the foreground before the blazing logs is unknown save in the rôle of the general or statesman he became in later life.
How these French officers looked this tall, stern boy up and down! How they enjoyed sneering to his face at English backwardness in crossing the Alleghanies into the great West which their own explorers had honeycombed with a hundred swift canoes! As they even plotted his assassination, how, in turn, that young heart must have burned to stop their mouths with a clenched hand. ”

“ It is certainly the oldest and most renowned in our America. The first European to enter it looked with wondering eyes upon the monstrous earthen forts of a prehistoric race whom we have loosely named from the relics they left behind, the mound-builders. Of this race of early Indians the later red men knew nothing, save what the legends handed down by their fathers told of a race of giants which was driven out of the Central West, and sent flying down the Ohio and Mississippi to reappear no more in human history. ”

“ His mission to La Bœuf 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! ”

“ The day passed and no word came to the anxious men in their trenches in the meadows. Another night, silent and cheerless, came over the mountains upon the valley, and with the night came rain. Fresh fears of strategy and surprise must have arisen as the cheerless sun went down.
Suddenly, at eight in the evening, a runner brought word that the French were run to cover. Half King, while coming to join Washington, had found La Force’s party in “a low, obscure place. [Pg 139] ”
It was now time for a daring man to show himself. Such was the young commander at Great Meadows. ”

“ For half a century after Washington capitulated, his roadway from the Potomac was the great highway across the mountains, and thousands of weary pilgrims to the great West camped near the spot where the Father of the West fought his first battle for it. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Cumberland Road, the historic highway of America, was built through Great Meadows, and the northern hill—on which the French opened the first battle of the French and Indian War on that July morning—over which the great road was built is named Mount Washington. ”

“ 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 [Pg 26] 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. ”

“ In the Black Forest the Shawanese gained another and a well-earned reputation—of being the fiercest and most uncompromising Indian nation with which the white man ever dealt. They were, for the half century during which the Black Forest of Ohio was their home and the Wyandots their allies, ever first for war and last for peace. Under their two well known terrible chieftains, Cornstalk and Tecumseh, they were allied both with the French and with the British in the vain attempt to hold back the tide of civilization from the river valleys of the Central West. ”

“ No young man more instantly sprang into the notice of the world than George Washington. The journal was copied far and wide in the newspapers of the other colonies. It sped across the sea, and was printed in London by the British government. In a manly, artless way it told the exact situation on the Ohio frontier and announced the first positive proof the world had had of hostile French aggression into the great river valley of the West. Despite certain youthful expressions, the prudence, tact, capacity, and modesty of the author were recognized by a nation and by a world. ”

“ How the French must have scorned England’s conception of America. Long after the French had passed from Quebec to the Lakes and down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, the English had a boat built at home which could be taken apart on the upper waters of the James river, carried across the mountains on wagons, to be put together on the shores of the Pacific Sea. How the French must have laughed when they heard of this; can you not see them drinking hilariously to the portable boat stranded in the Alleghany forests three thousand miles from its destination? ”

“ Horace Walpole, speaking of the French and English ways of seating themselves in America, said: “They enslaved, or assisted the wretched nations to butcher one another, instructed them in the use of firearms, brandy, and the New Testament, and at last, by scattered extension of forts and colonies, they have met to quarrel for the boundaries of empires, of which they can neither use nor occupy a twentieth part of the included territory.” “But,” he sneers elsewhere, “we do not massacre; we are such good Christians as only to cheat.” ”

“ What power hurled the flints of these warriors of prehistoric days? The Indian legend, that they were giants in strength, has been easily believed. Nowhere else on the continent are found such forts as were built by these ancient defenders of the Central West.
Throughout the eighteenth century this territory was a continual battle-ground. To it, both France and England, in turn, clung with equal determination, and both tried the foolish experiment of attempting to win it back, when once it was lost, by means of the Indians who made it their lair. ”

“ 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 day [Pg 30] dreams 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. ”

“ No statesman of his day knew and believed in the West as Washington did; and it is not difficult to think that had he not so known and loved it, the territory west of the Alleghany Mountains would never have become a portion of the United States of America. There were far too many serious men like Thomas Jefferson who knew little about the West and boasted that they cared less. Yet today the seaboard states are more dependent commercially and politically on the states between the Alleghanies and Mississippi than these central commonwealths are on them. ”

“ Ever and anon, from the Iroquois home-land, came great armies into the West in search of game. Launching their painted canoes on the headwaters of the Oyo (now the Allegheny and Ohio) , they came down with the flood-tides of the spring and fall and scattered into all the rivers of the forest—the Kanawha, Muskingum, Scioto, Kentucky, Miami, and Wabash. Other canoes came up Lake Ontario to Lake Erie and passed up the Cuyahoga and down the Muskingum, or up the Sandusky and down the Scioto, or up the Miami-of-the-Lakes and down the Wabash. ”

“ Jumonville? For these four hundred Spartans, a fight to the death, or at least a captivity at Duquesne or Quebec was all that could be expected—Jumonville’s party having already been sent into Virginia as captives.
But at eight in the evening the French requested a parley. Washington refused to consider the suggestion. Why should a parley be desired with an enemy in such a hopeless strait as they? It was clear that Villiers had resorted to this strategy to gain better information of their condition. ”

“ Enthusiastic tourists make the journey today from Great Meadows to the summit of Laurel Hill on the track over which Washington and his hundred men floundered and stumbled that wet May night a century and a half ago. It is a hard walk but exceedingly fruitful to one of imaginative vision. ”

“ Here he studied the Indian traders, a class of men of much more importance, in peace or war, than any or all others in the border land—men whose motives of action were as hard to read as an Indian’s, and whose flagrant and oft practiced deceptions on their fellow white men were fraught with disaster. It was of utmost fortune for his country that this youth went into the West in his teens, for he was to be, under Providence, a champion of that West worthy of its influence on human affairs. ”

“ Who but one acquainted with primeval forests can picture the straggling branches of the giant trees reaching out into the etherial battle ground to a last death grapple with its hoary rivals, both weighed down by luxuriant masses of moss and tangled vine? Records of early pioneers affirm that when this forest was first invaded by the woodman’s ax it was found to be one thing to cut a tree’s trunk but quite another thing to dislodge its top from the network of forest overgrowth, from which giant trees have been known to hang suspended in mid-air after their trunks had been severed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Washington left Great Meadows about eight o’clock. It was not until sunrise that Half King’s sentries at “Washington’s Spring” saw the vanguard file out on the narrow ridge, which, dividing headwaters of Great Meadow Run and Cheat river, makes an easy ascent to the summit of the mountain. The march of five miles had been accomplished, with great difficulty, in a little less than ten hours—at the rate of one mile in two hours!
Forgetting all else for the moment, consider the young leader of the floundering, stumbling army. ”

“ French and English character nowhere show more plainly than in the nature of their contact with the Indians as each met them along the St. Lawrence, Allegheny, and the Great Lakes. The French came to conciliate the Indians, with no scruples as to how they might accomplish their task. The coureur-de-bois threw himself into [Pg 80] the spirit of Indian life and very nearly adopted the Indian’s ideals. The stolid English trader, keen for a bargain, justly suspicious of his white rival, invariably distant, seldom tried to ingratiate himself into the friendship of the red man. ”

“ With matters in this doubtful condition, the Revolutionary War broke out and as commander-in-chief of the army, Washington was called to Cambridge. But he never forgot the dream of his youth and early manhood and at the close of the war, again took up the enterprise. The dream of the youth became the firm conviction of the man, and, next to his desire for the independence of his country, the chief ambition of his life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Six Nations. Of all American Indians the Iroquois were ever preëminent, invincible. The proud races of the furthest south had felt the weight of their tomahawks and the nations that camped about the shores of Lake St. John “kept their sentinels pushed well southward in dread of their fierce invasion.” As conquerors of half a continent, the choicest hunting-grounds were theirs, and so the forests, divided by the Oyo, Ohio, which took its rise in the Iroquois home-land south of Lake Ontario, was the nation’s choice. ”

“ Of the beginning of Washington’s fort on Mount Braddock nothing whatever remains save the record of it, which should be enough—though it is not—to silence all who, with gross ignorance of the facts, have imputed to the young commander a lack of military skill in choosing the site in Great Meadows for Fort Necessity. ”

“ 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 [Pg 32] 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? ”

“ The three nations found by the first explorers in the abandoned hunting-grounds of the Iroquois had been fugitives on the face of the earth for half a century, bandied about between the stronger confederacies like outcasts, denied refuge everywhere, pursued, persecuted, half destroyed. ”

“ There is not another episode in all Washington’s long, eventful life that shows more clearly his strength of personal determination and daring. Beside this all-night march from Great Meadows to Washington’s Spring, Wolfe’s ascent to the Plains of Abraham at Quebec was a pastime. A man in full daylight today can walk over Washington’s five-mile course [Pg 143] to Laurel Hill in one-fifth of the time that little army needed on that black night. If a more difficult ten-hour night march has been made in the history of warfare in America, who led it and where was it made? ”